Should the decision on Trident replacement be a subject of public and parliamentary debate? (Paired article with Commodore Tim Hare)

Published in the Oxford Research Group’s publication “The Future of Britain's Nuclear Weapons: Experts Reframe the Debate”
March 2006

The Government has made clear that a decision on whether to replace Trident will be made during this parliament.  The Secretary of State for Defence has promised a debate.  But when challenged to commit to a vote in the House of Commons, the Prime Minister studiously refused to answer the question.  It is pretty clear that Blair has already made his decision and John Reid, now Secretary of State for Defence, said when giving evidence to the Defence Select Committee in on 1 November 2005 that the UK will retain its nuclear capability for as long as any potential enemy anywhere in the world has them.  He argued that the fact that they were useless against international terrorism was no reason for Britain to get rid of its nuclear weapons when other countries were acquiring them.  Given that the Conservative Party will obviously support the retention of nuclear weapons, it is almost inevitable that a decision will be made to retain a nuclear capability.

There are various replacement options, which could be submarine, land or air based, but one of the most likely is to extend the service life of the existing submarines which could bring the UK’s procurement cycle in line with that of the US which produces and services the Trident missile system.  The US is currently planning to retire the last of these missiles from service in around 2040.  The reason why a decision has to be made soon is that although the UK Vanguard-Class submarines will not have to retire until 2024-2030, work on a replacement will have to begin in the next 3-4 years and development work would have to start by 2010-2015.  So if a decision is taken now to build new submarines in 2025-2030, it could not guarantee that its Trident missiles would be available after 2040.  Extending the life of the present submarines would enable to UK to buy into the future US replacement system.  The long term planning required for these decisions means that although there is an air of inevitability about the decision, the timescales are so long that there will be many opportunities to challenge and seek to reverse it. 

I believe that it is impossible to make an intelligent decision about the replacement of Trident without debate about Britain’s role in the world.  And given the disastrous mistakes that have been made in Iraq and the Middle East, it is imperative that we seek to learn the lessons of successive British Prime Ministers’ obsession with the “special relationship”.  There is a strong case to be made that the relationship with the US is a comfort blanket for a UK “which lost an empire but has not yet found a role”.  The UK role seems to be that of  being best friends with the world’s greatest power in order that we can pretend that this somehow makes the UK great.  But as we have seen over Iraq, the belief that this was the UK’s crucial international alliance led our Prime Minister to privately promise that the UK would accompany the US to war in Iraq and then engage in a trail of deceit to get us there.  And it was the deceit and secrecy that explains the failure to prepare properly for the post invasion period and thus for the continuing mayhem and suffering in Iraq.  Obviously the imperative now is to find ways forward in Iraq but we must also learn lessons.  The case of Iraq surely demonstrates that the obsession with the “special” relationship led the UK Prime Minister into a terrible error.  This involved a failure to act as an honest friend of the US and abject loyalty helped lead the US into a foreign policy error, more serious even than Vietnam.
 
There are powerful arguments against replacing Trident because it will encourage proliferation and is a waste of money but the most important argument is political.  The UK’s sense of itself as a nuclear power is a delusion.  Trident is supplied and serviced by the US.  It is currently untargeted and there is no prospect that the UK would ever use it without US approval.  It is therefore nothing more than a very expensive symbol – a military version of bling.  All it does is cement us to the US and an idea of ourselves as an important player because we are so close to the world’s greatest power.    It locks us into an image of ourselves that means we end up as little more than the US’s poodle and that both humiliates us, makes us a poor friend of the US and prevents us from playing a more useful role on the world stage.

We should therefore begin the discussion on the replacement of Trident by asking what our foreign policy is for and where our interests lie.  There is little doubt that the most serious threat to our future is climate change.  The “war on terror” is the immediate preoccupation but as the UK Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King has said on more than one occasion, climate change is a much bigger threat to our future than international terrorism.  This does not mean of course that we can ignore the threat of  terrorist attacks in our country and across the world but we need to make progress in bringing peace to the Middle East and combating global warming.  Instead current UK/UK policy is both inflaming the anger and bitterness that is spreading across the Arab and Moslem world and undermining international law and respect for the multilateral institutions that we need in order to create a world order capable of resolving both the conflict in the Middle East and the problems of poverty, population growth, environmental degradation and global warming that threaten the future of the whole of humanity.  This is an enormously important argument to which of course the replacement of Trident is irrelevant except insofar as it ties the UK to US policy and thus distracts us from putting forward the important lesson from Northern Ireland that a security response alone cannot defeat entrenched resistance built on a deep sense of oppression and injustice, but that a commitment to justice alongside an intelligent security and political response can bring such violence to an end.

The tragedy of the current situation in the Middle East is that there is a just peace available that would move the whole region forward.  It would entail the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel on pre ’67 borders, a negotiated end to the occupation of Iraq and the removal of all WMD from the region, including Israel’s nuclear weapons.  Unfortunately, there is no immediate prospect of the US supporting such a settlement as it is tied to Israel’s plans for its expansion of its borders.  This means that continuing bitterness and conflict are almost inevitable. This is a terrible threat to the future and the UK should be working with the rest of the EU for a peace in the Middle East based on the principles of international law.  Instead, the Prime Minister’s attachment to the special relationship has led to an unwillingness in the UK to take a different position on Middle East policy to that of the US administration and despite Prime Ministerial rhetoric about Two States and the Road Map whenever it comes to the crunch, the UK stands with the US on Middle East policy.
 
Perhaps even more serious in the long term is the fact that the climatologists of the world are now predicting with some certainty the prospects of a process of lingering death that could bring an end to our civilisation.  They say it will start with rising intensity and frequency of hurricanes, floods and droughts that we are experiencing now.  Famine and chaos will then increase in the poorest and most unprepared countries.  This will kill thousands and later millions of people as systems collapse and civil wars spread.  Some countries will see their coastlines erode and countries like Bangladesh will lose a large part of their territory to the sea.  Small island nations will disappear.  Other areas will become deserts.  There will be massive refugee movements.  Major wars are likely over oil and water.  The consequence will lead to destruction, disorder and the breakdown of society.  At the same time, sea life will be dying as the oceans are poisoned, taking away a major source of protein for billions of people, crops will fail and more people will starve.  And of course, by 2030-50, world population will have grown to 8-9 billion people.  And 90 per cent of the new people will be born in the poorest countries. 

The UK Government calculated in 2003 that if carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are to be stabilised at twice pre-industrial levels, industrialised countries will need to reduce their emissions by at least 60 per cent by the middle of the century.  And in the view of the President of the Royal Society …”even then, such a stabilisation level might be associated with a degree of climate change which will be judged to be too dangerous for the world to bear.”   To achieve these levels of reductions in Carbon Dioxide emissions will require massive change in our current model of economic and social organisation.

In preparation for the G8 leaders’ meeting at Gleneagles in July, the national science academies of the G8 nations plus China, India and Brazil called on the leaders to initiate a scientific study of stabilising levels of greenhouse gases at various concentrations in the atmosphere.  Such a study was intended to help all the countries that have signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change agree on the targets that are needed to secure the future of the planet. At Gleneagles, the US was not willing to agree to such a study or the UK to challenge and thus little progress was made.  Since then our Prime Minister has twice cast doubt on the value of targets to help reduce carbon dioxide emissions and said we should instead rely on new technologies.  There is no doubt that renewable technologies have an important part to play in reducing carbon dioxide emissions, but without targets we are unlikely to create the incentives necessary to drive progress.  And thus on global warming, despite the Prime Minister’s claim that the UK is taking a leadership position, it appears that the special relationship has led to us compromising our position on the most important issue for the future of our civilisation.  Of course, a replacement for Trident will contribute nothing to the prevention of global warming.  But UK determination to remain a nuclear power makes us dependent on US favour in a way that prevents us from playing a more useful role on the world stage.

Similar questions need to be asked about the purpose of the European Union Foreign and Security Policy and how the UK should square up its relationship with the US and the EU.  Some suggest that the EU must act as a counterweight to the US, and the UK must therefore choose between the special relationship and the EU.  The traditional answer to that is that the UK should seek to act as a bridge between the two, a role that clearly failed spectacularly in the case of Iraq.  In my view the EU aspiring to a great power/counterweight role is neither practical nor desirable.  But the EU could and should make the centrepiece of its Common Foreign and Security Policy the building of a new world order based on strong multilateral institutions capable of spreading security and greater equity within which we could co-operate to reduce the risks from climate change.  But the UK role as automatic ally of the US undermines the capacity of the EU to stand together for a different and more intelligent world order.

The reality is that it is current levels of poverty, population growth, environmental degradation combined with weak states experiencing growing conflict, disorder and suffering that is the greatest threat humanity faces.  Current development in China and India suggest that in thirty years time these two massive countries will be economically and politically much stronger players on the world stage.  The developments taking place in India and China demonstrate how the forces of globalisation can be harnessed to the sharing of technology and the reduction of poverty.   But they also show the limits to the economic growth, the planet can bear.  According to Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington DC, who is one of the leading US environmental analysts, if growth in China continues at 8 per cent a year, by 2031 China’s income per head for its 1.45 billion people will be equal to that of the US today.  He said

“China’s grain consumption will then be two thirds of the current grain consumption of the entire world.  If it consumes oil at the same rate as the US today, the Chinese will be consuming 99 billion barrels a day – and the whole world is currently producing 84 billion barrels a day, and will probably not produce much more. If it consumes paper at the same rate that we do, it will consume twice as much paper as the world is now producing.  There go the world’s forests.  If the Chinese then have three cars for every four people – as the US does today – they would have a fleet of 1.1 billion cars compared to the current world fleet of 800 million.  They would have to pave over an area equivalent to the area they have planted with rice today, just to drive and park them.” 

Mr Brown, who has been tracking and documenting the world’s major environmental trends for 30 years then said

“The point of these conclusions is simply to demonstrate that the western economic model is not going to work for China.  All they’re doing is what we’ve already done, so you can’t criticise them for that.  But what you can say is, it’s not going to work. And if it does not work for China, by 2031 it won’t work for India, which by then will have an even larger population, nor for the other three billion people in the developing countries.  And in some way it will not work for the industrialised countries either, because in the incredibly integrated world economy, we all depend on the same oil and the same grain. 
The bottom line of this analysis is that we’re going to have to develop a new economic model.  Instead of fossil-fuel based, automobile centred, throwaway economy, we will have to have a renewable-energy based, diversified transport system, and comprehensive reuse and recycle economies.  If we want civilisation to survive, we will have to do that.  Otherwise civilisation will collapse.”

Africa was the second priority of our Prime Minister for the Gleneagles summit.  The Make Poverty History campaign made many headlines, but in practice little was achieved.  There was an announcement of more debt relief for the countries who are already receiving debt relief paid for out of existing aid.  In addition, there were non-binding commitments to more aid for Africa.  But the reality is that Africa is still getting poorer.  Two million people remain displaced in Darfur, Niger has lived through its famine, Zimbabwe and Côte d’Ivoire are living with disaster and there is little international attention to supporting existing peace processes.  What is holding Africa back is conflict and disorder and lack of adequate international effort to drive forward peace processes in the large potentially rich countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and Angola.  The exploitative state structures and unnatural national boundaries imposed on Africa in the colonial era, followed by Cold War manipulation, have held back the development of the continent.  But now the threat is weak states and the consequent disorder which makes development impossible.  This means great suffering for the people of Africa, but also a massive unstable continent on Europe’s borders where criminality and violence can thrive. The same dangers exist in Afghanistan where the failure to plan for the development of the nation after a short military conflict  has left a desperately poor state dominated by warlords, with an economy based on narcotics which could destabilise the wider region.   The disorder in the Middle East has the potential to continue to spread and its possible consequences for the Horn of Africa and North Africa could impose further barriers to development in the poorest continent.

This short account of the threat to our future and the future of our civilisation demonstrates the irrelevance of the plans for a new weapon to replace Trident. It is clear that UK determination to have such a weapon ties us into a role of automatic ally of the US and thus prevents us playing a more useful role in the world.  It is also clear that this UK role undermines the ability of the EU to take forward an agenda that grapples with the major problems of the future.  But in addition to this, we are living at a time when there is a very real danger of a proliferation of nuclear weapons that will make the prospects of nuclear war very much more likely.  In recent years India, Pakistan and North Korea have announced their possession of nuclear weapons.  Israel refuses to publicly acknowledge that it is a nuclear state, but is in practice the fourth largest nuclear power.  It was little noticed that during the summer of 2002 there was a real prospect of war between  India and Pakistan that would have run a high risk of leading to a nuclear exchange.  This led the UK to withdraw large numbers of staff from the region, after taking expert advice on the extent of the likely fallout.  The lesson for Iran in comparing US policy towards Iraq and North Korea is quite obvious.  And the fact that the US is willing to co-operate with India on civil nuclear power shows a willingness to accept that the non proliferation treaty is breaking down.  A UK decision to invest in a new weapons system would further breach the principles of the non proliferation treaty and send out the message that if a nation wishes to be considered powerful and secure in an increasingly unstable world, it needs a nuclear weapon.  If the UK case for a new weapon system is justified then many other nations can claim an equal entitlement and the likely proliferation massively increases the risk of a nuclear exchange.

The case against the replacement of Trident goes beyond the narrow arguments about the morality and risk of nuclear weaponry.  Those arguments remain, but as the military experts always argue, the case for the UK continuing as a nuclear state, is political and not military.  My submission is that the political case against replacing Trident is overwhelming.  It could free us from the close reliance on the US which prevents us adopting a more useful role on the world stage.  This does not of course mean that we should move to a position of hostility to the US.  We have deep ties of history and language and at least half its population are unhappy with its current foreign policy.  But the UK as a non nuclear power, with the moral authority that we would gain by giving up our nuclear weapons, could become a leading player working to renew a commitment to non-proliferation and help to generate the ideas and build the alliances necessary to create the new global settlement necessary to save the future of human civilisation.

The right course would be to take Trident off patrol and store its warheads, to cancel plans for a new weapon and to work with others to strengthen existing disarmament treaties and negotiate new ones.  Alongside this, we should use our influence in the UN, World Bank and IMF, the G8, EU and the Commonwealth to start to build the new world order.  Our military will be kept busy helping to strengthen the UN’s capability to resolve and prevent conflict and help the African Union to build its capacity to help weak and fragile states to create security for themselves just as we did so proudly in Sierra Leone.  If the UK was not tied up currently in Iraq and Afghanistan we could make a major contribution to peace and development in countries like the Congo, Sudan, Nepal and in supporting the peace agreement that needs to be put in place in the Middle East.

All of this needs passionate and urgent debate.  A quietly managed process of legitimising a decision that has already been made, to continue as a nuclear power, will entrench the UK into a continuation of the errors that led us to Iraq and have so terribly dishonoured our country, further destabilised the Middle East and distracted us from attending to the most important threats we face.