What is Trident for? Launching the Trident debate on 14 March, former CND member and current foreign secretary Margaret Beckett said Britain needed nuclear weapons because we cannot be sure that “no power hostile to our vital national interests and in possession of nuclear weapons would emerge” over the next 50 years.
The crucial question then is what these “vital interests” are.
The Rifkind doctrineIn November 1993, the then defence secretary Malcolm Rifkind said that in…