Ban the Bomb or Ban the Beard!?

I have just read Rev Ian Johnson's From the Heart Column in the Echo. I normally don't read his extraordinarily regular columns, letters, articles etc. in the Echo, which tend be on any subject other than that of religion or even the Church of England. However on this occasion I made an exception as he was writing about an event that he and I both attended last Sunday (a commemoration of the lives lost as a result of the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Japan at the end of WW2).

Rev Johnson's article was about his involvement with CND in his younger years and the campaign to ban the bomb. He also argued strongly that Britain should give up its nuclear deterrent when Trident becomes obsolete.

The two atomic bombs are estimated to have killed up to 300,000 Japanese (including those who died immediately from the bomb blasts and those that died, often years later from the radiation). This was a dreadful and tragic loss of human life from a dreadful war.

It should however be noted that the argument for the use of the atomic bombs was that it would secure an immediate and unconditional surrender from a fanatical enemy who was willing to fight to the last, and that by ending the war early it in fact would save many more lives.

By the time of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese had been fighting a losing war for over a year. The American invasion of the small Island of Okinawa lasted two and a half months. In that battle 100,000 Japanese soldiers, 170,000 Japanese civilians and 12,500 American servicemen were killed.

Had the Allies had to invade the main Islands of Japan, the war may well have continued for much longer, with huge loss of life on all sides. A conventional campaign against the mainland would have meant the conventional bombing of civilian Japanese targets and likely hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths.

Shortly after WW2, the USSR obtained the Atom Bomb. Stalin himself was known to view atomic weapons as simply larger and more powerful bombs to use on the battlefield. Stalin of course killed approximately 30 million of his own people. In those early years of the Cold War, it is very clear that NATO's nuclear determent kept the USSR from using its own nuclear arsenal.

Today the Cold War is over and we face the prospect of an extremist government in Iran obtaining a nuclear bomb. This is a Government that openly states that it wants to wipe another country of the face of the map.

To give up our nuclear deterrent in a dangerous world would be very foolish. All Governments of both main political parties have supported maintaining Britain's independent nuclear deterrent. I see no reason why they should abandon that policy today.