IDEAS OF FEARFUL PROPORTIONS: DREADNOUGHTISM THEN AND NOW
Sean Howard
From END Info 43 | July 2025 | Download here
In mid-April, previewing (2025-npt-briefing-book.pdf) a crucial meeting of the 185 members of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) at the United Nations in New York, Ray Acheson, director of the Reaching Critical Will programme of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), reeled off a list of grim developments pointing towards an ever more precarious nuclear world. Faced with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Bomb-emboldened adventurism in Ukraine, and US President Donald Trump’s seemingly pro-Kremlin, anti-democratic embrace of chaos and contradiction in security policy, Acheson lamented that “NATO members are talking about proliferating nuclear weapons, including through new nuclear sharing arrangements with French and UK nuclear weapons,” while the European Union – now seemingly repurposed to prepare for, rather than prevent, general war – is embarking on a crash, €800 billion rearmament programme (Introducing the White Paper for European Defence and the ReArm Europe Plan- Readiness 2030 - European Commission).
The NPT – in force, but only selectively enforced, since 1970 – is designed and intended as a transitional mechanism to a nuclear-weapon-free world, mandating in its famous Article VI “good faith” negotiations to achieve Global Zero. Yet it “seems to have become the dominant perspective of states that support nuclear weapons,” Acheson argued, to view such legally-binding obligations to disarm “as being out of line with their security interests” and thus of no concern. “Law and multilateralism,” they added, “which are meant to constrain violence, are being abandoned in the pursuit of imperial ambitions. The world is being dragged back more than a century.”
The two-week session of the NPT’s Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) – finalizing plans for the treaty’s 2026 Review Conference – opened on April 28, 110 years to the day since the founding of WILPF at a gathering of over 1,000 suffragists in The Hague, the site of two Peace Conferences (1899 and 1907) attempting not just to forestall catastrophic conflict but permanently disarm and reorient world affairs. A third Hague Peace Conference was to have been held in 1915, and Acheson may have been thinking back ‘more than a century’ to this tragic time. The root causes of the Great War were complex and remain controversial; one, though, was surely (to coin a term) ‘Dreadnoughtism,’ the working assumption of the major European powers that if only they militarized massively enough (and could mobilize rapidly enough) they had nothing – certainly not defeat – to dread.
When Size Matters More than Security: The Titanic Problem with Dreadnoughtism
The Dreadnought, of course, was the grandly-deluded name for the class of supposedly indispensable naval wonder-weapon – the Titanic Supership – of the pre-WW1 era; but it is introduced here as emblematic of a 21st-century militarism now fearlessly charting the same hubristic course. Nowhere on earth is that emblem on more explicit display than in Britain, preparing to build a fleet of nuclear-armed Dreadnought-class submarines (Dreadnought, Valiant, Warspite, King George VI) to replace its more alliteratively-assertive Vangard-class force (Vanguard, Vengeance, Victorious, Vigilant).
On March 19, Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Defence Secretary John Healey welcomed Vanguard back to the Faslane naval base in Scotland after a record-breaking 204 days at sea, an inhuman doubling of the maximum tour of duty envisaged in the 1990s, that fateful decade when the door to Global Zero seemed wide open. The next day, at the Barrow-on-Furness shipyard, Starmer watched Healey ‘lay the keel’ for the first, eponymously named, of the Dreadnought submarines. Britain, Healey trumpeted in an interview with The Times (UK won't be 'shy' of nuclear weapon use against Russia, minister says | The National), should be “clear, strong and confident and proud” of the power of its nuclear forces to “do untold damage” to Russia or “any would-be adversary”.
Adding that President Putin “is fond of using nuclear rhetoric,” Healey added that though “we are sometimes very British about our nuclear deterrent,” we “should not fight shy of the fact we are a nuclear power, that we do have an independent nuclear deterrent”. The most obvious objection to this boast is that it ‘fights shy’ of an inconvenient truth: the ‘British Bomb’ (United Kingdom nuclear weapons, 2024) is essentially American, consisting of leased US Trident submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) armed with an American-designed warhead, while even the new Dreadnoughts will incorporate launch tubes co-developed with the US Navy.
But while ‘Britannia’ doesn’t have her own nuclear Trident, it could indeed still inflict ‘untold damage’. “One Trident submarine,” as retired Rear Admiral Chris Parry chillingly put it (One Trident sub could ‘incinerate 40 Russian cities’: Why Putin should fear Britain’s nuclear arsenal) on March 21, “has the ability to incinerate 40 Russian cities very quickly.” “That,” he said – that much ‘bang’ for an awful lot of ‘buck’ (£205 billion: the cost of Trident - CND) – “should make any world leader fearful.”
Without question: but why should possessing (on loan) the demonic capacity to kill millions in minutes be anything to be proud of, or leave us feeling we have nothing to dread? One unorthodox but instructive approach to those questions may be to circle back to the Britain not of 1915 but 1913, the twilight of the first heyday of Dreadnoughtism.
Lest We Forget: Dreadnoughtism Circa 1913
Through that year, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill pushed for an accelerated Dreadnought (or ‘Super-Dreadnought’) building programme in both Britain and Canada, while also advocating a one-year Anglo-German ‘Naval Holiday’ freezing warship construction – and thus the UK’s significant Dreadnought advantage – in place. Maintaining this advantage was non-negotiable; it was, as Churchill put it the previous November, a matter of “existence to us,” but “expansion” to the Germans, adding that the “whole fortunes of our empire” – apparently nothing to do with ‘expansion’! – “would perish and be swept away utterly if our naval supremacy were to be impaired.”
Canada was bitterly divided on the issue. In mid-May, the Conservative government of Robert Borden managed to steer a party-line ‘Dreadnoughts Bill’ through the House of Commons: £7,000,000 (in 1913 prices) for just three ships. In early June, the Liberal-majority Senate rejected the Bill at the impassioned urging of party leader and former Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier, fearful that British-commanded Canadian Dreadnoughts would draw the country into what he called (Vimy Ridge: Victory or Vortex? - The Cape Breton Spectator), as early as 1906, “the vortex of European militarism”.
A triptych of stories from the August 25 edition of the Manchester Guardian concludes our whistlestop tour of that echoing year. At a Peace Congress in the Hague, 950 delegates had just concluded a meeting – a PrepCom of sorts – to finalize plans for the 1915 Peace Conference, due to be held in the brand new Peace Palace, its Great Hall to be proudly adorned (whenever arbitration cases were in session) with a rainbow flag of peace. With regard to the official British stance toward the process, the Guardian reported that “statesmen of both parties have so often and so strongly declared that the present competition will ultimately end in war or revolution, they have so often made platonic wishes of a ‘naval holiday,’ that it behooves them now to put their professed wishes into concrete form, and to entrust their defence to some statesman of the first rank” – someone, presumably, other than Churchill.
As the peace delegates dispersed, Labour Party leader Keir Hardie was paying tribute in Trafalgar Square to the late German socialist leader August Bebel, recalling that “when efforts were being made to stir up bad blood between the German people and ourselves,” Bebel had “proclaimed that there was no enmity…and there must be no bloodshed.” “Every Dreadnought built,” Hardie added, “was a monument to the incapacity of statesmen,” but the working classes of Europe were more than capable of avoiding the tragic fate of “shooting themselves in a quarrel that was not theirs,” and would unite to “make war forever impossible by the general strike, if nothing else sufficed”.
Also in London, Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith – and King George V – received a ‘Peace Memorial’ signed by 400,000 men and women, up 150,000 from the inaugural version the year before. The Memorial rejected “war, militarism, and increasing armaments…in favour of friendly relations, obligatory arbitration, and a general reduction of armaments”.
This was the kind of thinking that a certain Count Gleichen, commander of the Belfast military district, described as a “softening of the brain” in what the Guardian called an “extraordinary attack on peace advocates” on June 8, 1913. “The Count,” the report stated, “said there were people like Mr. Keir Hardie who said that because you had a big army you introduced militarism and you induced war.” To which he gave this “flat contradiction”: “the strongest military nation at the present time was Germany. Germany was the only European nation enjoying peace during the past 42 years; therefore, a strong army made for peace, not war.” And though we have here moved from sea to land – to which we could now add the ‘domains’ of air, space, and cyber – it’s all the same conceptual realm of Dreadnoughtism, the embrace of military Gigantism in pursuit of immense strategic folly.
Dreadnoughtism Today: Starting from an Even Worse Place?
At least in 1913 there was a massive movement to abolish war, and a vibrant political, public, and media debate about the feasibility of irreversibly demilitarizing world affairs, where today no other business is allowed on the ‘war-preparedness’ agenda. There is, of course, still some dissent. A new STOP ReArm Europe (StopReArmEurope – European movement against ReArm) campaign – a coalition including WILPF and the International Peace Bureau (IPB), formed in 1899 at the dawn of the Hague Peace Conference movement – argues that crash-course militarization will only “make war more likely, and the future less safe for everyone!,” generating “more debt, more austerity, more borders,” while worsening the climate crisis.
And on March 9, just five days after the European Commission’s gargantuan Re-Arm Europe plan was unveiled, three Italian scientists issued a manifesto (Against Militarization: Scientists Unite in Opposition to EU Rearmament), Scientists Against Rearmament, deliberately echoing the Cold War Einstein-Russell manifesto, 70 years old on July 9, presenting the “stark and dreadful and inescapable” choice we have yet to make: “Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?” Currently signed by nearly 4,000 scientists and scholars from across and beyond Europe, the 2025 iteration notes that, at a time when “humankind faces tremendous challenges” such as “climate change famine in the global South, largest-ever economic inequality, increasing risks of pandemics, nuclear war,” the “last thing we need” is for “the Old Continent to move from a beacon of stability and peace to becoming a new warlord.”
Actually, Europe is already a ‘beacon’ of destabilizing militarism. Ten of the world’s top 16 arms exporters (Trends in International Arms Transfers, 2024) are non-US NATO states (in descending order of sales: France, Germany, Italy, UK, Turkey, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Norway, Canada). In its annual report (Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2024) on Trends in World Military Expenditure – released the day the NPT PrepCom opened – the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) documented a global rise in military spending of 9.4% in 2024 to $2.7 trillion ($334 per person on earth, the highest figure since the ‘end’ of the Cold War), to which NATO contributed 55%: $1.5 trillion, +$1,500 per capita. Thirty percent of NATO spending – $450 billion – was by non-US NATO members, three times the 2024 Russian defence budget of at least $150 billion, a near-doubling of its 2023 budget, mainly to replenish its unfathomably vast losses in Ukraine. As the then-Chair of NATO’s Military Committee, Admiral Robert Bauer (Netherlands), declared (NATO Military Chief Says Troops Would Be on Ground if Not for Russian Nukes - Newsweek) last November, “the Russians are not the same threat as in February 2022,” adding “I am absolutely sure if the Russians did not have nuclear weapons, we would have been in Ukraine, kicking them out”.
Yet Bauer is also one of NATO’s chief alarmists, conjuring, along with many other military and political leaders, the illusion of a fast closing window to rearm before all-out war with the mighty Russian Bear, probably this decade (Pre-War, Post-War, Anti-War? Defence, Disarmament and Deliberative Democracy). Such talk has even roused the ghost of civil defence, with Germany embarking on a nationwide bunker-building programme, and France announcing plans to follow Sweden and Finland in issuing ‘survival manuals’ to every household, for contingencies including nuclear war. According to the Swedish version (In case of crisis or war), when under nuclear attack “take cover as you would during an air raid,” and not for long: “Radiation levels will lower drastically after a couple of days.”
I doubt The Sun has ever have been quoted on Rethinking Security, but its headline on March 20 (https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/33938587/europe-ww3-zelensky-ukraine-conscription/) – the day of Healey’s hardman vow to ‘not fight shy’ – does suggest the fever-pitch the ‘pre-war’ brigade are at least partly managing to induce: War Footing: Survival guides, mass evacuations, huge bunkers, & conscription – how the whole of Europe is preparing for World 3. ‘Vlad,’ the paper informs us, “is only years away from a war to push NATO out of Eastern Europe. … Countries are preparing their citizens for a brutal fight.”
The astounding scale of these ‘preparations’ – the extent to which the envisaged EU military leviathan would ‘warlord it’ over us all – is spelled out in many sections of the March 4 White Paper, but nowhere more graphically than in the section on ‘Military Mobility and Infrastructure’, the identifying the ‘need’ “to swiftly move troops and equipment across the EU in case of conflict”. A significant redesign – a repurposing of economies, infrastructure, geographies – seems called for, to ensure the kind of rapid rush of forces into battle that played such a crucial role in transporting Europe from peace to war in 1914. How significant? The EU –
has identified four priority multi-modal corridors (rail, road, sea and air) for military mobility for short-notice and large-scale movements of troops and equipment. These corridors need substantial and urgent investments to facilitate the movement of troops and military equipment. Within these four priority corridors, 500 hot-spot projects have already been earmarked that need to be upgraded urgently (such as widening railway tunnels, reinforcing road and railway bridges, expanding port and airport terminals). Their security, maintenance and repair also need to be assured.
Imagine if, post-pandemic, this loving, lavish pursuit of mobility and accessibility had been applied in aid of an opposite aim: making life, not death, easier, for millions of people marginalized by poverty, ill-health, lack of opportunities, discrimination, and disability (Linking Disability Rights and Disarmament for Global Security)! But sick societies reflect sick priorities, such as Poland’s recent decision to divert $6 billion in EU-supplied COVID-recovery funding towards defence spending (Poland seeks to funnel 6 billion euros in EU funds for defence | Reuters). As Politico reported in late March (Poland gears up for war – POLITICO), not only is Poland “NATO’s biggest defense spender at 4.7 percent of GDP,” boasting “the EU’s largest army,” and “spending billions of euros on jets, rockets, tanks, artillery and more,” it’s now busy “getting its population ready for war,” including the introduction of military training (voluntary, but strongly encouraged) for every adult male from 18-60.
But ready for what war? The one where the fighting-fit boys emerge not from trenches but bunkers, all the better for a few days rest?
The Very Idea: Disarming Dreadnoughtism
On April 30, Maria Clara de Magalhães Ribeiro of the Young WILPF Network delivered a Civil Society Statement (30April_Gender.pdf) on Gender and Intersectionality at the NPT PrepCom. Endorsed by 15 organizations (including the impressive new coalition Secure Scotland (HOME | Secure Scotland | Food Security - Wellbeing Economy - Peace and Disarmament - Violence Reduction - Land Reform)) the Statement begins by returning to WILPF’s founding, quoting the League’s 1915 declaration that the “profits accruing from the great armaments factories” constituted “a powerful hindrance to the abolition of war”. “Today,” the Statement , “the situation has only gotten worse,” for example in a Europe “talking about ‘rearming’ even though it is already one of the most militarized regions on Earth.”
How to resist this Dreadnought-sized juggernaut? First, the Statement argues, by realizing that “behind this perpetual trend toward massive violence are ideas about security. What security is, how to achieve it, and who it is for.” “When,” for example, “people are taught that they must rule through violence; when they are taught that strength comes through the willingness and capacity to fight or wage war; when they are taught that dominating others is essential to their gender – to being a ‘real man’ – then we are set up for global catastrophe.”
And it is all a ‘set up’; because if other ideas are possible, then so are other, less dreadful, more livable worlds.
Dr Sean Howard is adjunct professor of political science at Cape Breton University, Campaign Coordinator of Peace Quest Cape Breton, and a member of the Canadian Pugwash Group.