Blustering Brown has sunk to new depths offering up a Trident sub as a fig leaf to make him feel important. Strutting aimlessly alone saving the world, the empty gesture is as much use as a coal-fired sub. It takes a leader with guts to scrap Trident, not a spineless posturing has-been living in a Yellow Submarine.
Coming up with a cunning plan, the wannabe commander-in-chief is to tell the UN he is willing to cut the number of Trident missile-carrying subs from four to three, a day after being anointed smug saviour of the world.
Only he's not a presidential head of state. Billy-no-mates Brown is a two-bit prime minister of a fag-end government, snubbed by Obama and set to be out on his ears in a few months time. Only ordering some poor soul to press the button is in his gift, for the time being.
The struggling Supreme Leader is thinking about, maybe, perhaps, getting rid of one sub - when three can easily do the job of blowing up the world.
Pseudo-liberals seem blissfully content looking for the 'sky of blue and sea of green', welcoming the move as some first faltering step towards scrapping Trident or the road to unilateral nuclear disarmament. This is nothing of the sort. This is empty gesture politics.
If deluded Brown thinks this will appease the Party Left or steal a march on political rivals, he's living in a Yellow Submarine. One of the best things about iTunes is you can delete all the Ringo rubbish from Beatles albums.
Scrapping one of four subs doesn't save 25%. More cash would have to be spent on maintaining the overall 'deterrent' capability of the remaining fleet. One sub is always out of action anyway for maintenance. The new breed of subs would be quite capable of taking up the slack after scrapping the spare.
You can't play football on deck so what do these guys on nuclear subs do all day apart from skulking around 'deterring' and watching Das Boot on DVD?
Captains have to read doomed Brown's droning drivel in a "by the time your reading this letter" before they can press the button. Maybe that's what's needed to tip them over the edge?
At the beginning of the year, with a warning of things to come, ex-generals thundered in The Times branding the Trident missile system completely useless and the £20 billion replacing it a waste of money, particularly in the current economic crisis.
With the new Vietnam looming in Afghanistan, they argued that rather than spending £20 billion renewing Trident, more should be spent on the armed forces.
"Nuclear weapons," they said, "have shown themselves to be completely useless as a deterrent to the threats and scale of the violence we currently face, or are likely to face - particularly international terrorism."
But hey, what do tin-pot generals know? With hindsight, it seems quite a lot.
Replacing Trident was one of war-mongering Blair's legacy leaving presents, giving the go-ahead to replace the system with a brand spanking new US baby, now heartily backed by Blinkered Brown.
Once again it raises the thorny question: what's independent or a deterrent about the UK's independent nuclear deterrent?
There's nothing independent about the UK's reliance on a US system with politicians quite willing to sell their souls to the US arms trade.
Trident has only one mission and that's to get a seat on the UN security council top table. It's a lot of money to fork out to join the big boys club. Whether it's three subs or four makes no difference to Iran or to the nuclear arm race.
Trident and the whole US-owned submarine missile system is a Cold War legacy. It is not a weapon for now, where the direct threat to the UK comes from home grown radical Islam.
The case for and against Trident will no doubt rage on, ad nauseam. The arguments are purely political rather than military.
With an empty UN gesture, Bottling Brown has kicked the Trident political football back into touch.
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