IF YOU want to cut through the spin around Trident, take the red pill and jump down the rabbit hole with this book to discover the brutal truths surrounding the neoliberal obsession with nuclear deterrence. The 14 articles in this collection may be thoroughly unpleasant but they are necessary reading.

The first, by the book’s editor Tony Simpson, tackles the issue of governmental mendacity. In 2014, the US navy awarded an £84 million contract for “tactical missile-tube manufacturing,” which would see 17 of them manufactured in a joint venture between the US and Britain.

It’s not that this country is allegedly contributing 70 per cent towards the “joint” venture nor that the Westminster government has deferred until 2016 the main-gate decision on Trident replacement that Simpson finds curious, but that the government had previously stated they would only use eight tubes rather than the 12 allocated for a British lead vessel.

In his first contribution Robert Green considers the 1785 abolition of slavery campaign and notes that the leading slave nations the US, Britain and France — leading guardians of nuclear deterrence today — were “outmanoeuvred by a network of committed campaigners who for the first time brought together humanitarian outrage and the law.”

That movement was able to mobilise public and political support to find more humanitarian means of creating wealth.

This, he believes, is evidence that a paradigm shift is possible with regards to Trident and that a more humane, lawful and safer security system is within our grasp.

His second article is the most convincing essay in the collection for nuclear disarmament.

During the Falklands war Margaret Thatcher was furious that HMS Sheffield was sunk by an Exocet missile sold to the Argentinians by the French and cites a memoir by former French president Francois Mitterrand’s psychoanalyst Ali Magoudi that a furious Thatcher called Mitterrand and demanded the secret codes that would jam the missiles’ acquisition system.

Otherwise, she would move a submarine into position and have it fire its Polaris nuclear missiles at Argentina.

Mitterrand complied.

Green argues that if Britain, in facing defeat, had fired a nuclear weapon against a non-nuclear state it would have caused disproportionate casualties.

This in turn would have made the this country a pariah state, the first to break the nuclear taboo post-Nagasaki which, in turn, would have led to a lifelong war with Argentina.

Despite the grimness of the subject matter tackled in this and other essays, Trident Undone is an optimistic collection which convincingly argues the case that people can still make a difference in abolishing nuclear weapons.

Review by James Walker