It's happened in the U.S. (Carter, Clinton, Obama) and Britain (Blair, now Starmer). Lefties getting pushed by the Right into crazy military posing and cock-of-the-walk behavior.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/08/uk-strategic-defence-review-nuclear-arms-race-armageddon

Plans by Keir Starmer’s government to modernise and potentially expand Britain’s nuclear weapons arsenal, unveiled in the 2025 strategic defence review (SDR), seriously undermine international non-proliferation efforts. They will fuel a global nuclear arms race led by the US, China and Russia. And they increase the chances that lower-yield, so-called tactical nukes will be deployed and detonated in conflict zones.


This dangerous path leads in one direction only: towards the normalisation of nuclear warfare.

These unconscionable proposals are a far cry from the days when Robin Cook, Labour’s foreign secretary from 1997 to 2001, championed unilateral nuclear disarmament and helped scrap the UK’s airdropped gravity bombs. They are a continuation of a redundant, inhuman, immoral, potentially international law-breaking deterrence policy that cash-strapped Britain can ill afford, will struggle to implement at cost and on time, and which perpetuates illusions about its global power status.

Starmer’s justification for spending an additional £15bn on nuclear warheads for four as yet un-built Dreadnought-class submarines, whose price tag is £41bn and rising, is that the world – and the threat – has changed. But in terms of nuclear arms, it really hasn’t. Even as cold war tensions receded, the eight other known nuclear-weapons states – the US, Russia, China, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel – clung on to their arsenals. Some expanded them.

A major nuclear exchange by nuclear powers is the most fearsome thing that could happen to the world. It must be avoided at all costs.