World in Chains

Edited by Andie Zelter 

(Luath Press, 12.99)

AT A time when the Scottish independence debate has highlighted the idiocy of spending mega-zillions on a Trident nuclear deterrent that is no such thing but rather a provocation to anyone crazed enough to target Faslane, this collection of 18 essays on the impact of nuclear weapons and militarisation from a British perspective is timely indeed. One’s only doubt is whether anyone in power will even pay attention.

It was as long ago as 1948 that Professor PMS Blackett’s Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy pointed out that not only was the atomic bomb unethical but the fire-storming of Hamburg and Dresden with conventional incendiaries and high explosives was counter-productive. 

By strengthening German resistance, it gave the lie to those who maintain that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs shortened the war. Anyone who lived through the London blitz knows that people pull together to a common end in such circumstances.

Nor is it true that there have been no use of nuclear weapons since 1945. During the Gulf war of 1991, to take one example, the US deployed bunker-busting bombs and depleted uranium shells. But Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime was not weakened by such attacks.

As AL Kennedy makes clear in the book’s introduction, there are little or no shelters worldwide to protect against nuclear weapons and there is always the possibility of accidents or defensive escalations.

While arms manufacturers are kept busy, well-rewarded and secure, all over the world people die in the unpeaceful peace nuclear weapons have created. 

Starving and living diminished lives, they are paying for the weapons which are killing them in so many ways. 

And all over the world, politicians have the power of life or death and use it badly. The strength of that argument is typical of this important work, whose only lack is an index.

Karl Dallas