08 May, 2017
The Foreign Secretary said it would be "very hard to say no" if Donald Trump asked the United Kingdom to join in with action against Bashar al Assad, if the Syrian leader launched another chemical attack.
Last July the UK Parliament overwhelmingly voted to replace the ageing submarines that carry the arsenal at a cost of £41 billion.
"If the Americans choose to act again, and they ask us to help, I think it will be very hard to say no", Johnson said.
Johnson said people who watched Corbyn "floundering" in debates with May in parliament with his "meandering and nonsensical questions" may draw the conclusion that he would never be prime minister, in a column in The Sun newspaper.
He said the usual convention by which MPs normally voted on any military action needed to be "tested".
Mr Johnson said there was "no question" that Assad's regime was responsible for the sarin gas attack earlier this month which prompted a USA retaliatory cruise missile strike on a Syrian air base.
The United States accused the Syrian army of carrying out a 4 April attack in which almost 100 people died from poison gas.
Britain endorsed the U.S. response to the chemical attack, but was not directly involved.
Mr Johnson also launched a powerful attack on the Labour leader, who in an interview at the weekend ruled out pressing the nuclear button and killing the leader of IS and said he would suspend airstrikes on Syria.
Discussing the Syrian regime's use of chemical weapons on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme, the foreign secretary said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had "unleashed murder upon his own citizens with weapons that were banned nearly 100 years ago".
Mr Johnson told LBC: "I'll tell you what we'll do".
He said rushing into supporting action in Syria by Mr Trump risked "undermining worldwide law" and had the potential to "create instability on a global scale".
He says the Opposition leader's long record as a peace campaigner and his anti-military stances actually mean "the consequences would be calamitous" if he ever became Prime Minister.
Quizzed on TV about his description of Jeremy Corbyn as a "mutton-headed old mugwump", the Foreign Secretary said he had borrowed it from author Roald Dahl's children's classic Charlie And The Chocolate Factory.
In a speech on Wednesday - Mr Johnson's first intervention in the general election campaign - he warned at the London Mayor's Banquet in the City of London that "some plaster may fall off the ceiling" in the Brexit negotiations.
He said: "There can be no more important task for a government than to keep people safe, and we must be prepared to do everything necessary to do so".
"The £350m represents the total sum that we do not control every week that is spent by Brussels, either in this country or it's squittered away in some other European country".
The PM praised Mr Johnson's role in trying to end the Syrian crisis, saying: "What Boris has been doing, and doing very well, is working diplomatically with the worldwide community, with the G7, and with others as well". The UK Statistics Authority has described the figure as misleading and likely to undermine trust in statistics.
