My weekly Comment in the daily Plymouth Herald (11.6.24). I want nuclear-everything (bombs, propulsion, energy, power) discussed during the General Election campaign but can clearly see it is a non-starter in any list of priorities. As, it would appear, is the same for war. Only the protests for Gaza have shaped any election manifesto, the rest being bland re-hashes of out-of-date and incoherent false promises.

The article was edited for publication, the original below.

There are no winners in a nuclear war

Not one Party leader has stated that they shall under no circumstances order the launch of a nuclear weapon. So it can hardly be against the rules of election purdah to argue for unilateral nuclear disarmament when we face such a ghastly future.

We are facing the real possibility of the use of nuclear weapons in the lifetime of the next UK Parliament.

Buried under the sincere emotional weight of commemoration of D-Day 1944, the American President, the de-facto leader of NATO, last week gave approval for US and UK weapons to be fired into and exploded inside Russia. US troops are standing alongside Ukrainians, assisting the launch of high explosives into Russian towns.

Not long before, President Biden had stated on screen that this would never happen, the engagement of NATO forces inside Russia would amount to the start of the Third World War. Yet it’s happening. Have we missed something here? Is everyone in a state of denial?

The more honest of the official military advisers tell us that the present risk of nuclear war is as grave as in 1962 and the early eighties. Some of us remember both periods as a time of breath-holding and anti-nuclear protests.

But not today. It is considered as “woke” to be against the readiness to unleash the Trident-system’s multiple nuclear warheads launched from the UK’s Vanguard nuclear submarines. Indeed, the Plymouth Herald rejoiced at the support of multiple Party-heads to pledge to bring the next generation of nuclear weaponry to Plymouth after the election.

The distraction of nuclear – weapons and power generation – taking much needed cash and skills from the enormous emergencies of both climate and social infrastructure – should be intolerable and exposed as lies.

Instead, “more jobs and more money!” was the parochial proclamation, devoid of any consideration of the impact on jobs and wealth should nuclear weapons ever be used.

And they may well be used, sooner than you think.

The military elite speak of the current escalating nuclear threat and counter-threat pattern, not as an opinion but as fact. There are preparations for resurrecting live nuclear weapon testing by Russia, China and the US. We witness the collapse of arms control measures, the modernisation of weapon systems and the emergence of political leaders fighting over access to the nuclear arsenals and boasting of their readiness to make the “first strike”.

There should be no doubt about the catastrophic reality of nuclear conflict.

The United States’ nuclear arsenal, to which the UK’s bombs are wholly subordinated, contain an Artificial Intelligence programme to deploy a launch-on-warning situation, making the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (huge nuclear bomb-carrying ICBNs) capable of being launched in as little as one minute—15 minutes for the submarines. There are enough weapons in those positions right now to bring on a nuclear winter that would kill at least 5 billion people. In a nuclear exchange, most people don’t die instantly – most die over a period of weeks or months in extreme agony, dissolved from within by the radioactive fallout.

The talk of “targeted” battlefield weapons is a nonsense of hawkish propaganda. There’s nothing targeted about them – these are weapons of mass destruction deemed illegal in international law. The cynically presented “low-yield” nuclear bombs, with smaller explosive and radioactive fallout footprints than those carried on the ICBNs, are nevertheless the size of that dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. For politicians to speak of their use in Ukraine or Gaza (and yes, active politicians in power have voiced those demands recently) is despicable.

There is only a single target for nuclear weapons – humanity itself. The first use of one nuclear weapon will, most likely, set-off a global chain reaction ordered by automation, not a Prime Minister or President. Britain’s nuclear weapons make us a primary target, as the offensive military commander, President Putin has pointed out.

Existential threats to the very future of the human race need to be understood and addressed in democratic debate. Nuclear war is right up there with climate and bio-diversity collapse. These horrors should be high on the election agenda.

Immediate unilateral disarmament is the only answer. Instead, raising the proportion of military spending, including at least £210billion of tax-payers money for the new nuclear weapons Trident system controlled by the United States, is written in stone in the Party manifestos and boasted for as a vote winner. Why would you vote for nuclear war? It is a war no-one can win.