The long trailed, looming decision by the SNP to reverse its policy regarding NATO in favour of Scottish membership has deprived many a unionist of one of its last remaining sticks with which to beat the Nationalists. The disappointment is palpable and no more so in the weekend’s Scotland on Sunday where Salmond’s supposed ‘NATO and nukes dilemma’ was splashed across the front page.

The argument, from Professor Malcolm Chalmers(?), seems to be that NATO won’t let an independent Scotland join its club if Scotland cleared nuclear weapons from its military bases.

The main article, and the accompanying editorial, involve telling Scots that you can’t be free of nuclear weapons and be a member of NATO in the short to medium term in an independent Scotland, and trying to make it the SNP’s problem at the same time. One initial oddity of this positioning is that opposition to nuclear weapons and membership of NATO are solid, historic Labour policies, and if there was one party that should be motivated to find a solution here it would be Labour. A solution over and above ‘let’s just stay in the UK shall we’. Lord George Robertson, former MP for Hamilton South, was recently the NATO Secretary General after all. Couldn’t he be expected to find a solution to this supposed impasse in the interests of Scotland?

Anyway, the article is difficult to take too seriously for separate reasons.

Post independence, on the one side, we would have a centre-right Government keen to ensure that rUK’s place in the geopolitical game remains strong and that the ‘special relationship’ with America stays tight. Underpinning each of these objectives is the requirement to retain a permanent seat at the United Nations. In order to ensure this, rUK needs to be a nuclear power. On the other side we have Scotland, a new country whose citizens have historically been opposed to holding nuclear weapons and led by a centre-left party (or parties) that have no appetite for paying for or holding nuclear weapons within their budgets or borders.

rUK wants nuclear weapons, Scotland doesn’t. There is no problem here. There may be an issue surrounding the timing of the physical move of nuclear weapons from Scotland to rUK but the weapons will always be operable and available to NATO if the simply unimaginable becomes reality.

Furthermore, it is not in rUK’s, or the USA’s, or France’s, or Russia’s interests for Scotland to have control over nuclear weapons. The smaller that club is, the better. There are good reasons after all why the many countries across Europe that successfully researched such weapons never actually created any.

I have always believed it is inconceivable that England, Wales or Northern Ireland cannot have a base for nuclear weapons ready in a matter of years, if it isn’t ready now. If this is indeed true then it is a dereliction of duty on the part of Westminster to have kept such supposedly strategically important weapons in a nation that (1) might leave the UK, (2) has never wanted the weapons in the first place and (3) should have been covered by a back-up location via a disaster recovery contingency plan.

So why this is all Scotland’s problem is beyond me. Indeed, it sounds more like an opportunity. Scotland could command a large price for keeping Trident where it is, and that doesn’t sound like bad news for Alex Salmond or an argument against independence to me.

The alternative of course is to simply scrap Trident, a decision that the coalition baulked at during this Parliamentary term. There is simply no conceivable scenario when these bombs would be fired, no country or state in the world that would deserve such horrors to be rained down upon it. So why keep holding these weapons? If they have served their purpose strategically, and run out of options geographically, let’s just put the whole thing to bed and save ourselves billions that we can build schools with, no?

Well, if it wasn’t for the permanent seat at the UN and that sordid special relationship, we might just manage to do that. Again, it’s not Scotland that wants to cling onto a seat at the big boy’s table, so why are people making it an issue for the Scottish independence referendum?

Experts can be dug up to provide front page exclusives and national newspapers can wring their hands in their editorials, but imagining problems that don’t exist or turning opportunities into issues for partisan reasons is not going to get Scotland anywhere.

This week marks a tipping point in Libya’s future. A tyrant reduced to playing hide and seek with the subjects that he was ruthlessly crushing a matter of weeks ago, a wave of jubilation celebrating decades of oppression finally being lifted and a country ready to be reborn.

Closer to home, this week may also see a tipping point for the SNP. Its judgement over being consistently anti-NATO deserves being called into question in light of recent events, which it surely will by opposition parties and the MSM before too long. An alliance between advanced nations where an attack on one is deemed to be an attack on all can only be a positive thing as, alongside the UN and the EU, it bonds together countries with the resources and the might to ensure global stability is maintained.

The SNP sees Nato in a different light, as a nuclear-weapon wielding relic of a bygone age when Russia was supposedly the bogeyman and ‘first strike capability’ was all that mattered. This dark imagining is a sci-fi nightmare that not only won’t happen, but is certainly not any more likely to happen through Nato’s mere existence.

It is testament to how sure-footed a politician Alex Salmond is that the First Minister’s “unpardonable folly” comments back in 1999 regarding the Nato bombing of Kosovo remain his most famous gaffe, one that Salmond himself regrets. However, that famous phrase has only served to regularly harden the belief across Scotland that the SNP is anti-Nato, even if there is strong support within the party to change this policy.

There is hardly a starker contrast between the SNP’s view of Nato and much of the rest of the world’s than the following two passages; the second a speech on Monday from President Barack Obama and the first a 2009 from Scotland’s whiter, younger, more Nationalist version, Jamie Hepburn MSP.

*S3M-3607*♦* Jamie Hepburn: 60th Anniversary of NATO
That the Parliament notes that 4 April 2009 marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO); recognises that the continued presence of NATO serves as a destabilising factor in the West’s relationship with Russia; notes that NATO relies heavily on the continued use of nuclear weapons as part of its operational capacity; recalls that the first Secretary General of NATO, Lord Ismay, described the organisation’s purpose as being “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”; further recognises that the world has fundamentally changed since the founding of NATO in 1949, and, given that the Cold War is meant to be over, believes that the organisation has no useful purpose in the modern world.

Barack Obama, 22nd August 2011
To our friends and allies, the Libyan intervention demonstrates what the international community can achieve when we stand together as one — although the efforts in Libya are not yet over. NATO has once more proven that it is the most capable alliance in the world and that its strength comes from both its firepower and the power of our democratic ideals. And the Arab members of our coalition have stepped up and shown what can be achieved when we act together as equal partners. Their actions send a powerful message about the unity of our effort and our support for the future of Libya.

The independence referendum may be some way off but I cannot see the SNP winning many friends by remaining so steadfastly opposed to Nato and the strategic options that it provides so soon after the organisation has enjoyed such clear successes, such as the Libyan operations in 2011.

Anyway, an independent Scotland pulling out of Nato is possibly the worst possible example of realpolitik that one could dare to consider. Let’s break down the timeline for how it would go:

- Scotland releases Libyan Lockerbie bomber and convicted murderer of numerous Americans, to outrage from the US
- America funds and organises a successful series of Nato bombing raids that results in dictator Gaddafi being deposed
- Scotland celebrates its independence and, on behalf of the new country, President Salmond says he looks forward to working constructively with the rest of the world and boosting Scotland’s international profile
- Scotland leaves Nato

Seems unlikely, doesn’t it?

In the military, the best course of action is often short and sharp, which is precisely how the SNP’s U-turn on an independent Scotland’s relationship with Nato should be if the they want to avoid this being a harmful distraction to the party’s referendum campaign.

It’s time for the SNP to kill this unnecessary sacred cow and accept Nato for what it is. Anything else is, yes you guessed it, ‘unpardonable folly’.

One of the few strong attractions of independence for me is the chance to backpedal on our island’s collective delusions of grandeur and to better reflect Scottish thinking in our policies – that we don’t rule the world with either a carrot or a stick. I did a calculation in a recent blog post that if the UK reduced spending on defence to Scandinavian levels, putting confidence in the UN/Nato, then we would save £24.4bn a year. Scotland’s share of that saving would presumably be around £2.4bn each year.

So I was initially dismayed by the SNP’s reaction to the closure of Leuchars and Kinloss as air bases. We pay too much for Defence relative to other nations of our size and we can’t have it both ways, we can’t seek to save money from no longer being the world’s policeman while protesting about cuts in Defence. Maybe this ‘grudge and grievance’ charge against the SNP stacks up after all.

However, that dismay lifted when I read Jennifer Dempsie’s excellent piece in the Scotland on Sunday. Jennifer makes a compelling argument in favour of a Scottish Army in light of the disproportionate level of cuts and under-spend that Scotland has suffered via the Defence Budget in the past decade.

If people are blinkered to make comparisons between Scotland and England when there’s a whole wide world out there then I for one am equally guilty in regularly citing Scandinavian countries as the perfect place for Scotland to copy, though recent events alone show that they are not insulated from the most unimaginable of horrors. On defence spending however I do believe that they have the right balance in terms of GDP spend and how safe the citizens seem to feel, particularly given how likely (or not likely) an attack on the peaceful Scandinavians would be. Would Scotland be as at risk of a repeat of the Glasgow Airport attacks if it was visibly moving away from the imperialist Britannia of old? We can’t know for sure but there are further benefits that would accrue from such a move.

The UK spends 2.7% of GDP on defence while Sweden spends 1.2%, Norway 1.6% and Denmark 1.4%. Jennifer stated in her article that “the Royal Norwegian Air Force operates more than 117 aircraft from seven airbases, the Royal Danish Air Force, which operates more than 111 aircraft from three airbases, and the Royal Swedish Air Force, which operates more than 187 aircraft from seven airbases.”

Scotland paid too high a price for forays into Iraq and Afghanistan without a sizeable Allied force and Scotland still pays too high a price for holding nuclear weapons in our waters. The numbers above prove beyond reasonable doubt that we can operate more than one measly air base in an independent Scotland if we rearranged our priorities away from playing the world like a board game, away from army boys wanting ever shinier toys, to a more peaceable, Scandinavian model where we involve ourselves in foreign missions in lower numbers and with a broader European/global consensus as to when action is necessary, while still maintaining a strong proud record of air defence and knowledge.

Based on a Scandinavian model, a Scottish defence budget would be less than the Scottish share of a UK budget and consequently would provide hundreds of millions of change leftover after keeping Leuchars and Kinloss as the air bases that the local community wants them to be.

With the debate around independence bizarrely focussing on Britishness in recent weeks, leading to Pete Wishart’s welcome rebuttal on Better Nation the other day, I can only hope that the public doesn’t lose sight of the facts and figures that shows what the pros and cons of a separate Scotland actually are.