Bless The Holy Fallout

The news that the Royal Navy is to hold a National Service of Thanksgiving for Britain's nuclear weapons on 3 May has to be an almost unique event and one rightly condemned by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which is running a petition to call for it to be cancelled. 

It is one thing to commemorate the sacrifice of the armed services in past conflicts - Remembrance Day offers reflection of the loss of the dead and the chance to engender hope for future peace. Above all else, it is about people, the flesh and blood and spirit that makes us human and that was either threatened, damaged or destroyed in war.

The Alpha & Omega: the Ape Doomsday Bomb!

This ceremony, however, is to give thanks for our possession of weapons systems - Polaris, Trident and the future Continuous At Sea Deterrent replacement (cost £205 billions). Not just any weapons systems of course - systems of Mass Destruction: many, many times more powerful than the puny atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Westminster Abbey will see God thanked for our supposedly independent nuclear force (which can't actually be used without US targeting systems and service facilities) which has the capacity to completely destroy the world and all life on it.

This is at best misguided; at worst, it is an ominous development, incorporating militarism and nationalism into a religious ceremony. Shades of a dark future - after all, our Secretary of State for Defence Gavin Williamson apparently dreams of a post-Brexit world where British armed services use our "hard power" to face off against Russia and China. Delusional fantasy for sure, but all the more dangerous in a mindset that seeks to bestow some sort of halo on a ballistic missile system and presumably sanctifies its use.

The 1970 film Beneath the Planet of the Apes offered us a glimpse into a nightmare future where the mutant survivors of the human race worship a Doomsday Bomb, with the intentionally ironic biblical name of Alpha and Omega. Of course, back then, it was just science fiction, but as has often been observed, yesterday's sci fi can all too easily become today's reality...