Photo taken from the BBC, with the caption “The remnants of the egg thrown at David Cameron.”

Because of its stupid paywall, I can’t link you to the Times article in which a number of top generals have come out and said that they agree with the Lib Dem position that Trident should be scrapped. Nevertheless, they have, and ahead of the debate on foreign policy tomorrow it’s going to give Nick Clegg a bit of a credibility boost. It’s not unprecedented – in fact it does come up outside of election politics from time to time – but in fairness it’s not even really inherently surprising, as the decision to retain a nuclear deterrent in the UK is fundamentally a political one rather than tactical.

This sprung to mind when I was reading an excellent post by Michael Krepon at ArmsControlWonk. The post is about the Indian strategic thinker and journalist Krishnaswamy Subrahmanyam. Subrahmanyam is an ambiguous figure – at one and the same time he is one of the foremost promoters of India’s nuclear programme, and one of the fiercest critics of nuclear weapons and their use. He describes nukes as “terror weapons,” but rationalises India’s ownership of them not by their own virtues, but by their iconography:

The nuclear challenge is not just the one posed by the Pakistani efforts to acquire nuclear weapons or even the Chinese challenge. [Writing elsewhere, Subrahmanyam estimated that Pakistan acquired a usable nuclear device three years before India.] It is a challenge arising out of the global strategic environment in which nuclear weapons have been accepted as the currency of power, nuclear capability has transformed the game of power to coercive diplomacy and the subcontinent is surrounded on all sides by nuclear weapons…

What’s this got to do with Trident and Nick Clegg? Subrahmanyam’s position is revealing; here, he justifies his stance, but also throws down a gauntlet for those western powers who, between them, own some 95% of the worlds’ weapons. For a country like India, the strategic equation is straightforward, and Professor Raj Krishna made the point in the April-June 1965 issue of India Quarterly:

It is an illusion to suppose that military weakness rather than military power makes a nation more influential in pressing for disarmament…. Virtue is respected only when it is backed by power; power without virtue is disastrous; but virtue without power is helpless. The fate of the merely virtuous is often decided in the assemblies of the powerful without reference to and at the expense of the virtuous.

This argument is often used by those who argue against the idea of unilateral nuclear disarmament by the UK. It’s not an entirely unreasonable position; it would be hard to argue that the UK could expect to lead the way by disarming, setting in motion a “domino effect” that would topple the atomic storage houses of America and the former Soviet Union. But it does ignore the fact that the UK is not in the same position as India, and thus the strategic calculus does not quite resolve in the same way.

In the first quote above, Subrahmanyam referred to nukes as being part of the currency of power. For India, that’s a realistic assessment; it’s closest neighbours, trading partners diplomatic concerns include two nuclear states with a recent history of belligerence towards India. The risk to India, then, is not that Pakistan or China might use their weapons; it’s that the weapons are a bargaining chip that India can’t counter, so has to neutralise. More to the point, as a second-order power, having nuclear weapons gets India a seat at the table. It means that America and Russia have to court its attention, and that China can’t move against it without the rest of the world exacting punishment.

Unlike India, however, Britain is still, just barely, a first-order power. And that means that it doesn’t have to act out to get attention on the world stage; it’s not surrounded by enemies, literally or figuratively, and no-one’s going to slam a nuke down in order to leverage trade concessions. Over the last twenty years, I literally cannot think of a single diplomatic, political or military engagement that would have gone differently had the UK not possessed nuclear weapons. And if you can effectively forget that they’re there for twenty years then what’s the point of having them?

But there’s a broader principle here, and that’s that the nature of power is misunderstood. If we return to the premise that nukes are part of the currency of power, then it has to be asked: what gives them their value? Again, this is the difference between first-order and second-order powers. For the first-order countries, it’s not the raw destructive power of the nuke that gives it its potency, because no-one believes that the truly powerful actors – the US, Russia etc – will actually use them. In fact, the raw destructive power of the US is basically the same with or without nukes; there’s only so many ways that you can tear a country apart, after all, and in the absence of nukes the US’s conventional forces would be more than adequate. The relationship actually goes the other way. Nukes are potent as power currency because powerful countries own them.

Within this are the seeds of the logic of disarmament. If power were to become correlated with the rejection of the bomb then that, too would spread. We know this because it’s happened:

Concepts and institutions which were considered inescapable and having no alternatives have become totally unacceptable and discarded into the dustbin of history. Slavery was a hoary institution… Monarchy and the divine right of kings had their day… No one today will fight for a king… The colour bar and discrimination based on it was prevalent even a couple of decades ago, but is no longer defended as a way of life… Colonialism is indefensible today – though in its heyday it was hailed as a civilising mission… All that has changed within our lifetime.

All of which is slightly airy-fairy and intangible, and doesn’t entirely relate to Britain – again, Britain no longer has the capacity to lead on this, so the argument is more appropriately directed at America. But for Britain to disarm would provoke a debate; we would be the first major power to voluntarily give up these arms. It would earn us diplomatic friendship in those up-and-coming countries with whom the unfairness of the non-proliferation treaty has always rankled: Brazil, South Africa, Japan, and, yes, India. And it would buy us all the goodies that Nick Clegg put into his manifesto with the Pot of Infinite Trident Money.

It seems increasingly like a good deal to me.