This year, the debate over Britain’s nuclear deterrent will be held seriously for the first time since 1987, thanks to its scheduled renewal and Jeremy Corbyn’s victory last year. The issue was raised in an Andrew Marr interview on Sunday and elicited the usual self-styled ‘moderate’ scoffing at a man deranged enough to think we should not retain the capacity to fry the skeletons of millions of people. But in spite of the useful stereotype of the bearded, lefty, pacifistic CND member, there is right-wing support for jettisoning the Trident programme, notably from journalist Peter Hitchens, whose conservative credentials Mussolini would find difficult to deny. Thus I would like to commit an act of left-wing apostasy, and offer a case for scrapping Trident to appeal to those of a centrist, and indeed a patriotic, persuasion.

Trident has no strategic value. In 2009, a group of retired military officers signed an open letter declaring that “Nuclear weapons have shown themselves to be completely useless as a deterrent to the threats and scale of violence we currently face or are likely to face.” This conclusion is hardly staggering. War today is waged not between nation-states, but against disparate groups of international dissidents often haphazardly thrust under the umbrella names of single terrorist organisations to persuade ourselves that the old adage about snakes’ heads and dying still has some relevance. A nuclear weapon cannot be utilised against a terrorist group which is ensconced in local citizenries. It would be like shooting needles out of a haystack. With an RPG.

And an expensive RPG, at that. The Ministry of Defence, which is notorious for making breezy underestimates of its projects’ costs, has announced that it will need to spend somewhere between £17.5 billion and £23.4 billion simply on renewing Trident. On top of that, the cost of maintaining the equipment over the course of its forty-year life is reckoned to be £57 billion.

Why, then, are we considering squandering billions on a militarily useless project? The answer lies in our history. From the very beginning, the nuclear deterrent’s purpose has been to maintain some semblance of British prestige even as greatness slips like sand through the nation’s fingers: witness the famous early justification from Ernest Bevin, that “I don’t want any other Foreign Secretary of this country to be talked to or at by a Secretary of State in the United States as I have just had in my discussions ... We’ve got to have this thing over here whatever it costs... We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.” Since then Britain has been reduced to the role of the archetypal teenage boy, desperately straining to impress its cooler peers by bragging, in this case, about how many innocent people it can kill.

This is the paradox of Trident. To call for its abolition is considered inherently unpatriotic, thanks to this entanglement of our prowess in technological military development with our sense of national prestige. Yet this manifestation of Britain’s pitiful post-imperial hangover is a suppurating embarrassment on display to the whole world. More than this, the effect of Trident on the national consciousness is both palpable and pernicious. It persuades us that we remain a global power, and this entails constant meddling in the affairs of others. Relinquishing Trident would be symbolic of a new direction for Britain, one of ceasing to blunder into delicate international situations and in so doing making ourselves the deserved focus of the world’s disdain.

What will truly enhance Britain’s international reputation? The theoretical ability to burn part of the planet and a reputation for charging blithely into Middle Eastern war zones? Or the use of those immeasurable billions to fund functioning healthcare and education? Rather than trying to keep ourselves in the list of the world’s most psychopathic nations, why not use the resources to improve our international ranking in education, in which we currently languish in 20th place?

One comparison illuminates the contrast between the status quo and a nuclear-free future. It is a custom that every few years the American President comes and patronises the sitting Prime Minister, praising Britain for our role in supporting them in their pointless wars around the world. But in the recent Democratic debate, the nation assumed a new position in the American consciousness when Bernie Sanders asked why it was that Britain spends half as much as the USA on healthcare, yet offers it free to every citizen. The Britain of the future will either be a half-tragic, half-risible imperialist shadow, or a shining example of mature unilateralism and humane healthcare. And it is worth asking: which is the truly patriotic vision?