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Going Nuclear: Britain's bomb in the South Atlantic
Paul Rogers
Twenty-five years ago
the Falklands/Malvinas
War was controversial
in Britain for three main reasons.
One was a widespread belief
that the war was fought by Margaret Thatcher's government to
cover up their failure to anticipate an Argentine invasion.
They were prepared to fight a
war that would cost the lives of
nearly a thousand soldiers, not
so much to safeguard the
lifestyles of less than 2,000
islanders as to prevent an electoral disaster.
Related to this was the bitter
controversy over the sinking of
the Argentine cruiser General
Belgrano by the nuclear-powered
submarine HMS Conqueror, when
the obsolete cruiser was actually
sailing away from the British
Task Force.
Tactical and strategic
The third issue was less prominent at the time but has never
gone away -- the question of
whether the Task Force warships
were carrying tactical nuclear
weapons when they went south
and whether Mrs Thatcher was
even prepared to threaten the
use of the Polaris strategic
nuclear system if things went
wrong for the Task Force.
Tam Dalyell was given information on both of these issues
from several sources at the time
of the war, and one of Britain's
most experienced defence correspondents at the time, Andrew
Wilson of The Observer, was told
flatly by one frigate commander
that he would not sail his ship
into a war zone unless he had
nuclear weapons on board.
After the war, other people
talked to Dalyell, including a
retired senior civil servant from
the Ministry of Defence and a
retired officer from the Polaris
fleet. Even so, successive governments steadfastly denied any
such deployments.
The official line
Then, last year, Professor
Lawrence Freedman published
his official history of the war. He
says he found no evidence to
support the Polaris claim, even
though Dalyell's sources were
insistent, but he did get confirmation that tactical nuclear
weapons were deployed from
Britain on two frigates as well as
the two aircraft carriers.
That this happened in a war
against a non-nuclear power may
seem astonishing, but it is little
more than an accurate indication
of British nuclear policy for fifty
years.
Governments have repeatedly
tried to give the impression that
nuclear weapons were solely for
deterring an all-out nuclear
attack on Britain, but this is far
from true.
"Out of area"
Britain was fully committed to
NATO's Cold War policy of
"flexible response" that included
a willingness to use nuclear
weapons first, and there is a long
history of Britain deploying
nuclear weapons to the Middle
East and South East Asia alongside a belief that it was possible
to fight "small nuclear wars in
far-off places".
Furthermore, the policy continues to this day although the
current government is doing its
level best to avoid any debate on
the issue.
Usable nukes
Britain's tactical nuclear bombs
were withdrawn in the 1990s
but they were replaced by a version of the Trident strategic missile that could be fitted with a
much smaller nuclear warhead,
similar in size to those that had
been seen as useable in nuclear
wars that fell short of all-out
catastrophe.
Since such nuclear war-fighting was not something one
should worry ordinary people
about, the term "tactical" was
banished, to be replaced by the
anodyne "sub-strategic".
Now, even that word is
banned from the lexicon, even
though the Defence White
Paper on the Trident replacement does admit that first use
remains an option, and a small
warhead will be available in the
new system.
Just as in the Falklands/Malvinas War, a quarter of a century
ago, Britain was prepared to
consider "going nuclear", so that
will continue to be part of the
defence posture for the next half
century.
It is just that you really
shouldn't talk about such things
in polite company.
Paul Rogers is Professor of Peace
Studies at the University of Bradford, and Global Security Consultant to the Oxford Research Group.
His latest books are A War Too Far:
Iraq, Iran and the New American
Century (Pluto Press, 2006) and
Beyond Terror (see Reviews page).
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