Lord Gilbert spoke a few months ago in the House of Lords on how the nuclear deterrent is effective in preventing wars.\u00a0 At some point I’ll put his argument up here.\u00a0 Meanwhile, a subset of his words were used in a number of articles online to say he was claiming we should “nuke the Taliban”.\u00a0 It is ironic he was advocating a solution for maintaining peace to prevent the deaths of huge numbers of civilians and got attacked for it.<\/p>\n
Anyway, you’ve gotta love the outraged headlines it produced.\u00a0 Examples are:<\/p>\n
As for what he said, this is taken from Hansard’s proceedings for 22nd November, 2012<\/a>:<\/p>\n Lord Gilbert: \u2026 I draw your Lordships’ attention to what used to be called the neutron bomb.\u00a0 The main thing was that it was not a standard nuclear warhead.\u00a0 Its full title was the ERRB: Enhanced Radiation Reduced Blast weapon.\u00a0 I can think of many uses for it in this day and age. \u2026 you could use an ERRB warhead to create cordons sanitaire along various borders where people are causing trouble.<\/p>\n I will give an example.\u00a0 \u2026 nobody lives up in the mountains on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan except for a few goats and a handful of people herding them.\u00a0 If you told them that some ERRB warheads were going to be dropped there and that it would be a very unpleasant place to go, they would not go there.\u00a0 You would greatly reduce your problem of protecting those borders from infiltration from one side or another. These things are not talked about, but they should be, because there are great possibilities for deterrence in using the weapons that we already have<\/strong>.<\/p>\n \u00a9 Parliamentary Copyright<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n He did not<\/em> say we should nuke the Taliban.\u00a0 He was saying there are options for deterrence that are not being considered because the subject is taboo<\/span><\/span>.\u00a0 The media reaction proved him right.\u00a0 If you want to read it in context, which is about how deterrence is preferable to war, he started speaking at 3.42 pm.<\/p>\n One has to be very careful what one says when advocating peace methods other than going to outright war.\u00a0 Many people don’t like it.\u00a0 Weird, innit?<\/p>\n As H used to say:<\/p>\n If things don’t change, they’ll stay the same.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lord Gilbert spoke a few months ago in the House of Lords on how the nuclear deterrent is effective in preventing wars.\u00a0 At some point I’ll put his argument up here.\u00a0 Meanwhile, a subset of his words were used in … Continue reading