The SNP must ignore the siren voice of Ian Blackford and hold fast to the principle of unilateral nuclear disarmament

When I rejoined the SNP two months ago, I was well aware that I would find myself in a minority in taking a somewhat nuanced stance on the Ukraine war.  Perhaps because of the party's pro-Europeanism, perhaps because of an understandable fellow feeling with a country that has had its sovereignty trampled all over by a larger neighbour, the SNP has taken a stance of almost limitless support for the Ukrainian government in persisting with the war for however long it wishes.  But now that Ian Blackford has used the war as justification to come out in favour of the retention of nuclear weapons, perhaps I could just very gently observe that many SNP members may be waking up for the first time to the trap they have walked into by taking too 'conventional', too 'European mainstream' a position on Ukraine, because that effectively locks you into the logic of that mainstream European view, which ultimately leads back to the conviction that Russia is a very real threat to the continent's security and that nuclear weapons are an indispensable part of any protection against that threat.  If America is no longer willing to 'deter' Russia with nuclear weapons, British and French nuclear weapons will have to fill the gap - or so that mainstream view holds.

I suppose in theory the SNP leadership could follow Ian Blackford in surrendering to that logic, and try to frame support for nuclear weapons as merely a shift from 'unilateral' to 'multilateral' disarmament.  But if they did so, they would alienate an enormous chunk of their party membership and would probably end up losing many of their most committed and experienced activists.  Because we all know that "multilateral disarmament" translates into English as "no disarmament".  When Labour abandoned unilateral disarmament in the late 1980s, they packaged it in exactly the same way as "multilateralism" but in practice since then they have been fully wedded to the indefinite retention of a so-called "minimal nuclear deterrent" regardless of circumstance.

Mr Blackford's comments strongly suggest that he always privately believed in the principle of nuclear deterrence, but went along with the policy of disarmament because he thought it was a luxury Scotland could afford for as long as we were "protected" by the American nuclear umbrella.  But that categorically is not the place that true support for unilateral disarmament comes from.  Unilateralists understand that deterrence simply does not work, and that if you depend upon it to prevent either a conventional invasion or a nuclear attack, you are making as fundamental a mistake as France did with the Maginot Line in the interwar years.  The lengthy list of occasions in the Cold War when a nuclear exchange came within a whisker of occurring strongly suggests that if you tempt fate long enough with "deterrence", eventually your luck will run out, and 90% of the population of the world will be wiped out and human civilisation in any recognisable form will end.  That's not a mistake anyone can learn from.  

In the long run, the only way to save humanity is to opt out of deterrence and actually eliminate the weapons themselves.  The SNP have had this one right all along, and it would be an absolute tragedy if they suddenly lose their way simply because people have fallen in love with the fashionable cause du jour.