"NO MORE NUKES," the protesters chant outside.
The Defence Secretary's stomach drops, as always when he hears it. They are camped around his office, and seem intent on making his life a living hell.
The other slogans aren't so bad. Many placards decry nuclear warheads as disgusting weapons of mass destruction: they are designed, not for selective strikes against legitimate military foes, but only for massacring cities of innocents, for burning and corrupting their flesh and their genes, for devastating a people and their land for generations.
Such power to cause indiscriminate harm should not be found in any civilised arsenal, some say. These are the weapons of terrorists, of those who are looking for genocide, not for those who ostensibly seek peace. Some are unhappy that such warheads are not only kept by the United Kingdom, but kept in close proximity to citizens of their own.
That is the only point on which they are wrong.
"NO MORE NUKES," the protesters chantoutside. They don't know how correct they are.
The United Kingdom has not had nuclear weapons for at least two decades, as the Defence Secretary learnt when he ascended to this office. The country's submarine Trident weaponry, just like those of Poseidon and Neptune, exists only in popular myth.
It is a necessary fiction. The need for a deterrent is well-established: war is exceptionally rare between nuclear powers, and they are not invaded lightly. With the likes of Russia and North Korea remaining constant threats, it is important to show that we could be an equal threat to them if trodden on. The deterrent is the yellow and black on the body of a wasp, the rattle of a poisonous snake. No peaceful nation wishes to use any warheads that they have, but having them prevents them for needing to.
It is the oldest type of wisdom: if you would seek peace, prepare for war. Or at least, pretend that you have.
Warfare is ruled by bluff as much as poker. Actual conflict is the showing of hands, establishing whose strength is truly greater, with each side presumably believing it is them. Everything else is an attempt to avoid that as quickly as possible, hoping that weaker rivals fold before the stakes are forced too high.
The advent of tanks was quickly followed by the creation of fakes: termed 'spoofs', they were widely used by UK forces in World War II to great effect. In 1941, the Royal Engineers constructed four folding tank regiments for use in the North Africa campaign; in 1944, one-hundred-and-forty-eight inflatable tanks were stationed at the front line during one operation.
The United States formed a Ghost Army in the same war, armed with not only fake tanks but decoy planes, and giant speakers projecting the sounds of men and guns. A unit of one thousand deceived the Germans into thinking they were thirty times that number. The Americans had been pioneers in such deceit before: in their War of Independence they had famously constructed "Quaker Guns", cannons made from painted logs, and reportedly earned surrenders without a single shot needing to be fired.
The Defence Secretary wonders if the United States are still a nuclear state. They would not tell him if they were not: the United Kingdom's own secret, after all, has been kept from even its closest allies. As well as wishing to keep it secure, there are benefits to the deception beyond the deterrent itself: Britain enjoys prestige and respect as one of the world's few nuclear powers, a permanent seat on the UN Security Council despite the nation's relative size. It is a façade worth keeping up.
"NO MORE NUKES," the protesters chant outside. They can never know they speak the truth.
Closing his eyes and ignoring the noise, the Secretary pictures a world of complete disarmament, where no country holds nuclear warheads, though some still claim that they do. That world looks much the same as the one he is in.
He does not believe the simple lack of a deterrent would not lead to the immediate invasion of the United Kingdom; nevertheless, he feels it makes the country safer. That argument is irrelevant. Now that the lie has been told, the risks of revealing the truth are far greater than the simple absence of weaponry: the scandal would rock the world, the nation's people and its allies indignant as what they saw as a betrayal of their trust.
Britain would never again be able to make a credible threat, and the reputation of deceit would erode trust even in deals on finance or trade. Internal politics, already bereft of trust, would dissolve against the revelation that both major parties had been lying to the public for at least twenty years.
The Defence Secretary does not see it as betrayal. It had been explained to him, and he agreed that it makes sense before he swore the oath to take this secret to the grave. The nature of a deterrent had always been that of a bluff: no Prime Minister in the modern age would ever have pressed the famed red button. None would be willing to wipe out a million civilians, with such an act of mindless violence not justified even in retaliation for a million of our own.
It had always been a bluff, with there never a need for an actual bomb. The Trident programme, when established, described itself as "the minimum effective nuclear deterrent". That indeed it is. It is effective as a deterrent, but does not require such great expense: money that, as the protesters are rightly pointing out, could instead be spent on healthcare, education, methods to enhance life rather than to wipe it out.
The problem is, as their pressure grows, that there is nothing he can do to appease them. That money is already being spent. They can chant as loudly as they like, but the Secretary cannot decide to decommission nukes that don't exist. Ninety percent of the country might rise in support of disarmament, and he will remain inside this office, hands shackled by the lie. The truth could never be revealed: this was a perfect situation, the best of every world, and yet the people did not, could not know.
"NO MORE NUKES," the protesters chant outside, heaping their pressure upon an already nervous man. He must soak up all of their loathing, standing before an irate crowd to deny them what they already have, an elegant solution that brings rewards without facing any of their mentioned risks.
"NO MORE NUKES," the protesters chant outside. They threaten to undo it all.
