Sir Hugh Beach calls for nuclear decommissioning
By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor

AS military top brass, he is far from one of the usual suspects - but when it comes to Britain's nuclear weapons, he isn't mincing his words. This is how general Sir Hugh Beach, the former deputy commander-in-chief of UK land forces, sums up the UK's Trident missile system: "It's no bloody use. Let's not waste money on it."

Beach says that the Trident nuclear submarines, based on the Clyde and armed with warheads, should not be replaced but immediately scrapped.

His call echoes demands from a series of other military leaders who want government action on nuclear disarmament. And it comes against a background of international moves to cut nuclear weapons stockpiles, initiated by the US president, Barack Obama.

The UK government under Tony Blair in 2006 gave the go-ahead for a £20 billion programme to replace Trident submarines and missiles in the 2020s. But the decision has been strongly opposed by the Scottish government and the Scottish parliament. Now Beach, who was also a member of the government's security commission and a senior adviser to the ministry of defence, has powerfully questioned the justification for replacing Trident.

"Britain cannot claim to have derived any direct security benefit from the possession of nuclear weapons," he argued. "British nuclear weapons did not deter Argentina from attempting to annex the Falkland Islands in 1982, nor did they help Britain to recover them, despite the belief that a Polaris submarine was patrolling the South Atlantic."

In a speech to a conference on Trident in Glasgow yesterday, Beach pointed out that about 30 countries which had the ability to develop nuclear weapons had chosen not to.

"It is time to reflect on how thin the justification for Trident really is and to evaluate it fairly and rigorously against the costs," said Beach, who is now on the board of the Centre for Defence Studies at King's College in London.

"It would be better to cancel it the Trident replacement programme now and better still to decommission the existing Trident boats forthwith."

Nigel Griffiths, the Edinburgh Labour MP who resigned as deputy leader of the House of Commons over plans to replace Trident, pointed out that the prime minister, Gordon Brown, had recently spoken out in favour of a world without nuclear weapons "However, talk is one thing," he said. "What people around the world are crying out for is action by our leaders. Nothing less will be accepted."