Red: Sam Cockle-Hearne
We live in an uncertain world. Brutal civil wars and ever-changing foreign relations undoubtedly put the issue of national security on the front line of political discourse. Factoring in increased Russian expansionism from an unpredictable Putin regime, it’s understandable large parts of British society support the Trident nuclear programme. However, all that being said, so long as we live in a world of nuclear superpowers far superior to us, Trident makes little difference to our power relations.
After all, the UK’s nuclear capabilities hold no real influence in a bilateral nuclear world. The Arms Control Association estimate Russia have 4,500 warheads stockpiled and 1,735 warheads deployed on Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, compared to the USA’s estimated 4,571 stockpiled warheads and 1,481 deployed warheads. In stark contrast, the UK is estimated to have 120 deployed warheads and 95 stockpiled or retired warheads. As far as the balance of power goes, our contributions are evidently insignificant. Indeed, the most frequently deployed argument defending the Trident nuclear programme is to ensure a happy stalemate to prevent mutually assured destruction; mutually assured destruction is the belief that a single missile launch would prompt a chain reaction causing irrevocable damage to all states involved. So long as two states with nuclear capabilities sufficient to totally annihilate the other exist, this doctrine is upheld. That is to say, we require only the USA and Russia to maintain a peaceful balance averting the threat of mutually assured destruction. Not us.
The frequent counterargument presented is that we ought to maintain stockpiled and deployed warheads should a nuclear threat be levelled directly against the UK. The burden of proof then is on Trident supporters to prove that Russia and the US would not react with proportion to any show of nuclear force, triggering a bilateral conflict and resulting in mutually assured destruction. This is, for obvious reasons, unlikely.
So why does this matter? We can safely decommission Trident, but why should we? The answer fundamentally lies in the cost of Trident. Pinpointing the precise price tag is almost impossible, with rough approximations ranging from official estimates of £31 billion to the CND’s claim that it’s a whole £205 billion. On top of an unequivocally hefty sum, there will be a further cost of £250 million to maintain existing warheads and between £1.2 and £1.4 billion to run existing Trident submarines until 2028. In the meantime, the NHS ran a deficit of over a billion pounds this past year – and it’s not the only public service which is struggling.
So why are we spending such obscene amounts of money on the renewal of a system that really holds no impact on a bilateral nuclear world? We must come to accept that Trident is a gross waste of money, and go on to make a demonstrable positive impact on the lives of British citizens by channelling this funding into our strained services. Trident has had its age – and it’s time to retire it.
Blue: Matt Burwood
Nobody likes nuclear weapons, just as nobody likes war. As a technology designed to end countless lives and bring suffering upon countless more, it is straightforwardly uncontroversial to condemn them and wish that they had never existed. Alas, developments in relativistic physics rendered the development of the first nuclear warheads inevitable, this leading straightforwardly to multilateral armament. While I fully sympathise with those who wish it were not so – that these weapons could be unwritten from history – the world becomes no less dangerous through our wishful thinking.
The most important concept in this debate is that of the aptly named MAD, or mutually assured destruction. “You nuke me, I nuke you” is essentially the deal, made possible using Trident submarines with second-strike capability. If rational agents behave in such a way as to promote their continued existence, then the threat of retaliation renders a first nuclear attack irrational. There’s simply nothing to be gained from such an apocalyptic decision. When Mhairi Black claims secondary strikes are pointless “because we’d all be dead anyway”, she misses the point that we wouldn’t all be dead in the first place precisely because we have the ability to retaliate.
All this talk of rational agents is very well, I hear you say, but what if some raving despotic lunatic comes to power? What if we let enthusiasm trump rationality? Armageddon at the hands of a reality star with a bad hairdo seems a pithy end to thousands of years of human endeavour. Well, the argument works both ways. While a nuclear capable North Korea with increasingly strident rhetoric is concerning, what would be more concerning is a world in which North Korea were the only nuclear capable state. The unilateral disarmament folk need to consider which state actors they would be content to see retain their weapons while the rest of the world honourably set theirs aside. North Korea? India? Israel? Or maybe Russia, who have recently scrapped their non-proliferation treaty with the United States, and stationed weapons in Kaliningrad for good measure?
Putting existential threats momentarily to one side, the anti-Trident campaigners are often quick to criticise the cost of the system. Renewing Trident is undoubtedly set to be a big cost, and the running costs amount to around 5% of the annual defence budget. But the costs are only meaningful when one considers the counterfactual. It is impossible to say where the money would otherwise be spent, but there is a plausible argument that without nuclear weapons in the latter half of the 20th Century there would have been far less to deter Russian aggression, and far less to discourage conventional attacks on European nations. How much might this have cost? It seems plausible that providing an equivalent deterrent in terms of conventional weaponry would either be impossible or cost far more than 5% of the defence budget.
So think of Trident as the ultimate insurance policy. Just because you never claim on your insurance doesn’t mean it was a waste of money, and you have to consider the costs you may otherwise incur in the worst case scenario. At best, scrapping our deterrent could cost some hopelessly large fraction of national GDP. At worst, the country could cease to exist.
