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A family relaxes on a peaceful August day, children are busy playing on the streets and despite it being wartime, life is good. No sound can be heard but laughter and the whistle of the wind blowing through the trees. Suddenly the whistle is replaced with a whine, as the air raid sirens blare out, silencing the children. The parents quickly rush outside, escorting their crying children inside, the city has been bombed before, how different will this be? Peering through the windows, a nightmarish sight is seen. A fireball claws at the sky, reaching miles upwards. Nobody knows what’s going on, what’s going to happen, what the beast will do. It keeps getting bigger and bigger, and they see houses getting flattened, hundreds every second. All they can do is hold each other as they are blasted into infinitesimal pieces by the pressure wave. With that over 145 thousand people are dead, and the first of two nuclear weapons to be dropped on civilians has been used. We now know that the explosion also caused decades of suffering from radiation, meaning the impact of launching one is exponentially increased. Yet still, there are people advocating for the maintenance of nukes. The United Kingdom currently has 120 usable nuclear missiles which are simply hemorrhaging the government’s budget and causing needless risk to the health of the British public. This is why I am arguing for the production and maintenance of nuclear weapons to be banned in the United Kingdom.
Firstly, the impact of modern-day nuclear weapons is devastating, and a nuclear war would be potentially world-ending, so we can’t risk actually using any nukes. The submarine-based nuclear missile system used by the U.K. is called Trident, and each missile has the explosive power of 100 kilotons of TNT. For context, if one of these were shot at Edinburgh, everything bar the farthest outskirts would be leveled by the shock wave, and the last 1% would certainly die from injuries in the following days and weeks. Using a nuclear weapon on a state that itself owns nukes would certainly cause retaliation, and since nowadays 9 countries have nuclear weapons, this situation is not too far-fetched. A nuclear war would also cause a nuclear winter, where for years afterward the entire world would be cooled from a layer of debris blocking the sun’s rays, causing crops to fail and mass hunger. The suffering caused by a nuclear war means we could never risk using one, and so therefore the small advantages of having them are far outweighed by the other disadvantages that come from them.
One of those disadvantages is the way the weapons are transported, which causes unnecessary risk to the public. In the U.K. we use a convoy of 20 vehicles, and these drive on public roads all the way from southern England to central Scotland, two to six times a year. The vehicles have to travel hundreds of miles, giving them ample time for things to go wrong. Accidents could easily happen, as they travel in any conditions, so on wet or icy roads the heavy trucks could fall over. The warhead could potentially explode, with obvious consequences. However, a far more dangerous possibility is if the truck was attacked. Driving on public roads, the convoy could do nothing to protect it from an organized threat, and the damage a terrorist group could do with a nuke is immeasurable, any demand they have would have to be followed, or if they decided to use it, they could kill millions. Overall transporting nuclear weapons is very dangerous, but if we banned them this problem would be entirely resolved.
Another disadvantage of having nuclear weapons is the enormous cost of maintaining and replacing them. Our current nuclear weapon program (trident) costs anywhere between 2.3 and 4.6 billion pounds every year simply to maintain the weapons, depending on how many weapons need services and the type of maintenance needed. The money goes towards inspecting the weapons, and repairing any problems. The average cost of building a new secondary school in the UK is £30 million, so with the average yearly spending on nukes, we could build 115 new schools every year. Not only do we have to maintain them, but they also need to be replaced, and in 2028 trident will be renewed, costing an expected £31 billion simply to acquire the weapons. Incorporating the fact that we cannot morally use them due to the suffering they cause, it’s as if the money is just being flushed away, it’s only purpose is to convince other countries that we are in the big leagues too.
A further reason we should ban nuclear weapons in the U.K. is that even if we decided to disregard the moral problems with firing nuclear weapons, international laws prevent us from using them. The United Nations state that firing a nuke breaks the law stating “Never use weapons that are incapable of distinguishing between civilian and military targets”. However, it’s not just one international law. To name just a few of them it breaks the Geneva Convention, the international court of justice law, and The Hague Convention. This means either we follow these laws, which would render our weapons entirely useless, or break these laws and come under the scrutiny of the most influential powers in the world. Going with the former means we can never fire them, and so the money is being wasted even more so than not using them for moral reasons. Going with the latter means we will be struck with sanctions that will severely cripple our economy and make the lives of the British population significantly harder, all for the massacre of millions of civilians in another country. So therefore we are in a complete lose-lose situation while maintaining nukes. However, once again getting rid of them solves this problem entirely, as we no longer need to hemorrhage money for no gain, proving that banning nukes in the U.K. is beneficial.
While banning nukes has many advantages, some people say that we need them to act as a deterrent against war. The founder of deterrence theory said, “The capacity to harm another state is now used as a motivating factor for other states to avoid it”. Relating to nukes, this means that in theory owning nukes will stop countries waging war on us, as we are able to fire nuclear weapons at them. While it is true that most states are affected by this rationale, the type of states that would attack us in the first place is not rational, and so would not be deterred in any way. Furthermore, for deterrence to work, we must be willing to use the weapons, and as I’ve already discussed there are so many complications with using them it is not even an option. Therefore they become redundant. On top of that, we do not even need to own them ourselves to have a deterrent, we are allies with countries (mainly the United States) that have access to a much larger stockpile of nuclear weapons than us, and so if a state is going to be deterred by our nukes in the first place, even if we get rid of them all, they will still be deterred by our allies applying that threat. So the deterrent point is almost entirely negated, and the disadvantages I have stated far outweigh the slim advantages.
It is obvious that we should ban nuclear weapons. A world without them is a significantly happier and safer one. No matter the outcries of those who want to dance with death, the only way we can know what a better tomorrow will look like is to take the first step to achieve it. Before disaster strikes.
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