Richard Norton-Taylor, Fawzi Ibrahim and Margaret Owen on the government’s security, defence and foreign policy review
Far from looking forward, as ministers maintain, the government is looking backwards in its defence and foreign policy review (Report, 15 March). The plan to raise the limit on the UK’s Trident nuclear stockpile by more than 40%, from 180 to 260 warheads, is a dangerous and expensive return to cold war thinking. Britain’s nuclear arsenal, dependent entirely on US technology, is even less of a deterrent and less relevant now than it was then.
Writing about Trident 11 years ago in his autobiography, A Journey, Tony Blair said: “The expense is huge and the utility … non-existent in terms of military use.” But he thought giving it up would be “too big a downgrading of our status as a nation”. It was nothing to do with credible defence, and it isn’t now.
