Trident: How Important is an Independent Nuclear Deterrent?

Britain’s leader of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, has declared his opposition to the use and possession of nuclear weapons:

Specifically, he wants to discontinue Britain’s Trident nuclear program. Trident consists of four submarines, 58 Trident II D-5 ballistic missiles, and 160 thermonuclear warheads. All together, Britain has the 5th largest nuclear program in the world:

How important is this program to Britain’s security? On this issue, I think both Corbyn and his critics have oversimplified matters a bit. The role nuclear weapons play is more complicated than both hawks and doves typically acknowledge.

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Niall Ferguson is Wrong about World War I

I ran across a piece in The Guardian in which Niall Ferguson, a British historian, made the increasingly popular argument that it was in the British national interest to avoid participating in World War I, that the decision to do so was a mistake. This argument, which I am seeing made all over the place in the popular press (as 2014 is the 100-year anniversary of the 1914 start of the war), is deeply misguided. I contend that it was an absolute strategic necessity that Britain enter the war to prevent Germany from defeating France. Here’s why.

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