Features - James Halliday

An independent Scotland could never dream of equipping itself with nuclear weapons. That fact must be obvious, because any attempt to do so would be financial idiocy. If the English would only reach the same conclusion, they would be sparing themselves, and us, trapped as we are in their State, great and prolonged and needless disadvantages. So, even before coming to any questions of principle, we are clearly free from such temptations. Our problem is that we are in the presence of nuclear weapons whether we like it or not and we have to pick our way carefully among all the problems which therefore arise.

A new book offers excellent assistance, with information and analysis, towards reaching sensible judgments about nuclear bases in Scotland and the prospects of their closure. The authors are very much aware of Scottish interests and attitudes, but most useful for Scots readers is their explanation of how Scottish behaviour might affect England/Britain. They conclude that no suitable English base could be found to accommodate Trident, and that a Scottish Trident could mean a British decision to abandon their nuclear strategy.

This must come as a very exciting and encouraging thought to all who yearn for such a decision, but let’s not get carried away just yet. There are other possibilities and other problems awaiting us on the road to independence.

One simple fact, still not widely understood in spite of the best endeavours of many writers, is that Scotland was brought into the Union with England precisely because English politicians saw that Scotland might pose a threat to England’s security. They would not permit that threat to develop and so Scotland was intimidated and blackmailed into surrender. Do you imagine that things are all that different to-day? Professors Chalmers and Walker give scholarly consideration to how England could come to terms with a Scottish demand for Trident’s removal, but they are taking a wrong turning.

In the first place, every political trick in the book would be used to ensure that Scottish voters and their elected representatives would never make any such demand. Imagine the money, the advertisements, the Press, the Media, the Labour Party — by the time they were finished with us we’d have become persuaded that removing Trident was the moral equivalent of slaughtering our own children. Think of the last Election campaign and multiply it, and then imagine your chances.

And if, by some remarkable feat of enduring courage, Scottish defiance was maintained, they could, and would, fall back on plan B. They don’t have General Wade’s army any more, but they have its equivalent. A, military occupation, again "explained" by massive propaganda and supported by many Scots justified by alarmist notions of the threat to British security and defended by official Tory and Labour spokespersons, would be imposed.

In other words, if we by our actions appear to be presenting a threat to England’s security, we will not be allowed to proceed to independence at all. If you bridle in angry pride at the thought of being defeated in this way, just ask how you’d propose to get out of the trap. There is no comparison between Scotland and any previously liberated part of Empire, because we are cursed by our geographic position. "What about Ireland"? might once have been asked. Perhaps during the Second World War there were some thoughts that Irish bases might be repossessed to deal with U-boats, but such thoughts didn’t get far because the Irish were sheltered by the American eagle’s wing — a still relevant fact of life. We have no such friends, and all too many of our most voluble countrymen have worked hard to invite American enmity.

The calm and gentlemanly statesmen who are imagined by Chalmers and Walker negotiating Trident’s departure, lamenting the while that their strategy is thereby laid in ruins, will never emerge in reality. There is not the slightest chance and not the slightest thought in any decision-maker’s mind, that Britain will change its nuclear policies.

If we want to be independent we must face these strategic realities. If you want independence, do not tie your ambition to the humiliation of England. Give them always a way out, a face-saving option. "Let them up easy", as Abe Lincoln remarked in other circumstances.

Chalmers and Walker are greatly to be applauded for their work and we must all benefit from it, but we have a particular objective and a particularly difficult problem to negotiate on our way to that objective.

Unchanged Waters: The UK, Nuclear Weapons and the Scottish Question — Malcolm Chalmers and WIlliam_Walker. Tuckwell Press, 2001: 196pp £14.99.