Even in my younger days, when I was more of a leftie than I am now, I thought CND and the Ban the Bomb movement naive. You can’t uninvent something.
It would be like trying to ban penicillin. Once nuclear weapons were developed by scientists working on the wartime Manhattan Project in America, they were here to stay. And now the Strategic Defence Review reveals we are going to spend another £15billion on them.
The scientists back then worried that politicians would fail to grasp the awesome power they had been given. Then came the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and the lesson was learned.
This raised a moral question that philosophers have wrestled with throughout history. Is it right to do a bad thing to prevent a worse one from happening?
Had the awfulness of the thermonuclear bomb not been demonstrated at Hiroshima to kill 140,000 people, it might have waited for the Cold War to become hot to kill 140 million. That doesn't answer the question, but it is a statement of the geopolitically obvious.
The fan club for nuclear weapons claims they are a deterrent which has kept World War Three at bay for the last 80 years and will continue to do so.
There is no absolute proof for this. Just because something hasn’t happened, it doesn’t mean it never will. Turkeys might assume that, as human hands have fed and cared for them all their lives, that's how it will always be. Imagine their surprise a few weeks before Christmas.
In 1907, sea captain E.J. Smith boasted about how he had never seen a shipwreck or been “in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort”. Five years later, he skippered the Titanic.
The received wisdom is MAD - mutually assured destruction - works, and in the absence of another theory, the UK has no option but to go along with it.
It makes North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un’s headlong rush to develop long-range nuclear missiles, despite the cost to his impoverished country, look less bonkers.
Keir Starmer is right to beef up our nuclear warheads - but he now needs to watch his back - Nigel Nelson
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He saw what happened to Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi when they didn’t have any. Defence Secretary John Healey told the BBC: "Our UK nuclear deterrent has been the ultimate guarantee of security. It’s what Putin fears most.”
But then the Russian president could say the same about us to justify his own arsenal." While it might be concerning to hear Keir Starmer say that our military is moving to “war-fighting readiness”, one would hope our armed forces are always ready for war, otherwise, there’s not much point in them.
For the past 30 years, our four Trident nuclear submarines - Vanguard, Victorious, Vengeance and Vigilant - have provided us with the ultimate security blanket.
I’ve always been in favour of them. Our nuclear RAF bombers were scrapped in 1998 because the enemy could see them coming.
Subs can glide along underwater and pop up undetected anywhere. Each boat has the destructive power of eight Hiroshimas.
Under CASD - Continuous At-Sea Deterrence - one sub is always out and about somewhere, and not even the sailors on board know where they are. Another boat is on standby, a third on training exercises, while the fourth is parked in a garage being serviced.
The Vanguard-class submarines are to be replaced by Dreadnoughts at a phenomenal cost. And they will carry the warheads, which the PM announced yesterday, that are about to go into production.
That, to my mind, is money well spent - assuming we can find the cash, which was the only thing Keir Starmer was opaque about.
And with good reason. A YouGov survey within hours showed half of Britons want more spent on defence, but half don’t want taxes raised to pay for it, and half are against spending cuts.
To make things more difficult, European leaders are already squealing that the UK’s target of spending three per cent of our GDP on defence is not enough. And Donald Trump wants it upped to five per cent.
This is going to be a hard sell for the PM when the bills come rolling in. And with plunging poll ratings, he needs to watch his back, and not just from the Russians.
Manchester mayor Andy Burnham has yet to make an intervention on the Defence Review. As a local governor, not a national one, it would be odd if he did. But he is increasingly commenting critically on everything else, and the talk at Westminster is that he's fast emerging as a challenger to Keir Starmer’s leadership, which means the PM will have another war to fight - the one to stop Andy getting back into Parliament.
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