Yesterday, Britain’s senior soldier became confused and momentarily deluded into thinking that his mouth and brain were connected. He lectured Britain, via the BBC, on how a nuclear deterrent is only of use when it succeeds in deterring – a valuable piece of advice, indeed!

“Nuclear deterrent used every day,” says UK chief of defence staff Sir Nicholas Houghton.

What he failed to mention, in his anxiety to become a latter-day Bomber Harris, however, was that to spend £100bn of taxpayers’ money on replacing Trident is £100bn ‘down the drain’.  It would certainly not deter any rogue nuclear state which already possesses a second-strike, nuclear arsenal vastly superior to anything that Britain has, or will have for the next 20 years, in attacking us.

There is currently at least one entity – the only undeclared nuclear state on the planet – that currently meets the above criteria – the State of Israel. Why Israel?  Well, unlike the United Kingdom, France and all other 26 EU member states, it refuses to become a party to the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT); it refuses to allow its massive secret underground nuclear weapons facility, at Dimona, to submit to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and it refuses to be a party to either the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) or the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC).

This automatically defines Israel as a rogue (nuclear) state outside of all international agreed conventions regarding the rules of war. Furthermore, its current prime minister is the leader of a right-wing political party, and coalition, whose direct antecedents include the terrorist bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem that killed 91 British and other civilian and military personnel in the first mass terrorist bombing anywhere in the world. That act, in pursuit of a political ideology, was carried out by the illegal Irgun Zvai Leumi paramilitary group, the forerunner of today’s IDF, which was founded by military activist Vladimir Jabotinsky, from Odessa.   Jabotinsky’s personal secretary for many years was none other than Benzion Netanyahu, the father of the current Israeli Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.

Why is this information relevant to the verbal diarrhoea of an (admittedly senior) British soldier?  The answer lies in his appalling ignorance of the reality of the politics and nuclear assets of regimes that could, in an instant, become active enemies of the United Kingdom and who have, and will presumably always have, vastly superior nuclear arms.