I remember to this day the talk we were given at school in 1963 about a possible nuclear attack on the UK. This was at the height of the Cold War and shortly after the Cuba missile crisis. It scared the life out of me.

A few years after that, I joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and later became obsessed with what are called ‘broken arrows’ – when things go badly wrong in terms of ‘lost’ nuclear warheads, accidents in nuclear facilities, near misses, communication breakdowns and so on. It’s acknowledged that there have been at least 32 of these major incidents — and these are just the ones that we know about!

Every nuclear-armed country will have its own ‘broken arrows’ portfolio. The Nuclear Information Service here in the UK tracks as many of these incidents as it can; back in 2017, its ‘Playing with Fire’ report detailed 127 accidents, near misses and "dangerous occurrences" on UK soil and in its coastal waters since the 1960s. And we know that thousands of cyber-attacks are launched against the Ministry of Defence and its contractors every day. Hair-raising really doesn't cut it!

So, I guess I've been living in a state of measured, back-of-mind nuclear dread for a long time — with the front of my mind increasingly taken up with dread at the thought of the climate apocalypse bearing down on us! But however bad that gets, it would be nothing in comparison to an all-out nuclear war.

So, I'm finding it really painful to see how the notion of Mutually Assured Destruction (the crazy idea that lies at the heart of nuclear deterrence theory) is being gradually ‘re-normalised’. Ideas such as ‘tactical nuclear weapons’ or ‘limited nuclear strikes’ (particularly in terms of the war in Ukraine) pop up all over the place, even as the all-important 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) lurks unregarded in the margins of this new nuclear discourse.

The fact that Article Six (of the NPT) enjoins all 191 signatures to the Treaty ‘to pursue nuclear disarmament in good faith’ is studiously ignored. In fact, exactly the opposite is going on. Today's nine nuclear-armed nations already lay claim to tens of thousands of ‘Hiroshima bomb equivalents’, and yet this is increasingly seen as insufficient.

China is increasing its arsenal of warheads by around 100 every year. Russia is known to be expanding its capabilities in many different areas. President Trump is already committed to prioritising nuclear weapons programmes over other security programmes, based on $25 billion of additional investment in nuclear weapons every year, with an ambition of reaching $2 trillion over 30 years — including massive new expenditure on his so-called ‘Golden Dome’ defensive shield — which essentially undermines the rationale behind any nuclear deterrence theory.

In the UK, the most recent Strategic Defence Review waxed lyrical about ‘modernising and expanding’ the UK’s nuclear weapons arsenal, specifically committing £15 billion to purchasing from the US new warheads for the four Dreadnought-class submarines under construction – which will end up costing taxpayers anywhere between £45 billion and £75 billion over the next 20 years.

Prime Minister Starmer has also committed to the purchase of 12 F-35A fighters specifically designed to carry the B61-12 ‘gravity bombs’ (each three times as powerful as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima) and ‘tactical nuclear weapons’. For the first time since 2008 that means US nuclear weapons will be back on UK soil, either at RAF Lakenheath (where significant new accommodation facilities are already under construction) or RAF Marham in Norfolk.

Any references to the UK’s obligation to advance the case of multilateral disarmament are entirely tokenistic. 80 years on from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it feels completely surreal to be falling once more ‘under the shadow of Armageddon’. And while each nation sees its new nuclear commitments as necessary and defensive, its adversaries inevitably end up interpreting them as offensive.

At one level, I get it. Interpretations of national and international security have always been about the battle between ‘hawks and doves’. Right now, against the backdrop of a deteriorating security and geopolitical environment, the hawks are in the ascendant. Things are demonstrably falling apart. The rules-based international order that shaped international relations over decades has been stripped bare by the totalitarian troika of Putin, Xi Jinping and Trump.

At such moments (when ‘the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’, as WB Yeats put it), nuclear states reach for expanded security blankets of every kind – not just nuclear, but ‘conventional’, as in non-nuclear defence expenditure. In February next year, the 2010 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty expires – and almost all defence experts are of the opinion that there is no way this will be renewed. That will be the last of yesteryear’s arms control agreements consigned to the same historical junk pile as all the rest.

The time-honoured, ultra-hawkish rationale for all this is, of course, greater national security. The UK’s Strategic Defence Review leans into that rationale with almost obsessive repetition, even though its somewhat desperate advocacy for a huge PR campaign to persuade UK citizens of the necessity for this rather undermines its own case!

In fact, I would argue that what the Labour government is now doing is to comprehensively undermine every single aspect of the UK’s national security. This is all about opportunity costs — at two levels.

First, our little country is still struggling to come to terms with our post-imperial reality. Year on year, we're getting poorer, as the devastating report from the Office of Budgetary Responsibility (‘Fiscal Risks and Sustainability’) in July 2025 makes clear. Interest on servicing our debt will reach £100 billion this year, more than 8% of total GDP. Labour's near-insane commitment to increase defence spending to 5% of GDP (not least to stay on the right side of President Trump's mercurial narcissism) will massively exacerbate those budgetary problems. And there is literally zero recognition in the Strategic Defence Review that national security is as much about health, education, social care, food security, energy security and combatting the climate crisis as it is about weapons of war.

Digging down to a deeper level, the blinkers are even more ruthlessly applied. Any kind of peripheral vision about national security has gone. The UK’s longer-term role in a fractured world warrants not so much as a passing reference: our ‘soft power’ (epitomised by the extraordinary role that the British Council and the BBC World Service have played over many years) is ignored. Our former inspirational example in embracing the UN target of 0.7% of GDP for international aid has been entirely undone, first by the Conservative Party and now by Labour.

As a declining economic power, to be spending these massive sums, year on year, servicing our debt and ramping up defence expenditure, seems the height of folly. Especially with a government that refuses point blank to increase tax revenues by taxing ‘assets‘ as well as ‘income’.

So here we are again, under the shadow of Armageddon. And as someone prone to nuclear dread (as referenced above!), the attacks by Israel and the USA on Iran’s nuclear facilities couldn't help but make things just a little bit worse — coming on top of Russia's takeover of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear reactors and its recent drone strike on the infamous Chernobyl nuclear power station in February.

As we're constantly told, the rules of modern warfare are constantly changing in all sorts of different ways. For instance, as a passionate defender of Ukraine, I couldn't help but jump for joy when I read of Ukraine’s audacious drone attack on Russia's strategic bombers. But then I got a grip on my feelings: what that attack tells me is that there is now not a single nuclear facility anywhere in the world, military or civilian, that is now ‘safe’ against this kind of threat. And let's not even start discussing cyber threats!

Simply put, there will be no secure future for humankind unless and until:

  1. We rid the world of all nuclear weapons.

  2. We close down (over time) all nuclear power stations.

  3. We urgently address the worsening threat of climate breakdown.

World leaders today would appear to have zero appetite for addressing any of these conditions. The dread goes on, I fear!