Would you buy an Insurance Policy from Trident Tony?

Michael White reports in the Guardian (March 15) that a cross party majority of MPs voted for renewing the Trident "insurance policy". This is a poor reflection on the reasoning ability of pro-WMD MPs.

The “insurance policy” is a powerful argument at the emotional level; after all, who would like to go into an uncertain future without insurance of some kind? Insurance is good and sensible. Prudent, even.

But the insurance metaphor does not stand up to scrutiny. With insurance, we pay a certain amount of money regularly into a common fund. The fund increases, and if in time Something Bad happens to one of those paying into the fund, that person receives an amount of money from the fund which enables them to make good the loss that they have sustained. It is impossible to make this analogy with WMD.

In the case of Trident, we certainly pay (£75 billion going on to £100 billion) into a fund, but it is not a common fund in the sense that any number of other nations pay into it for mutual benefit. But if we did accept for the sake of argument that we in the UK are all paying in to some kind of common security policy in Trident, what do we get out of it if Something Bad (i.e. a nuclear attack on our country) happens? Do we get an amount of money to make good the damage done to our nation by the attack? No. What we get is the satisfaction that the person or persons who launched the nuclear attack on us will suffer just as much death, injury, burns, destruction, disruption, disease, misery and cancer as we have suffered. If not more.

The insurance argument is backed up by Ministers for Mass Destruction when they say we cannot know what will happen in the future. Yes we do. If the UK persists in clinging to its WMD safety blanket, other tin-pot dictatorships will want the same thing. Nukes will proliferate, and the probability of a nuclear war will approach unity. In other words, we will blow ourselves up.

So Trident is in no way analogous to an insurance policy, and in describing it as such, Prime Minister Blair is showing us once again what a stranger he is to the truth.

See also: Nuclear Deterrence and Logic