Scrapping the Government’s plans for a “like for like” replacement for Trident is one of the most frequently mentioned examples of savings Vince Cable and the Liberal Democrats would make. But what would the party do instead?
Nick Clegg addressed that in his Radio 4 interview yesterday:
What we’re saying is there are a number of options that you could explore in the future… you could equip the Astute submarine. What we’ve done is, I asked Menzies Campbell to look at the range of options and he’s published a number of options simply to make the point which the other parties won’t even accept that there are alternatives to a like-for-like replacement for Trident.
“We haven’t yet settled on which of those options. What we’re doing is something the government are refusing to do, and the Conservatives refuse to do – they wont even include it in a future defence review. Whether we have a nuclear deterrent or not depends heavily on whether multi-lateral nuclear disarmament in the non-proliferation talks succeed or not I am a multilateralist.
Hat-tip: Left Foot Forward
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14 Comments
I read the paper on this the other day, and I’m still formulating some thoughts on it. Without some clarity around who advised the development of the paper it’s difficult to attribute some of the weaker thinking in it. the main attributions are to explicit opponents, and the arguments are neither balanced nor particularly rigorous.
Unfortunately Nick has caught a cold with his comments, the paper talks about considering tactical weapons launched by a fleet boat and places it as a ”least viable” approach. Equipping an Astute type hull with strategic ballistic missiles will end up with a hull resembling an extant bomber, equipping Astute with enough tactical weapons to ensure munitions on target will require a significant increase in the flotilla and reduces the ability to deliver a strategic effect within the littoral only
Both approaches would suck up a considerable amount of money anyway.
Nick assertions that we can go from a standing start to delivering nuclear munitions in a matter of month are without foundation. The infrastructure to build the munitions would take longer than that to build..
We don’t build the infrastructure. We buy a lot of that stuff from the US.
Surely the only sensible option to Trident is “nothing” ?
@Andrew
The position presented by Nick would withdraw us from our relationship with the US for access to the delivery vehicles, we build our own warheads. The paper suggests that we’d be able to build warheads in a matter of months. If we withdrew from the agreement we’d also need to build delivery vehicles, either strat ballistic or tactical sub sonic cruise. Strat would have to be from scratch, tac could be done using a modified Stormshadow or similar.
I’m not even sure we can afford to spend money on Trident, or a like-for-like replacement. Fact is, Trident or any nuclear deterrent doesn’t add much to our national security and hasn’t since the end of the Cold War. Its also an exceptionally large expense, we’re talking not just the missiles (whatever option we go with) and the Astute class submarines (which are another big expense) you also need a full packet of anti-submarine warfare capabilities just to protect Trident.
We’d be much better off investing properly in the Queen Elizabeth class Carrier, MRAPs and a better range of Fast Jets than Eurofighter than spending all that money on an asset which has no practical value in terms of our warfighting capability. Especially given the wide range of low intensity conflicts we’re currently engaged (and have been for 20 years) in where Trident is of zero use.
Last comment by Greg makes a lot of sense.
Dont forget….America has a duel-key on the Trident, it couldnt ever be used without their say-so, its not independent, and its not just the UK that decides on the thing…we just pay for it.
@Philip
That’s a widely held misconception but is wholly untrue. The UK has rights to a number of delivery vehicles, deployed in our bombers. We manufacture our own warheads, deployment and launch is entirely national.
In practice, as observed, we’re unlikely to launch independently. The nature of the weapon is such that it’s of little operational value at the national level. But we could if we wanted to.
There is a lot of public support for not replacing Trident so it could be a vote winner. £97 Billion is a lot to be spending on new nukes at a time of big public cuts. A lot of senior military figures have come out against replacing Trident such as Field Marshal Lord Bramall (former chief of the defence staff), two former Generals (Lords Ramsbotham and Sir Hugh Beach) and more recently the ex-head of the army General Dannatt. I’m sure they would rather the money was spent on basic equipment rather than a “defence” system that has no relevance to the modern world. The current head of the army General Richards has warned the government against spending large amounts on new weapons that are not relevant to modern conflicts. This is on top of a big hole in the defence budget; the simple truth is we can’t afford to replace Trident.
Obama is leading the way with nuclear disarmament (he’s even won a noble prize for it) and considering both Lab and Con want to replace Trident, not replacing it at all could be issue that makes the Lib Dems stand out. This is a real opertunity for Britian, only 9 countries have nukes, the rest of the world seems to get on just fine without them
The only acceptable nuke would be a suitcase bomb personally delivered by the Prime Minister.
Of the 3 main parties the Lib Dems have the best policy on this.
But it can and should be better.
Why does anyone think that our possession of nuclear weapons will have any leverage at all in multilateral arms negotiations? if we replace Trident, who will we be negotiating with to get rid of them again?
Why should the British taxpayer spend any money at all in replacing Trident. A far bigger threat to our security is global warming, so we should spend money on mitigating that instead. There is no point in replacing Trident. It is a waste of money when we can least afford it.
@meandering mammal
We don’t produce our own warheads. They are produced in this country (big deal) by Halliburton and other companies since we quietly sold these industries off in 2008. All the tech is rented or bought from American businesses. The subs have to return to the Atlantic coast in America every few months for the nukes to be refurbished. And the US could cut us off any time by repealing the Mutual Defence Act in Congress. It’s debatable whether we could fire a missile without US say so, if unlikely circumstances demand it, because we use US firing software. There is no consensus about whether or not GB has autonomy over the firing system coming from people who have worked on Trident.
It’s a stupid policy, totally useless for today’s wars, which does nothing but subsidise US industry – but Labour and the Conservatives are convinced for some reason that it’s a vote winner.
@Ed
It’s a couple of years since I was formally involved in the Strategic systems project and the Nuclear Firing Chain, so things may have radically changed from what I knew. However, the weapons are built in the UK by AWE Management Limited; Serco, Lockheed Martin and Jacobs, although MoD has a so-called ”Golden Share”, so ownership is both Sovereign and retained.
Personally I don’t subscribe to the theory that the US government would cut us off via some backdoor just because the tech is developed by a US company. The operational systems are supported by
We do circulate the delivery vehicles through Kings Bay on a fairly regular basis, although the weapons themselves are removed from the Delivery Vehicles before they’re taken over there. As observed above we have rights to a number of vehicles, we draw them from a common pool.
The only doubts that I’m aware of from those in StratSys and the NFC are around political considerations, would the UK really order the deployment? Personally I think not, but I’m not impressed by any of the three parties positions here. Our position is, in my opinion, a complete cop out.
Trident highlights the need for an whole new level of curiosity and understanding in our collective mind about the phenomena of nuclear energy, and the Atomic World where it comes from. We are still beholden to a description of the atom made ages ago by imperial men imbued with patriarchal values.
Meanwhile, there’s a series of photographs, taken by the French military when they were testing a nuclear device in the South Pacific in the ‘70’s, which clearly show that nuclear fission is an enormous drama of love and longing, being played out by the masculine and feminine forms of energy released out of matter by the fission process.
These photographs are floating about on the Internet, but they have become separated from each other over time. I’ve placed them in order in a file labelled “Romeo and Juliet in the Atomic World”.
The original physicists and the young cowboys who split the atom never saw this process. Once you see it, then this romantic and sexual process can be seen or inferred in all the other video records of nuclear fission.
The whole drama is done and over in two or three seconds. That’s why it has not really registered that this sublime process is going on. We need to adjust our thinking to the fact that space time at the Atomic level is very compressed compared to our human sense of it. What we see in two seconds feels like the equivalent of several hours in their time.
There is ample evidence in our nuclear work that the world of the particles is far more social and sentient and infused with spiritual energy than we have so far cared or dared to consider. The evidence gets screened out by the scientific method. And no one in the industry wants to see or feel the pain we are stirring up in the particle world.
Yes, scrapping Trident is a good positive step in the long overdue need to look with fresh and friendly eyes into the Atomic World, and see again the profound and wholly sensible nature of our Universe.
Good luck Nick Clegg and your colleagues and political party.
Ian Turnbull
The cost of the new subs is huge, 104 Bill. They cost about 2 Bill to operate per year (about 20% of the rest of the of the Defence Budget, or 10% of the NHS budget).
The new subs will however last 30 years, so spreading the cost of build makes it 3.5 Bill per year (so, 35% of the rest of the defence budget p/a, or 17.5% of the NHS budget p/a).
Big money, no doubt about it, but (assuming we keep a deterrent) I see no alternative. Land based missiles have limited range, so we would need to base them in ‘dodgy’ areas of the world. Planes cost a fortune to keep airborne and can be shot down.