Campaigning for the Labour Party in the 1980s a young Tony Blair was vociferous in his opposition to the use of a nuclear deterrent. As Prime Minister in 2006 he announced that giving up nuclear weapons today would be “Unwise and dangerous.”

He was wrong in the 1980s and he is wrong today. The original rationale for Mutually Assured Destruction was sound and almost certainly stopped the Cold War from turning extremely hot. But while we have stopped fighting the Soviets New Labour are still fighting Thatcher. Blair’s decision to replace Trident probably had as much to do with projecting an image of strength as it did with his stated defence rationale.

And what exactly is that rationale? That in this world of unknowable and amorphous threats the nuclear arsenal is our ultimate insurance policy. It’s an idea that sounds reasonable except that we can actually estimate where the next threat will come from and our ultimate insurance policy is, as it always will be, the United States.

The world has changed since the 1980s and Tony Blair is right that we do now face new and difficult threats. Russia may be throwing its weight around but its new found confidence is only a result of record oil and gas prices. Its economy is still unproductive, its population is shrinking and the Russian leadership are as aware as anyone that they cannot afford a confrontation with the West. So where might a nuclear threat to the U.K. come from? The most widely touted source would be a nuclear armed Iran. The Iranian regime has had a fairly sophisticated nuclear weapons programme for some time but it is still a long way from manufacturing a deployable warhead; the CIA aren’t even sure that the Iranian weapons programme is still active. Furthermore even if the Iranians did manage to produce a nuclear warhead it would take a huge technological leap to produce a delivery system capable of reaching London. But let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that Iran was able to produce a long range nuclear missile; the mere announcement of this fact would probably lead to imediate air-strikes by America. Even if the U.S. did not strike Iran then Israel certainly would. Perhaps this strike would fail; but then how would that lead to the Iranians nuking London? A nuclear strike on a major NATO ally would in any case inevitably mean a massive and total U.S. retaliation. This point would not be lost on the Iranian leadership and for all their belief in the apocalypse they have so far shown an unwillingness to provoke it ahead of time. Even if the U.S. did not retaliate, which would be fantastical idea, the U.K. would always need U.S. permission to retaliate with a nuclear strike. So the presence of a retaliatory nuclear arsenal is entirely irrelevant to what is supposedly the U.K.’s most pressing nuclear threat.

There are of course other nuclear armed states but it is unthinkable that any of them would ever even consider attempting to flatten the U.K. Pakistan is easily the most unstable nuclear armed country but even her arsenal is safe under lock and key with the country’s formidable army. Pakistan like any country has no desire to provoke an apocalyptic U.S. response. It is true there are Islamists who would dearly love to get their hands on the nuclear arsenal but the likelihood of them taking power in Pakistan is effectively zero. Even if the unthinkable did happen the U.S. has emergency procedures in place to cover such a scenario.

Nuclear proliferation amongst so-called rogue states remains a major problem. Indeed Libya and North Korea were sufficiently unworried about the U.K’s current arsenal to pursue their own weapons programmes. For North Korea it seems to have been a cry for attention as much as anything else and Libya’s programme was successfully ended through old-school diplomacy and spy craft. The way to counter proliferation is with old fashioned carrot and stick diplomacy, rather than a standing arsenal.

The one group that may conceivably be willing to use nuclear weapons against us would be a terrorist organisation. But a nuclear terrorist attack is also probably the most unlikely scenario of all. For a start even using all the resources of a nation state and knowledge and technology borrowed from the West it is very, very difficult to develop a nuclear weapon. For a disparate terrorist group it would be nigh on impossible. Furthermore the logistics of assembly, transportation and detonation mean that such a plot would almost be guaranteed to fail. We know that Bin Laden expressed interest in acquiring nuclear weapons but that the idea never progressed past the enquiry stage, we also know that even fanatical Al Qaeda members have expressed doubts about the morality of nuclear terrorism. 9/11 itself was immensely controversial and, but for Bush’s over-reaction, would have been a tactical failure for Bin Laden. The most pressing question about a nuclear terrorist strike would be ‘Who are we going retaliate against?’. Terrorist groups don’t tend to have capital cities or headquarters, nor do they like to leave proof of their activities. Would the U.K. seriously consider annihilating millions of people on the basis of a hunch that a terrorist may have based himself in their country? In announcing the extension of the Trident programme Blair argued that the biggest danger to the U.K. lay in the danger of a rogue state aiding a terrorist group. But in the event of a nuclear strike how would the U.K. obtain proof of this? And does anyone seriously believe that the U.K. would flatten a country because its unelected Government may or may not have had links with a terrorist group? I doubt it and once the fear of Mutually Assured Destruction has disappeared then a nuclear arsenal really has very little use.

The U.K. does face a very real threat today far more dangerous than a hypothetical nuclear threat twenty years from now. It’s a threat that comes from its own citizens and a twenty billion pound nuclear arsenal does not protect against suicide bombers who make their weapons from chapatti flour in the kitchen of a council house. When MI5, MI6 and anti-terrorist police are crying out for extra funds it is criminally negligent to spend billions of pounds on a deterrent to a threat that does not and will not exist.

Furthermore if we did need to retaliate using a nuclear arsenal then it will have failed in its only purpose. It is an extremely flimsy insurance contract and a reactive rather then pro-active form of defence. The rogue states and terrorist groups do not conduct their activities at Faslane naval base. In order to stop nuclear proliferation we are going to have to use our intelligence service and our armed forces in difficult parts of the world. The British Army is already engaged in the former Al Qaeda stronghold of Helmand; it is likely to remain there for several more decades and to have participate in further expeditionary warfare in the same part of the world. And it is woefully under equipped. Here is the real lynchpin of the argument against Trident; British troops are a far more useful in ensuring our safety and we are failing them miserably due to a chronic lack of funding. The cost of Trident is estimated to be an incredible £15-20 billion plus up to £2 billion a year running costs. When British troops are dying due to a lack of body armour or being outgunned by peasants with Kalashnikovs then that is an absolute disgrace.

Just imagine what those billions could buy for our armed forces: medium and heavy lift helicopters, ground-attack aircraft, attack helicopters, transport aircraft, surveillance aircraft, IED resistant vehicles, mobile firing platforms, Minimi machine guns, under-slung grenade launchers, heavy machine guns, body armour, night-vision goggles and surveillance drones not to mention higher pay, better accommodation and more recruits. That would make a real difference to our security and to spend money on nuclear weapons while our troops are dying is insane and criminal.

Nor would the U.K. have to give up its place at the Security Council if it decommissioned its weapons. It has one of only three deep water navies in the world and it spends more on its armed forces than anyone else apart from the U.S. Furthermore it is a responsible democracy engaged in peacekeeping operations in dozens of theatres across the world.

Getting rid of Trident doesn’t even mean loosing our nuclear deterrent. The NATO treaty regards an attack on a member country as an attack on all members. It is inconceivable that America would not guarantee our freedom in the face of a nuclear threat. We could even formalise this pact by allowing America to use British bases to install the star wars defence shield. Furthermore we actually have more leverage over U.S. policy than is often realised; America has been chastised by the Iraq tragedy and unilateralism has been discarded. In short the U.S. needs its allies and it will protect them. America also needs its U.K. staging bases and the British owned island of Diego Garcia to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It wouldn’t be to difficult to give a few basing rights in return for the U.S. publicly guaranteeing retaliation in the event of a nuclear attack on Britain. America would surely more than happy to oblige one of its most important allies. And the price of this arrangement? A handshake with our guarantor.