His Grace is so wrong over Trident (From The Northern Echo)

His Grace is so wrong over Trident

10:53am Tuesday 6th July 2010 in

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OOH! The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, he do say some queer things. After 9/11 he said the suicide bombers “experience their world as leaving no other option except turning to violence”.

Then there was the call for aspects of Shariah law to be incorporated into the British legal system. Now, he has declared that the renewal of our Trident nuclear defence system is “a more expensive way of unaccountable slaughter”. Wrong on every count.

First, Trident is comparatively inexpensive, costing less than five per cent of the defence budget – not a bad bargain for a frontline, state-of-the-art nuclear deterrent.

Secondly, it is not about “unaccountable slaughter”. It is, in fact, a deterrent. It has worked as a deterrent and dissuaded our enemies from attacking us for decades. Trident has never led to the slaughter of a single person – and we trust it never will.

Dr Williams is a Christian gentleman, a humane man, but he is living in a world of ideal virtue, as if everyone else in the world were as full of sweetness and light as he is.

But the world is far from perfect and there are many enemies who would kill us if they thought they could get away with it. Trident tells them they would not get away with it.

Because of this, our enemies have not so far chanced their arm. The nuclear deterrent is not a beautiful and wholly good thing. It is a necessary evil. It is less bad than the “unaccountable slaughter” which would be more likely if we did not possess it.

There is a world of difference between belligerence or warmongering and legitimate defence.

We have a duty to defend ourselves, and particularly to defend non-combatants, civilians, innocent women and children.

This inalienable duty destroys the pacifist argument. I may have the right not to resist, to lay down my own life in the face of enemy attack. But I do not have the right to lay down the lives of my fellow countrymen, those same civilians, women and children.

Weapons do not in themselves cause wars.

In fact, the last century shows that weapons can even help to prevent wars. In the Thirties, the pacifist tide was at its fullest – except in Germany and Italy whose aggression provoked the Second World War. British politicians of all parties favoured massive disarmament, pretending that getting rid of our weapons would end all wars. Only a handful of men, chiefly among them Winston Churchill, understood that without a strong defence Hitler would overrun us.

Of course, Churchill was derided as a warmonger.

Some politicians even said that no defence could ever be strong enough to discourage a determined enemy. Stanley Baldwin wanted to scrap the RAF fighters saying: “The bomber will always get through.” Tell it to Hugh Dowding and Keith Park… There is a good case for claiming that nuclear armaments have prevented large wars since 1945. Pacifists and CND supporters say that our possession of nuclear weapons makes us a more likely target. But the clinching argument against this view is based on historical facts: the only nation to have suffered a nuclear attack was Japan – a country which did not possess the atomic bomb.

I wish the world were all sweetness and light like our dear Archbishop. But it isn’t.

There are plenty of nasties out there and we must take care to defend ourselves.

■ Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange