Was / is the concept of unilateral nuclear disarmament misguided ? Is Trident worth keeping ? Should we go for cheaper but more vulnerable systems ?
In times of peace you prepare for war. Its all well and good coming to agreements with other civilized countries to disarm but with the likes of North Korea and certain middle east countries heading the way they are we would be foolish to leave ourselves defenseless. Trident is the ultimate compromise, no one would want nuclear weapons anywhere near their homes.Trident takes them far away from anywhere that would be effected if something went wrong. Its also pretty difficult to organize a terrorist attack on a sub when you have no idea where it might be. Do we need a nuclear deterrent, yes, unfortunately. Do we need Trident, yes, it might be costly but keeps the weapons out of sight/out of mind.
After 33 years of military service I have given this subject a great deal of thought... Do we need a nuclear deterrent? No, definitely not. The old "cold war" enemy - the ones who actually understood "mutually assured destruction ie the USSR - is no longer a threat. The nut-case states - North Korea etc - and the stateless terrorist organisations do not care if we have the capability to obliterate them, and so it is not a deterrent to them. Did America's massive nuclear arsenal prevent the Twin Towers attacks? Why do we still have one? So that the British government can keep its place on the UN security council and pretend that we are still a player on the world stage. The majority of European nations do not have nuclear weapons. Their influence, in the grand global scheme of things, is generally no less than ours. It is about time that Britain gave up on its ideas about still being a global force, forgot about the fact that we once had an empire, learnt the fact that we are - in reality - a small country on the fringes of Europe, and concentrated on the important things. The money spent on maintaining a nuclear deterrent is a massive drain on our defence budget in particular and our national budget in general. Yes, I know it's not a simple thing to just get rid of nuclear weapons... But it should be a long term aspiration. Having nuclear weapons, and aligning ourselves with the USA, actually makes the Britain MORE of a target for terrorists and rogue states; it makes the situation more dangerous, not safer...
I agree to keeping a nuclear deterrent in the form of Trident, and one that is, at least theoretically, independent of the US. The idea of not being able to say to a state like N Korea, "You can and will be nuked if you start something serious", doesn't bear contemplating. And relying utterly on any nation, even the USA, to do our necessary dirty/wet work for us is ... well, fraught with danger. It doesn't matter if our small capability is insufficient to frighten a big player, such as China. There's a big difference between being a small nuclear nation and being a completely non-nuclear one.
Any decision taken now to retain, renew or scrap the UK's nuclear weapon system will have momentous consequences for a long time to come. If we did not have them, it would take decades to put them in place. We have no idea what kind of threats our children or grand-children might be facing in 20, 30 or 40 years time, and we have no idea whether nuclear weapons would be irrelevant or indispensable. On balance though, given a world in which nuclear weapons are possessed by (at least) USA, Russia, China, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, Iran and N Korea, I believe the UK would be far better off with them than without them. Britain is indeed a small island on the fringes of Europe; it always has been. But that fact has never held back our nation from being a major force in the world, economically, militarily, politically or culturally, and quite often a force for good. It is surely too soon to turn our toes up and cease aspiring. As for the "massive drain on the defence budget", maybe not all that massive. The UK defence budget is about £40 Billion per year, and the cost of maintaining a nuclear force over the next 40 years (including renewal) would average out at something like 10% of that.
When CND was first founded, its objective was multilateral nuclear disarmament. This was rather similar to moves to achieve international bans on use of poison gas, biological weapons, and later land mines, which have been reasonably successful. Later on CND fell into the hands of Soviet-sponsored extremists who changed the objective to unilateral nuclear disarmament, and it thereupon lost all legitimacy and all chance of achieving anything at all. So the answer is yes, it's not just misguided but counterproductive. In the 1950's when only a handful of countries in the world had the capacity to produce any nuclear weapons, the idea of multilateral disarmament has some real traction. Five decades on, the situation is wholly different. Nations with thousand of warheads usefully can agree and have agreed to reduce their numbers, but for the UK with only a few dozen the notion is irrelevant.
Nuclear Weapons are not and never can be a deterrent to a splintered factional organisation like Al Qaida and if you've spent 33 years in the Military then you'd be aware of that so it's a touch disingenuous to suggest 9/11 is a reason to scrap Trident. It is arguable that the massive US (and NATO) arsenal of Nuclear warheads kept Europe safe from Soviet aggression during the period from 1945 to 1985 when Gorbachev saw the writing on the wall for the USSR. It's also quite plausible to suggest that Israeli nuclear weapons have done plenty to keep their country clear from Iranian (and previously Iraqi) aggression.
Interesting perspective. I take your point about stateless terrorist organisations where the asymetrical nature of any conflict makes it hard to identify and tackle the heads of the organisation but I am not so sure about including N Korea in that assessment. The N Korean leadership would be obliterated in a retaliatory strike in the event they lauched a premptive strike, and I am sure they know that and that knowledge will hopefully prevent them doing anything stupid. So I don't think MAD is redundant just yet. The non nuclear states within Europe shelter under the NATO umbrella. If we have an appropriate defensive capability, which includes the ability to launch nuclear weapons, then we only become a target if we represent a threat to any potential adversary. I don't think the possession of nuclear weapons is in itself a threat to anyone, it is the stated policies and behaviour that we need to consider.
I think even China couldn't ignore the destructive capability of 16 Trident missiles each with multiple independently targeted warheads.
Am I wrong in thinking that the hunter killer sub's can launch cruise missiles with nuclear tips. We would not be looking to wipe out USSR city's just to hit back if one of the small nations attacked us. I agree that we need nuclear capability but does it have to be in the form of such a massive force. We are never going to attack only ever retaliate. Trident to me is simply not affordable. Regards Steve
@ apuhtred - yes, I believe you are wrong about ( UK ) submarine launched Cruise Missiles being nuclear-capable. @ johnv - there are lots of nuclear states outside Europe who do not have a "nuclear umbrella" to shelter under, who do just fine... NATO is, after all, an inefectual organisation run by an indecisive committee - pretty much like the UN in that way...The biggest argument I can come up with against the irrelevant and expensive drain on our finances that a "nuclear deterrent" creates is that NO government in Britain would EVER have the balls to use it. The rest of the world knows that - so why do we have one ? The reasons for keeping it are ENTIRELY political and have nothing whatsoever to do with defence...
I fully accept there is a strong political element to a British Trident. The whole concept of a nuclear deterent and MAD is that nobody has the balls to use it and everybody knows that. Unfortunately we cannot put the genie back in the bottle. Imagine a world where only N Korea had a nuclear capability. If Cruise missiles can be filmed by CNN they can be shot down, and if they can be shot down then they are no longer a deterent, hence the A in the middle of MAD.
The MOD has considered the obvious "Tomahawks on Astutes" option intensively for years, and come down against it. So no, although firing nuclear tipped cruise missiles from torpedo tubes is theoretically possible, we can't, we don't and we're not likely to.
I was saying today different topic but my son asked me about the death penalty and would that vile scumbag who burnt his kids to death get the chair . I explained we no longer have that. I said there will always be some random nutter or fanatic who has a cause or a plan or wants to kill , murder .. Or a physcho No matter what you threatened them with they would still have that drive to do what they need to do. It's the same with nuclear war Wrong person with finger on the button boom .... Then everyone hits their button and we would never know ... Be over in minutes.
Not for everybody it wouldn't ! We'd most probably die in the Nuclear Winter following you selfish northern hemisphere bastids war
The US won't give up their nuclear arsenal. The Brits will never ever use theirs if the Americans didn't want to use their own. Hence we (a) don't have an independent nuclear deterrent in any case and (b) we can always benefit from the nutty gunslingers' one (like Germany and Japan) if we ever really needed one. So there is no point in having one. You might think that Trident is a "nice to have", i.e., if we had loads of spare dosh, hey, why not? But we don't have loads of spare dosh, and nuclear weapons should come so far down the priority list they are never likely to be bought. As for "curling up our toes as a world power" - why not? In what way is life for the average Brit better because we cling to notions of being a world power? As has been pointed out so cogently, if the US spent its money at home on its own people, instead of trying to rule the world, life for the average American could be so much better (and probably the lives of many other people throughout the world). Leaders want power for power's sake. Access to nuclear weapons increases their perceived power - that's why they want them. If their focus was really on improving the lot of the people they govern, all sorts of decisions would be taken differently.
The former Soviet Union dissolved itself into independent states of varying amounts of power and influence. This happened, what, 70 years after it all started? If Glidd can offer me an ironclad guarantee that the USA won't follow the same path in the lifetime of me, my kids and their children then I will change my mind about Britain having its own deterrent :smile: Actually no, not even then. There is something distasteful to me, personally, in the idea of "We don't need a nuclear deterrent because our political masters in Washington DC have it covered.". Don't like that one bit.
