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The Intelligence2 Debate

The Intelligence2 Debate

Wednesday, 21st November 2007

The motion: Britain Doesn’t Need Trident

Concluding for the motion, Dr Rebecca Johnson, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, confessed that she had once ‘danced on nuclear weapons silos at Greenham Common’. These days her hopes for disarmament rested on the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The treaty binds all signatories, including Britain, to scrapping nuclear weapons. Our international obligations couldn’t be clearer.

Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the local MP, strode to the lectern and spoke with an exhilarating touch of martial crispness. He’s a far more impressive and stirring orator than his Hush Puppy performances on Newsnight would suggest. He grappled with Helena Kennedy’s emotive imagery and reminded her that casualties are not caused exclusively by nuclear weapons but by war itself. As John Major’s foreign secretary Rifkind recalled being briefed that in the event of the PM’s indisposition he would take sole control of Britain’s nuclear stockpile. ‘A sobering responsibility.’ He also corrected the suggestion, cunningly forwarded by Rebecca Johnson, that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty obliges Britain to disarm unilaterally. In fact the treaty urges the nuclear states to work for a general reduction in their capability.

Vigorously summing up the debate, Helena Kennedy urged us to support ‘a moral cause. The voice for change. The voice for peace!’ There was an eruption of applause behind me. I turned round. It was Bianca Jagger. Doubtless she supported the motion but she was against the flow of opinion on the night. The nukes won.

Votes

Before the debate: For 283; Against 291; Don’t Know 133

After the debate: For 268; Against 429; Don’t Know 18

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me

November 23rd, 2007 10:41pm

it is incorrect than we import warheads from the us.the warheads are british.the trident missiles are american build and are shared between the british and US ssbn


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