FOLLOWING this week’s failure by the Liberal Democrats to adopt an unambiguous anti-Trident policy, Labour will get the chance next week to start changing the political weather — by abandoning its unthinking addiction to the so-called nuclear deterrent.

The party’s association with these terrible weapons goes back more than half a century. It was of course the Clement Attlee government that began secretly developing them.

Even then the decision was all about the supposed prestige associated with such an indiscriminately destructive arsenal, rather than any assessment of how useful it was.

“We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs ... we’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it,” Ernest Bevin said back in 1946, stung after apparently being patronised by his US counterpart.

Similarly, Tony Blair in his autobiography admitted that the military utility of this hugely expensive commitment — renewing Trident is estimated to carry a £100 billion price tag — was “non-existent,” but he opted to keep it because he worried about “the downgrading of our status as a nation.”

But would Britain be less respected abroad if we opted to decommission our nukes?

South Africa’s decision to become a nuclear weapons-free zone following the overthrow of apartheid resulted in a wave of international goodwill and an appreciation of the maturity and commitment to peace of the revolutionary government.

Britain’s “independent nuclear deterrent” does not deter anyone.

The death cults of Wahhabi Islamist terrorism positively celebrate suicidal attacks and have never been put off their murderous designs because the people they were fighting, whether the Soviets in Afghanistan back in the 1980s or the United States and Britain in Iraq in the 2000s, had nuclear stockpiles.

Indeed, the possession of nuclear weapons if anything makes a country more likely to come under nuclear attack — at key points in the cold war the world teetered on the brink of nuclear destruction.

It was always because people panicking at the prospect of being attacked themselves came close to a pre-emptive response. At one point during the Cuban missile crisis, only the heroic actions of Soviet naval officer Vasili Arkhipov prevented a misinterpretation of US depth-charges leading to a global war.

And anyone following international diplomacy will be well aware that non-nuclear powers such as Germany and Japan are not less powerful for it. Economic clout counts for rather more than any display of lethal weapons.

No government could ever contemplate using such weapons — or so we should hope.

Each Trident submarine carries up to 96 warheads. Each warhead is eight times more powerful than the bomb that killed almost 150,000 people in Hiroshima in 1945.

And our arsenal is not actually even independent, relying on US delivery systems and maintenance. Our missiles are drawn from a joint pool at the US strategic weapons facility in King’s Bay, Georgia.

We live in a country where, courtesy of the Tories, a million people rely on food handouts to survive. Where a quarter of our children are projected to be living in poverty by 2020.

A Labour government will have work to do if it is to reverse the vicious attack on living standards launched by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats from 2010 and if we are to invest in a real economic recovery for everyone.

In that context, why spend tens of billions on a useless weapon even Britain’s military doesn’t really want?

Labour will have an opportunity next week to talk it over. It should do so calmly and rationally, without tub-thumping hyperbole full of bogus “national security” concerns, and in the confident knowledge that many millions of voters would be more than happy to see Trident scrapped.