“We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs,” Labour’s Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin reportedly said in the 1940s, adding, “we’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it”.
That “thing” was the atomic bomb, but since the UK acquired its first nukes, the party has changed its mind several times over whether they’re a good thing. Nuclear weapons, said the BBC, have “always been a divisive issue within Labour”.
Anti-nuke ‘fixture’
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Previously ‘unthinkable’
A ‘nuclear-free world’
‘Unshakeable’
Asked by ITV News if he would be willing to push the nuclear button if Britain were under attack, should he be elected prime minister, he said “deterrence only works if there is a preparedness to use it”.
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