On Monday, MPs will be asked to give the green light to the construction of four new Trident nuclear missile submarines. The government has earmarked £41bn for the boats, significantly more than it first estimated. They could cost much more. Almost £4bn has already been spent on submarine design work. The cost to public funds of the whole Trident project over a 30-year lifespan is estimated to be more than £200bn.
The government says it does not recognise the figure but refuses to volunteer an alternative. “The government needs a safe space away from the public gaze to allow it to consider policy options for delivering the deterrent in the most cost-effective way, unfettered from public comment about the affordability of particular policy options,” the Ministry of Defence said in response to a freedom of information request in March.
Jon Thompson, the MoD’s then top official, told the Commons public accounts committee last year that Trident was the programme that most kept him awake at night. “It’s the single biggest future financial risk we face. The project is a monster,” he said.
Meanwhile, work is under way in secret at Britain’s nuclear bomb factory to upgrade the existing Trident arsenal and to develop an entirely new warhead, according to a report from the Nuclear Information Service, which the MoD has not denied. The Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) at Aldermaston and Burghfield in Berkshire is working on a programme to upgrade the current UK Trident warhead to produce the “Mk 4A”, which will be more accurate and have greater destructive power, the report says. The costs and timetable of the programme have not been revealed to parliament.
Trident is described as a deterrent. The nuclear missiles will only be fired, and deterrence have failed, if the UK has already been obliterated. The question is not whether Trident – whose missiles are leased from the US and whose warheads rely on US technology – could be used, but whether they would be. And are they actually needed?
Ministers and pro-Trident Labour MPs say a new Trident system is needed because the world is a dangerous place, and will remain so. Trident is the ultimate insurance, they argue. It is an argument devoted uniquely to nuclear weapons. The government is not building new hospitals or care homes, for example, in case of a pandemic or any other crisis affecting the health and wellbeing of its citizens.
Ministers say Putin’s Russia, and China, and North Korea, are posing a growing threat. The suggestion is that only Britain’s nuclear arsenal will deter these countries from launching a massive military attack on the UK. What conceivable interest would these countries have in doing so? If they were mad enough to do so, would Trident be a credible deterrent preventing them? Would there be any point in a retaliatory attack in the event of the Trident deterrent having failed?
Much more of a threat from these countries are massive cyber attacks. But the greatest threat to Britain’s security, and the government says it will be for a generation, is terrorism, in particular radical jihadi groups. Trident long-range inter-continental missiles with nuclear warheads are hardly a deterrent against them. The real danger is that they will get their hands on some of the nuclear material kept in less-than-safe stockpiles scattered around the world.
For trade unions, it is a question of jobs. At their conference earlier this week, members of Unite said they would not oppose replacing Trident “until there is a government in office ready … to give cast-iron guarantees” that all jobs would be preserved. Yet even if Trident were cancelled, work on decommissioning radioactive facilities would last into the 2040s, and perhaps beyond, and the AWE’s expertise in future disarmament measures would still be needed.
It is curious that while the UK has the expertise to build nuclear submarines, it has to rely on others to build civil nuclear reactors needed for its citizens’ energy supplies. Moreover, the money devoted to Trident (and to two ill-conceived large aircraft carriers, whose cost is now more than £6bn, almost double the original estimate) is skewing the defence budget. Plans to build eight (cut from 13) Type 26 frigates on Clydeside are likely to be delayed because of budget pressures, creating uncertainty about job losses.
Monday’s vote appears to be a foregone conclusion. Ministers, backed by the Whitehall establishment, will argue that with Trident Britain will count as much in the world as it ever did, despite Brexit. It is also a matter of British pride; Trident is worth the expense to remain a member of the nuclear club.
In David Greig’s play The Letter of Last Resort, a (female) prime minister, on her first day in office, discusses with a senior Whitehall official instructions she will give a Trident submarine commander in the event of a catastrophic attack on Britain. “To write ‘retaliate’ is monstrous and irrational. To write ‘don’t retaliate’ renders the whole nuclear project valueless,” she says. “Yes, madam,” says the official.
