The Nuclear Deterrent

For my first proper post, I thought I'd briefly explain my own stance on Trident and counter some of the more vocal arguments against it.

I'll start with the obvious: Why do we need nukes? Nukes are bad. Why don't we get rid of them all?

Well yes, obviously nuclear weapons are nasty, dangerous things and the world would be better off without them. However, despite mankind being clever enough to develop devices of such awe- and fear-inspiring power, it still hasn't worked out how to physically change the past. Nuclear weapons have been made, and there are people all around the world who have the knowledge required to make more. There's absolutely nothing you can do about that, no matter how many trees you hug or monkeys you break out of labs. Add to this the element of standard human nature, and you can always guarantee that someone, somewhere, would quite happily mess around with one at the expense of someone else given half a chance.

Non-proliferation is all well and good, but there will always be someone who ignores it - usually the people you'd trust the least - who would suddenly become the only people on the planet with the biggest of big sticks. Those who have them won't use them for fear of getting one back, and those who want them won't get them for fear of getting smacked. It works, so why try and fiddle with the situation? As far as I'm concerned, giving up the nukes would be a stupid idea that would truly destablise the world. I have no issue with the likes of Russia and China keeping their's, either, because it serves to keep our own politicians honest (for a given value of honest, at least...).

On this basis, you then need a credible method of delivering said devices else your threat has no teeth. This is where the funding argument comes in, as submarine-based systems are bloody expensive. Unfortunately, the UK doesn't have much other choice, as we're not really the biggest of places. We can't dump the missiles in some cheap silos up in Scotland, because (of the shit ever hit the fan) the Russkis and the Chinese have almost certainly got enough power to level the entire place before we get one off. A land-based deterrent is predictable and easy to counter - and the counter is not particularly attractive if you live within 500 miles of the silo, like most of us would.

Similarly, sticking them in a plane and flying them onto target is out of the question as planes are easy to shoot down. You might not have to destroy the entire British Isles to keep yourself safe, but you're still pretty confident that you'll get away without a scratch. i.e., you're not deterred.

Keeping the warheads on subs is the only way to keep them hidden long enough to get a shot off. It's the only way to get them close enough to the target to be effective. It's the only way to put enough doubt into a potential enemy's mind to keep him honest.

So why do we go for really expensive subs? Well ok, I'll give you that. We do seem to over-engineer this part quite a lot. However, consider the alternative - would you trust your country's last line of defence to the cheapest option? The consequences of it failing are pretty damn stark, and what price do you put on avoiding a Fallout: New London scenario? You can't even save on the cost of the missiles, because the alternatives (i.e. cruise missiles) are illegal according to the same sorts of treaty that the anti-nuke campaigners begged for in the first place.

Basically, the world is stuck with nukes. We can't uninvent them, we can only hope that no-one hits the big red button. The only way to ensure any chance of that is to have everyone sat in a state of perpetual fear for themselves, where the repercussions are too dire to consider.

The final argument is that the only real threat now is from non-state entities, i.e. terrorist organisations, who don't actually care and can't be nuked in return. This is, to me, completely moot. Just because we're all worried about Oba... sorry, Osama right now does not mean that another conventional war won't kick off in three, ten, or fifty years. I mentioned at the start that we can't undo history... we can't predict the future either. I'd also like to point out that all terrorists have to live somewhere, and I reckon if someone was daft enough to try a nuke as a terrorist plot, the deserts around Waziristan would soon be turned to glass - and if OBL was that keen on being a martyr he'd have come out of hiding years ago. Fear of retaliation doesn't just work on us and the Russians.