[pyro-manic]

This is going to be a big issue in the next few years, as the government decides on whether to replace the Trident missile-equipped Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarines, and what to replace them with.

The Vanguards are the only intercontinental delivery system for Britain's nuclear deterrent, so if they are not replaced Britain will no longer be a nuclear power. The vessels aren't due to be decommissioned for another 20 years or so, but developing/procuring a replacement will be very costly and time-consuming.

What do you think should be done? Should the UK be the first country to take a step towards removing the scourge of nuclear weapons, or is it vital for world security that the second-strike capability is retained?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4109564.stm

The article doesn't cover the whole story, just Portillo's viewpoint, but I think his reasoning is deeply flawed. He says "we would be a more useful ally for America" without them, as we could spend more on extra attack submarines and capital ships. But then we become even more attached to and dependent on the Americans, which is not something I feel we should be doing either militarily (as it reduces the Forces' stand-alone usefulness even further) or politically (even closer ties to America isolate us from the rest of Europe, and make us more of a target for anti-US groups).

I don't like nuclear weapons, but I do think that they are keeping the world fairly safe. I'd love to see Britain get rid of them, but other countries would have to do so as well, and that isn't going to happen (certainly not in the case of the US, Russia, China, Israel or India/Pakistan, and I doubt the French would give them up either, given their love for all things nuclear)...

Your thoughts, please....

[Rictor]

My thinking is: the benefits of Britain taking a step forward toward deprolifiration outweigh the possible risks. If Britain took the important step, it would set an impressive precedent, and if done right, give a boost to the nuclear disarmament movement. So you ask, what about the necessity of a nuclear detterant. Well, for one thing, the UK is not under threat, even remotely, from anyone that I know of, and is not likely to be so for a long time. Everyone in Europe is more or less buddy buddy, and the chances of another WW2 scenario erupting are very remote. Even then, there are two other countries, France and America, who's interests are close enough the UK's that they can fulfill the requirements of "don't you dare look at me like that, I've got The Bomb". Sure, not too many people prefer to leave their defense, even potentially, in the hands of others, but in any real world scenario I think Britain could be considered as good as armed (with nukes).

In any case, if it were to happen, Britain would be perhaps the only country on Earth that could talk about nuclear disarmament from moral high ground.

[vyper]

In principle I would agree with you Rictor, however in practise the possible risks of being the first major nuclear power to engage in deproliferation are top great. I'm afraid I back the stance of upgrading our current deterrent to become more effective and less reliant on the US.

[Nuke]

nuke em all and let god sort em out...

only i dont believe in god, oh well, it wont matter after the global thermonuclear bbq

[aldo_14]

The question that occurs to me is.... who's going to nuke us anyways?    Who are we actually deterring?

Because.... all the fundamentalist loonie nations purported to have ICBMs have other targets, France & Israel don't strike me as being hostile to us, China, Russia and the US will be more interested in each other than, and the former Soviet states AFAIK are more interested in saving money through getting rid of any nukes that they have, than in actually spending to make them useable.

So I'm not sure where the threat is.  Sure, MAD was a balancing factor in the Cold War, but that was only really about the US vs Russia anyways; the combined arsenals of europe didn't account for all that much in comparison to those 2.  I can't really feel a tangible benefit of having a nuclear arsenal, and I'm not sure the money required to upgrade would be worth it.

(after all, saying having nukes has stopped an attack upon us risks falling into the same territory as saying I have a rock that scares off tigers).

[Fineus]

The thing that strikes me first is, who really cares enough that Britain is a nuclear power in the world anyway? Myself? I don't think the British government has the balls to use a nuclear weapon whether they have them or not. We (as a nation) simply don't seem to hold the stature and importance in world power that we once did.

In addition to this, it's a fair bet that if Britain were in need of a nuclear arsenal... we'd go straight to America to get it. Our current relationship with the US implies that any attack against us would be met with absolute force on their part.

Britain could take the first step in nuclear disarming. This could go two ways. Firstly, other nations all over the world would be moved by this show of moral strength and feel compelled to reduce or remove their own nuclear arms. Or.. nobody would care. Feeling that Britain is not really worth worrying about - the main contenders in the power game at the moment being the US, China and Russia... as well as the middle east and their collective weapons (biological, chemical etc.).

Personally, if it were my decision to make. I'd have Britain publically disarm the majority of its nuclear capability whilst secretly replacing at least 50% of our intercontinental nuclear delivery systems. Our current tendency to play the US's lapdog and really make no progress of our own (either internally or internationally) is really getting Britain nowhere.

Of course, it's not my decision to make

Edit: Aldo beat me to some of my points

[Nico]

Originally posted by aldo_14
The question that occurs to me is.... who's going to nuke us anyways?    Who are we actually deterring?

The aliens man, the aliens.

I shouldn't speak since I'm not British, but I wouldn't particularly like my gvt to get rid of them. Not unless it's the last one to do so, at least. ANd, dunno, that kind of things, it's always when you don't have them anymore than an occasion arises when you think "damn, these could have come in handy"

****ing aliens.

[aldo_14]

Bah, the aliens always invade the US first, anyways.  Have you learned nothing from TV?

(incidentally, the only time a nuke comes in handy - for any sane country -  is when you're already ****ed, and you want to **** the other guy back before you die.  In a metaphorical sense, of course.)

[Nico]

No, you wait for the aliens to invade the US, and you nuke the US. It's that simple, but since the States are so big, we need many nukes, so keep yours.

[Rictor]

You could always auction them off. I'm sure there are some rich oil sheiks willing to pay top dollar for a little, shall we say, insurance.

Originally posted by Kalfireth
The thing that strikes me first is, who really cares enough that Britain is a nuclear power in the world anyway? Myself? I don't think the British government has the balls to use a nuclear weapon whether they have them or not. We (as a nation) simply don't seem to hold the stature and importance in world power that we once did.

In addition to this, it's a fair bet that if Britain were in need of a nuclear arsenal... we'd go straight to America to get it. Our current relationship with the US implies that any attack against us would be met with absolute force on their part.

Britain could take the first step in nuclear disarming. This could go two ways. Firstly, other nations all over the world would be moved by this show of moral strength and feel compelled to reduce or remove their own nuclear arms. Or.. nobody would care. Feeling that Britain is not really worth worrying about - the main contenders in the power game at the moment being the US, China and Russia... as well as the middle east and their collective weapons (biological, chemical etc.).

Personally, if it were my decision to make. I'd have Britain publically disarm the majority of its nuclear capability whilst secretly replacing at least 50% of our intercontinental nuclear delivery systems. Our current tendency to play the US's lapdog and really make no progress of our own (either internally or internationally) is really getting Britain nowhere.

Of course, it's not my decision to make

Edit: Aldo beat me to some of my points

Well, in any case, it's unreasonable to expect other nations to disarm just at the drop of a hat. But I think the important thing is to show that it *can* be done, and set a precedent. From there, it could possibly be decades before anything happens, but it's absurd that something which is supported by the vast majority of the world's population, namely nuclear disarmament, can be such a non issue as to not seriously be considered by any government. If it happens, it will only happen because the the people of Russia, or India or the US wish it so, and are passionate enought to fight the government over it.

[Kosh]

Nukes are bad (except for blowing stuff up in outer space, that is different). No nation should have the power to wipe out another nation in just a few minutes with disasterous consequences for everyone else (nuclear winter, radiation, etc).

[Flipside]

The fact is that anyone who thinks they are responsible enough to know when to launch a nuke, isn't.

I'm a bit worried about focus swinging back round onto Nuclear weapons these days, they've been pretty dormant as an agenda item since the collapse of Soviet Russia, and had faded into the background, but with the threat of dirty bombs etc, some western countries have suddenly started kicking off their their nuke programs again. If you think about this, it doesn't deter anything, in fact, it means there will be more materials for dirty bombs knocking around.

[NGTM-1R]

Not really...the threat of dirty bombs is a direct result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the attendant collaspe of Soviet security forces' tight controls on nuclear material. Russia is pretty much the only place in the world where you can get nuclear material if you want to.

[Flipside]

America 'lost' 4 Nuclear submarines and a Cruiser in their last Navy Audit. They existed on paper, but no-one could find out where they were.

It's just Russia that you hear about more, but a lot of countries have lost a lot of nuclear stuff in the last 20 years, and building more missiles only provides the opportunity to lose more.

[NGTM-1R]

Originally posted by Flipside
America 'lost' 4 Nuclear submarines and a Cruiser in their last Navy Audit. They existed on paper, but no-one could find out where they were.

Do you have actual documentation of this, or is it hearsay? Because it strikes me as EXTREMELY unlikely in the first place, and even more extremely unlikely that I would not have seen an article on it in Proceedings, which is the U.S. Naval Institute magazine I've been getting for the past ten years...

[Nico]

Yeah! They just started an escalation game! Flipside, pop up something bigger. Tell us daddy is an admiral

[Flipside]

It was the first run of, I think, the 1992 Audit, the Audit was at fault in that case, it was paper error, the ships never existed, but it shows how easily things like that can happen

There are currently 92 missing Nuclear weapons floating around just in our oceans, heads from nuclear torpedoes, the remains of ICBM's from damaged or abandoned Subs etc. That includes debris from at least 2 American subs and 1 UK Sub. The same goes for on land, it is the nature of Beaurocracy that stuff gets lost in paperwork. It is the nature of Corporacy to not tell anyone you screwed up, the mixture of these 2 are dangerous.

Russia is the main source for 'lost' nuclear weapons, I'll freely admit that, but Nuclear equipment goes missing all the time, from Nuclear waste from powerplants to warheads on missiles. It's often put down to paper error, but that doesn't mean it is neccesarily always the truth

Oh, and Nico, Daddy isn't an Admiral, however, my Sister-in-law's father was before he retired Grandad was a Sgt Major if that helps?

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Flipside
The fact is that anyone who thinks they are responsible enough to know when to launch a nuke, isn't.

I'm a bit worried about focus swinging back round onto Nuclear weapons these days, they've been pretty dormant as an agenda item since the collapse of Soviet Russia, and had faded into the background, but with the threat of dirty bombs etc, some western countries have suddenly started kicking off their their nuke programs again. If you think about this, it doesn't deter anything, in fact, it means there will be more materials for dirty bombs knocking around.

Of course, didn't both US and Iraqi (pre 90s, IIRC) studies decide a dirty bomb was pretty much useless as a weapon?  (I think due to the problems of dispersing enough radiation, over a large distance, to actually kill someone or cause anything more than a very slight increase in the chance of cancer).

[NGTM-1R]

Having done a brief looking around into that statement, I must conclude that the audit bit is not, in fact, true. I can find no evidence to support it.

Every time there has been a lost nuclear weapon, there has been an intensive effort to recover it if at all possible; those that haven't been recovered are beyond the current ability of our undersea technology to do so. Witness the loss of a bomb due to midair collision between a pair of B-52s off the coast of Spain in the '70s. Over a month and billions of dollars were expended employing just about every Western-made deep submersible to find and recover the thing, which was done successfully.

Suggesting one could recover reactor material from the Thresher or the Scorpion, for example, without anyone knowing it is beyond mere lunacy: there are only a very few submersibles in the world capable of diving that deep. They are expensive to hire and very high-profile; also most of them belong to government agencies at least partly. It's also worth noting that no one has ever lost an SSB or SSBN.

Similarly, even on land, people take this stuff very seriously for the very reason that it can be used as weapon. There was a massive stink about a package of radiological iodine that went missing from a hospital a few years ago, and it wasn't even enough to be really lethal without extremely prolonged exposure. Nuclear disposal is well-documented and at minmum closely watched by government agencies, if not actually done by them. Even in Russia, the problem is not that material is "lost": it's all accounted for at the moment. The problem is that it's sitting in unguarded warehouses and you could just walk in and swipe it if you wanted to.

[Flipside]

Indeed, a dirty bomb is far more effective as a phsychological weapon (used by both sides), I'm glad someone pointed that out, and, in fact they are far far more likely to use nuclear waste than a full warhead

But the proliferation of new nuclear weapons being bought about is the symbol of a worrying trend, it's not as if they are effective in the slightest in the kind of war we are facing these days and are somewhat expensive for the taxpayer

Ngtm1r - As I said the Audit was considered failed and re-started, I can't remember the exact date There was also a lot of MTB's missing till it turned out they were being used as training vessels and the paperwork hadn't been updated. As I said in my last post, if stuff is lost on paper or mis-filed, it can be a long time before it's found, it's more that kind of thing I'm worried about, not the stuff that makes the headlines, but the stuff that doesn't get noticed, I guess I've grown somewhat sceptical in my old age for what defines 'every effort'. For example, did anyone find anything about what happened to all that ammo that went missing in Iraq?