Johann Hari

The world is still pleasurably suffering from Woah-bama whiplash. Did he really win? Are we all awake? And would anybody mind if he starts a few months early? The need for decisions is rapidly piling up – and one of President-Elect Obama’s first choices is whether to bring to an end the strangest story ever told in American politics.

It is the tale of how a man with Alzheimer’s Disease came up with a physically impossible fantasy based on a B-movie he once starred in – and how the US spent $160bn trying to make it come true. These billions succeeded only in making some defence companies very rich, and making Russia point its nukes at Poland and Britain once more. Oh, and if Obama doesn’t decide to close this long-running farce now, it will make one more contribution to world history: the number of Weapons of Mass Destruction in the world will dramatically increase.

Here’s how this story began – and continued into our time. In the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan was increasingly worried a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was inevitable, until a long-suppressed memory resurfaced in his mind. In 1940, he had starred in a hokey movie called ‘Murder in the Air’. He played a secret agent who had to protect a newly invented super-weapon called the “Intertia Projector” which fired an electrical current at any plane or missile approaching the United States, rendering it worthless. In the film, a scientist tells Reagan this weapon “makes the US invincible in war, and promises to become the greatest force for world peace ever discovered.”

Why, Reagan wondered in the Oval Office, couldn’t he have a real Intertia Projector? Let’s create a machine that would detect any incoming nuke as it approached the US and zap it into nothing! The Cold War standoff would be over! Reagan was losing the ability to distinguish between reality and films: he repeatedly claimed he had been at the liberation of Auschwitz, when he had recreated it in Hollywood. After the Second World War, there had been a few studies trying to invent such a machine – but they all concluded it was “impossible.” Nonetheless, Reagan decided in 1983 to call on America’s scientists to make it happen.

Everyone was bewildered. Reagan’s undersecretary of Defence, Richard DeLauer demanded to know how such a “half-baked political travesty” got into a Presidential address. As the Pulitzer-prize winning historian Frances Fitzgerald explains: “Most of the scientists and defence experts invited to the White House for dinner that evening expressed incredulity. An umbrella defence of the United States was a virtual impossibility… [But] when the experts insisted that science was not magic and that American technology could no do everything, they would be accused of lack of patriotism.”

The lack of evidence didn’t deter Reagan’s team. The man he put in charge of the programme, James Abrahamson, declared: “I don’t think anything in this country is technically impossible. We have a nation which can indeed produce miracles.” The programme was dubbed ‘Star Wars’ – which was fitting, since it was science fiction. As the years passed, the US strategic planners developed ever-more-fevered fantasies of how the shield would allow them to strike anywhere in the world without any risk of retaliation.

By the time Reagan left office, there was a vast industry dedicated to chasing this will-o’-the-wisp. Huge defence contractors – including Boeing and Lockheed Martin – were making billions from it, and giving fat donations to politicians in both parties. In the decades since, the US has spent more and more, and asked the ‘shield’ to do less and less. Now they want it to just take out a single nuke – and it still doesn’t work. The tests only succeed when the interceptors know where the missile is being fired from, where it is heading to, and the warhead continually broadcasts its location to the interceptor. Some success. They have been given a near-impossible-task: scientists compare it to hitting a bullet with another bullet.

But while the system’s positive effects have failed to materialize, its negative consequences are real. America’s strategic opponents have assumed the leading super-power couldn’t possibly be spending this much on a pile of junk – so they are reacting on the assumption that the shield works. This means they are preparing bigger and more nukes, to preserve their ability to punch through the shield. They are retargeting their missiles at Poland, Britain and the Czech Republic, the countries hosting the dud-interceptors. If they believe they are being attacked, they will destroy us first, in order to destroy the ‘shield’ and have the ability to strike back. US intelligence has been blunt about what will happen if the interceptors continue to be constructed. China will increase its nuclear arsenal “tenfold”, India and Pakistan would “respond with their own build-ups,” and Russia’s “only rational response… would be to maintain, and strengthen, the existing nuclear force.”

So the US has spent $160bn, only to increase the nuclear danger to itself and the rest of us. Stars Wars is a perfect example of the magical thinking that now dominates the American right. Don’t like global warming? Don’t worry, it doesn’t exist! Don’t like evolution? It’s a myth! Didn’t find any WMD in Iraq? They must have been shipped to Syria! Want a magical nuclear shield? If you build it, it will work!

Sure, maybe one day scientists will discover some technological way to evaporate nukes in the brief window before they strike. Maybe they will discover how to turn lead into gold – a pursuit that obsessed Europe’s best minds for centuries. Maybe aliens will get in touch. But none of these assumptions are a sensible basis for government policy.

There is now a possibility this will end at last. After speaking to Obama on Tuesday, the Polish President Lech Kaczynski said the project was seriously in doubt. During the campaign, Obama offered a third-way dodge on Star Wars: he said he supported it but “only if the technology is proved to be workable.” Well, we know it isn’t workable. Obama is the first Presidential candidate of our time not to be taking money from the defence contractors. He has no political debt – but his country’s is huge. Can it afford $10bn a year on this dangerous techno-trash?

In the primaries, Obama pledged to pursue real multilateral nuclear disarmament – but the shield-fantasy ensures the opposite will happen: a dramatic increase in the nukes scattered across the globe. Of course, if Obama ditches Star Wars, the neoconservatives will accuse him of “backing down” and “showing weakness”. But is it really sensible to keep spending $10bn a year on an act of self-harm just to save face? The story that began with Reagan’s dementia-fantasies should end with Obama’s empiricism.

This decision isn’t just about a bogus nuclear shield, crucial though that is. It is a test of whether the government of the United States has returned to the firm land of empirical reality – or whether it is still way out there in the blue, gasping for air among the ideological stars.

Do you know the story of the grizzly bear that nearly destroyed the world? It sounds like a demented fairytale – but it is true. On the night of October 25th 1962, when the Cold War was at its hottest and Kennedy and Krushchev’s fingers were hovering over the nuclear button, a tall dark figure tried to climb over the fence into a US military installation near Duluth, Minnesota. A panicked sentry fired at the figure but it kept coming – so he sounded the intruder alarm. But because of faulty wiring, the wrong alarm went off: instead, the klaxon announcing an incoming Soviet nuclear warhead began its apocalyptic wah-wah. Everyone on the base had been told there would be no drills at a time like this. The ashen men manning the station went ahead: they began the chain reaction of retaliation against Moscow.

It was only at the last second – as the missile launch was about to begin – that the sentry got through to the station. It was a mistake, he cried – just a bear, growling at the fence. If he had made that call five minutes later, you wouldn’t be reading this article now.

I have been thinking about that bear recently, because there has just been a string of startling security lapses in the British and American nuclear arsenals. In the past year alone, a truck carrying a fully-assembled nuclear weapon has skidded off the road in Wiltshire and crashed, while six nuclear warheads were lost by the US military for 36 hours.

A new documentary called ‘Deadly Cargo’, recently premiered in Glasgow, documents a simple and extraordinary fact: every week, fully assembled Weapons of Mass Destruction are driven along the motorways and byways of Britain. Britain’s nuclear submarines are up in Scotland, while the factories that need to test and replenish them are down in the Reading – so they are shuttled between them all the time in large green trucks that are followed a half-mile behind by decontamination units. It slipped on ice and crashed not long ago.

The film shows how a group of brave protestors called NukeWatch have been able to figure out the exact route of the convoy and track it. One of them explains, “You reach out on the motorway and they’re an arm’s length from you. That’s how close the British public come to nuclear weapons.” If they could work it out, couldn’t other groups with uglier motives do the same?

Leaked documents from the Ministry of Defence show them fretting that an attack on the convoy “has the potential to lead to damage or destruction of a nuclear warhead within the UK” and “considerable loss of life.”

More amazingly still, Britain’s weapons do not have a secret launch code. They can be fired or detonated by the commander in charge of them simply by opening them up manually and turning some switches and buttons. Every other nuclear power has an authorisation code known only to the country’s leader, which has to be read out to the soldiers in charge of the weapon before it can be used. Not us. Whenever the British government has tried to introduce this basic safety procedure, the Navy has got huffy and refused to participate, saying it is “tantamount” to claiming their officers are not “true gentlemen.”

The Navy dismiss the risk of a hijacking, or a Doctor Strangelove situation where a navy commander goes nuts. But the latter has almost happened. In 1963, a US B47 bomber crew guarding a nuclear bomb discovered that one of their colleagues had broken all the seals, removed all the safety wires, and turned on both the pilot’s readiness switch and the navigator’s control switch on the nuclear bomb. The man responsible seemed to be going through a bout of insanity.

In the US, an even-more startling nuclear lapse occurred last summer: bombs with the force of sixty Hiroshimas were simply lost by the military. On August 29th, a group of US airmen accidentally attached six nuclear warheads to their plane, mistaking them for unarmed cruise missiles intended for a weapons graveyard. They were then flown across the continental United States and left, unwatched by anyone, on an airstrip in Louisiana. Nobody even noticed they were gone for more than a day. This is not, it seems, a freak event: the Air Force’s inspector general found in 2003 that half of the “nuclear surety” inspections conducted that year were failures. Yes, that’s half.

This is what we know is happening in relatively orderly and open societies. There have almost certainly been incidents in China and North Korea and Pakistan that we will never hear about – until the worst happens.

The dangers of any individual nuclear accident are of course very small – but small risks of massive death, accumulating more and more over the sixty years of the nuclear age, suddenly don’t look so negligible any more. Those who campaign for a reduction in the number of nuclear weapons are often referred to as utopian, or naïve. In fact, it is utopian to believe we can carry on like this without an explosion sooner or later.

So it is disturbing that the number of nuclear weapons in the world may be about to dramatically increase. Not in Iran, where (thankfully) sanctions seem to be working, but in Russia and China. The Bush administration, backed by the British government, has been insisting for more than twenty years on building a “nuclear shield” that would, in theory, shoot down any incoming nuclear weapons before they struck the US and its allies. After more than $100bn of military-industrial bungs the technology still doesn’t work, but they are pushing on with it anyway. Russia and China have been pleading for a treaty that would prevent it because they want to retain the existing balance of power – but the Bush administration has flatly refused.

The result? China and Russia are now saying they will significantly increase their nuclear weapon production. It is, they insist, the only way to ensure they would be able to punch through the US missile shield and so retain some parity with US power.

The more weapons, the more likely an accident – or worse. But when the world should be scaling down the number of nukes, the Bush administration is actually ensuring they are ramped up.

Almost unnoticed in the Presidential race, Barack Obama has proposed the US recommit itself to moving towards a world without nukes. This isn’t out-of-the-blue: his best work as a Senator has been trying to lock up Russia’s barely guarded old weapons – while Bush tried to slash the funding for it. Some 66 percent of the US public support the zero-nukes goal. Yet Hillary Clinton has been bragging about her ability to “obliterate” Iran instead, while McCain has cheered on the Bush shield-madness. There is no popular movement to pressure them into sanity.

Without the careful multilateral dismantling of these weapons, thousands of them will remain scattered across the earth, waiting – waiting for an accident with a bear, or a hijacked convoy, or a flipped-out submarine commander. Precisely how many nuclear near-death experiences do you want to risk?

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The suicide-murder of Benazir Bhutto by her moral and intellectual inferiors seems to have made the world notice – just for a moment – the nuclear warning-light that has been flashing angrily all year.

Punctuating 2007 there has been a string of nuclear break-ins, accidents and screw-ups that should have us sweating. How many people know that Congo’s main nuclear scientist was arrested in March for flogging off enriched uranium to anyone who wanted it, in a kind of radioactive e-Bay? Or that this summer six bombs with more explosive power than Hiroshima were accidentally flown across the continental United States, and left unguarded on a landing strip in Louisiana for ten hours before anyone in the Air Force wondered where they’d gone? Or that this November, four unknown men managed to shoot their way into South Africa’s main nuclear facility, which has the material enough for 25 nuclear bombs – and could rummage through the enriched uranium storage vault for forty-five minutes before they escaped?

It has taken the groaning and potential collapse of a nuclear state for us to see, even flickeringly, the risks of having so much nuclear material scattered across the globe. We don’t currently know how many nukes Pakistan has: some estimates say fifty, others go as high as 120. The Pakistani dictator General Pervez Musharraf assures us they are all securely locked-up and locked-down. Yet interviewing experts about the programme and poring through the major academic studies has led me to conclude this is not the case.

But first, the good news. Some worthwhile safety precautions have been put in place in Pakistan over the past five years. The country’s nukes are not kept on hair-trigger alert, ready to fire at any moment. Instead, the warhead cores are kept in different places from the weapon detonation components. To put them together and make a shootable nuke would take around three days – providing a long(ish) fuse in a crisis. Even if jihadis managed to seize one nuclear weapons site, they would still need to seize another one – and secure transportation between the two – to go nuclear.

Nothing else about this picture is reassuring. Professor Shaun Gregory of the Pakistan Security Research Unit has discovered that almost the entire nuclear arsenal is kept in the most fundamentalist part of Pakistan – the West. This is one of the main jihadi gathering-places, where the 7/7 bombers trained and Osama Bin Laden is almost certainly hiding out. They are stored there because it is the furthest possible point from Pakistan’s nuclear rival India, giving the country maximum warning time in a nuclear war or hypothetical invasion.

The big danger is that this part of the Pakistani state shatters into competing fragments, and control of the nukes becomes contested. Already, today, Musharraf finds it impossible to control great swathes of the country’s territory. It’s not hard to see this loosening yet further. Pakistan is a cobbling-together of conflicting linguistic and tribal groups, many of whom want to go it alone. If the military begins to fracture, the experts fear three potential scenarios – none of them probable, but all of them possible.

Nightmare One: a jihadi group manages to seize a nuclear weapon outright, by force, from the vacuum. Osama Bin Laden has, after all, told his fanatical followers it is an “Islamic duty” to acquire a “Muslim bomb” (presumably followed by Islamic radiation sickness and Islamic cancer). This scenario is highly unlikely. If the army breaks up, it will be a major prestige-prize to keep control of the weapons, establishing that you are the Top Dogs. They will not relinquish them without a hard fight, or lots of cash.

Nightmare Two: One of the broken shards of the Pakistani army that manages to hold onto some of the nukes turns out to be sympathetic to al Qaeda. This is more likely, because parts of the Pakistani army have already helped al Qaeda, repeatedly and enthusiastically. For example, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was about to be seized in Karachi a year after the attacks – until he was tipped off by friends within the Pakistani military establishment. He was passed from serving military officer to serving military officer, until he was captured in a military safe-house in Rawalpindi. The senior Pakistani nuclear scientist, Pervez Hoodboy, estimates today that ten percent of his colleagues are Talbianists, noting, “There is potential for dark things to happen.”

Nightmare Three: As Pakistan falls apart, the soldiers at the nuclear sites start to sell off the nukes to whoever will pay for them. Again, this is more likely – because it has already happened. A.Q. Khan, the father of the country’s nuclear bomb, effectively opened an international branch of Tesco for nuclear weapons. He merrily sold secrets and equipment to the tyrannies of North Korea, Libya and others. The former UN weapons inspector David Albright says: “As loyalties break down, they may look for an opportunity to make a quick buck. You may not be able to get a whole weapon, but you might get the core.”

So while the Bush administration has been chasing against two WMD programmes that long-since stopped – Iraq’s and Iran’s – a real WMD danger has been swelling unnoticed. What can be done now? Figures close to the Bush administration are mooting short-term ‘solutions’ that could actually make the problem even worse. Frederick Kagan – the architect of Bush’s surge policy in Iraq – has drawn up hellish plans to surround the Pakistani nuclear bunkers with tens of thousands of high-powered landmines and cluster munitions to prevent anyone getting in or out. (Intriguingly, one of Benazir Bhutto’s last acts was to promise to hand Khan over to international investigators – prompting a panicked squawk from Musharraf.) Scott Sagan, a US counterproliferation expert, warns: “If Pakistan fears they may be attacked, they have an incentive to take [the weapons] out of the [more secure] bunkers and put them out in the countryside,” where they are more vulnerable to being grabbed by fanatics.

Every time the US military has war-gamed sending in troops to seize the unknown number of weapons, it has ended in a horrific blood-bath – and the weapons still eluding their control. As Professor Gregory puts it: “Condoleezza Rice’s remarks about ‘contingency plans’ to secure Pakistan’s nuclear weapons were really only a rhetorical exercise aimed at reassuring the American public. If the situation really did disintegrate to the point where Pakistani control of the weapons eroded there would be very little the US, or anyone else, could do.”

There is only one long-term solution, long-since left for dead by the dedicated followers of political fashion. We need to steadily reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world through determined multilateral negotiations. A fiercely proud Pakistan will not reduce its arsenal alone. But in lockstep with India and the rest of the nuclear powers, there is a chance. So far, on the international stage, only Barack Obama has mooted this. But the only alternative is to wait, and wait, until somewhere, one of these weapons is seized – and used.

Comments are welcome at johann -at- johannhari.com

You can read my recent column about the situation in Pakistan here.

You can read my other articles about nuclear weapons here.

You can join my Facebook group 'Let's hold a global 'I Survived George Bush' party on January 20th 2009' here.

There has been a string of sweaty headlines from almost every continent on earth over the past month that might seem, at first, to be unconnected.

In Syria, a mysterious series of explosions in the desert turn out to have been an Israeli military strike which they claim was designed to take out the early stages of a nuclear weapons programme. In Iran, the chief nuclear negotiator with the West has quit because he doesn’t agree with the hardline stance of President Ahmadinejadh. In Washington DC, the Bush administration continues to funnel cash into developing “more useable” battlefield “mini-nukes.” In Russia, Vladmir Putin has ordered Russia’s fleet of strategic nuclear bombers to resume round-the-clock patrols for the first time since the fall of Soviet tyranny. In India, the government has fissured and almost collapsed over the question of whether the country should enter into a nuclear deal with the US. In North Korea, dictator Kim Jong Il appears to be – perhaps – taking baby-steps towards giving up his nukes after a lot of bribes. And somewhere in the distance, Diana Ross should be singing, “I’m in the middle of a chain reaction.”

These scattered stories are all fever-symptoms of living in the Second Nuclear Age. In the First Nuclear Age, the Cold War, there were two concrete power blocks facing each other eyeball-to-eyeball, and there was a doctrine, however hellish, regulating their use: Mutually Assured Destruction. You fire, we’ll fire, and then we’ll all die. Today, that world – with its mad MAD doctrines – is gone, and the odds of a nuclear weapon actually being used are swelling.

In the Second Nuclear Age, we have mini-cold wars spreading across the world’s hot-spots. India vs Pakistan. Israel vs (soon) Iran. North Korea vs (soon) Japan. And – back from the dead – the US vs Russia. Yet this time there are no hot-lines, no agreements not to fire first, and barely any plans to defuse the stand-offs. Just 27,000 nuclear weapons, each one 70 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Some scientists suggest it would take the use of less than 5 percent to trigger a global nuclear winter.

Shortly before he was assassinated, President John F. Kennedy foresaw the world we are now living in. He said, “I ask you to stop and think for a moment what it would mean to have nuclear weapons in so many hands, in the hands of countries large and small, stable and unstable, responsible and irresponsible, scattered throughout the world. There would be no rest for anyone then, no stability, no real security.... There would be only the increased chance of [nuclear] war.”

So how do we get out of this radioactive cul-de-sac? Kennedy had an idea. He ran in 1960 as a nuclear hawk, baiting Republic President Dwight Eisenhower from the right by falsely claiming he had allowed a “missile gap” to develop between the Soviet Union and the US. But then – in the Cuban Missile Crisis – he came within inches of overseeing a nuclear holocaust. After that, he declared, “The weapons of [nuclear] war must be abolished, before they abolish us.” He proposed a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) based on a simple bargain. The countries that already had nuclear weapons would agree to slowly disarm in lockstep, and in return the countries without weapons would agree not to tool up. The Treaty was eventually signed after his death, in 1968.

It is still the best route out of our current nuclear crises – yet the NPT is being used as toilet-paper by the world’s leaders. The Bush administration, for example, has ignored both parts of the bargain: it has buffed up its own arsenal instead of reducing it, and it has recognised and rewarded other countries for proliferation. That’s what the current row in India is about. The US is proposing to reward India for becoming a nuclear power, offering it nuclear materials and other goodies. The Communist members in the Indian coalition are refusing, and they are prepared to bring down the government if necessary.

The UN High Level Panel on Threats recently warned about where we’re headed: “We are approaching a point at which the erosion of the non-proliferation regime could become irreversible and result in a cascade of proliferation.” Most of us have been inert in response. The old mass movements for upholding the NPT have largely melted away.

Yet – for the first time in a long time – there has been an almost-unnoticed flash of hope on this issue from the US. Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama was recently attacked for making a “gaffe” after he said he wouldn’t, as President, use nuclear weapons against civilians. (Ah, such “political immaturity”). But instead of backing down, he raised the stakes, announcing: “Here’s what I’ll say as President: America seeks a world in which there are no nuclear weapons.” He pledged to “strengthen the NPT”, take US missiles off hair-trigger alert, and multilaterally make mighty cuts in the US nuclear arsenal “to stop giving countries like Iran and North Korea an excuse.”

In other words: Obama wants the bargain Kennedy proposed to be brought back to life. The developments in North Korea suggest Obama’s preferred strategy – diplomacy – might work. A fortnight ago, Kim Jong Il agreed to disable his main nuclear complex at Yongbyon and declare all his nuclear activities by the end of the year. He has been dragged to this point by a combination of sanctions and bribes by all the world’s major powers, who are unusually united. It’s hard to be totally optimistic: Kim made deals in the past, only to see them break down. But it suggests that sustained anathemising of proliferation may bear results in the end.

And for Iran? Many of the people who oppose (as I do) the Cheney-Giuliani plans to bomb Iran think this is simply a matter of waiting for the internal Iranian opposition to depose the Holocaust-denying thug Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh. But this ignores a simple fact: a majority of Iranians want nuclear weapons, according to every opinion poll. It’s desirable for the Iranian people to ditch Ahmadinejadh for lots of reasons – but it isn’t a non-proliferation strategy, unless he is replaced by somebody even more dictatorial.

No; the only long-term way to drag Iran away from the nuclear path is to change the minds of the Iranian people themselves. In a Bushian world where all the major powers, including Britain, wave their own nuclear weapons as virility symbols, that is impossible. In an Obaman world where the existing nuclear powers were dismantling much of their arsenals, it could – just – be done.

And if the sanctions and threats and carrots all still failed? If Kim and Ahmadinejadh’s successors insisted after all on tooling up? A denuclearizing world could – as an absolutely last resort – justify taking military action to prevent other countries going nuclear. But today, to go to war supposedly to uphold the NPT would be a sick joke, when the world’s leaders are all blatantly burning it themselves – and ramping up the risks of the Second Nuclear Age.

You can read my other articles about nuclear weapons here and e-mail comments to j.hari -at- independent.co.uk

A metaphorical mushroom cloud will hang over Westminster this week. On Wednesday, the House of Commons will debate whether Britain should breach the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and buff up our stockpile of Weapons of Mass Destruction for another generation. Already, one government frontbencher has announced he will resign over Tony Blair's shiny new nuke-delivery systems, and a majority of Labour backbenchers in a BBC survey have declared they will rebel. The Prime Minister has slapped down a challenge to the opponents: "Those who question this decision need to explain why disarmament by the UK would help our security." He's right. So let's do it. Let's show how insisting Britain maintain nearly 200 nuclear bombs on hair-trigger alert floating around this island, each with eight times the explosive power of the bomb that incinerated Hiroshima, makes us less safe.

There are three ways in which Britain is threatened by nukes from the outside. So let's look at them one-by-one:

Nuclear Threat One: A fundamentalist group could smuggle a nuclear weapon into this country and detonate it in London or Manchester or Glasgow. There are a tiny but determined band of people who would like to carry out this plan: for example, Dhiren Barot, a Hundu who converted to Islam, was convicted last October for communicating with al Quaeda about detonating a radioactive dirty bomb on British soil. Who can doubt he would have sought to explode a nuclear bomb if he could get hold of one? Osama Bin Laden has declared that the acquisition of an "Islamic nuclear bomb" (presumably followed by Islamic radiation poisoning) is "a religious duty," and he tried to buy one himself when he was living in Sudan in the mid-1990s.

The will is there, and the knowledge is not too hard to get - just check out the book 'How To Build a Nuclear Bomb' by Frank Barnaby. The only (massive) obstacle to the Bin Ladenists' ambitions is getting hold of highly enriched uranium or plutonium. In theory, these essential nuke-ingredients are kept locked away - but in practice, they are often guarded with rusty padlocks and in some recorded instances, even men armed only with garden rakes. When I travelled through the wrecked warzones of Congo last year, I was amazed to discover there was still a nuclear site there, in the world-capital of pillaging. So I wasn't surprised when last week, the head of the Democratic Republic of Congo's collapsing nuclear reactor plant was arrested for flogging off his enriched uranium to the highest bidder. (Nobody knows how much is missing). This isn't as rare as it sounds. The US Council of Foreign Relations explains that in the former Soviet Union, "Even basic security arrangements such as fences, doors and padlocks remain inadequate in many locations," and the situation in India is almost as bad.

Trident is, of course, useless against this sort of threat, because non-state actors leave you with nowhere to retaliate against. If the 9/11 massacres had been nuclear, the only retaliatory target would have been Hamburg, where most of the planning took place - hardly a sane suggestion. Besides, jihadists actually welcome death. For them mutually assured destruction isn't a deterrent; it's an incentive.

But does Trident actually make this situation worse? I think it does, for one reason. Every penny we spend on the illusory 'safety' of Trident is a penny we are not spending on securing collapsing nuclear facilities across the globe. John Kerry estimated it would cost £8bn to get all the world's enriched uranium and plutonium sealed away. Replenishing Trident will cost at least £20bn. (This government figure is actually an extremely conservative estimate. As CND have shown, it leaves out great chunks of necessary expenditure: the £300m that must be spent every year on conventional forces guarding Trident, and so on. They reckon the bill could rise as high as £75bn). Let's lock up the nuclear materials, and spend the at-least-£12bn change on detecting and catching the maniacs who want to use them.

Nuclear Threat Number Two: A regional nuclear war could break out somewhere else in the world and trigger a nuclear winter that makes the planet uninhabitable. This is by far the biggest nuclear danger to us, and the least discussed. There are currently 30,000 nuclear weapons on earth, and the use of barely a dozen could cause irreperable environmental damage. This is not a wildly implausible scenario: only five years ago, Britain had to advise its citizens to evacuate India and Pakistan because of the real risk of a nuclear war, and it's not hard to imagine a similar situation soon between Iran and Israel.

There is only one route out of this. It is the NPT, created in the 1960s after the world came within inches of consuming itself in fire during the Cuban Missile Crisis. (I have met Robert McNamara, who was in the Oval Office throughout. He is still ashen with the memory). The NPT is based on a simple deal: the existing nuclear powers slowly scale down their nuclear arsenals in lockstep, in return for the non-nuclear powers agreeing not to tool up. The renewal of Trident blatantly violates this, our last best hope. Article VI of the Treaty is unequivocal: "Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament." As Rabinder Singh QC and Professor Christine Chinkin said in a recent legal opinion, the renewal of Trident "in our view constitues material breach."

A global momentum towards disarmament is the best way to sway Iran and other countries in the Middle East from going nuclear. Of course, only the criminally naive believe the deranged anti-Semite Mahmoud Ahmajinejadh will wake up the morning after Britain disarms and realise he doesn't need a nuke after all. Gandhian suasion has little effect on religious fundamentalists. But we need to be playing a long game here, appealing to the Iranian people themselves. Most estimates suggest it will take a decade for Iran to have an actionable nuclear weapon, and Amadinejadh's domestic popularity is already dissolving. (just look at the local election results). Unless the US and Israel bolster him by attacking, he will be gone before he has access to a weapon. But the core will remain: the Iranian people will still want a nuclear bomb, with around 80 percent demanding one in opinion polls. In their situation, it's not hard to see why. They are ringed by nuclear neighbours, and traumatised by the memory of the CIA overthrowing their democratically elected Prime Minister in 1953 and installing a fascistic dictator. (My family lived under that tyranny for many years).

If we want to change this pre-and-post-Ahmadinejadh wish within Iran, we need to change the external situation. In a world that is increasing its nuclear arsenal, the Iranians want a weapon of their own. In a world that is steadily decommissioning its nuclear weapons, they probably would rather spend the money on schools and hospitals, like everyone else. Renewing Trident diminishes the chances of that ever happening - and therefore our own safety.

Nuclear Threat Three: Some as yet unidentified state will one day emerge and threaten us with nuclear annihilation. This is unlikely, but not impossible: in the 1920s, few people saw Nazism on the horizon. But there is a better way to guarantee against this than Trident. It is known as ‘the Japanese option’. At the moment, Japan has a virtual nuclear arsenal. Dr Andrew Dorman of King’s College London explains what this means: “Japan currently has a civil nuclear programme and advanced rocket technology. Estimates range from six months to two years for how long it would take Japan to build a nuclear capability. Likewise, Britain could retain its design teams and maintain the capacity to build and reconstruct its nuclear force, but not actually have one day to day.” No threat is going to emerge in less than six months. By going Japanese, we could simultaneously strengthen the NPT, appeal to the Iranian people, and retain a guarantee against nuclear blackmail.

So yes, Prime Minister, these are three ways in which disarmament would make Britain safer. You keep talking about Trident as an "insurance policy", but as Bruce Kent of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has warned, it is as if you were about to take out an insurance policy against subsidence that contributes to the subsidence of your house. Let's just hope - naively - that the fall-out is, in the end, only political.

POSTSCRIPT: Lots of American readers have e-mailed to ask how this applies to the Bush administration. (42 percent of hits on this site come from the US, 18 percent come from Australia, and 8 percent from South Africa, which is interesting). It seems that the White House has adopted a two-pronged strategy for dealing with nuclear weapons. First, they are massively increasing detection of radioactivity at the ports. As I understand it, this is a pretty weak defence, because it's difficult to detect highly enriched uranium-235, which is used to make fission weapons. Highly enriched uranium doesn't emit much radiocativity because it is a low-enery isotope and can be easily hidden inside lead casing. The second prong is to build the 'Star Wars' defence shield, which will supposedly deflect nuclear weapons out into space. Unfortunately this idea was a product of Ronald Reagan's demantia-riddled brain and is based on extremely shaky technology and science. You can read my take on it at http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=403

Jeffrey Lewis - a nonprofileration specialist at the New America Foundation - told the New Yorker why these strategies appeal to the Bush team: "You don't have to go mess with the difficult diplomacy of getting the Pakistanis to secure their material if you can ring the country with interceptors. Even if it's ineffective, it's somethign we can do entirely ourselves - that's just really appealing to these guys." But that won't protect you againsta nuclear winter; it probably won't protect you even against smuggled nukes or a direct nuclear attack. (For those of us who love America, that's a pretty depressing thought). There is no alternative to directly engaging with the world, and the two most obvious solutions - securing all the loose nuclear material, and returning to the NPT - are still the best.

You have to give credit where it's due: George W Bush has crafted a beautiful response to the 60th anniversary of the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that falls next week. He has chosen this as the moment to drive (yet another) asbestos stake through the heart of the world's Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and to lend his approval to a century of nuclear stand-offs across the globe. Don't be mean-spirited - you have to admire his Bill Hicks-style genius for comic timing.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (may it rest in peace) is pretty basic. It was written in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when pale and shaken world leaders were slowly realising how close they had come to committing "rational suicide" by launching a nuclear war. A consensus emerged that the number of nuclear weapons in the world needed to be drastically reduced, and that no new nuclear powers should be allowed to emerge to increase the risk even further. Almost every country in the world signed. The non-nuclear countries agreed not to tool up, in exchange for the already-nuclear countries agreeing to slowly dismantle their arsenals and to never, under any circumstances, share their nuclear technologies.

The Treaty has been in intensive care for years. Since it was signed in 1968, at least six other countries have acquired nukes, and only one country (South Africa) has disarmed. During Bush junior's presidency, the US has ramped up its arsenal of WMD, working on "mini-nukes" and "more useable" bunker-busting nuclear weapons. The North Korean tyranny has spent billions on nuclear weapons while its people starve and the Iranian mullahs are inching close behind. The recent UN meeting to discuss the future of the Treaty was a shambles, since it was plain that nobody intended to abide by its terms.

And then this week, George Bush unplugged the life support and held a pillow over the patient's face. After fêting Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the White House, Bush unilaterally ended the sanctions imposed against India since it went nuclear in 1998, and privately welcomed her role as an nuclear bulwark against China. He announced a deal to begin sharing US nuclear technology with India, making a mockery of one of the key ideas of the Treaty.

It would be more honest to give the Treaty a public burial and admit that, for now, we are living in a world where nukes are proliferating across the globe with no international restraints. This might just jolt us awake. But should it? Is there really any danger of a nuclear weapon actually being used this century? Sadly, you can only dismiss nuclear weapons as 1980s nightmares if you are very short-sighted or if you have a very bad memory.

Let's look at the sub-continent Bush has just begun to share his nuclear technologies with. Twice in the past six years, India and Pakistan have stood at the brink of nuclear war. In the 1999 Kargil crisis, the countries exchanged nuclear threats 13 times - with no hot-line between the two leaders to calm them down. Just three summers ago, Britain advised her citizens to evacuate cities like Delhi and Karachi because there was a "real and imminent" risk of them being evaporated in a mushroom cloud. The Foreign Office's judgement call was right: the Indian Defence Minister George Fernandes was bragging: "India can take a nuclear hit and hit back," while Pakistan's General Mirza Aslam Beg announced: "We can make a first strike, a second strike and even a third. Look - you can die crossing the street, or you can die in a nuclear war. You've got to die some day anyway."

We are entering a world of rapidly multiplying nuclear stand-offs like this. India vs Pakistan. Iran vs Israel. America vs.China. Within decades, North Korea vs Japan and South Korea. Not one Cold War, but many - and the risk is doubled each time.

True, since the election of the Congress Party last year, India's relations with Pakistan have (very slightly) relaxed. But the construction of a nuclear bunker underneath the Prime Minister's office has continued, and nobody has forgotten that the two countries have been at war four times in the past 60 years. The bombs have now fused with the fierce nationalism of the countries, with some Indian leaders still talking proudly of the "Hindu bomb" - presumably followed by Hindu fall-out and Hindu radioactive poisoning. (There is a horrible irony in this, since Robert Oppenheimer - the father of the bomb - responded to seeing the first ever nuclear explosion by quoting the god Vishnu from Hindu scripture: "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.")

It is wildly naïve to think that all these stand-offs between highly volatile countries can continue until - when? forever? - without, sooner or later, a bomb being used. Even the minimal protections of the Cold War - like hotlines between leaders - are not yet in place in most of these countries. How many reruns of the Cuban Missile Crisis should we risk over the next century?

It is not only the Usual Suspects who are warning about this. Even Margaret Thatcher - one of the most militant defenders of nuclear weapons in the world - has predicted that a "battlefield nuclear weapon will be used in the next 20 years".

So where are all the old luvvies-for-CND, now the issue has become more complex, more "foreign" and less sexy? At the height of the last India-Pakistan stand-off, I asked Martin Amis what he thought about nuclear weapons now, and he mumbled something about a "regional nuclear war" being "less frightening". This is based on a dumb and flawed premise. All nuclear bombs in existence today are 20 times more powerful than the weapons dropped on Japan, and there are currently over 9,000 of them ready to fire within 45 minutes. The danger of any of these being used against Britain is virtually nil. But if just a handful of these weapons is exploded anywhere, there will be disastrous ecological and economic consequences everywhere - including here. They will not be confined to the region where they are detonated. It is not clear how many weapons have to be exploded to trigger a nuclear winter and On the Beach-style universal death, but some scientists believe the use of India and Pakistan's joint arsenals would be sufficient.

These are ludicrous risks when there is a solution out there - even if it is pretty retro. One day we will have to disinter the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, wipe off the soil Bush just tossed on to its coffin, and try to start a process of gradual, multilateral disarmament, removing a major threat to human life one radioactive step at a time. But do we have to wait for Hiroshima Redux to actually happen before we start on this long, slow work?

So Gordon Brown has announced the renewal of Trident – the delivery system for our very own Weapons of Mass Destruction – and without a pause the debate has immediately sunk into the incessant babble about the Labour leadership. Does this mean Gordon will be challenged from the left? Is this a rapprochement with Tony? No doubt in the middle of a nuclear war itself, Nick Robinson would stand in the shadow of a mushroom cloud, his remaining flecks of hair falling from his head along with layers of skin, and ask earnestly how this will affect the Blair-Brown relationship.

This decision is far too important to be left to Westminster Village trivia. It goes to the heart of the single greatest threat to the future of the human species, along with global warming. It is only four years now since India and Pakistan were so close to nuclear war that Britain had to order its citizens to evacuate the sub-continent. We are about to see a nuclear standoff between Israel and Iran in the heart of the most volatile region in the world. This is the reality of the Second Nuclear Age, a time when mini-cold wars are proliferating across the world’s hot spots, each offering their own protracted Cuban Missile Crises and their own dark possibility of triggering a nuclear winter.

That’s why our politicians are right that the Trident question is a “vital matter of national security” – it’s just that they fail to see how. Let’s start by asking the most basic question. What are the threats to Britain’s security, and can Trident help? The most obvious danger to your physical safety and mine is from 7/7-style jihadi groups staging another attack on the civilian population. Before these non-state actors, nuclear weapons stand limp and useless. It is hardly an option to deploy Trident against Leeds, the home of Mohammed Sidiqh Khan.

The second risk – real but very, very slight – is from a hostile state, Iran or North Korea or some as-yet-unanticipated foe, at some point in the future trying to threaten London. There is a way to deter this tiny risk without having ready-to-fire nuclear weapons, which we’ll get to in a moment.

That leaves us with the third risk, by far the greatest. It is of a nuclear exchange somewhere else in the world severely damaging the global environment. Every bomb held by a nuclear state today is between eight and seventy times more powerful than the bombs that burned Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The scientific evidence suggests that if more than a handful are ever used anywhere, Britain’s climate will be dangerously disrupted and could be irreparably destroyed. So it is obviously a matter of urgent national security to reduce nuclear proliferation and ease nuclear tensions.

This is tough to do if we are conspicuously clinging to – and even improving – our own nuclear weapons systems, claiming they are “essential for our national security”. If we use this argument, how can we object when the people of Iran and India and Pakistan say the same? If nukes make us safer, why not, say, Egypt, Taiwan or Brazil? Why not everyone? What makes us special, other than raw power? Brown has offered an unwitting argument for universal proliferation. As Mohammed El Baradei, the Nobel Prize-winning head of the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA), says, “It is very hard to preach the virtues of non-smoking when you have a cigarette dangling from your lips and you are about to buy a new pack.”

You do not have to believe in some (currently) utopian plan for total disarmament to swing the momentum across the world from a rapid build-up to a gradual scaling-down. I recently spoke to Robert McNamara, who was Kennedy’s defence secretary at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. He explained how this momentum could be achieved in the American context. “I was placed on a panel where I was arguing for disarmament and the other guy was arguing in defence of nuclear weapons. I said to him, ‘At the moment the US has 2000 nuclear warheads on hair-trigger alert to be fired in 15 minutes. That’s enough to destroy the world 16 times over. Why don’t we cut back to, say, 200, enough to destroy the world just once? Wouldn’t that be a good start?’ And he agreed. So let’s cut back to that, then we can have a debate about the zero option.”

Few people have pointed out that there is a similar way to achieve that momentum in the British context. It would allow us to retain a deterrent effect against any future aggressive state, and reduce the (far greater) danger from proliferation at the same time. In nuclear circles, it is called ‘the Japanese option’.

At the moment, Japan has a virtual nuclear arsenal. Dr Andrew Dorman of King’s College London explains what this means: “Japan currently has a civil nuclear programme and advanced rocket technology. Estimates range from six months to two years for how long it would take Japan to build a nuclear capability. Likewise, Britain could retain its design teams and maintain the capacity to build and reconstruct its nuclear force, but not actually have one day to day.”

The Japanese option would guarantee that if we ever needed a nuclear deterrent again – and a risk is not going to suddenly emerge overnight – we could very quickly assemble one. But we would have saved a fortune in cash (why not spend it on securing the massive amounts of nuclear material still barely guarded in the former Soviet Union?). And, more importantly, we would have sent a very strong signal that having dozens of weapons of mass destruction waiting on standby – to be fired at fifteen minutes’ notice – is not our idea of security. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, our best hope for a less radioactive world, would begin to breath a little on its intensive care bed.

And if Britain went Japanese, this might help us a little in the current stand-off with Iran. At the moment, the Iranian problem is being widely misrepresented as a problem with Ahmadinejad specifically. He is indeed a repellent fundamentalist (with the emphasis on the ‘mentalist’), but when it comes to acquiring nukes, he is simply following the wishes of his people. The polls show that a fat majority of Iranians want a nuke (even the liberals the world looks to as an alternative) and in a world where even Gordon Brown says it is essential for a nation’s security, who can blame them? So even when Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs are eventually toppled in a democratic revolution, the Iranian desire for nuclear weapons will still be there – unless we change the wider, global nuclear context.

In a world where everyone is replenishing and polishing their nuclear warheads, the Iranian people want one of their own, and they are not alone. If we continue on this course, sooner or later one of these countries will end up getting and using them. In a world where a major nuclear power is slowly standing down its nuclear arsenal, that might just change. Last week, Gordon Brown threw away any chance we have of finding out – and his decision made Britain far less safe.

POSTSCRIPT: Comments on this article for publication can be sent to letters@independent.co.uk

If they are just for me, send them to johann *at* johannhari.com

In his novel Underworld, Don DeLillo describes a world born in Hiroshima and buried with the broken bricks of the Berlin Wall – a world where we all lived “in the shadow of a mushroom cloud.” He shows how the possibility of nuclear annihilation hung in the air as softly as radiation after an attack, pervading politics, pop music and the everyday nightmares of everyday people. DeLillo only got one thing wrong: he implies the world awoke at the end of Cold War and wiped away its radioactive sweat. As Iran slows approaches the moment when it has mastered centrifuge technology and snapped up enough uranium hexoflouride to enrich a nuclear warhead, as Jacques Chirac warns he may respond to a jihadi attack on France with a “targeted nuclear attack” (a cruelly absurd concept) against the Middle East, as it emerges that George Bush is developing “more useable” bunker-busting nukes, we have reached that point in the nightmare where you realise you have not woken up at all. Welcome to the Second Nuclear Age.

The best guide to this new world is Mohammed El-Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the deserving winner of last year’s Nobel Prize for Peace. He explains: “There are 27,000 nuclear warheads in the world, and when you see more and more countries acquiring nuclear weapons, countries that do not really have sophisticated command structures… The odds that these weapons can be used is much higher [than in the First Nuclear Age, the Cold War]. Either we are going to have 20, 30, 40 nuclear states, or we are going to have to think differently about or security.”

There are currently eight men who have the power to incinerate you, everyone you love and millions more human beings in a second: George Bush, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, Vladmir Putin, Hu Jintao, Ehud Olmert, Mohammed Singh, Pervez Musharaff, and Kim Jong Il. The world – and the IAEA – is presently fixated on the soon-to-be ninth member of the nuclear club: the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadineijad.

It’s not hard to see why Ahmadineijad’s finger on the button is causing cold (war) sweats for el-Baradei on down. This is a man who has explicitly said that Israel – another nuclear power – was created under a false pretext because the Nazi Holocaust is “a myth”, and therefore should be “wiped off the map”. He is not criticising the vicious occupation of the West Bank. He is not calling for a two-state solution and compensation for the Palestinians. He is calling for the 1948 ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians to be matched by an even-bigger ethnic cleansing of the Jews in 2006, relocating those who survive in Alaska or (this’ll work) Germany.

It is not clear how much of this is merely the rhetorical sounding-off that is routine in the region, and how much he will actually act on. Some observers believe he really might be an Iranian Doctor Strangelove, pointing to Ahmadinejad’s links with fanatical religious movements who believe the Twelfth Imam will return to earth soon in an apocalyptic clash between good and evil. When he addressed the UN General Assembly last November, he chose to deliver a call for the “hastening” of this event, and he was later captured on film saying he believed God had hypnotised the world’s leaders at that moment and left them so transfixed they “literally” did not blink throughout his 28-minute speech. (This would have dried out their corneas and made them all blind, but no doubt Allah works in mysterious ways).

I doubt Ahmadineijad is really planning an imminent attack on Israel, but there is a certainty that the moment Iran has nukes, an indefinite West Bank Missile Crisis will begin that could go radioactive at 15 minutes’ notice after a provocation - or even a mistake - by either side. Anybody who believes this would be a mere regional nuclear war – a distant battle about which we need know little – should swot up on the science of nuclear fall-out.

So the current debate is focussing on the short-term levers we can pull to prevent this happening. But there’s a problem – none of them work. For three years, the world – led by the European Union – has been trying to bribe, carress and flatter Iran out of tooling up. The carrot has failed: they are proceeding anyway, and the latest talk of a compromise from Teheran sounds like a stalling operation. But the sticks are not much better. The UN Security Council is unlikely to impose sanctions, because China or Russia will veto them. Even if they do, they will merely trigger a humanitarian disaster in Iran (remember the horrors they caused in Iraq, on top of Saddam’s tyranny?) and give the regime a convenient excuse for all the country’s problems. People are already dying in Iran because of the very limited sanctions at the moment. The West is refusing to sell Iran spare parts for their aircraft – and there has already been two plane crashes as a result, one killing over 100 people. What effect would an extension have?

But there is another, harder reason why sanctions will not work: Ahmadineijadh has the world over an oil barrel. As the world’s fourth largest oil supplier, when he says “you will regret it if you impose sanctions”, he means it. He has it in his power to stage a swift sequel to the 1973 oil price shock that levelled the world economy. What politician will risk $100-a-barrel oil prices and certain global recession?

Military options are hardly better. Even if Bush and Blair could persuade their electorates into another war based on WMD after the Iraq lies, a regime change strategy is not a non-proliferation strategy for one glaring reason. According to every reliable opinion poll, the Iranian people themselves want to get nuclear weapons by a very wide margin. It is one of Ahmadineijad’s few popular policies, along with his Chavez-style commitment to redistribute Iran’s oil profits to the poor. Unless you are going to install a dictator – an obscene idea – then changing the Iranian government will make no difference. (My parents lived in Iran under the last American-installed dictator, the Shah. He was so corrupt that Teheran – a city of six million people – did not even have a functioning sewage system). Even if there is a democratic revolution against the Mullahs by Iran’s very young, very angry population – as I hope – the nuclear issue will not be affected. Nor will Israeli military strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities work: there are more than forty scattered across the country, many so far underground they cannot be reached by bombs.

So it is time to take a deep breath, accept with a sick stomach that Iran is going to go nuclear in the next few years, and look to long-term solutions. Here we need to go back to el-Baradei who, as head of the IAEA, he is also keeper of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This Treaty was created in the 1960s after the world stared Armageddon in the face during the Kennedy-Kruschev stand-off. (It is only now we have the records of both sides that we know just how close to a global holocaust we really came). The NPT was based on a blunt bargain: the existing nuclear powers would slowly, gradually reduce their nuclear arsenals in lockstep – monitored by the IAEA – and in return nobody else would try to tool up. Nobody ever officially repudiated the NPT – but all sides have used it as toilet paper, with the US developing an ever-mighter arsenal, India being officially welcomed to the club with no penalties, and Tony Blair currently renewing Trident (“the nuclear weapon Harrods would sell you,” as Sir Humphrey once described it).

The NPT is our only safe route out of the Second Nuclear Age. As el-Baradei puts it, “The big boys need to understand that the major league is not an exclusive club. If you are not going to gradually dissolve the club, others are going to join.” We can cling to our arsenals with jealous pride as more and more countries like Iran build their own, until one day – next year, next decade, next century – the mushroom cloud returns. Or we – the people of the democratic world – can begin to force our governments to actually follow the Treaty they have signed up to and start a process of careful multilateral nuclear disarmament that locks in all nuclear countries – including Iran.

The mayor of Nagasaki recently reminded us of the costs of the Make Humanity History alternative: “After the bomb, Nagasaki became a city of death where not even the sound of insects could be heard. After a while, countless men, women and children began to gather for a drink of water at the banks of the nearby Urakami river, their burnt skin hanging off in sheets like rags. Begging for help, they died one after one in the water or in heaps on the banks.”

The bombs held in current nuclear arsenals are seventy times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. If we don’t begin opposing the drift towards more and more of them, we will live in the shadow of the mushroom cloud for the rest of our lives – and millions may die there.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

The British government elected yesterday will have to take two radioactive decisions by 2008. These choices will address the biggest existential threats to the future of the human species: man-made climate change and nuclear weapons. Your great-grandchildren will live with the consequences when Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Michael Howard are nothing but skeletons and a pile of yellowing press cuttings.

The first decision: Should we build a string of nuclear power stations? Just five years ago, environmentalists wouldn't have paused for a second before answering: no! no! no! The green movement was smelted in the fight against nuclear power, and even now the facts are startling: every man reading this, for example, has plutonium in his testicles thanks to nuclear power.

But now there is an even-greater ecological danger than a Sellafield or Chernobyl: man-made global warming. A handful of environmentalists like James Lovelock have broken ranks to declare that waiting at the end of the climate change rainbow there sits a nuclear power station. They give off no greenhouse gases - none - so Lovelock argues that their dangers "are insignificant compared with the intolerable heat waves and rising sea levels of global warming".

I am uncomfortable with his unquestioning evangelism for nuclear power. Leaving future generations with tonnes of nuclear waste that remain toxic for 10,000 years is hardly problem-free, even if you forget about the risk of accidents or fanatics getting hold of nuclear material. One environmentalist says: "Embracing nuclear power in an attempt to avoid global warming is like taking up heroin to avoid an addiction to crack."

But are they equally bad? To a sunny optimist like me, it is painful to admit we now face three options and they are all lousy. Option one: we can carry on with the current level of carbon emissions and try - somehow - to deal with soaring temperatures and the unravelling of the world's ecosystems. Option two: we can have a massive shift to nuclear energy, and deal with the cancer and the nuclear waste. Option three: we can drastically scale back our carbon emissions through government diktat, with the inevitable impact this will have on mobility, economic growth and employment.

I wish renewable energy sources like wind, wave and solar power made up a fourth option, but we have to be honest: while essential they will not meet most of our energy needs any time soon. I reluctantly think the least-bad (but still terrible) option is to build nuclear power-stations for a generation while we wait for these clean sources to become sufficiently advanced to meet our needs.

But this leads to the second, equally large nuclear decision - and a difficult problem. If we accept the spread of civil use of nuclear science as a regrettable lesser evil, are we also making the spread of nuclear weapons inevitable? Many of the countries that are trying to acquire nuclear weapons publicly claim to be legally developing nuclear power, but have in fact been enriching uranium on the side.

Britain is hardly blameless. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, nukes are about to be rhetorically wheeled into the chamber of the House of Commons. The government now has to decide whether to replace the Trident nuclear submarine with a new £10bn set of weapons. To WMD or not to WMD? That is the question.

The government and the defence establishment will try to frame this as a question of national virility. Do you want your country to be able to "punch above its weight"?

But there is a wider context. This is an age of massive nuclear proliferation, with regional Cold Wars developing all over the world: India vs Pakistan - a rivalry so volatile that Britain evacuated her citizens from the region three years ago - and soon Israel vs Iran, and North Korea vs Japan and South Korea. If these eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations continue, sooner or later there will be a nuclear exchange.

During the past few years, the British government has had a failing, flailing strategy: try to bribe or bomb new countries out of acquiring WMD. But the strategy of renewing and upgrading our own WMD while lecturing the rest of the world not to get them simply doesn't work. The pressure to acquire weapons from the Iranian public and Iranian democrats is even stronger than among the unelected mullahs. If anything, our hypocrisy seems to be making them more determined to get nukes.

There is another way. Right now, all the pressure on the government about nukes comes from conservatives who want to upgrade and retain every single warhead. It is time to offer a counterbalance by reclaiming the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament from unilateralist Trots and make it a mainstream, multilateralist organisation again.

It might sound naïve to propose reviving disarmament, but it is even more delusional to believe we can carry on with dozens of countries acquiring nuclear weapons without confronting catastrophe sooner or later. As a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Britain is supposed to already be committed to "pursue nuclear disarmament". The treaty is currently being reviewed in a month-long meeting in New York, where Kofi Annan has described existing nuclear arsenals as "a real danger" and said disarmament was "vital".

So how could Britain begin to meet these commitments, as most of the other 180 signatories are demanding? We could begin with an acknowledgement of reality: Britain is extremely unlikely to ever use our nuclear warheads. Against the only security threat we face they are totally useless. Even in the extremely unlikely worst-case scenario that al-Qa'ida acquired and used a nuclear device, what good would our deterrent be? Who would we nuke in response?

There is only one good use for our nukes: as bargaining chips to begin a process of phased multilateral disarmament that would gradually reduce the world's nuclear stand-offs. Britain - one of the founder members of the nuclear club - could offer to begin slowly dismantling a few of our 48 warheads in exchange for Iran remaining non-nuclear and the other nuclear powers making similar incremental reductions. The drift towards building nukes might - just might - begin to be replaced with a momentum towards disarmament if we blink first. The NPT provides the architecture to do this - but until we force our government, it will cling to these totems of power. Do we have to wait for another Hiroshima before we act?

Long after the ephemera of day-to-day Westminster politics and the bustle of the election has been forgotten, these are the nuclear decisions on which our politicians will be judged by the history books - if there are people around to write them.

Dig out your old nuclear holocaust movies. Dust down your ancient CND banners. Get ready for the return of the mushroom-cloud nightmares you consigned to your subconscious back when the Berlin Wall fell - 2005 is going to be the year nuclear weapons come back.

Let's take a tour of all the people who are about to force nukes back onto the political agenda - and into your dreams. Iran's mullahs are about to get a nuclear bomb. This isn't a scaremongering Saddam-will-get-you-in-45-minutes piece of nonsense. Everybody - from France to Germany to the Arab countries - agrees. Iran has been noisily testing its shiny new Shahab ballistic missile, and simultaneously enriching uranium.

Israel is preparing for a pre-emptive strike, but doesn't know how to judge the timing. What if they misjudge and attack after the Iranians have a weapon ready for use? In the next year, there will be a pre-emptive war, a nuclear stand-off or even a nuclear exchange in the most volatile region of the world.

Back at the ranch, the United States is building a "new generation" of nukes. They are smaller, quicker and - as the US right describes them - "more useable". Margaret Thatcher, on the basis of her impeccable links to the Bush administration, predicts they will be used as battlefield weapons within the next 20 years. Ah, but don't worry, the Bushies say: the US will be safe from retaliation because of the National Missile Defence shield they are building. Remember that? It's Ronald Reagan's baby, the Star Wars system that will somehow shoot any incoming nukes off into space.

Here's where Britain comes in. This nuclear shield would need a smattering of interceptor missiles across the world. Tony Blair has already privately agreed to allow RAF Fylingdales in North Yorkshire to be used as one of the bases. Britain will be essential to the US defence shield, but not covered by it - making us the first target for any attempt to blast a hole in US defences. And as if all that isn't enough, the next Parliament will have to decide whether to replace Trident, the British nuclear submarine carrying 48 nuclear warheads, each eight times more powerful than the Hiroshima blast.

Does all that sound complicated - and terrifying - enough? We're not through yet. India and Pakistan are still in a nuclear stand-off over Kashmir. They've already had two Cuban Missile Crises in the past decade. (Remember when Britain strongly advised its citizens to leave both countries two summers ago because they might be about to be evaporated?) There is still no hotline between the two countries' leaders, even though they threatened nuclear strikes against each other 13 times in 1999 alone. Pakistan's leadership is making peaceful noises at last - but it is very vulnerable to an Islamic fundamentalist coup.

And we're still not through. Now that North Korea's psychopathic regime has nukes, countries across Asia are considering acquiring a nuclear arsenal of their own, with South Korea and Japan at the front of the queue. More stand-offs. More risk. And did I mention the hundreds of "loose nukes" still barely protected in the former Soviet Union?

The truth emerging from this scattered picture of nuclear proliferation is simple: there is a stronger chance of a nuclear bomb being used now than at almost any point in the Cold War. No, the old fears won't come back. A nuclear attack on London is phenomenally unlikely (for now). But there is no such thing as a regional nuclear war. An exchange between India and Pakistan, or between Israel and Iran, would - quite apart from killing millions of people - risk irreparable ecological damage to the planet. Today, along with man-made climate change, nuclear weapons are the biggest threat to human life as we know it. So why is hardly anybody talking about it?

Partly, it's because nobody seems to have any good answers. We all know that during the Cold War, nuclear weapons were regulated by a simple doctrine: Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). If you used a nuke, you were guaranteed to be nuked in return. What doctrine now regulates the use of these weapons?

Some people believe that MAD is still a working principle. The conservative commentator Matthew Parris, for example, speaks for many on the right when he says that India and Pakistan are more stable because of nuclear weapons. "If India and Pakistan did not have nuclear weapons, they would have gone to war in 2002 ... the threat alone defused the situation. No lives were lost. This was the classic case for nuclear weapons, and it was demonstrated [there]." So MAD got us through the Cold War; it will get smaller powers through their own conflicts with less bloodshed. Proliferation is a good thing.

This argument is flawed for several reasons. Even when MAD was practised by two relatively stable super- power blocs for just 40 years, it nearly broke down and led to "rational suicide" on several occasions. Does anybody really think that if this is replicated across the world - in the most tense, dangerous and often fanatical regions - it will not break down sooner or later? Just one lapse, just one crazy leader testing the doctrine, condemns tens of millions of people to death. It requires delirious, wild optimism to believe MADness on every continent will keep us safe indefinitely.

But more importantly, all over the world, even the strained logic of MAD is evaporating. The US government believes it will, within a generation, be safe from retaliation because of its missile shield, so MAD will no longer apply to them. Many ultra-nationalists in the Indian government in 2002 seemed to have a worrying lack of knowledge about the effects of a nuclear war, claiming that it would have "a limited effect" and "we could take it". MAD doesn't work if people don't understand the consequences. And Islamic fundamentalists who believe that death can be more glorious than life, who welcome "martyrdom", are obviously not going to be put off by retaliation. So, against our biggest security threat - al-Qa'ida - MAD is useless.

I can only think of one long-term answer to the danger: phased, tightly monitored multilateral disarmament, reducing all the world's nuclear arsenals one step at a time. Right now, this is so far off the political map it sounds crazy. But what is the alternative?

There is Parris-style faith in MAD. Or there is the neoconservative solution, which is to keep thousands of nukes ourselves but deny them to everybody else through raw force. This is not a tenable long-term solution. Perhaps an Israeli bombing raid on Iran's reactors will work this year - but can proliferation be dealt with that way indefinitely? How can we sustain such hypocrisy without making more countries eager to get nukes to spite us?

Multilateral disarmament is deeply flawed, but the alternatives - endless proliferation or a neoconservative resort to force against any potential nuclear powers - are more dangerous still. Even if slow, careful nuclear disarmament didn't seem the best option to you at the height of the Cold War, it should now. Yet the people who should be making this case - groups like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament - have gone off on a Trotskyite tangent, campaigning on causes that have nothing to do with nukes. (Their current crusade is to put Tony Blair on trial.)

The business of building a long, slow campaign for global disarmament should begin again in 2005 - but I don't think it will. The citizens of democratic countries will, I fear, have to wait for a nuclear blast somewhere - in Delhi or Seoul or Karachi - before we wake from our nuclear coma. By then, it will be too late for millions of people - and perhaps for us.

While the British and American political classes chatter about weapons of mass destruction that have long since dissolved into the sands of Iraq, out here in the real world the threat of WMD being used - the mass murder of civilians - is real and growing. Let's look at just two of these dangers: the threat to Pakistan's nuclear arsenal should General Pervez Musharraf be killed, and the loose nukes which are almost unguarded in the former Soviet Union.

In the last few days, Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, has apologised on live TV for flogging off nuclear secrets to the highest bidder, including the most depraved abuser of human rights in the world, the North Korean government. He exculpated the Pakistani government of any responsibility, but that isn't much of a relief. He has extremist Islamist sympathies, and Khan is not a lone traitor, a nutcase now safely intercepted.

Pakistan's state structures are utterly divided. On one side, Khan swam in a river of intense anti-Western hatred that runs straight through Pakistan's national security apparatus. A large slice of Pakistan's notorious secret services, the ISI, have links to jihadist groups, supported the Taliban and pushed for an intensification of the nuclear stand-off (even to the point of war) with India over Kashmir.

In contrast, Pervez Musharraf, an unpleasant dictator who came to power in a coup in 1998, does seem, under considerable US pressure and financial inducement, to be trying to bring this large, sordid underworld under control as much as he can without being toppled. The more blatant jihadists are being arrested, and he is talking peace with Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Indian Prime Minister.

So, future Khans will be jailed by Musharraf and we can cross Pakistan's nuclear weapons off the list of geopolitical reasons to stay sweatily awake at night, right? No. Musharraf is perched on top of a volcano, and he could be burned away at any moment. He has already narrowly survived assassination by fundamentalists twice this year. If - when? - Musharraf is killed, there is a real risk that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal will be seized by the jihadi extremists within the ISI. A nicely polished set of pro-Taliban, pro-al-Qa'ida nukes will be the result.

Many serious commentators are warning of this. Bernard Henri-Levy, one of France's leading public intellectuals, conducted a year-long study into Pakistan for his recent book, Who Killed Daniel Pearl? He explains, "We don't have to scare ourselves about what would happen... if Musharraf were overthrown and replaced by a clique of religious fanatics. The clique is already there. The religious fanatics are in the arena. Because they invented Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, they have the key, the access codes for the Pakistani silos, transmission systems and warheads."

All the West can do about this massive WMD danger, it seems, is pay for some impressive security for Musharraf - a troop of US marines should be training his security personnel - and keep prodding him to deal with the jihadist networks, while also democratising and developing Pakistan to tackle the root causes of fundamentalism. This is a terrible juggling game, and one dropped ball will lead to disaster.

And so onto the next real batch of WMD that could massacre millions: Russia's loose nukes. When the Soviet Union collapsed, there were 27,000 nuclear weapons hanging around, and enough plutonium and uranium to make a further 55,000. Each one of these weapons would produce a blast considerably larger than Hiroshima's. For several months in the early Nineties, scientists at a nuclear institute in the former republic of Georgia took turns guarding 22lb of highly enriched uranium with garden rakes.

Even today, only 40 per cent of these weapons are being guarded to the same high standards as US nuclear material. As the US Council of Foreign Relations explains, "Even basic security arrangements such as fences, doors and padlocks remain inadequate in many locations."

Smuggling this liberally-sprinkled nuclear material out to terrorists is not a sci-fi scenario. It has very nearly happened on several occasions. One Russian naval officer in Murmansk crawled through a hole in the fence surrounding a submarine fuel facility, broke into a barely-locked building, hacked off a 10lb lump of enriched uranium and hid it in his garage. He was looking for a buyer when he was caught by the police.

In 1994, three former Soviet citizens were arrested in Munich. They clung to a lead-lined suitcase containing 12.7oz of plutonium. They were planning to sell it to maniacs who wanted to make a dirty bomb. The German intelligence agencies alone report that they have intercepted more than 800 attempts to smuggle nuclear material out of Russia since 1991. More than 4lb of highly enriched uranium stolen in 1993 - after it was abandoned, unguarded, in the Sukhumi research centre in Georgia - is still missing.

This is especially worrying because some of the world's most virulent jihadists are working out of Russia's backyard. The crazed war on Chechnya commandeered by Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin has murdered over a third of the Chechen civilian population in 13 years. It has turned the province into a petri dish for the world's most savage Islamists, including al- Qa'ida. They are fighting worryingly close to an awful lot of unguarded weapons.

So what has George Bush, resolute foe of an al-Qa'ida-meets-WMD sandwich, done about this menace? He actually slashed funding to deal with Russia's loose nukes by a third in 2001, and only reversed this decision after 11 September. It would cost a mere $13 billion to buy all of Russia's loose nukes and turn them into fuel for power plants, yet Bush refuses to do this on the grounds of expense. He has spent over 1,000 times this sum on tax cuts for the American rich over the next decade.

His Democratic opponents have wisely raised this as an election issue. Bush is, in this area, blatantly weak on US national security, in order to pay for his ideological crusade in favour of America's supposedly persecuted rich.

Democrats must not allow this issue to be dropped. If you were Osama Bin Laden this time last year, where would you go shopping for WMD - to your friends in Pakistan's secret services, to the many unguarded Russian weapons sites, or to your mortal enemy Saddam Hussein? Tony Blair was right to warn that WMD pose an apocalyptic threat to free societies, but totally wrong to believe that Iraq was their most likely source for Islamists. Blair's misjudgement in making WMD the official reason for the recent Iraq war might have actually made it even harder to deal with the very real danger.

Oh, and George Bush's sane and rational response? This week, he asked the Senate for billions of extra dollars to develop a "new generation" of WMD for himself, including hydrogen bombs and "mini-nukes". Sleep well, everyone.

May 23, 2003, Friday

SECTION: COMMENT; Pg. 18

LENGTH: 1233 words

HEADLINE: THE SECOND NUCLEAR AGE MAY BE MORE DIFFICULT
TO SURVIVE THAN THE COLD WAR;
THERE IS A GREATER RISK OF A NUCLEAR WEAPON BEING
USED NOW THAN AT

BYLINE: JOHANN HARI

BODY:
If you mention nuclear weapons in a political context,
you immediately make people think of a world gone by:
Michael Foot shaking a stick before a Hyde Park crowd,
Reagan and Gorbachev at an icy summit, nightmares
about mushroom clouds over Sheffield. Nukes seem in a
British context as real a political issue as coal
mines, incomes policies or Harold Wilson's paranoia -
even though we are supposed to have just fought a war
to prevent nuclear proliferation. All this
corduroy-clad distance obscures a central - and
terrifying - fact: there is a greater risk of a
nuclear weapon being used now than at any point in the
Cold War other than during the Cuban missile crisis.

Margaret Thatcher - in her recent book Statecraft -
explains that "battlefield nuclear weapons will
probably be used in the next 20 years". She is right
and I, for one, am terrified. The US Senate authorised
the Bush administration on Tuesday to begin research
on "mini-nukes", which would have around a third of
the power of the weapon that in a few seconds ended
more than 100,000 human lives in Hiroshima. (The same
number died the following week in Nagasaki, one of the
great war crimes of the 20th century).

Senator Edward Kennedy has a unique insight into
nuclear war, since his brother Jack was the president
who reined in hardline military figures during the
Cuban missile crisis. Curtis LeMay, the then US air
force chief of staff, wanted to launch a "tactical
nuclear strike" against the Soviet Union's provocative
decision to locate missiles in Cuba; if Kennedy had
not stopped him, you would not be reading this
newspaper today. So what did Jack's sibling and
political heir say on Tuesday? "The hardliners in the
Bush administration say things are different today. A
nuclear war won't be so bad if you just make the nukes
a little smaller," he explained. "That's nonsense. Is
half of Hiroshima okay? Is a quarter of Hiroshima
okay?"

Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of State, claims
that the Bush administration just wants to study these
weapons, "not to develop, not to deploy, not to use"
them. This is howlingly disingenuous: tens of millions
of dollars aren't being spent simply to see the pretty
pictures these plans might make on a page. If there is
no intention to use these weapons, then why not spend
this money on some of the 40 million people who have
no healthcare insurance in his country? Or on Iraq,
where - despite the euphoria following Saddam's
downfall - there is a danger of a cholera outbreak?
Yet the neo-cons privately ask liberals who backed the
recent war: if it was okay to use massive firepower to
overthrow Saddam, why not the possibility of a
teeny-weeny nuke if the war had dragged on for years,
or the Iraqis had used weapons of mass destruction?
Come on, they nudge; don't be a wuss now.

The answer to this is clear. Even the horrible
weaponry that was used in the Gulf could be wielded
with a degree of precision; it is a testament to this
fact that, in a country of 22 million people, 13,000
people (10,000 of whom were soldiers) died in the
recent war. A nuke - even a "small" one - is an
entirely different question. These weapons are
immense, blunt instruments of mass murder, entirely
incapable of minimising civilian deaths - and that's
an insurmountable problem before you even consider
their environmental impact.

Regular readers will know that I am not reflexively
critical of the US, which can sometimes be a force for
great good in the world as well as bad. But liberals
who backed the war now have a responsibility (perhaps
especially so) to point out that the Bush
administration's current nuclear policy is - without
hyperbole - extremely dangerous not just for the US
but for all life on this planet. It is not just the
"mini-nukes" (a preposterous term which makes them
sound like something you might find under your
Christmas tree); it is the decision to pursue National
Missile Defence, to trash the Anti-ballistic Missile
Treaty, and to refuse to ratify the Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty.

These choices need to be seen in the context of a
revolution in the role of nuclear weapons in
international relations. The Yale political scientist
Paul Bracken, in his 1999 book Fire in the East,
writes that we have entered "the Second Nuclear Age."
The First Nuclear Age began with the attack on
Hiroshima and built into the Cold War stand-off
between the US and Russia. It was a very dangerous
period, and our world was nearly destroyed at least
once. It was, however, regulated by the doctrine -
understood by everyone - of Mutually Assured
Destruction. Although its acronym MAD was apt, it made
a strange, awful sort of sense.

The Second Nuclear Age is very different, and less
easily comprehended. One of the reasons why anxiety
about nukes has evaporated is that we have no
replacement for the old narrative of how nuclear war
will affect us individually. In the old world, a
three-minute warning would come over the radio, and we
would scramble into our cellars and wait to be
incinerated. But nobody quite knows how a nuclear war
between, say, India and Pakistan would affect us.
Would sheep in the Lake District die, as they did
after Chernobyl? Would the global economy collapse?
Would there be a nuclear winter, and the slow
extinction of man? The truth is that it depends on who
launches the weapons, who retaliates, and other
unknowable factors; but all of these are real risks.

The new, second era is one of massive nuclear
proliferation, as the technologies needed to produce
these weapons become ever easier to acquire. Instead
of a bipolar world where two big power blocs confront
- and restrain - each other, we have a multipolar
world where a whole range of countries wave their
nukes as protective devices, status symbols, and
potential weapons. This is far more dangerous. Does
anybody honestly doubt that at least one of the dozen
countries that now have nukes will one day have a
leader who makes a terrible misjudgement and launches
a nuclear attack?

This nearly happened last year, after all, over
Kashmir, and Clinton administration officials still
turn pale when they talk about the similar
Indo-Pakistani crisis that happened in 1996. A nuclear
attack is nearer now than ever, and the risk of
terrorist networks getting hold of these weapons is
only one among many.

It is hard to know what to recommend. More wars of
counterproliferation by the US might be necessary,
even though the Iraq war has not yet produced any WMD.
Yet it is hard to see how any American president will
be able to justify restraining others countries'
behaviour towards nukes when his own is so palpably
irresponsible. George Bush is blithely waving his
lighter around in a gunpowder factory. There is
certainly more need for a credible campaign for global
nuclear restraint and disarmament now than there has
ever been.

But CND as an organisation seems to have become
obsessed with preventing conventional wars, and
opposed the just action in Iraq. They should now focus
their energies on their defining mission: pressuring
politicians to reduce the number of nuclear weapons on
Earth. Otherwise, the oldest of cliches might yet come
true: we might leave it too late, and I will get no
pleasure from saying "I told you so" as we are all
starving and freezing to death during a nuclear
winter.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

There is more likely to be a nuclear war now than at any other time in the last twenty years. This sounds like a preposterous assertion: after all, the cold war is over, the Berlin Wall sits in pieces on innumerable mantelpieces, and the great ideological battle between West and East is a fading memory. Yet nuclear weapons are proliferating at a terrifying rate. The assurance of mutual destruction that created a perversely stable bipolar world is gone.

The principle of mutually assured destruction (which has the painfully appropriate acronym, "MAD") ruled the cold war. It meant, simply, that if one of the two forces launched a nuclear attack on the other, the victim would immediately retaliate, and humanity would be destroyed. This terrifyingly rational principle ensured that an attack would never occur unless a psychopath led one of the key powers.

Leaving aside the Cuban missile crisis, and the fact that at least one of the world leaders of the time (Ronald Reagan) had mental health problems, the principle was a fairly sound one. During the cold war, I would not have been an exponent of nuclear disarmament. I do not think it was desirable for the forces of democracy and market economics to put themselves at the mercy of a pernicious Soviet Communism which showed itself quite willing to seize what territory it could by force.

We face a different international climate today. We're all capitalists now, even red China. Territorial expansion is the goal of only a few, increasingly impotent and irrelevant feudal powers. Competition is for economic rather than military superiority. The precarious balance of the nuclear age no longer exists. We now have a situation where more and more powers see nuclear weapons as a virility symbol, a way of showing that they mean business on the international stage.

A number of candidates in the recent Indian elections were quite open about this, arguing that their immense nuclear capability demonstrated that Indians were big boys now. Yet these same leaders also made it clear that they were prepared in some circumstances to use their warheads against their equally well-equipped neighbour, Pakistan.

This is the same nuclear Pakistan where a military coup recently occurred. As it happens, the coup was by what seems to be a relatively benevolent sect, but what is to say that the next coup, or the coup after that, will not be fuelled by fanatical nationalists who want to teach those pesky Indians a lesson?

And if this scenario is to be replicated globally, across Latin America, the Middle East (where already Israel has nuclear weapons), the former Soviet Union (Yeltsin's finger on the button, anyone?) – given all this, can we really say with any confidence that at some point, one of these hotspots will not erupt into another Hiroshima?

There's a certain arrogance in the belief that it's okay for us Westerners to have nukes because we're terribly responsible and democratic, but as for these filthy foreigners… The obvious solution is phased disarmament by consent of all nuclear nations. The poetry of Auden, who said that "we must love one another or die", trips easily off the tongue in this context. Nice rhetoric, but it's the politics of fantasy-land. The US Senate only last month vetoed the Treaty which proposed simply to stop any further nuclear tests from being conducted, so thanks to our Republican chums, there'll definitely be plenty of nuclear explosions on our planet in the decades ahead. If they won't even stop testing, how do we get them to scrap the weapons themselves?

The sad truth is that I don't have any answers, and I can't find anybody who does. My gut feeling is that we should disarm, alone if necessary, given that we are extraordinarily unlikely to be threatened with nuclear attack by another power. Even if we were challenged by another country, it is far more likely that biological or chemical weapons would be used, since they are much cheaper to manufacture and easier to 'detonate' accurately.

Nobody can credibly claim that we would reciprocate against such an attack by nuking, say, Baghdad or Peking, so there's no deterrent there. We can show the world what every nation could do with the spare billions saved from weapons like Trident, by spending it on schools, hospitals, and caring for each other. We can be a beacon of light, showing the world that the money squandered on nuclear defence could be used for constructive purposes. Utopian? Probably. But I see no obvious loss, and it's a damn sight better than acquiescing in the unthinking creation of a world armed to its nuclear teeth.