Wandering off the beaten track here, but interesting debate.
I’m with you on Trident Mitch. IMO, total madness to spend £100billion on a WMD that is capable of destroying the planet over and over again, when we can’t even afford to feed our own people.
The latest figures from the Trussell Trust show a 19% year-on-year increase in food bank use, demonstrating that hunger and poverty continue to affect large numbers of people in the UK, including rising numbers of low-paid workers. The trust’s food banks distributed enough emergency food to feed almost 1.1 million people for three days in 2014/15 – up from 913,000 the previous year.
I think attitudes are changing towards nuclear weapons and more people are finding it difficult to justify such huge public expenditure in light of increasing hardship like the aforementioned. Back in the 80s if you opposed the deployment of WMDs you were labelled as a bunch of ‘misguided lesbians’, but now the mood is shifting and the County is more evenly split, with a higher percentage of Scots against them.
Who decides who the good guys are when we talk of nuclear weapons acting as a deterrent? Using such logic, ordinary Iranians could and indeed do argue that Iran is developing nuclear weapons out of a rational fear for its national safety because of the systematically threatening posture of the United States and Israel. Maybe a view not widely shared here or in the US, but a widespread one held in many parts of the world nonetheless. I wonder if the US/UK led invasion of Iraq in 2003 without UN backing would have happened if Saddam had possessed WMDs? How many people would be happy for WMDs to be sited in Wiltshire?
