Britain's Trident folly

Recently, the British government slapped down a French offer to reduce the costs of our submarine patrols by taking turns to prowl the same seas rather than duplicating the effort and occasionally crashing into each other.

This proposal, it said, would cause ‘outrage', on the grounds that it's an unacceptable erosion of sovereignty. Using a system leased from the United States, on the other hand, presents no such difficulty. When the government says our sovereignty is threatened, it means that another nation might disrupt the orders it receives from Washington.

So Britain must maintain the pretence that this is theirs alone, and sustain its extravagant doctrine of ‘continuous at-sea deterrence'. Deterrence against what? Nazis? Aliens? Killer jellyfish? The Trident missiles, due to be replaced and deployed at a cost of several tens of billions, have no visible strategic purpose. They are the reification of a fantasy: a fantasy that the United Kingdom is still a defining world power and that its enemies present an existential threat. As usual, the government is preparing for the last war, building a fantastical Maginot Line against the enemies of a previous century, the ghost armies that haunt the official imagination.

Let's begin with the sovereignty issue. When I once made the mistake of stepping into a Blockbuster video shop, I found myself walking past aisle after aisle of Hollywood movies. Then I came across a tiny section labelled ‘foreign', which contained about a dozen European films. Either Hollywood's hegemony was such that the US was no longer perceived as another country, or Blockbuster had adopted the US definition of foreign and imported it 4,000 miles into the UK. The same confusion governs this country's defence policy. The other side of the Channel is forrin. The other side of the Atlantic isn't.

As Dan Plesch shows in his report on British weapons systems, Britain has no independent deterrent. Since 1943, when the UK joined the Manhattan Project, its nuclear weapons programme relied on crumbs from the US table. The US has granted Britain a franchise on parts of its programme, which it has graciously allowed to rebrand with the Union flag.

Britain's Trident missiles are currently leased from the US. The warheads they carry are based on an American design (the W-76) and manufactured at the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Berkshire. Its factory is a copy of a nuclear plant at Los Alamos, and it is two-thirds owned by the American companies Lockheed Martin and Jacobs Engineering. The firing system is designed and built in the US; so is the missile guidance system. The missiles are aimed with the help of US satellites. The subs themselves are designed and built in the UK, but use American components and American reactor technology.

Tale of dependence

Britain's dependence doesn't end there. In 2003 the then UK defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, announced that he would restructure the armed forces to make them ‘inter-operable' with those of the US. The idea that the government, which has renounced sovereign control of its forces, could launch a nuclear attack without the blessing of or instructions from the US is ludicrous. Yet it will not contemplate even sharing patrols with France.

Both the government and the opposition assert their virility by rejecting offers of power-sharing from Europe, while accepting offers of subordination from the US. So to the second issue, the question succinctly put by Field Marshal Lord Carver: "Trident what the bloody hell is it for?" The defence green paper contends that the system's purpose is to "deter and prevent nuclear blackmail and acts of aggression against our national interests that cannot be countered by other means".

It's true that other states (eight to be precise) possess nuclear weapons, though none is currently willing or able to use them against Britain. This could change. Every nuclear state uses the same argument as the UK's: it might be blackmailed by someone else with nuclear weapons.

The only certain means of preventing nuclear blackmail is multilateral disarmament. The only route to multilateral disarmament is for the nuclear powers to show that they are serious about junking their weapons. The non-proliferation treaty commits the nuclear powers "to pursue negotiations in good faith on nuclear disarmament".

In return, other nations promise not to acquire nuclear weapons. By failing to honour their side of the bargain in the name of defending themselves from proliferation elsewhere, the nuclear nations invite other countries to proliferate.

The opinions of parliament, where MPs launched one of their biggest revolts when asked to approve a new Trident programme, and the public, which has turned sharply against rearmament, count for nothing. Only when the US orders it to do so will the British government decide that sovereign interests are best served by abandoning the nuclear programme. Until then, as social services are cut, this fairytale budget won't be touched. The government must please its imaginary friends and fight its imaginary enemies.