The first thing one has to recognize, and it's still not really common knowledge, is that Britain

right from when it first had developed nuclear weapons has always had thoughts of using them in

small nuclear wars. You go right back to the beginning when we had quite small nuclear weapons

on planes that were operating off aircraft carriers. We had five fleet carriers back in the 1960s.

Each of those could be equipped with either the Buccaneer or the smaller Cimiter Strike aircraft,

both of which were nuclear capable. We had nuclear weapons which could be put on those ships.

And extraordinarily, one of the areas of the world that they fairly regularly went to was

Southeast Asian, the West Pacific, and we're going back to that with the current carry,

the Queen Elizabeth, heading out that way quite soon.

So essentially, right through the history of British nuclear weapons, there's been a recognition

that you might want to use nuclear weapons in what we used to call a

small nuclear war in a far-off place. And we've seen, you know, in the 1990-191, Gulf War,

talk about the use of nuclear weapons. If Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons, we've seen a

similar thing in the 2003 war. And it's clear that we did actually have tactical

nuclear weapons on task force ships in the Falklands War, although they did not enter the actual

war zone.

So there's a long history of that.

The government doesn't even like to talk about the fact that we've never gone for a no first-use

policy.

It really doesn't like talking about the fact that we do have

a tactical or if you like sub-strategic version of Trident, a warhead with a much smaller yield.

The Americans have introduced one for their Trident Fleet as well. Britain has had it a long time

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