First Cold War

After World War II, as successive British governments latched themselves to America’s bloody drive for global hegemony, Atlanticism was woven into Scotland’s story. In 1964, Alexander MacIntyre of Strone designed a “Polaris military” tartan for the US naval officers stationed on the Firth of Clyde. Polaris, the British state’s first nuclear weapons program, was obtained from the Kennedy administration in 1963 and stored at Faslane on Scotland’s west coast — though it remained almost entirely under NATO command.

The presence of Polaris brought Scotland into the calculations of a Cold War that often ran deadly hot for the people of the Global South. The price of the submarine-based weapons was discounted in 1966 by $14 million following Britain’s agreement to lease the Pacific island of Diego Garcia to the US military after the ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of the Chagos Islands’ two thousand inhabitants.

Faslane, however, was just one part of the military architecture that Malcolm Spaven labelled “Fortress Scotland” in 1983. The white sands of Machrihanish, immortalized by Paul McCartney’s ballad “Mull of Kintyre,” played host to US nuclear depth charges. The village of Arrochar, a busy destination for Scotland’s mountaineers, sat just a few miles from one of the largest weapons stocks in Western Europe. Created on NATO’s behalf in 1962, at its peak DM Glen Douglas’s 650 acres stored up to forty thousand tons of munitions. Dalgety Bay, a small town on Scotland’s east coast, was only cleared of radium in 2023 after radioactive particles from scrapped World War II aircraft were found to have contaminated the area in 1990.

Today the Ministry of Defence (MoD) owns 64,900 hectares of Scottish land, which is roughly double the combined holding of Scotland’s thirty-two local councils. Polaris’s successor, the Trident nuclear program, is still based at Faslane and remains dependent on the United States. In September 2024 — months after a Trident missile misfired and crashed into the ocean during a rare test launch — Keir Starmer’s new Labour government amended Britain’s Mutual Defense Agreement (MDA) with Washington. The clause stipulating that the MDA must be approved by parliament every ten years was expunged. All references to an “expiry date” have been removed “to make the entirety of the MDA enduring,” reported Declassified UK. Scotland may no longer be home to thousands of American soldiers, but the role of the world’s hegemon in Britain’s national security remains as central as ever.

Proud Independence?

This proliferation of military bases, ammunition stores, and training camps has always sat uncomfortably beside Scotland’s place in the popular imagination. Mel Gibson’s Braveheart becomes a lot less stirring when one considers Caledonia’s contemporary imperial significance. The tranquility of the Isle of Lewis is disturbed when one remembers the clouds of bubonic plague that exploded above its beaches during the Churchill government’s biological weapons tests in 1953. The northwest coast’s rugged beauty is blighted when one is reminded that the Royal Navy dropped three one-thousand-pound bombs at Kyle of Durness as recently as 2011.

“The bonnie, bonnie, banks of Loch Lomond are famed in song,” wrote veteran peace campaigner Brian Quail in 2004, “but few who take the high road towards the ‘steep steep slopes of Ben Lomond’ realise that among the traffic hazards they may face en route are convoys carrying nuclear bombs, which regularly share the same road. Or that they are a few miles from the biggest arsenal of nuclear bombs in Europe — Coulport, a short hike away over the moors to Loch Long.” In his song “As I Walked Down the Road,” folk singer Dick Gaughan recalled making that very journey:

I felt so sad just standing there

In a place I’d once loved well

Now used without permission asked

To house the very teeth of hell

But all those folk who strive for peace

My heart went out to all of them

Their struggle’s on, it musn’t cease.

Seen in the context of perpetual military expansion, the return of US soldiers to Scottish shores is hardly a surprise. Indeed, it is tempting to understand such developments as a London imposition north of the English border — and sometimes this is the case. With defense remaining under Westminster’s control, the Scottish government was not consulted by the MoD about their agreement to station US warplanes at RAF Lossiemouth — not that the ruling Scottish National Party (SNP) voiced any complaint.

There was once a time, not so long ago, when Scottish nationalists sat at the forefront of Scotland’s antiwar movement. In 1969, two years after her historic by-election victory in the traditional Labour heartland of Hamilton, the SNP MP Winnie Ewing told the House of Commons that the Polaris nuclear program was “immoral in its intrinsic nature.” Four decades later, riding a wave of mass opposition to Tony Blair’s illegal invasion of Iraq, the SNP won the opportunity to form its first minority government in the Scottish Parliament. Popular and institutional antiwar sentiment was central to the twentieth-century development of Scottish nationalism. However, these days are long gone.

Since the SNP took power in Edinburgh, its eighteen-year tenure has been marked less by a challenge to the military-industrial complex than by the warm embrace of Western foreign policy. In 2012, the party abandoned its opposition to NATO membership after a determined campaign by the SNP’s then defense spokesperson Angus Robertson. While their antinuclear position was retained, the credibility of the SNP’s opposition to Trident was irreversibly undermined by their endorsement of a first-strike nuclear alliance. In March 2022, six months after she called for NATO troops to remain in Afghanistan for “as long as is necessary,” then first minister Nicola Sturgeon suggested that NATO should implement a no-fly zone over Ukraine following Russia’s invasion, risking catastrophic escalation.

This trajectory was interrupted in April 2023 by Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation. Later that year, her successor Humza Yousaf attracted well-deserved praise for his courageous defense of the Palestinian people as Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip began. Yousaf deviated from the Western consensus to call for an end to the bombing and an immediate arms embargo. His thirteen-month tenure, however, was the exception rather than the rule. Indeed, just months after Yousaf left office, Angus Robertson — now responsible for the SNP’s upcoming Scottish election campaign — secretly met with Israel’s deputy ambassador to discuss “unique commonalities” between Scotland and Israel, including energy and culture.

What’s more, as first minister, Yousaf proved unable to sever the Scottish government’s extensive public subsidies for arms companies complicit in Israel’s crimes. In the twelve months up to November 2024 alone, £2.5 million of taxpayers’ money was awarded by the Scottish government’s arms-length funding body to major weapons companies, including BAE Systems, Boeing, Thales, and Leonardo. While the SNP claimed to operate a human-rights-based approach to foreign policy, Scottish Enterprise funded thirteen arms manufacturers to the tune of £8.2 million between 2019 and 2023.

Defense Jobs

The centrality of the arms industry to what little remains of Scotland’s industrial base has long seen these subsidies left unquestioned. British military expenditure, according to the MoD, supports some 12,200 jobs in Scotland across nine separate sites. While the phrase “just transition” is now common parlance among Scottish Government ministers in the context of North Sea oil and gas workers, no such attention has been paid to diversification away from the defense industry — or the worker-led economic alternatives envisioned by the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders of the 1970s. Under the guise of behaving as “a good global citizen,” the SNP has time and again serviced the interests of imperialism, betraying the political currents that brought Scottish nationalism out of the wilderness in the twentieth century.

The last twelve months have revived Scotland’s antiwar movement as thousands have taken to the streets to challenge their politicians’ complicity in the massacre of the Palestinian people. Tactical discussions have developed on how to form bonds between workers and campaigners to confront the military-industrial complex and initiate a new phase of resistance to war at home and abroad. For inspiration, we need not look further than a little songbook produced at the height of the anti-Polaris movement. “Paper Hankies” sung to the tune of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” by the peace campaigners of the 1960s, urges Scots to

Chase the Yankees out the Clyde

Away wi‘ Uncle Sammy

Chase the Yankees out the Clyde

And send them hame to mammy.