Is there a rationale for continuing Britain's nuclear force in the 21st century? This is one of the debates taking place at this year's Hay Festival. Science correspondent James Randerson previews the event.
Renewing Britain's Trident nuclear deterrent will lock the UK into its "poodle role" as an add-on to US foreign policy, according to Labour MP Clare Short.
Speaking at a Hay Festival debate on the future of nuclear weapons, she will say that replacing the current nuclear deterrent will also fuel nuclear proliferation by legitimising the desire of other nations, such as Iran, to acquire nuclear weapons.
"It's purely a pretence that Britain is an independent nuclear power. It's a joke," she said, "We are completely dependent on getting the missile from the US and having it serviced there. So it absolutely locks us into the poodle role with the US."
Her opponent in the Greenpeace sponsored debate entitled War and Peace? is Michael Codner, director of military service at the Royal United Services Institute. He said that nuclear weapons convey a degree of international influence that the UK cannot afford to give up.
"It is a matter of influence, particularly in relation to the US," he said, "That's certainly to my mind how they currently fit in to British defence policy which Clare Short presumably subscribed to while she was still a minister."
He pointed out that if the UK gave up its nuclear weapons it would leave France as the only nuclear power in Europe. "Would the British people be comfortable with a situation where there was only one nuclear nation in Europe and that was France?"
Short, who resigned from the cabinet over the Iraq war in 2003, said this argument could only lead to nuclear proliferation. "If we have to have one to be an important power in the world then you cannot say to India, Pakistan, Iran ... you can't have them we can."
"Is Iran happy that the only nuclear power in its region is Israel? Is it rational for an Iranian government, even a good Iranian government, to want nuclear weapons? I think you can say it is very rational after the invasion of Iraq and the non-invasion of North Korea."
Codner said the decision would take so long to feed through into new weapons, the government should take a precautionary approach. "There's not an obvious threat directly to the UK mainland at the moment. But that's not to say there wouldn't be in 2020."
~ The debate will be chaired by Stephen Tindale, executive director of Greenpeace.
