WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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This is the Camberwell Submarine.

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It's not actually a submarine, it's a heating boiler and exhaust for most of the houses around here,

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but it's the closest I can find to a submarine that I've got access to.

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So, here I'd like to tell you about something you might not know,

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which is the "letter of last resort".

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The UK has four Trident-class nuclear submarines.

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They are our main nuclear deterrent;

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we're one of the few countries that actually has nuclear capability.  The thing about nuclear war is,

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it is monumentally stupid.  It involves the deaths of everyone involved

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and uncountable numbers of civilian casualties.  So the thing is...

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if you were the Prime Minister and you know that there are missiles launching towards the UK

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and you have four minutes to respond - as was quite possible during the 1980's...

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What do you do?

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Do you launch?  Do you send yours off in return,

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knowing that the only thing it can accomplish, knowing that you cannot intercept the incoming missiles,

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the only thing that you launching can accomplish is killing more innocent civilians?

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Do you launch, do you take the retaliatory strike that you've always threatened?  Or...

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do you accept that all you can do at this point is kill more people and not launch?

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And more importantly...

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What if the Prime Minister is already dead?

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What if the second-in-command is already dead?

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What if the attack has hit and nothing has gone out to the British nuclear submarines?

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Different navies around the world have different ways of dealing with this, and the British way of dealing with it

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is just... an almost poetic way of doing things.

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Inside every British nuclear submarine, inside a safe,

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inside another safe is one of four letters, all identical and handwritten by the Prime Minister.

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And every Prime Minister that comes to power, even now, even David Cameron,

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one of their first duties is to sit down and hand write four letters

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that say to the commander of each nuclear submarine, if all has failed, if Britain is destroyed,

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if the Prime Minister is dead, if everyone in the chain of command is dead and you have nothing else to do...

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...do you launch?

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And if the submarine surfaces and finds that Britain is destroyed -

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and one of the tests they use is whether Radio 4 is still broadcasting...

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allegedly...

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they look in the safe.

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They open the envelope, they look at the letter, and that tells them whether they

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kill uncountable numbers of people as retaliation

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or whether they go the nearest friendly port and do what they can to rebuild.

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And that's thing about nuclear war: once it's started, all bets are off.

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You may as well just give up because the idea was never to launch...

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...it was always to deter.

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And that is something you may not have known.

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