Trident Renewal 2

Dear Mr Waterson,

Thank you for your letter dated 4 September 2009 ref: NW/hid
I should like to reply to a few of your points.
No one can accurately pedict the threats that will face Britain between 2025 and 2055
No one can accurately predict anything - even the sun rising tomorrow. Nor could they in the past, and nor will they be able to do so in the future. When 2055 comes around, we shall still not be able to accurately predict the threats that Britain will face. This would therefore justify yet another renewal of Trident or its successor after 2055. The argument would never let us out of the nuclear weapon cycle.
Nuclear Weapons cannot be disinvented
Nothing whatsoever which has been invented can be uninvented. Nuclear weapons are not uniquely uninventable. However, things can be made irrelevant, just as the early 20th century Dreadnoughts were. We no longer need them because their world has gone. A Nuclear Weapons Convention, which Britain ought to pursue, would make not just the weapons themselves, but the whole infrastructure, including research etc unlawful and subject to strict and verifiable international control.

Like many technologies, making nuclear warheads is not just a matter of learning formulas. They involve a great deal of engineering skill and hand-eye experience. Practitioners need to serve an apprenticeship in this. If the production of nuclear weapons ceased, these skills would be lost in quite a short time as the practitioners died or were scattered. It is rather like, say, trying to reconstruct prehistoric methods of iron smelting. Furthermore, nuclear warheads are only part of the story. They are integral to a wide infrastructure and, ultimately, of a culture which sees them as a badge of superiority and power. Once this culture and infrastructure is dismantled, The reconstruction and rediscovery of nuclear warheads would be irrelevant.

The concept that nuclear weapons are needed for our defence only makes other countries think the same. Will the world be safer places when all countries have nuclear weapons?

Yours sincerely

Dorothy Forsyth

Dorothy’s carefully-crafted reply yielded an email simply saying "I suspect we will have to agree to disagree on this issue!"
In response a letter was sent to Beckett news-papers and copied to Nigel Waterson

In a reply to a constituent's letter questioning the government's plans to renew Trident, Britain's nuclear weapons system, MP Nigel Water-son made several asser-tions.

Among these was the sup-posed knock-down argument that 'nuclear weapons cannot be disinvented'.
The constituent pointed out that this is indeed true. It is also meaningless.

Nothing made by mankind can be disinvented. But nuclear weapons can be made irrelevant. We should be working for a world in which they

they have no value by supporting a nuclear weapons convention which would ban all nuclear weapons everywhere.

Only last week the United States tabled a UN Security Council resolution calling for negotiations to begin on 'a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control'.

The treaty would include closing down all nuclear weapons research, the bases, as well as dismantling
the missiles and the warheads them-selves

Nuclear weapons need a highly-trained skills base.
Once these skills are no longer needed it would be very diffi-cult to resurrect them..

This is a serious argument, based on experience and research. All Eastbourne's MP could say was, 'I suspect we will have to agree to disagree on this issue!'