Nuclear Threat

Yes, I'm still meant to be on internet silence, but Linux and various bits of software have me stumped for a while until I get some help from the mailing lists, so I thought I'd cast my mind over the implications of the court case this week that resulted in a jury deciding that it was okay to commit a crime in order to prevent what the perpetrators believed would be a greater harm in the future. The case in point was that they had committed (and admitted) criminal damage by climbing a chimney at a Kent power station with the intent of scrawling graffiti on it in protest at its pollution record and plans to expand the facility, which, their oh so clever advocate declared would cause more and more widespread damage to people and property through the global warming it would contribute to.

Now, some of the more unthinking environmentalists might see this as a great victory. A court recognized that global warming was such an imminent threat to life and property that it was justifiable to commit brazen thuggery leading to criminal damage on anything that allegedly contributed to that global warming. Yay!?

Nay! I have two problems with this.

First is the acceptance, apparently by both judge and jury (and so, you may think, all "reasonable people"), not just that anthropogenic climate change is a fact but also such a grave threat that it justifies individuals taking the law into their own hands. To my mind this is still a matter in the political arena. Not only are there still, and perhaps growing, voices of dissent on the very premise of the debate; that mankind is responsible for such a change that it is a threat to the planet's very future. But also about what to do about it and when. A power station after all merely supplies a demand. Is the power generator guilty or the consumer making those demands? It is more dangerous to disrupt existing dwindling supplies before we have worked out how to replace them with cleaner affordable technologies? If the threat from global warming is real, so presumably is the threat of harm through disrupted power supplies.

Second is how this operates as a precedent in other, possibly more serious cases - although I heard someone saying that this decision will not be treated as forming a precedent, I'm not clear how that can be prevented. It is okay to murder an abortionist in order to stop the immediate harm to others he or she will cause? That threat, after all, is far more immediate and traceable to an individual than the effects of a single coal power station amongst all the coal fired power stations and other "climate vandals". We're starting to get not only into the realms of Philip K Dick's pre-crime but vigilante prevention of what individuals claim may be a pre-crime. This is hardly the basis for the rule of law.

Oh, you can say that no court is going to acquit a murderer because they thought they were preventing a bigger crime, but actually we already do. The "reasonable force" defense can be used to justify a death in the process of preventing an immediate threat to others' life. This decision seems to extend the boundaries of "immediate threat" let alone accurate identification of the person causing that immediate threat.  One could, and many do, fight abortion on the basis that the most immediate threat t future generations of humanity is eradicating them before they are born.  If we're going to adopt a principle (and I do) that we have a responsibility of stewardship not to harm future generations' survival on the planet then it would be legitimate for others to argue more forcefully that we have a responsibility to see those future generations actually survive as far as birth!

Anyway, two odd sounding sources provide what I believe are better alternative "precedents" to work from. First, there is a Catholic maxim that it is not legitimate to cause one moral bad, or an act that could foreseeably lead to morally bad consequences in order to prevent another, even near certain, specific bad. It is used mostly about abortion again. It is used to argue that it is not even permissible to abort a new life in order to prevent the death of the mother - often in the circumstances of an ectopic pregnancy for example.

Of course the world's aggressors, including the US and UK, routinely ignore this. They argue that foreseeable "collateral damage" is permissable to remove a dictator, for example. It is not. Terrorising and killing the people of Bagdad in "Shock and Awe", even as "collateral", was morally repugnant, notwithstanding our general agreement that the regime they were trying to punish or remove was also morally repugnant. The results of ignoring of this basic principle are there for us all to see - there can be little doubt now that more people in Iraq have suffered for longer under the oversight of the western occupying forces than it is likely would have happened at the hands of the previous repugnant regime. At least there could have been alternatives that held less potential for further suffering.

But on the environment, the libertarians' respect for the rule of law provides a better alternative to various bearded crusties climbing a chimney and committing vigilante criminal damage. Locke's proviso can be used, for example, to tackle pollution. If you, a power generator or anyone else - a pig farm even, pollute the atmosphere we both have to share, we have the right to legal remedy. Just as much as if you came along and started digging a hole in my prize rose border. Indeed this ought to work better than any political "solution". Protectionism is a political strategy, and even Green politicians will forcibly protect their favourite, in this case, power generation mechanism against legitimate complaint of harm. If planning permission were truly privatised, those affected most would almost certainly do better out of it than they will once the government has removed most of their rights in order to force their political idea of strategic energy infrastructure through.

Yes, we all need power, but left to ourselves we would probably not choose to have a nuclear reactor at the bottom of our garden. But, as they say, everyone has their price. If, collectively, my neighbourhood decided that the compensation on offer was enough when weighed against the costs of electricity or the convenience of not having a long transmission route or any potential danger they'd accept that nuclear reactor. If nobody accepts any price for nuclear, they have to weigh that decision against the potential alternatives. If nobody wants a giant power station, then we perhaps have to accept that we will have to help our neighbours fund micro-generation.

For some reason I have Oliver Kamm's blog in my daily reading list. I have no idea why - I don't like his style, his politics or his opinions most of the time, but today he has a go at Chris Huhne about that nuclear issue. He says, at the end, that he's "doubtful that the Lib Dem contenders have thought much about this issue beyond their internal party positioning, and I wouldn't trust them anywhere near this country's security policies."

I think that's just wrong. Kamm picks on one word in Huhne's article on Trident..."independent". He says that the Trident system is independent to us - that we bought it once and for all from the Yanks (and saved a whole load of money because we did buy existing technology from elsewhere) and could use it independently. I disagree - I think we are dependent on the Yanks for maintaining the missile system - only the launch platforms, our nuclear submarine fleet, are ours.

Now all of this is a slight side-show. At the moment I cannot conceive of a situation in which the UK might be tempted to initiate an independent, unilateral launch of ICBMs. But if we did, and it was over a cause the Yanks did not agree with us on, would we find that "our" missile system was truly independent? I don't know, but for me all this misses the basic point, and one that Kamm simply sweeps under the carpet. Chris wants, if we can't negotiate multilateral complete disarmament, a different system because the threats today are different. Kamm seems to suggest that buying a system for the next forty years makes such a question irrelevant - the old threats may have returned in that time so we'd be back to needing a system like Trident.

I assume here the question is whether we want submarine launched long-range Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile nukes. And this is where we diverge. The threat is different. We have the existing system for a particular type of threat - that of massed ranks of opposing missiles targeting our cities and mainland installations where it is a good thing that we have our missiles offshore and moving around, albeit slowly, so that in a Mutually Assured Destruction scenario we can still launch when all our land based facilities are reduced to radioactive rubble. The US can have land based Minuteman missiles because they're on the other side of the planet from what was the main threat - the Soviet Union - and can be sure to be able to fire a few off before the USSR's nukes reach them.

Neither are appropriate for the type of threats we now have. Far more useful to us would be the sort of thing the Greenham peace camp was meant to prevent - nuclear armed cruise type missiles that are far more flexible as to launch platform and scenario, so called tactical nukes. Personally I can't see again a reason why we would use such creatures either. Emerging nuclear states have to have two technological breakthroughs to produce weapons that might threaten us or ours - the nuclear warhead and the long range launch platform. We've seen how claims of Saddam's ability to reach Cyprus were found completely untrue, we know that even North Korea's missiles were far from stable. We're more likely to see terrorist launched nukes come in the shape of a suitcase - ground detonated by timer - which no nukes of our own are going to be able to counter.

I am a unilateralist - no doubt someone whom Mr Kamm thinks a lilly livered coward out of touch with the world and its threats. But even if we cannot persuade the rest of the world to get rid of nukes once and for all at the next round of talks, I think the better deterrence nowadays would be a truly independent, multi-platform, tactical device rather than ICBMs designed for a particular cold war scenario of roughly matched opponents and "push button warfare".