National security

Nuclear Weapons Irrelevant in Context of Security Challenges Faced by UK

Johnson said that the theory of nuclear deterrence was developed in the 1950s to justify spending large sums of money on the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. This deterrence was supposed to reassure people that the weapons would stop a war rather than lead to a new one.

"But in the real world, post-Cold War this is not how the deterrence could possibly work," she said, stressing that former US State Secretary Henry Kissinger and former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara clearly recognized that relying on nuclear weapons for deterrence is increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective.

"For the British, they are still clinging to this idea despite the fact that having nuclear weapons since 1952 has not prevented us going into wars, it has not prevented wars like the Falklands, having nuclear weapons didn’t stop Russia losing its war in Afghanistan and it did not prevent the US losing its war in Vietnam," Johnson said.