Hiroshima Day, 2018

On this day 73 years ago, the United States exploded a nuclear bomb over Hiroshima, the first and also the second-last use of nuclear weapons in war time.

The United Kingdom’s supply of nuclear missiles are stored at their purpose-built home in Faslane.

The majority of Scots support a no-nukes Scotland.

Scottish Labour, the SNP, and the Greens all support not renewing Trident.

All of this adds up to the surety that when Scotland becomes independent, and Faslane ceases to be a UK military base, the nuclear missiles must go.

But the removal of Trident is always going to be the biggest problem the Westminster government/the UK’s Ministry of Defence has with Scottish independence, because not only is there nowhere else for it to go and it would take a couple of decades to build an alternative site, there isn’t a realistic alternate site in the rest of the UK for deep-water nuclear submarines.

Devonport is physically possible but is a political impossibility, certainly for any Conservative government (and in a twenty-year construction plan there will likely be at least one Conservative government): while Scots feel uncomfortable about how near Faslane is to Glasgow, Devonport is literally in the middle of Plymouth. Pembrokeshire is a technically feasible location, but building an entirely new military depot for nuclear weapons on the coast of Wales creates a whole new political problem for rUK after iScotland has voted Yes and departed.

Hiroshima lies and nuclear deaths

Seventy years ago today, on 6th August 1945 at 8:15am JST, the US bomber Enola Gay dropped “Little Boy” on Hiroshima. Three days later, another bomber from the same squadron, Bockscar, dropped “Fat Man” on Nagasaki.

The Japanese government were struggling to surrender and end the war: the US government wanted to try out the effect of their two kinds of nuclear weapons on two cities that had not yet been firebombed. After the two nuclear weapons had been dropped, negotiations could be allowed to begin: Japan’s surrender was announced on 15th August.

By 15th August, the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had already killed between 84,000 and 123,000 civilians: by the time Japan formally surrendered to the Allied forces on 2nd September, over 246,000 civilians had been killed by the US bombing on those two cities.