Blue Streak, Polaris, Trident, Whatever..

Blue Streak, Polaris, Trident whatever you want to call it, Britain's so called independent nuclear deterrent is a very peculiar thing. All of my life I've lived in the shadow of nuclear destruction. Amazingly it hasn't happened. That we are alive at all is not down to precautionary steps either, there's no fall out shelter in this basement (actually no basement). This is not Switzerland or for that matter France, which built many deep car parks for the purpose. Given the warning sirens, we British might as well have put  hankies over our heads. Excepting the Queen, who may still have a special little train somewhere, and some civil servants who might scoot down a hole in Wiltshire, we'll all be dead.
It's probably not down to people not wanting to kill me either, it's just threatening nuclear strike comes over as a bit naff, all that posturing so passe, it's not political leaders that will press the button, it's just an accident waiting to happen. I'm not sure even the military want them, they strike me as rather unreliable as a military option.
In the eighties CND was right at the heart of things, now we seem peculiarly attached to those nukes. They appear to represent British jobs. Predictably UKIP want to increase military spending and put ex-soldiers in the police, a most peculiar thing; it's all getting a bit Siegfried and Maginot Line; always ready for the previous war.
To have nukes for prestige? What a thing! To show the world in the aftermath of WW2 the Brits could still do cutting edge; making weapons of mass destruction which would trickle down to better frying pans; embark on a scientific quest of such unimaginable complexity, cost and moral bankruptcy in order to get a better Electrolux? Tragic. I'm reading a very funny (and furious) book by Simon Winder called 'The Man Who Saved Britain' about James Bond; he puts the madness in to context very nicely.
Of course one or more of these things is going to go off sooner or later, and I would tentatively suggest that we plan for that not by building more of them, but by getting rid of them. Meanwhile the new wars are clearly informational, porn-bombs and pictures of cats on social media laying waste to whole generations.