DOES anyone seriously think Nicola Sturgeon would send Trident packing if she wins the independence referendum she hopes to hold next year?

You may think the question is academic because the likelihood of there being a referendum next year is vanishingly small. Nevertheless, it is an important question following Ms Sturgeon’s trip to America where she said rejoining Nato would be “the cornerstone of an independent Scotland’s security policy”.

Trident is a cornerstone of Nato’s security policy.

It makes very little sense, morally or strategically, to say you’ll get rid of nuclear weapons when you are jointing a nuclear alliance. It is nuclear Nimbyism to rely on such weapons for Scotland’s defence, and then deny the ones you already have in your own back yard. Removing Trident from the Clyde during or even after a European war would clearly diminish Nato’s strategic cohesion during the first European war in 80 years.

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You may not like the fact that Nato is a nuclear alliance. But then don’t join it. Ms Sturgeon is a long-time supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, not the campaign to keep nuclear weapons so long as they aren’t around here.

Nuclear defence is non-negotiable under Nato’s charter. Member countries cannot become nuclear-free zones except in the most hypocritical sense. Nato countries are obliged to actively support the nuclear strategy. They contribute to building delivery systems, logistical support and planning, even if they don’t actually have warheads on their soil.

Anyway, why should others take the risk of defending Scotland if it is not prepared to take responsibility itself? Removing Trident would take many years even if somewhere suitable could be found to relocate it. Not Devonport, certainly, because it is within a large population zone of nearly 200,000 people in Plymouth. There is nowhere else in Britain that could take the naval base, and more importantly, the Coulport nuclear weapons depository, without decades of reconstruction and upheaval.

The First Minister is a virtuoso at making nonsense sound plausible. Her position on nuclear deterrence is a masterpiece of incoherence posing as principle.

She said last month that nuclear weapons make countries “less safe”, not more so, and that “the only thing they appear to deter is proper [military] help to Ukraine”. That was a singularly crass observation when Vladimir Putin is engaged in nuclear blackmail. It is Russia’s nuclear weapons, not the West’s, that is deterring Nato countries from imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine – a policy of which Ms Sturgeon appears to approve.

Ask Ukrainians whether giving up nuclear weapons makes you less safe from invasion and they’ll invite you to take a day trip to Mariupol. Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994 after assurances from President Clinton that the West would guarantee their independence. They are bitterly disappointed and now regret opting for unilateral disarmament.

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Does anyone seriously believe that Putin would have invaded had Ukraine kept its Cold War arsenal? Not Finland and Sweden certainly. These Nordic nations have woken up rather abruptly from the sleep of neutrality, and are desperately trying to get under Nato’s nuclear umbrella before Putin turns on them. Under Article 5 of the Nato charter, any strike against one member country means retaliation from them all.

The SNP used to regard Nordic countries as beacons of non-aligned pacifism, which has never been the case. Sweden recently restored conscription. Finland has remained neutral by being constantly preparing for war. All males over 16 must do military service and the Finns have built a network of nuclear bunkers under housing blocks and in hills. Yet foreign minister Pekka Haavisto says that’s no longer enough. The nuclear threat from Russia forced Finland to seek the Nato nuclear backstop.

Ms Sturgeon insists that Scotland could be like Norway and be in Nato and not have nuclear weapons. But the reality is that the weapons are already in Scottish waters and have been for 60 years. They are an integral part of Nato defence and scrapping them, at a moment of acute global tension, would be contrary to the spirit and the letter of the charter.

Russia’s war of aggression in Europe has changed everything. Nato has never been stronger, with new countries lining up to join and existing member countries racing to boost defence spending. Germany has abandoned pacifism and Ostpolitik and is actively re-arming for the first time since the 1930s.

Scotland may seem at small risk of a Russian invasion, but the Ukraine war has changed attitudes here too. A Survation poll earlier this month suggested that 58% of Scots want to “retain the UK independent nuclear deterrent” and only 20 per cent wanted to get rid of it. The SNP’s conviction that unilateral nuclear disarmament is a vote-winner is looking distinctly shaky – as is the idea of a post-nuclear “peace dividend” after independence. Defence spending is going nowhere but up in the new Europe where Scotland occupies a crucial strategic position.

Scotland’s Nato role is to act as watch-keeper of the Greenland Iceland UK (GIUK) gap – the route for the Russian fleet to access the North Atlantic. That was the reason for the Faslane submarine base being here in the first place.

The GIUK gap lost importance after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but Nato is again Minding the Gap. There is enormous relief in the alliance that the First Minister has agreed to align with Nato’s military order. Only a few years ago many thought an independent Scotland was unlikely to do so willingly.

So don’t expect to see the back of Trident in the Clyde any time soon. It would anyway be one of the key bargaining chips in any post-independence settlement with the UK. The best CND could hope for is a commitment to phasing out nuclear weapons over decades.

The UK is theoretically committed to negotiated disarmament under the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty of 1968. That has yet to lead to any significant disarmament anywhere. Now Vladimir Putin has set the clock back to 1938, there’s even less chance of removing weapons of mass destruction from Glasgow’s doorstep.

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