Trident

[sobrique]

It would appear that the Trident program is up for renewal. Our nuclear submarines, and their ICBMs are getting old and out of date.
Renewal is costed at between 10 and 25 billion.

As you may have guessed, this has sparked some fierce debate, about 'nuclear deterrent'.

For my money, we may as well just scrap Trident. Simply because by the time we're prepared to actually fire, we'll have already lost whatever conflict we're looking at, and it'll be retribution.

I mean, just ask yourself for a moment: You're the one in charge of the arsenal. At what point are you prepared to fire them? When someone declares war? When they threaten you with nukes? When you have soldiers on your land? Or when they've fired already, and you want to kill all their civilians too?

The problem with ICBMs you see, is they're strategic. What they're really good at is cutting the heart out of a few square miles of city.
In general, I'm not against nuclear weapons. They're like, bombs that explode bigtime, and have a few secondary affects.

The thing I have a problem with though, is that there's really never a moral case for 'stop your army, or we'll blow up a lot of your civilians'. That's pretty much what the terrorists do.

And frankly, I don't think any of our politicians (and strategic nukes _is_ a political decision) would be prepared to do that either.

At least, I hope they wouldn't and if they are, then I'd rather like them to stop representing me in Parliment.

So, let's just scrap trident. If the defense is that important, let's buy a load of new toys for the Armed Forces. I'm sure 10 - 25 bn of ships/aircraft/guns will go a long way. Nukes are a fairly cost effective solution - they give a lot of bang for your money. But they're also the First world equivalent of sucide bombing. Ugly, nasty and utterly pointless.

The UK will still be a 'nuclear power' - I'm pretty certain there's quite a few 'special weapons' locked up in bunkers around the world. They're unlikely to get used too, but I can at least see that they _might_ be used as tactical weapons. 4 minute citykillers, are really not needed.

Comments

[the-g-man.livejournal.com]

Personally, I don't see anything wrong with a strategic nuclear deterrent. Unlike most armaments it doesn't have a lot of aggressive use. It can't used to project power, only to dissuade other nations from projecting power against you. But I'd want us to have it instead of a standing army - not in addition. After all, who is going to try invading a country whose only recourse is to strat-nuke the invader.

[sobrique.livejournal.com]

The lack of an army though, also limits interventions in foreign policy. E.g. peacekeeping, and UN actions.
Not that that's overly a problem, I suppose, but ... well I suppose if you project a 'if you mess with us, we have one solution and it's nuclear' would project the image of a country full of psychos.

[the-g-man.livejournal.com]

I suspect a country strategic nuclear weapons are far more likely to be used as part of an escalation. This is at least an honest and easily understood defence policy. Yes, it does limit the country in acting as a peacekeeper but there are other contributions that a country could make to the international stage - development, disaster relief and the like - which are far less ambiguously colonial.