Yesterday, Rishi Sunak – who, some reports suggest, is currently the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom – visited Barrow-in-Furness to herald the “next generation” of Britain’s nuclear industry. The Cumbrian town is where our four new Trident-carrying Dreadnought-class submarines are being built and plays host to the Royal Navy’s current Astute-class submarines.
Alongside the publication of the Defence Nuclear Enterprise Command Paper explaining the update on our nuclear deterrent, Sunak pledged an immediate £20 million and a further £20 million over the next decade towards the Barrow Transformation Fund, designed, in the Government’s words, to make Barrow “an even more attractive place to live, work, and build a nuclear career”.
Number 10 claims that more than £763 million will be invested in jobs and education in Barrow by 2030 to create more than 8,000 new jobs. Coincidentally, Barrow and Furness was won by the Conservatives in 2019. Simon Fell sits on a majority of 5,789. Also coincidentally, Michael Gove described the town as “the new powerhouse for the North” just last summer.
But there was more to the announcement than a simple scraping of the pork barrel. Sunak claims that “the future of our nuclear deterrent and nuclear energy industry” is “a critical national endeavour”. In an increasingly volatile world, “the UK’s continuous at-sea nuclear deterrent” is more vital than ever. Nuclear also delivers much-in-demand “cheaper, cleaner home-grown energy”.
More British nuclear power has few greater supporters than myself, even if I am sceptical that the ambitions of successive governments for more reactors will ever be realised. But I doubt whether yesterday’s announcement was anything more than throwing good money after bad. Pin a CND badge on my chest and call me a Corbynista: I don’t believe in Britain’s nuclear deterrent.
Admitting this feels socially unacceptable amongst right-wingers. That shouldn’t be the case. Trident-scepticism is the sensible position. For one thing, the system doesn’t appear to work. Last month saw the second successive failed test of a British Trident submarine-launched missile. How can it terrify Vladimir Putin if we can’t even get it up? What a fitting symbol of our national impotence.
The securocracy claims there is no cause for alarm. American tests have been successful. Since we share a common pool of missiles, this should mean that the Trident system is “still generally in working order”. Even so, the case against our nuclear deterrent doesn’t live or die based on whether it actually works – although, one would suggest, that should play at least a small role in considerations.
Trident is both pointless and expensive. If it is a deterrent, it would have failed in its only task if it was ever actually used. Launching a missile would only come as revenge for a nuclear attack on Britain from Moscow. Millions would be dead; civilisation as we know it would be extinct. Not to go all Sting about it, but Trident only exists to take a few of those Ruskie bastards with us to the grave.
The cost of our mutually assured destruction is an estimated 6 per cent of our annual defence budget. The Dreadnoughts being built at Barrow will cost at least £31 billion. As Eliot Wilson has pointed out, that is a costly commitment at a time when defence spending is under strain. The House of Commons Public Accounts found a deficit of £16.9 billion in the Defence Equipment Plan only this month.
Not only is the largest ever gap between, in Wilson’s words, “what the armed forces are expected to do, and the funding they have to do it”, but comes just as ministers are demanding more defence spending. Grant Shapps claims we are in a “pre-war world” and wants a “bigger budget”, whilst Anne-Marie Trevelyan and Tom Tugendhat want a “much greater pace” of investment.
So do our readers. Last month’s survey found that three-quarters of Conservative members backed defence spending over tax cuts in the Budget. A Savanta poll suggests that this sentiment is shared by the Tory voters (both of them). Even if Jeremy Hunt didn’t cough up in the Budget, the consensus is that spending should rise to at least 2.5 per cent of GDP as quickly as possible.
Leaving aside the small issue that there is no money – sorry WASPIs! – if Tory MPs continue to avoid spending cuts, tax rises, or planning reform, the case for more spending is clear. The war in Ukraine, China’s looming attack on Taiwan, the impenetrable turbulence in the Middle East: sorrows come not as single spies but in battalions. Fail to prepare, prepare to fail, and all that jazz.
Yet doubling down on our nuclear deterrent is exactly the wrong way to go about protecting ourselves. An increase in defence spending would be channeled through the dumpster fire that is the Ministry of Defence and wasted on more procurement scandals and diversity initiatives. But because backing Trident also means accepting Britain’s ongoing humiliation: our vassalage to the United States.
Having an independent deterrent is based on the tacit assumption that, in the unlikely event Putin threatened to invade Britain, Washington wouldn’t deploy their nukes in our defence. With successive Presidents tilting towards the Indo-Pacific ahead of the coming endgame with Beijing, our strategic autonomy is more important than ever. But Trident’s ‘independence’ is a sham.
Since we abandoned Blue Streak for Skybolt’s hollow charms, we have been dependent on Washington for the maintenance, design, and testing of our nuclear deterrent. Huge amounts of the underlying technology are American. If a President so wished, they could immediately cut off the technical support needed to keep Trident at sea. We can only look on in envy at a Force de dissuasion that we were too tight to copy.
Number 10 clings to the idea that Britain has ‘operational independence’. But Trident is the atomic equivalent of a very expensive hire car, leant to us by Washington to soothe our national ego. It is central to our post-Suez crouch as America’s loyal but useless sherpa. Rather than be the Greece to their Rome, we are a geriatric Scrappy Doo in dire need of being put down.
As Henry Hill and Aris Roussinos have elucidated, our fealty to America has meant successive governments have tried to preserve global commitments on the cheap. We are committed to defending Europe from a Russian invasion but would run out of artillery in eight days. We spent £8 billion on aircraft carriers whose contribution to a war with China would be to be sunk within minutes.
What has been gained by our loyalty to Washington? Passionate Atlanticism brought us humiliation in Afghanistan and Iraq. Joe Biden ignored us during his retreat from Kabul; his preference for our freeloading cousins across the Irish Sea is painfully obvious. Trident is an expensive attempt to impress a girl who just isn’t that into us. Why do we continue to indulge Churchill’s hollow fantasies?
Our diplomatic class, still reading the Seven Pillars of Wisdom under the covers, once feared us becoming a “greater Sweden”. To prevent that, they surrendered our independence to Washington and Brussels. But they sold their country down their river for nothing. Hemmed in by a stagnant economy and a dysfunctional state, Britain is destined to be one giant Bicester Village for our new CCP overlords.
Doubling down on Trident is as unwise as hollowing out our equipment stockpiles to delay Ukraine’s partition by a year or two. An Anglo-Gaullist government zealously committed to decolonisation would cancel the programme immediately and plough the money into our real strategic priority: patrolling the North Sea and defending Europe’s Atlantic flank. It is too late to develop a truly independent deterrent or take up Guy Mollet’s offer of a Franco-British union.
This is an obvious fantasy. It would rely upon our politicians, diplomats, and securocrats admitting how reduced Britain is as a world power. It’s much easier to waste billions of taxpayers’ money clinging to Washington’s tailcoat than face the hideous reality of a coming war for which we are hideously unprepared and powerless to stop. Our ‘deterrent’ did not stop Putin from invading Ukraine and will not stop China from taking Taiwan. It is an irrelevance.
Still, at least a Third World War might finally give Trident a chance to prove its worth. Come, friendly bombs – and prove to the MoD that a nuclear war can be value for money.