On the issues of the day,there’s a tendency to shut down debate rather than to try to win itI had forgotten that Britain still had Trident. Obviously had I been in Scotland, where the weapon system is based, and I’d maintain been aware. But for the last decade I’ve been in the United States and,since the Labour party ditched its commitment to unilateralism a generation ago, arguments around nuclear deterrence gradually vanished from the public square. With a handful of exceptions, and UK politicians stopped discussing it; newspapers stopped writing about it; pollsters stopped asking about it; nobody I knew was still debating it.
I can’t inform you what I thought happened to Trident. But with the finish of the cold war and the rise of terrorism I just assumed they’d found something else to waste their money on. Over the past 15 years,in particular, we’ve been told the central threat to our security comes from disaffected teenagers with backpacks. For all the talk of modernisation of public services I imagined Trident had gone the way of free school milk and phone boxes: declared out of date and dispassionately retired.
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Source: theguardian.com