Fraser Dick of Edinburgh University
Student Nationalist Association
(EUSNA) investigates:
The Deadliest River on Earth

The dangers of nuclear

weapons cannot be overstated

You might not be immediately aware of it, but a force far deadlier than the alligators in the 
Nile or piranhas in the Amazon lies in the still grey waters of the Clyde. The United Kingdom’s
nuclear ‘deterrent’, Trident, is based at Faslane, just 25 miles from our largest city. Four 
submarines glide silently in and out of the Gare Loch, barely hinting at the terrible power
within them. That’s 200 nuclear warheads, a stone’s throw away from over 1 million people.
The Scottish people have repeatedly shown their opposition to these weapons being in
Scottish waters, but UK governments of Unionist parties have repeatedly refused
point-blank to withdraw them.

Nuclear weapons are the most destructive objects ever devised by mankind. In their only
wartime use so far, two of them killed over two hundred thousand people in Japan, most of
them innocent civilians. They make no distinction between enemy soldier and innocent child.
They lay waste to cities and leave whole areas drowned in radiation for years. And with the
fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the chances of their being deployed
has reduced considerably.

When the United Kingdom first obtained nuclear weapons in the early 1950s, the then
Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin said ‘We’ve got to have one and it’s got to have a bloody
Union Jack on top of it’. The world has changes utterly in the last 60 years, but,
unfortunately this attitude persists in Westminster. The government of the United Kingdom
will never give up its nuclear weapons as long as they guarantee it a permanent seat on the 
United Nations Security Council. Weapons with the capacity to kill millions are an
extravagantly expensive vanity project so United Kingdom Prime Ministers can
strut on the world stage as if the Empire never went away. Billions of pounds of 
taxpayers’ money spent in service of a dead ideal and to massage the egos of those who
still see the UK as a Great Power.

Estimates vary, but one source puts Trident’s cost at £12.9 billion in 1996 and £280 million
per year to run. That is a staggering amount of our money for an immoral weapons system
that is nearing obsoleteness in the post-ideological world where threats are just as, if not
more likely to come from non-state actors, such as Al-Qaeda, than an opposing country like
the Soviet Union. It boils down to about one billion of that is Scotland’s share based on
population. Think about how easily that sort of money could be put to better use. We 
could buy more state of the art equipment for our hospitals and schools. We could upgrade
our roads and infrastructure. We could invest even more in green energy to provide
the successor to the nuclear age.

This is one of the many reasons why we need independence. To break away from
the ridiculous posturing of the United Kingdom on the world stage and
concentrate not on weapons to kill millions but on finding solutions to the
problems that blight the lives of our people. A country that can afford to spend
billions on nuclear weapons and millions on the monarchy but claims it can’t afford to pay
for free university tuition in England or free personal care for the elderly as we have here 
in Scotland is not one that I want to be a part of.

Fraser Dick is from Linlithgow and studies Maths at Edinburgh University.