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Let’s face it, as a nation, we’re on a bit of a downer at the minute, aren’t we? Where once Britain produced ships and steel and coal, we now produce buy-to-let landlords and website designers and call centre workers.

So, is it any wonder that Tony Blair wants to put some oomph back into the country’s spirits. Sure, our manufacturing industry is in the toilet and, thanks to the Iraq war, we’re a laughing stock on the world stage, but at least we’ll still be able to rain hot, radioactive death down on our enemies for generations to come. As if raining hot, ordinary death on our enemies hasn’t got us into enough trouble in the last few years.

But Blair’s a man in a hurry. The decision to renew the Trident nuclear missile system is one that just won’t wait, apparently. There’s no time for tedious things like a proper debate or consultation. North Korea has got the bomb (we think) and Iran is trying to get one (so we’re told). This despite experts insisting that a decision could be delayed until 2014. North Korea might yet come back to the negotiating table – Kim Jong Il expressed ‘regret’ for the country’s recent nuclear test after being leaned on by China. Seeing as how we may be about to ask Iran to help us get out of Iraq, maybe ratcheting up the radioactive rhetoric with them isn’t a great idea right now either.

The Prime Minister did make one concession to the pacifists and traitors seeking to leave Britain defenceless, however. Inching towards his disarmament obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty of Nuclear Weapons, he announced the number of British warheads will be reduced from 200 to 160. That should come as a comfort to the citizens of Tehran or Pyongyang should they find 20% fewer British warheads raining down on them.

But let’s get down to it: most people, even those normally sympathetic to his way of running things, seem to think Blair’s in such a hurry with this because he wants it to be part of his legacy. He wants to go out with a bang. To secure Nuke Labour’s future. If only it hadn’t been for his fallout with Gordon Brown, he might be in less of a rush.

It’s a strange concept when you think about it, this increasingly frantic vanity in search of something, anything to be remembered even slightly fondly for. When the history books are written, when they come to the part about Blair renewing our nuclear deterrent, won’t everybody just say, ‘yeah, but he only did that to secure his legacy’? It’s so transparently artificial – like pushing someone in a lake, jumping in to rescue them, and then parading about the place telling the world how you saved somebody’s life.

Blair also shifted the terms on which Britain might use its nuclear arsenal. In a rather disturbing passage of his speech to Parliament on Trident, he said this:

It is not utterly fanciful, either, to imagine states sponsoring nuclear terrorism from their soil. We know that this global terrorism seeks chemical, biological and nuclear devices. It is not impossible to contemplate a rogue Government helping such an acquisition. It is true that our deterrent would not deter or prevent terrorists, but it is bound to have an impact on Governments who might sponsor them.

In the bad old days of the Cold War, nuclear weapons were the ultimate deterrent against attack – if someone sent missiles in our direction then they got a brace of them back. Mutually Assured Destruction. It’s how we avoided war for so many years (although, don’t say that to the Vietnamese, the Koreans, Afghans, former Yugoslavians and huge swathes of Africans.)

Now, however, it sounds like Blair’s saying that he’d be prepared to lower the burden of proof that would warrant a nuclear attack. Previously, you’d have launched yours the second you were sure your enemy’s birds were in the air. In these more paranoid times, however, should an Iranian-sponsored terrorist outfit explode a dirty bomb on the streets of London (damage caused and threat to health: negligible; panic caused: massive), Tehran can expect a warhead up the wazoo.

It’s a terrifying prospect when you think about it. What Blair’s saying here is that he’d be prepared to listen to hearsay evidence as a basis for launching a nuclear attack. It’s like his anti-social behaviour policy where a person can be given an ASBO and even face jail on the uncorroborated say-so of somebody else – it’s just the consequences are slightly more upsetting than being banned from the local shopping centre.

It’s also a gift to dissidents and provocateurs. We’ve seen in the last few weeks the confusion and misinformation nuclear material on the streets of London has caused. Is it the Russian Government, or somebody else who wants you to think it’s the Russian Government, who’s leaving Polonium 210 around the place like the rest of us leave our dirty underwear and fag ends? Are you an Iranian dissident group who wants to see the regime in Tehran knocked over without all the hassle of a coup or a resistance movement? Get yourself some smuggled Iranian uranium and make a mess with it in Hyde Park.

Considering the hysteria that would undoubtedly be whipped up by the Sun and John Reid in the aftermath of an attack, could you expect cooler heads to prevail? Christ, 85% of American troops in Iraq still think Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. People will believe anything and continue to believe anything even in the face of the evidence.

We’re allowed to have shiny, new nuclear weapons while telling the rest of the world that they shouldn’t have them. God knows we’ve lived with Blair’s double standards for long enough but he’s starting to look like the well-fed Mr Bumble who goes ballistic when Oliver Twist asks for more. And is Iran actually developing the bomb anyway? The likes of Blair say so but where’s the evidence? Not that there’ll be any hassle in conjuring some up should WMD push come to excuse-for-war shove. This is all despite Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declaring that an Iranian bomb would be un-Islamic and issuing a fatwa against the stockpiling of nuclear weapons. Sure, torture and the suppression of dissidents are fair game but you have to draw the line somewhere.

There’s also much debate about how much power the country’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is allowed to wield by Iran’s religious leaders. Considering the amount of stick he got from the Imams his week for watching a female song and dance show at the Asian games in Qatar (he’s ‘damaged the image of Iran’s Islamic revolution and its commitment to Islamic rules’, apparently), you have to wonder if he’d risk his scrawny neck in order to obtain nuclear weapons.

There’s an arrogance, a puffed-up ego about wanting to be a member of the nuclear club, on the part of us, North Korea and (say Tony and George) Iran. Of all the countries in the world, 183 don’t have nuclear weapons. Why do we have them and not, say, Sweden or Canada? What is it about us that makes us think somebody’s more likely to nuke us than the non-nuclear nations? Unless, it’s our unerring knack of getting ourselves in the shit, geo-politically speaking. We really have a way of attracting unwanted attention to ourselves. It’s the foreign policy equivalent of walking through a mugging hotspot while shouting loudly into your mobile that you’re wearing your new Rolex watch. Of course, nobody deserves to be mugged but for God’s sake, you don’t go out of your way to invite it.

A successor for Trident is the Viagra that our waning national libido so desperately needs. Can’t produce a national sporting side worth a damn, one in five British children can’t find the UK on a map, one in five 11 year-olds leave primary school unable to read and write properly. But just look at the size of our twenty billion pound cocks. We might be erect but that doesn’t mean you should fuck with us.

(First published in this week’s The Friday Thing.)