You are the second biggest spender on nukes

It is hard to take the British defence establishment, which has lobbied relentlessly for enormous increases in military spending, but which has then largely spent it on a nuclear capability, which is precisely the reason we are so poorly defended and need an increase in defence spending in the first place.

It is reported today that Britain is now the third largest global spender on nuclear weapons, behind only the US and China in terms of total spend this year. But Britain is a tiny country compared to either, and per capita, Britain spends more on nuclear weapons than any country other than the US.

In fact, in Britain, in the year just passed, every single man, woman and child in Britain was charged the equivalent of £180 each for the development of nuclear bombs. We are without doubt a global outlier. We also manage to have significantly less nuclear autonomy than France, which spends much less on nuclear weapons. Remember, we don’t own a delivery system but rent it from the US.

We are also the only nuclear power which seems regularly to fail to build bombs (our nuclear programme has been repeatedly delayed and is billions over budget). The National Audit Office recently ruled that the Ministry of Defence has repeatedly demonstrated “poor management” of the programme.

It identified a nuclear industry in Britain which thrives in secrecy and opaque accounting; and in this context, 'thrives' means 'profiteers enormously through monopolistic supply chains, lack of scrutiny and a blank cheque mindset'.

What this means is that a total of 18 per cent of the UK's defence budget is now being spent on nuclear weapons. These have done nothing to aid Russia in its invasion of Ukraine and have not stopped Ukraine's successful defence of most of its territory. They have not helped the US or Israel subdue Iran.

There is no obvious use for nuclear weapons. They appear only to deter other countries with nuclear weapons, none of whom are or would be likely to threaten the UK with a nuclear attack. And since they would never be likely to make that threat, it is purely because the UK has its own nuclear weapons.

Britain's nuclear weapons have nothing to do with the defence of Britain. In fact, at times the UK military seems entirely disinterested in defending Britain, instead spending its money in a way that suggests what it really prioritises is foreign adventurism. That an island nation has two aircraft carriers is hard to explain. That we have military bases around the world is purely a relic of colonialism.

Britain's nuclear weapons now have much more to do with power games being played with Washington and the desire to maintain an (unjustified) seat as a Permanent Member of the United Nations Security Council. They defend only the interests of the elite, not of the nation and certainly not the nation's territory.

The lessons for how to do that are coming so fast just now that, yet again, it is almost surprising to see how leaden-footed Britain's defence establishment is. It has taken Ukraine only a couple of years to devise an entirely different form of warfare that is effective against a better-armed opponent, and it has taken Hezbollah only a few months to adapt it to Lebanon.

Britain's defence establishment is in a close financial relationship with the military industries (the cross-over between which is almost patently corrupt). Senior military figures spend decades handing poorly drafted contracts to corporations that absorb enormous sums through inefficiency and then move straight into lucrative paid positions on the Boards of those companies.

Then again, national military establishments have never had any substantial interest in democracy; right now in Finland, its political leaders are considering overturning a ban on nuclear weapons on Finnish soil, a move supported by only 18 per cent of the public.

Defence in a Nato world is anti-democratic and about protecting big financial interests, not national populations. Only a fundamentally different attitude towards national security will actually keep us safe and prevent the defence establishment from treating public funding as a slush fund to be shared with their future employers.