KEIR STARMER’S decision to buy 12 nuclear-capable F35A warplanes from the United States leaves us all less safe.

The decision stinks on every level.

Those who argue British rearmament will revive our gutted manufacturing sector instead see the Prime Minister splurging enormous sums — each plane comes with a price tag of $80-100 million — on US-built weaponry.

Hardly surprising, since a key motivation for Starmer is to appease a belligerent White House, whose demand that we ramp up “defence” spending serves the war profiteers of its bloated military-industrial complex. F35 manufacturer Lockheed Martin is one of the death-merchants that has done very nicely out of a world at war, with sales up 5 per cent last year to $71 billion.

Much worse still is the shift in nuclear policy this indicates. It lowers the threshold for use of a nuclear weapon in conflict, which has been taboo ever since the only country ever to do so — the United States — killed a quarter of a million people by dropping the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago this August.

Nuclear-capable aircraft will be a “second pillar” of our nuclear arsenal, ministers say, additional to Britain’s existing “continuous at-sea deterrent” of Vanguard submarines bristling with Trident missiles.

Britain’s existing nuclear weapons do not keep us safe, nor are they a truly independent deterrent, the missiles being leased from the United States and the guidance system being US-designed.

But at least the at-sea deterrent is conceived as a last resort. It is popularly justified as a means of striking back at an adversary with such force that we would not be attacked in the first place — though the Nato military alliance to which we belong has always refused to rule out first use of nuclear weapons.

Nuclear-armed aircraft are different. They would carry smaller, so-called tactical nuclear bombs, which military planners say would enable “limited” battlefield use that wouldn’t necessarily escalate to nuclear armageddon. Submarines can launch these smaller, though still devastating and poisonously radioactive, weapons too but the armchair generals fear a country under attack might not be able to distinguish whether it was under full-scale nuclear assault or the more “limited” variety, so might respond as if to the former.

The spin is that these weapons reduce the risk of all-out nuclear war. Nonsense. Convincing the reckless warmongers who rule us they can use nuclear weapons without provoking all-out retaliation will normalise their use. Their very possession will accelerate nuclear proliferation, convincing every country fearing attack that it needs such weaponry itself. Dropping a nuclear bomb on someone is always going to be a huge escalation: the idea of a contained nuclear war is dangerous fantasy.

This catastrophic development, which also breaches our obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, is not being debated in Parliament, though few issues could have graver consequences. It is decreed by the Prime Minister on the grounds that we can “no longer take peace for granted.”

But why is that? It is because our own government, and the US administration it shackles itself to, are leading a march to war. After a week in which Starmer has sternly warned the victim of unprovoked military attack, Iran, to “de-escalate” while bleating about the right of the aggressor to “defend itself,” nobody should fall for the lie that our military posture is defensive. If or when the long taboo on nuclear war is violated, will it be in “self-defence” or to further the crazed ambitions of a far-right US president or the genocidal schemes of a murderous Israeli regime?

It is because we can no longer take peace for granted that nuclear disarmament is so urgent. Britain’s rulers must feel pressure to stop stoking the nuclear arms race and bringing our country and the planet closer to the brink.