"You can only talk about a few bad apples for so long before you need to take a serious look at the barrel."

Gary Younge

238Pu

to think the unthinkable for a moment - what would actually happen if the UK government were to decide to scrap the so-called nuclear deterrent, instead of committing to the next generation of weapons?

lots of anguished wailing, of course - from the opposition and the media, who would feel honour-bound to vent some steam about the importance of the nuclear deterrent in maintaining the balance of power that secures our place in blah blah blah. some complaints, too - less hysterical, but probably better informed - from the armed forces, who would wonder what was going to happen to all those submarines and the people who sail in and service them. and then there'd be the sweet bleating of the sheepy flocks who just want to be left in peace and - bless the ickle lambs - put their trust in the government and the media and the armed forces to behave in their best interests and defend their right to do so.

but - political baloney and civic naïveté aside - what would actually happen? would the North Korean government, for example (well, I know - North Korean fat bastard psychotic paranoid looney-man dictator - but let's pretend it's a government) - next in line for bogeyman of the century award - conclude that such wimps as didn't have a nuclear deterrent must be ripe for invasion, and therefore declare war on the UK in order to pre-empt a strike by the Disunited States? (?) (double-?) would Russia, in such desperate need of living space (!) (double-!) get there before him? India? France? Israel? (ok, that last one's a joke) (admittedly a very strange joke) is it really true that the security of my family - the security of knowing, in a relative sense, that, provided we abide by the eccentric standing orders of English law and pay our taxes and do our bit to contribute to the local economy, we might reasonably expect to pass our time in any way we choose and proceed unmolested through this adventure of life - that all this is dependent on my country's possessing a ridiculously large number of warheads of such devastating destructive potential that they could never be used except to ensure the fiery murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians, of people like ourselves whose lives, like ours, had proceeded, up until the moment of the flash like a thousand suns, on the assumption that they, too, might reasonably expect to pass their time in any way they chose and live their own lives unmolested by foreign interference?

it's all very strange.

well, no, actually, it's all very simple. the madmen in charge of the DS (stand up Dubya, stand up Kim - now, try to spot the difference) believing that God has anointed them top-dog, believe also that in order to maintain their position as top-dog they need to show off the biggest pumped-up cock stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world, and that this requirement extends to their fawning economic dependents allies also (provided that thy cock stockpile doesn't get to be as big as mine).

so - no worries, mate. consider it done. how about's we fix you up with my twin virgin sisters while we're about it?

jesus wept.

even the fuggin Commons defence fuggin committee doesn't see the point! on the one hand we're being told that the major threat to our peace and security is terruh, which knows no country and operates by stealth and out of shoes and backpacks and on a shoestring. and on the other we're being persuaded that in order to maintain our peace and security we need to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons that not only will be capable of frying the entire ozone layer at first strike and accomplishing overnight what global warming will be labouring to achieve at best in a hundred years or so (well - safely beyond the political lifetimes of this generation of arseholes, which is effectively the only determining factor), but will also cost more than something like the combined GDP of all those impoverished African states whose poverty we're committed, thanks to the sterling efforts of Saints Bob and Bono, to eradicating (yeah, right).

the nearest this planet ever got to nuclear armageddon was under the presidency of another popular saint - JFK - who, the terrifying hindsight of history has revealed, was perfectly prepared to make real the dictum that the DS has based the entirety of its foreign policy on since 1945 - better dead than red. and if a saint was capable of that, god save us from what this lot's got in mind for us.