THE photograph of a submarine’s weapons engineer holding the trigger that would be used in the final stage of a nuclear missile launch will send a shiver down the spine of every reader of The National.
It’s the red button that Jeremy Corbyn famously said he wouldn’t push, but quite clearly many other politicians would have no such qualms.
Being prepared to wipe out cities and kill millions of people is sadly the sort of political machismo we have come to expect from the Tories and their friends at Westminster.
The picture was taken yesterday on board HMS Vigilant, one of four nuclear warhead-carrying submarines, during Defence Secretary Michael Fallon’s visit to the Faslane Naval Base.
It was a press facility carefully stage-managed by Fallon to persuade the media – and through it – people across Scotland, to back his case that spending £167 billion on renewing the Trident nuclear weapons system is the right thing to do.
But how wrong he is.
The arguments against renewal are powerful – and ones that both Scotland’s main political parties, the SNP and Scottish Labour, support.
To mention just some: nuclear weapons are immoral and their use would amount to mass-murder of civilians; renewing these weapons breaks the terms of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to negotiate in good faith to achieve nuclear disarmament, and renewing them encourages other states to do so too.
There are others too, ones that demolish the main renewal “deterrent” rationale: having these weapons does not protect us, but on the contrary puts us in more danger from extremists, and spending such huge sums on their renewal will inevitably divert funds from areas such as intelligence, which is crucial in defeating our most pressing threat, Daesh.
Put simply, yesterday’s visit speaks volumes about Fallon’s audacity in trying to win Scots over when it’s clear our country has no truck with these weapons of mass destruction.
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