Trident – last of the UK deterrent force?
In the next 10-15 years – the Trident D-5 SLBM deterrent force for both the US (Ohio-class) and the UK (Vanguard-class) will be approaching the end of their service lives.
In the UK, the government got approval from the House of Commons in March of 2007 to spend between 15 and 20 billion Pounds on a new class of submarines to continue to maintain a submarine launched deterrence.
Even though this program was approved, some former senior British military officers have recently come out and said the Trident replacement is ‘irrelevant’ and would prefer to see the money spent on conventional forces (which are more useful in today’s War on Terrorism).
But the final rebuttal in the article was very interesting;
Former Conservative defence secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind said he was a “strong believer in multilateral nuclear disarmament” and was presently involved in a campaign to try to get all the nuclear powers to reduce their dependency on such weaponry.
He said the officers’ call for “Britain to get rid of all its nuclear weapons regardless” was a “very serious mistake” and unworkable.
He said: “Ultimately we are talking about an insurance policy for the next 50 years.
“Russia and China remain nuclear powers. I don’t know who is going to run China 20 years from now, they could be friendly, they could be hostile”.
I am sure that this won’t be the end of the debate (and may even foreshadow a similiar debate here in the US in the coming months).
