Who will this new Trident defend us against then? Surely it is an insurance policy for an uncertain future? What do you mean? Why not just cut down the destructive power we now have to a lower level? Have any countries actually got rid of their nuclear weapons? How many countries now have nuclear weapons?
At least eight, and possibly nine. They have around 15, nuclear warheads between them. What does the rest of the world think about us having nuclear weapons? Is that the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? Yes and it agreed three things: That every signatory is entitled to have civilian nuclear energy. That those without the bomb at the time would not try to get it. That those five countries then with the bomb would negotiate the elimination of all nuclear weapons.
Are the countries with nuclear weapons in violation of the NPT? Has the International Court of Justice had anything to say about all this? Security threats like terrorism, cyber-attacks and the climate emergency are not, and can never be, addressed by Trident.
The gaps that need to be addressed are in areas such as maritime patrol, in ships and aircraft to patrol our waters, as well as conventional defence personnel and equipment.
Of all the countries in the world, just nine possessed nuclear weapons at the start of The legally binding UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has come into effect in early , aiming to ban nuclear weapons with a goal of their total elimination.
Independence will give us the power to remove nuclear weapons from Scotland, and being free to make different decisions from Westminster can save billions of pounds — money that can deliver direct benefits for the people of Scotland.
We want to see a world free from nuclear weapons, and an independent Scotland will be a principled advocate for nuclear disarmament on the global stage. The only way to remove them from Scotland is with independence. This is the cost of building and then arming, running and repairing four nuclear submarines over 40 years of operational life, followed by their upkeep as decommissioned hulks until the navy decides how to dispose of them.
A safe way of scrapping a nuclear submarine has still to be found; the 19 that the Royal Navy has so far withdrawn from service — the oldest of them in the s — are all still laid up in navy dockyards at Rosyth and Devonport. But in October, the Tory MP Crispin Blunt, a Trident sceptic, used information contained in a parliamentary reply from a junior defence minister, Philip Dunne, to estimate a far higher figure.
It may turn out to be lower. The new submarines may not last so long in service as the 32 years assumed by Blunt, and the principle of continuous-at-sea-deterrence could be modified — continuous only at times of international tension, for example — or even abolished by a future government.
On the other hand, the cost could be higher. Over the next 15 years, a second referendum on the independence question in which Scotland votes to leave the United Kingdom is at least a strong possibility. But unless the Trident renewal programme is something that the government secretly wants to cancel and would be happy to see sunk by Scottish independence, plans must exist to move the base out of Scotland.
The visitor imagines a small dockyard disfiguring a bare Scottish coast. A wood separates the road from the loch, but here and there a rough path leads down to a rocky beach glistening with damp seaweed. Scramble down one of these paths and you look across a mile of calm water to the kind of industrial scene that has vanished from most of Britain.
Among the wharves, cranes, ships and sheds, a tall chimney marks the power plant that can generate enough electricity for a town of 25, people. Nearby, a ship lift capable of holding a 16,tonne submarine rises to the height of an storey building. A cluster of accommodation blocks looks as trim and permanent as a fair-sized municipal housing estate.
Faslane has a hospital, shops, naval mess rooms and civilian canteens. By day, the scene on the Gareloch is full of movement. Police launches and small grey warships come and go from the jetties, and sometimes, assisted by tugs, the heavy, dark shape of a submarine moves into mid-channel and slides towards the Firth of Clyde. By night, from the straight hill road that was built to take the lorries loaded with nuclear warheads on the last leg of their journey from Berkshire to Coulport, the base spreads out below like a brightly lit seaside resort with a pier and a promenade.
Security is dramatically visible: double razor-wire fences, sentry posts, watch towers. Sometimes, driving slowly to take in the view, you form the impression that the car behind is also taking an interest — when you stop, it stops — too artfully, you think, but then you were raised on the paranoid fictions of the cold war. Faslane belongs to that time, and more particularly to one of its most influential theories: that the immensely destructive power of nuclear weapons had changed the purpose of military strategy from winning conflicts to deterring them.
An adversary would be dissuaded from attacking because the lives and property lost in a counter-attack would be too heavy a price to bear. No matter the difference in military strength between the powers — for example, between the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom — the same calculation would still apply. The Soviets could easily wipe out the UK completely and capture what remained of its resources, while UK retaliation might amount only to the ruination of Moscow.
But for the Soviet Union, that might be dissuasive enough. How was that capacity to be kept intact? Defensive missile shields offered only limited protection to pre-emptive attacks on the static and hardly secret locations of land-based nuclear weapons: airfields for the aircraft that would drop free-fall bombs and the silos that sheltered intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Submarine-based weapons, on the other hand, had the twin advantages of mobility and near-invisibility. A nuclear submarine could travel as fast as any large surface ship and at lower speeds much more quietly, and therefore less detectably, than its diesel-driven predecessor.
The increasing range of missiles meant that by the early s they could be fired well out to sea and hit a target a thousand miles inland. Their submarine launch platform had a whole ocean to hide in.
They too are outdated … Today the submarine fleet has come to the forefront as the chief naval weapon, and the chief aerial weapon is the missile, which can hit targets at great distances, and in future the distance will be unlimited. By , this had become equally clear to the Royal Navy. The first of them, HMS Dreadnought, put to sea in , but only after considerable technical assistance from the US navy and the American engineering company Westinghouse.
It marked the beginning of a dependence on American technology that has grown with every generation of British missile submarines since. I saw Faslane for the first time in the early summer of , from a steam train puffing slowly into the western Highlands. At the time I recognised her only as a member of the King George V class: ten inch guns in three turrets, two funnels, 27 knots at full speed.
I knew this because I lived next door to a royal dockyard, Rosyth, and ships had become an enthusiasm. There was, of course, something else — some ineffable boyhood veneration of the ship itself and with it the kind of patriotism — unexamined, omnipresent — that came from watching films about the war at sea.
I argued with an American boy at my primary school. Who had the bigger navy? I contested, insupportably by then, that it was ours. This was the case with the Blue Streak medium-range ballistic missile, which the government intended as the successor to an RAF bomber fleet that improved Soviet air defences were making obsolete. Britain then turned to an air-launched ballistic missile, the Skybolt, which America was close to putting into production, but in that too was cancelled after a series of test failures.
This was a grave blow to British plans — an agreement reached between President Eisenhower and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had made the deal for the Skybolt look a certainty. If Britain was to persist with an effective nuclear deterrent, it needed to persuade the US to let it have the only available alternative: the powerful submarine-launched missile, Polaris. Britain had some leverage here: in the US navy had established a forward base for its Polaris fleet at the Holy Loch, which lies only seven or eight miles across the Clyde from the Gareloch.
During the negotiations over the site, the British side raised the idea that one day Britain might obtain Polaris missiles for itself. The Americans resisted the idea; they distrusted British behaviour after the Suez invasion five years earlier and, more broadly, believed that the fewer countries that possessed their formidable new weapon the better. Enmities developed. There were rumours that Washington wanted to push the UK out of the nuclear business.
With these dozen words, Britain could claim that its new deterrent would be free from foreign veto over its use. The warheads and the submarines would be made in Britain. Polaris was certainly an American missile, made by Lockheed now Lockheed Martin in California, but it would be just as obedient to British command as the British-built bombers it replaced.
We are often traitors to our earlier selves. In , I was the kind of boy who loved warships; in , I was another kind of boy who opposed them. The US navy established its Polaris base in the Holy Loch that year it stayed until in the face of fierce opposition from the anti-nuclear movement, which was reaching its first peak.
Ongoing atmospheric testing, the effects of radiation on Japanese fishermen, the better-dead-than-red rhetoric of politicians, the obvious futility of civil defence: all contributed to the general foreboding and, among a minority, the need to protest. Civil disobedience and non-violent resistance, then novel techniques to Britain, gave the demonstrations unprecedented publicity. Under Johnson, it seems that where Trump leads, we must follow.
Alan Shaffer, Pentagon deputy under-secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, also made reference to the new UK programme in a briefing session at the annual nuclear deterrence summit, in Alexandria, Virginia.
It is understood that the US had agreed with the UK not to make any announcement while parliament was in recess. Hans Kristensen, director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists, said the development of the new warhead posed significant geopolitical problems.
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