A few days from now parliament will be asked to make a final decision on whether or not to spend around £40bn renewing Trident. Many of the Labour MPs arguing in favour do so not because they regard nuclear weapons as an essential tool in our armoury, but because they are terrified of being thought “soft” on defence. And they are right to be worried. For years the British addiction to nuclear armaments has proved a devastating weapon in the hands of the Conservatives and their friends in the tabloid media, even if they are not much use against our enemies.

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And yet just about anyone who has ever given the matter any thought knows it’s bonkers. Most Tories know in their heart of hearts that Trident is of little or no relevance to national defence in the 21st century. So, too, do a fair swath of the military. Indeed, our possession of nuclear weapons was never primarily about defending us from the Russians. On the contrary, it made us a target.

One has only to read the minutes of a top-secret cabinet subcommittee on 26 October 1946, at which the fateful decision to develop a nuclear arsenal was taken. Opinions were divided. The chancellor, Stafford Cripps, was against on the grounds that they were a luxury we couldn’t afford. Ernie Bevin, the foreign secretary, arrived late having nodded off after a good lunch. “What’s your opinion, Ernie?” he was asked. To which Bevin replied: “We’ve got to have that thing over here, whatever it costs … we’ve got to have the bloody union jack flying on top of it.” Why? Because, said Bevin, the Americans will never take us seriously, if we don’t.

And that in a nutshell is why British taxpayers have been saddled for 65 years with an expensive, but fundamentally useless weapons system. It is about keeping up appearances. Maintaining the pretence that we are a superpower, capable (to use a phrase much beloved by successive British prime ministers) “of punching above our weight”. The one practical outcome is that it buys us a permanent place on the Security Council of the United Nations. I made this point privately to the defence secretary, when parliament last voted on the subject and he replied: “The Foreign Office put that in my brief, but I told them to remove it.”

Far from being overjoyed at British membership of the nuclear club, the Americans were deeply unenthusiastic. There was constant friction between the Macmillan government and the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations over the British demand for US nuclear technology. The Americans were concerned about proliferation, fearing that if they gave Britain Polaris, the French – and perhaps even the Germans – would want their own nuclear weapons. But the British would not be dissuaded. At the Nassau summit in 1962, President Kennedy overruled his advisers and agreed to provide Britain with Polaris.

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Reporting from an Anglo-American conference at Ditchley Park a few months later, Sir Bernard Burrows, a senior Foreign Office official, wrote: “The whole American team and practically the whole non-official British team expressed strong disapproval of the retention of an independent deterrent by the UK. They argued that its military value was slight and that … its existence played an important part in encouraging the French to continue with their plans.”

In the late 1970s the James Callaghan government, again in secret, took the decision to upgrade the UK’s nuclear arsenal. Today, once again we are faced with a decision about whether to renew or phase out, and once again no rational discussion of the subject is permitted. At a time of unprecedented financial constraint, with parts of the public sector facing meltdown, this is the elephant in the room. Contrary to what is sometimes alleged, one doesn’t have to be some sort of extremist to take the view that enough is enough. Even Tony Blair, who gave the green light to renewal, said in his memoirs that it was “an on-balance” decision.

There was a delicious moment on Newsnight recently. The entire programme was devoted to Trident. The usual suspects were on parade. Defence secretary Michael Fallon talking up the Russian threat, Admiral Lord West saying how “shocked” the Americans would be if we were to phase out Trident. Then up popped Nancy Soderberg, the former US ambassador to the United Nations.

Trident, she said gently, was only of “symbolic” value, and its disappearance would make no difference to the balance of power. Wouldn’t abolition make us vulnerable to threats from Russia, she was asked. “No,” she replied with a kindly smile, the UK was under the Nato nuclear umbrella and always will be. For good measure she added that it was difficult to persuade countries such as Iran that they didn’t need nuclear weapons when countries such as Britain and France insisted on retaining them.

None of this, of course, cuts any ice with our hysterical tabloids or our political masters. Trident might not prove much use against the Russians, but it is a valuable – if rather expensive – stick with which to beat the government’s political opponents. In the past the Labour party has been deeply damaged by the – false – allegation that it would leave the country defenceless and understandably most Labour MPs have no desire to repeat the experience. Paradoxically, the opposite is true. Dispensing with Trident would enable badly needed investment in our conventional forces. Something many senior Tories and members of the military establishment are only too well aware of.

For Labour the only way out of the current dilemma is to allow its MPs a free vote and then forget about it. The stark political reality is that only a Tory government could phase out our nuclear arsenal. The case for doing so is not difficult to argue, if only they could bring themselves to forgo the short-term political advantages of pro-Trident posturing and address the long-term national interest. Were they to do so, it would be a five-minute wonder and then quietly forgotten.