Trident replacement decision, July 18. Stephen Kelly / Press Association. All rights reserved.On July 18, parliament will vote on renewing the UK’s
Trident nuclear weapons system. The British public are tired of
simplified, polarising campaign messages, and are fast losing faith in their
elected representatives, setting the stage for a renewal of Trident by default.
The country’s state of internal crisis cannot
be an excuse for us to sleepwalk into this decision. This vote is too important
and too existential to ignore due to ‘campaign fatigue’. There needs to be a deeply
searching debate.
The lifetime cost of replacing Trident,
running into several tens of billions, is of course hugely relevant, as is the
nation’s defence, but no less relevant is the thinking behind what it means for
a nation to continue to invest in weapons of mass destruction with the capacity
to kill millions.
Illogical
deterrence?
Deterrence, the logical framework frequently
used to justify Trident, is based on a fundamental assumption that with your
finger on the button you will act rationally. This logic is flawed. If those in
control are rational, then the only decision they could make is to not use
nuclear weapons. If they are not rational, they will not accept the logic.
Denis Healey,
Secretary of State for Defence (1964- 1970) and ‘alternate decision-taker’ (should
the Prime Minister be incapacitated) revealed in 2008 that he would not have given the order
to press the button. He knew that there was then no point in
killing 20 million Russians. He also
knew that even if he acted pre-emptively, a huge swathe of the British public could
be dead within half an hour. He judged
that there was simply no point in a first strike, and no point in retaliating.
But what if Healey’s theoretical calculation
was wrong? Could there be a credible threat of a nuclear strike against the UK?
And could Trident even give a credible counter-threat if the basic logic were to hold?
Not according to Field Marshall Lord Bramall, a former
head of the armed forces who states that “Nuclear weapons have shown themselves to be completely useless as a
deterrent to the threats and scale of violence we currently face or are likely
to face, particularly international terrorism”, or Michael Portillo, former
Defence Secretary under John Major, who
described David Cameron’s argument that
threats from North Korea have made it essential for Britain to renew its
Trident as “absurd”.
And what about the irrational leader with
their finger on the button? Whether they realized that the chances of
retaliation by a sane rationalist would be limited. or didn’t care— there would
be little deterrence effect.
Delusory
Independence?
The government claims that the UK’s Trident
programme is independent. It is neither
politically or operationally independent.
From the signing of the US-UK Mutual Defence
Agreement (MDA) to its 2024 extension, Britain’s nuclear weapons have always been inextricably dependent on the US:
- The
UK leases its Trident
II D5 missiles from the US; - The UK pays the US for submarines
maintenance, and missile replacement in the US; - The UK’s warhead is based on a US-developed
warhead; - To aim a nuclear missile, the UK relies upon
the US controlled Global Positioning System;
The UK cannot develop, maintain, or even
launch a nuclear weapon without the support of the US. In fact, it is
unthinkable that the UK could even unilaterally decide to carry out a nuclear strike.
Paradoxical proliferation?
The 2015 Review Conference of the Parities
to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), heard
the UK claim that it
is “at the centre of international efforts to stop the spread of nuclear
weapons, to create a nuclear weapon free world”, but simultaneously it will “retain
a credible and effective minimum nuclear deterrent for as long as the global
security situation makes that necessary”.
The Hiroshima bomb that killed or
wounded approximately 150,000 people had a yield of 15 kilotons. The UK’s
current warheads have a yield of 100 kilotons. Each submarine can carry up to
40 warheads. This raises the question: How is a ‘credible minimum’ defined?
Further, the transfer of knowledge, and
leasing of hardware as agreed in the MDA contradicts the NPT. Article I of the NPT reads
“each nuclear-weapon State Party
to the Treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear
weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons or
explosive devices directly, or indirectly”.
The UK then,
cannot take any moral high ground in calling other NPT states to comply with
the NPT when it is holding it in contempt itself?
Democratic
regression?
Perhaps the least questioned aspects of
our somnambulant response to replacing the ‘continuous at sea deterrent’ is what this
means for democracy.
The decision to launch a nuclear weapon
lies at the command of the Prime Minister. By putting such awesome power in the
hands of one person, we have, as Harvard professor Elaine Scarry puts it “bypassed the distributional structures that
characterise democratic governance”, and we are, in effect, living in a state
of “chronic emergency rule”.
Despite recent precedents of
parliamentary consultation before sending troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, the
power to commit the UK intervention overseas rests in the hands or the Prime
Minister, not the peoples’ representatives in parliament.
By replacing Trident we are, by default,
accepting this hegemonic formulation of our constitution—we are ceding control of
our existence. With other nuclear powers also concentrating this extreme power
to a handful of people, and with the global reach of nuclear arsenals, we are
living under a global umbrella of emergency rule and catastrophic destruction.
With these costs, flawed logics,
hypocrisies and assaults on democracy isn’t it worth debating the renewal of
Trident, instead of sleepwalking into more of the same?