It's the prestige, stupid

"Labour is the only party pledged to end the nuclear madness."
Tony Blair (1982)

The Trident programme is "unacceptably expensive, economically wasteful and militarily unsound". Gordon Brown (1984)

Edging out even Newcastle's horrific display, the week's most depressing spectacle came in the House of Commons, where a Labour government once again needed the support of the Tories to pass the kind of bill that, only a couple of decades ago, they vehemently and justly opposed. Why exactly do we need to renew Trident anyway? It's certainly not about guaranteeing our security: terrorists aren't likely to bother with missile defence shields or submarines out at sea when plotting bomb attacks in London, and if North Korea ever does develop full nuclear capacity, we'll be well down the list of potential targets, possibly somewhere along with Sweden, New Zealand and Guatemala. More pertinently, in the highly unlikely event that a rogue state such as Iran were to launch an attack on Britain, it's utterly inconceivable that the US would fail to retaliate. The Germans and Japanese understand this; even the right-wing nutters in Tokyo realise that their standing in world affairs is not harmed by their lack of a nuclear deterrent, nor is their economy hindered by the need to develop and maintain useless warheads.

Like an impotent old man with a teenage girlfriend, Britain and France hold on to their deterrent for no other reason than prestige, in vainglorious pretence that we are still big players, no matter what the cost. Quite what good it does the French remains unclear; surely everyone knows that in order to beat them you only have to go through Belgium? As for the British, we sacrificed economic development to our history and imagined status straight after World War II, developing a costly independent capacity when the Americans, fearing secrets would be leaked to the Russians, reneged on a promise to share their own nuclear research. Having the bomb didn't help us in Suez or the Falklands, didn't affect currency devaluations or mass unemployment, didn't improve the education of our children, or the quality of the NHS.

We don't need Trident. We need a better society.