[Robin McAlpine Blog] Debunking the Trident ficition again

[ALBA-Bot]

Debunking the Trident ficition again

Just for the sake of completeness, let’s take one more spin round the ‘the UK doesn’t have an independent nuclear deterrent’ now that finally the ‘foreign policy insiders’ are admitting it. This leaves only the true dullards peddling the ‘strong, independent first strike capacity’ line.

Those dullards are Keir ‘look at how tough I am’ Starmer, Ian ‘please can I have a lordship’ Blackford and Stewart ‘hi MI5, which bit am I supposed to read out loud?’ McDonald. They still pretend to think there is a version of this timeline where the UK can successfully launch a nuclear missile on its own.

Let’s start with ‘successfully’. The last time the UK successfully test fired a Trident missile was in 2012. The UK military has attempted two test launches since then. One, in 2017, headed off in completely the wrong direction. The other, in 2024, didn’t get high enough to trouble a chimney sweep before plopping humiliatingly into the sea.

Britain can’t fire a Trident missile successfully. It can’t pull it off even when it knows the whole world is looking because they’ve announced they’re going to try. It is simply not credible to assume that you have an ‘independent nuclear deterrant’ if you can’t make it work for 13 years.

Who knows why this is happening. It could well be to do with the fact that our nuclear submarines are utter rust-buckets in desperate need of replacement a long, long time ago. They are so rickety that we now know that the whole ‘permanent at-sea deterrent’ thing isn’t true and we have had periods with no deployed nuclear capacity.

That is probably because there is so much wrong with the submarines that they’re all but death traps. But then again, this is the UK so procuring reliable, time-dependent defence infrastructure is not a strong point which means the replacement for these subs is way over budget, way over time and not going to happen any time soon.

And is it the subs that are causing the misfires, or is is the missiles? If it’s the missiles, we can’t do anything about that anyway, because we don’t own them. Back when the UK was trying to develop a nuclear weapon it tried and failed to design and build an intercontinental missile as a delivery system. So Harold MacMillan begged Dwight Eisenhower to lease Britain US missiles.

Eisenhower was very hesitant to do so and resisted for a while but such was the UK’s whining noise he eventually relented and we got the Polaris missile system on lease (and we handed over an entire loch to the Americans in exchange, somewhere to dump their bombs safely close to Glasgow….). When Polaris became redundant we shifted to Trident when that became what the US was leasing us.

If we needed to launch a strike then it isn’t clear we’d definitely actually have a submarine at sea to fire from because they’re all a pile of rapidly-deteriorating crap

It is useful to get the picture here to understand what any of this really means. Every few months the ‘UK’s’ nuclear missiles get their warheads taken out (we own the warheads, but on our own we need to put them in an old Ford Transit and hoof them over to Russia ourselves) so they can go back to the US for maintenance.

To get the full picture about what this really means, it was revealed quite a while ago that all these missiles just go to the same factory where they are just added to the US missiles getting maintenance. The likelihood is that we won’t even get the same missiles back we sent over. I’m guessing the US isn’t sending us the missiles that get the best test results…

So we’ve got a handful of whatever missiles the US has left over once it has taken the ones it wants, we are then supposed to fire them out of a few rust-bucket submarines which are more like to be in dry dock getting fixed than being anywhere at sea. Which is probably fine anyway because we can’t successfully fire them.

Now, all of that is public domain. What no-one will admit or discuss is how operationally independent any of this is in reality, assuming that we could actually fire a missile anyway. Or at least until recently no-one would discuss other than anti-nuclear campaigners.

The reality is that it is vanishingly unlikely that the US does not put ‘kill switches’ in all its Trident missiles, for its own purposes never mind anything else. They wouldn’t want a rogue Trident missile fired at the US and they must presumably have some methodology for aborting a misfire accidentally heading towards a wrong target.

So let’s assume that at the very least, any Trident missile could be brought down by a US administration if they wanted to. It is simply not credible that they can’t do this. So let us focus for a second on the main claim of the pro-British-nukes brigade – that Trident is operationally independent because the chain of command stops at the British Prime Minister.

Which is to say that in the official operating procedures as we know them, there is no veto along the way from the UK deciding to fire a missile to the missile being fired. In UK defence lore, that is 100 per cent the prerogative of the Prime Minister (which was once Liz Truss it is worth remembering…).

But is it in reality? Obviously all things nuclear bomb are highly classified but it is a long, long way from clear that the UK can fully target the system without relying on live, US surveillance infrastructure. The UK had access to the Galileo system but lost that when it left the EU, and even so that probably wouldn’t have been permitted for use as a nuclear targetting system

So the UK has started a project to try and create such system but it doesn’t have one solely in its control. Which is to say there is always someone who can obstruct the UK’s ability to target. It is highly likely that Trident will be based on US systems so even though the fire codes may be in our control, is the system for targetting?

Pulling this together, let’s go over how independent this system really is. First, it stops being independent in a few months if the US refuses to service the missiles or provide spare parts (both the nuclear subs and the warheads are owned by Britain but built to very exact UK specifications and relies on UK components).

So we better get on with firing it soon or we won’t have any missiles. If we did fire it the chances are the launch would fail as that has been our experience of all our test firings for over a decade. And if we needed to launch a strike then it isn’t clear we’d definitely actually have a submarine at sea to fire from because they’re all a pile of rapidly-deteriorating crap.

Let’s say we have a sub at sea and do fancy firing a missile, it is certainly not clear we can do that without the support of someone with a full satellite guidance system. But even if we overcame all of these hurdles and got a missile in the air, it is almost certain the US could bring it down if it wanted to, long before it hit a target.

I know all of this therefore so do all our potential opponents. I’m not sure they’ll be feeling all that deterred. And this was all permitted simply to maintain the fiction of the UK as a serious global player and to maintain our permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

We are spending an absolute fortune on a pointless luxury bomb that we can’t even use purely to give the impression we are important

Except we spend a fifth of our entire defence budget on this fiction and now, finally, insiders are speaking out and saying what people like me have been saying for a long time – the ‘independence’ of the UK’s nuclear arsenal is very, very much in doubt. (People like me don’t even pretend it could be independent because it’s not).

This was all fine when it was a fiction we held to on the basis that this £200 billion bluff would never be called since the UK and the US would never do anything different militarily, now or ever. But that bluff has been called and we are holding nothing.

Look, I get it, that never-knowingly-not-embarrassing Ian Blackford is absolutely desperate for a sinecure in the House of Lords. He’s a pompous fool who absolutely loves the Westminster way of life and would bite your hands off for a Lordship – after all, all the best extra-marital affairs are to be had in Westminster.

Stewart McDonald is a man who has made up for lack of intellect with unquestioning subservience to powerful people so will say anything for the remaining three or four minutes while we can still remember who he is. And Keir Starmer is just in need to approval from people more powerful than him because he’s a fundamentally weak man.

Why these three are keeping the pretence going is clear enough. Why any of the rest of us should go along with it is a long way from clear. We are spending an absolute fortune on a pointless luxury bomb that we can’t even use purely to give the impression we are important.

Meanwhile we’re all-but undefended as we have geared up our military mainly to keep the US company on its next violent folly. Trident plays no credible or serious part in the UK’s defence. Want to increase UK defence spending by 20 per cent? Scrap Trident.

Source: Debunking the Trident ficition again