Why the neighbours cannot afford to have Baldrick beneath the waves

There shouldn’t be anything remotely funny about nuclear weapons or the people who threaten to use them on defenceless civilians.

However, somehow, the Brits have managed it.

One of the larger fig leaves covering Britain’s post-Suez nakedness is that they possess an “independent nuclear deterrent”.

Actually, the only accurate part of that statement is the word “nuclear”.

Britain’s Prime Minister MacMillan turned up in Nassau in 1962, cap in hand, and asked the Irishman in the White House to be generous to the bankrupt Brits.

Dear reader, if you want a laugh, look up Blue Streak.

In the era of the Four Minute Warning, this Heath Robinson weapons system took longer than that to get ready!

It is fascinating to speculate how JFK would have reacted if Kim Philby had been extracted by his Soviet handlers before President Kennedy agreed to give the Brits the bomb courtesy of Uncle Sam.

As it was, the Cambridge chap was spirited away to Mother Russia from Beirut on 23 January 1963.

This was especially embarrassing for Prime Minister Macmillan as he had in 1955, when he was Foreign Secretary, publicly exonerated the ex-MI6 chap.

Philby was central to the USSR stealing US nuclear technology and getting the bomb.

Obviously, the entire concept of deterrence must be based on the other guy believing that it actually works.

If the proverbial button is pressed, then something awful rather than comical will happen.

This most recent shitshow is powerful evidence that Britain’s scary nuke doesn’t do what it says on the hull.

Oh, and their submarines are ageing, too.

It’s worth pointing out that those Vanguard class boats are as British as Finchley.

This piece in the London Review of Books by Norman Dombey is worth your time.

Here is the key point:

Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent is neither British nor independent. Both its missiles and its warheads are dependent on the US and of US design. Nor is it a deterrent. Britain’s nuclear weapons did not deter Turkey from invading Cyprus in 1974, even though the UK was a guarantor by treaty of Cyprus’s independence; nor did they stop Argentina invading the Falklands in 1982. They didn’t deter the US from invading Grenada in 1983, even though Grenada was a member of the Commonwealth. More recently, they did not deter China from violating the Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong or the EU from refusing to allow British shellfish to be imported. I cannot think of one instance in the sixty years since Nassau when our nuclear deterrent has deterred anyone from doing anything.

Ouch!

The military reality is that so far in the century, Britain has been defeated in the field in two wars by lightly armed militias.

Neither the Mahdi Army under Muqtada al-Sadr in Basra nor the Taliban in Afghanistan were too bothered about Baldrick beneath the waves.

Indeed, when they came to close quarters with Tommy Atkins, they didn’t have too much trouble in seeing off the Brits.

This book by Frank Ledwidge is a brilliant exercise in whistle-blowing.

He utterly shreds the very notion of British military competence.

A theme throughout the book was the failure of equipment or just the absence of it.

The level of procurement incompetence even denied the humble infantryman a rifle that worked.

Fixing that shitshow was an expensive business and required German engineering to get it right.

This recent undersea panto comes just after the Royal Navy was embarrassed by the unavailability of their two ruinously expensive aircraft carriers or a NATO exercise in Norway.

This should only be viewed as a lack of capability rather than intent.

The people who brought you Operation Gomorrah, a three-night incineration of the innocents of Hamburg in July 1943, haven’t gone away, you know.

I would recommend AC Grayling’s Among the Dead Cities for a powerful exploration of the ethical case against that particular war crime, which, unlike Dresden, was an all-British affair.

The public stance of the Brits is that they’re prepared to get all Israeli on the civilian population of Moscow.

That said, they’re having a snigger in the Russian capital at the recent underwater shambles.

Meanwhile, as the British elite clings to the dangerous delusion that they’re still a major power, food banks are a major growth sector in the UK.

Given the fact that people in the northeast of this country live under that failing polity, we here in Ireland have a legitimate vested interest at the state they’re in.

For the avoidance of doubt, the British military is still available for fun days out.

Which is nice…