THE vote by the British Parliament Wednesday to renew the UK’s nuclear weapons capability is supremely disappointing. With it the government of Tony Blair finally surrenders the last shred of the “ethical foreign policy” with which it came to power a decade ago. This was a final opportunity for Blair in the closing months of his premiership to have an impact for good on world affairs. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) to which Britain is a signatory is misnamed. A key part of its texts dedicates the nuclear powers to the ultimate abolition of nuclear weapons. Abolition means total disarmament. Here was a chance for London to show the way and demonstrate its commitment to the ultimate aim of the nonproliferation deal.
A British decision to abandon nuclear weapons would have had significant repercussions. The position of France, the other European nuclear power, would have been undermined. The Americans — whose weapons technology the British use, and the Russians would have been forced again to acknowledge the NPT promises they made. The impetus would then have moved to China and India and Pakistan. As the Middle East’s only nuclear power, Israel might have been forced to disarm and Iran to abandon its apparent atomic weapons program. So much might have been achieved had the British government seized this unique opportunity to keep its NPT promises. But Tony Blair has thrown the chance away.
It is surely no coincidence that the nuclear vote in the British Parliament was a replay of Blair’s catastrophic decision to back the Bush invasion of Iraq. On both occasions, because a large number of government legislators rebelled, the vote was only won with the wholehearted support of the opposition Conservatives. They, like President Bush’s erstwhile Democrat supporters, are busy trying to talk themselves out of their once-wholehearted commitment to the Iraq debacle. They will surely also rue the day they threw up this chance to change the nature of international armaments.
The Blair government has sold the pass. The time to draw a marker in the sand and show the way to existing and would-be nuclear-armed states was now. What was so depressing was that throughout the debate, no British government voice seriously addressed the issue of nuclear disarmament. Instead, Blair insisted that the world was becoming ever more insecure and it would therefore be madness for the British to abandon the nuclear card. The madness is surely the inability to recognize that it is the threatening presence of existing nuclear-armed powers that is propelling threatened states like Iran and North Korea into nuclear armament.
Blair may fear that without its nuclear option, the UK might no longer be able to punch above its weight in world affairs. The absolute reverse is true. Had he quit this wicked weaponry, Britain’s world standing would have been immense.
