Many years ago when I was a young naval recruit, I dreamed
of going to sea on a Trident submarine. I never achieved that ambition much to
my chagrin at the time, but I look back now and realize that it was a great
blessing in disguise. The Trident system is now aging and UK Government is
currently going through the decision-making process of whether or not, or if so
how, to replace it, see:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-23117303
Submarine-launched ballistic missiles, like the nuclear
weapons they deliver, are a virtual icon of the Cold War with the Soviet
Union which engulfed the world between the end of World War II and
the late 1980's. The purpose of the nuclear arms race was to create a
"deterrent" based on the fact that nuclear weapons are so destructive
that any use of them would be instantly fatal to any enemy; therefore any enemy
that possessed nuclear weapons themselves could not be attacked because their
retaliation would inevitably result in the same outcome for the attacker; it
was a suicide pact. It became known as "MAD- Mutually Assured
Destruction", that most infamous acronym. Over the course of the Cold War
both sides spent trillions of pounds building up their nuclear arsenals, often
at the cost of diverting funds away from healthcare, education and industry;
nothing exceeded maintaining the nuclear deterrent on the scale of priority. "Jobs
not Bombs" became the prime slogan of the anti-nuclear protesters. As
technology progressed and missiles became more accurate the possibility emerged
that a nuclear-armed enemy could in
fact be defeated without subjecting yourself to retaliation, if it were
possible to destroy all the enemy's weapons delivery systems before they had a
chance to fire back at you. Both sides tried to outdo each other in double,
triple and even quadruple redundancy by building more and more weapons, in the
hope that the other side would never be able to guarantee targeting all their weapons,
because there were too many of them, and the precious deterrent could be
preserved, but it was an impossible situation because you couldn't stop the other
side simply building more missiles; and so on and so on, ad infinitum. The only solution was to put weapons on the one
platform which is totally invisible and therefore cannot be targeted: a
submarine. The Soviets launched Project
AV 661, the first submarine armed with nuclear ballistic missiles, in 1956
and the Americans quickly built and launched their own in response, USS George Washington, in 1959; and a new
stage in the nuclear arms race had begun, beneath the sea. The Trident
submarines and missiles are the most recent development of that race being
first deployed in 1979. However a few years later Mikhail Gorbachev was
appointed Soviet premier and the Cold War was wound down; in 1991 the Soviet
Union was officially disestablished and it was all over.
For anybody who lived during the Cold War the idea that
nuclear weapons, least of all a full deterrent, would still be needed after the
end of it (a wistful concept in those days), would be preposterous. It would be
directly contrary to all government rhetoric at the time. Yet in the world
today little has changed in the formation of the nuclear arms systems of major
Cold War nations. We are now facing what would have previously been
unthinkable, a new completely post-Cold War generation of global nuclear
deterrent, the replacement of Trident. Post-Communist
Russia
has gone the same way; indeed it has already launched some of its new
Borei class submarines:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFlX6AHGmaQ.
China, and more
recently
India,
have joined the A-list of nuclear-armed nations. We are now back in a situation
that it feels like we never left, a world in which there are nukes everywhere
and everybody is too scared to get rid of them in case their neighbour doesn't.
This must mean that nuclear weapons were never a unique feature of the Cold War to begin with; the Cold War was just the excuse to develop and deploy them. The cost
is as crushing as it ever was; the
UK's
Ministry of Defence estimates the total cost of "Successor",
Trident's replacement, would be fifteen to twenty billion pounds; that's enough
money to rebuild the
John Radcliffe
Hospital ten times over! The
Government is considering cheaper options that reduce capability but are more
affordable, like three submarines instead of four. At the moment the Trident system
can maintain "CASD- Constant At Sea Deterrence" with a single boat
out at a time and the other three in port on maintenance and training. With just three boats, CASD might have to be dropped in favour of a deployment only
if the political situation heats up. They might build smaller boats with fewer
missile tubes, or even abandon the concept of ballistic missiles altogether,
and instead use existing SSN's- fleet attack submarines, armed with cruise
missiles. Another option is to do away with sea-based weapons altogether and
replace them with land or air based systems.
However there's another option I can think of that has not
yet been suggested by the Government:
don't
replace bloody Trident at all! Let the powers-that-be stand by their
original Cold War flannel and admit nuclear weapons were in existence purely to
protect the "Free World" from the "evil Commies" and once
that job was done we wouldn't need them. The Russians can help by aborting
their own Bulava missile and
Borei-class
submarine programmes; the same goes for the other nuclear-armed nations. The
attempt to justify the lunacy of replacing Trident is pathetic; David Cameron
names
North Korea
as the menace for which this very expensive white elephant in vital:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22031893.
There may be danger, exaggerated to make his point, but no
"uncertainty" from the "regimes" he talks about because
these regimes are being set up by the very corporations and states that then
tell us we need nukes with which to fight them; the solution to the danger is
not to set them up in the first place, duh! Apart from the cost, there is also
the hazard related to nuclear power and weapons construction, and the toxic
radioactive waste products from it; cancer hot-spots around weapons planets and
shipyards servicing nuclear submarines are a fact, see:
http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/news/sfexam04.htm.
At the moment
Scotland
is about to choose whether or not to remain in the
United
Kingdom, see:
http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/scottish-independence.html.
If the vote is for independence then the Royal Navy's Trident base at Faslane
will almost certainly have to close, adding to the already considerable costs
because a new one will have to be built in England or Wales; where, in
your back yard!? Even military experts
are warning the Government that replacing Trident is a very unwise idea. In a
word, we don't need it and it causes nothing but problems.
Nuclear weapons are essentially a form of psychological
warfare. They can never be used in combat because any use would result in
immediate defeat for
both sides... not
to mention risking the devastation of the entire planet. The power of nuclear
weapons lies entirely in the fear we have for them in our minds, as was
illustrated so well in Stanley Kubrick's satirical film
Dr Strangelove, see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yfXgu37iyI.
In fact the
New Zealand
researcher Bruce Cathie believes that in any nuclear exchange the vast majority
of the weapons could never detonate anyway, and at a higher level those who
wield them know that, see:
http://www.antigravitymovie.com/cathie.htm
(Bruce Cathie sadly died a few weeks ago, RIP). But so long as we
think they will work, that's all that
matters. Whatever the truth behind this theory there is no doubt that nuclear
weapons are in essence a symptom of the relationship between we, the people,
and those we allow to rule us. In this day and age their overriding strategy
has changed little and is really very simple: make us scared! Induced fear of
enemies, either non-existent or controlled, has led us to accept the most
unpopular and pathological policies or actions imaginable; there is no
depravity we will not stoop to if the Government know how to frighten us enough
to make us do it. I think if we, the people, reject nuclear weapons it will be
an encouraging sign that the grip of fear the Elite have enjoyed with us is
slipping.
