Trident a History

But the system, known as continuous-at-sea-deterrence or CASD, is essentially the same: four submarines work a rota which has one submarine on a three-month-long patrol, another undergoing refit or repair, a third on exercises, and a fourth preparing to relieve the first. The navy’s code name is Operation Relentless.

This is an epic vigil, born in the cold war and not abandoned by its passing, and the government intends that it continues into a third generation of ballistic missile submarines – the provisionally-named Successor class – that will work to the same pattern as the Vanguards and carry a new version of the Trident D5, now under development. In the end, a military strategy devised to deter attack by the Soviet Union will have outlived its original enemy by at least half a century.

Since the advent of the industrial revolution, few weapons systems have survived so long. The modern battleship, devised under the empty blue skies of Edwardian Britain, demonstrated its vulnerability to air attack even before Pearl Harbor; its useful career lasted hardly 40 years. Britain’s submarine-launched nuclear weapon, on the other hand, seems immune to obsolescence – as well as to financial, social and political hazards such as reductions in public spending, deindustrialisation, and the growing possibility of the break-up of the kingdom it was designed to protect. …

The Scottish Question is a familiar one. But Trident sits at the heart of a more complicated puzzle – what we might call the British Question – and embodies many of the crises and anxieties that have afflicted the United Kingdom since the second world war: the passing of empire, the “special relationship” with the United States, the decline of manufacturing and the disappearance of an industrial working class (and its consequences for the Labour party) – and, of course, the spectre of Scottish independence and the end of a United Kingdom. Trident and its ancestors have been among the causes and consequences of all of them. Where and how (if at all) its successors are deployed will be a measure of the kind of country, or countries, that Britain becomes. …

Delivery of the new fleet, already delayed from the early 2020s to 2028, is now scheduled to begin in the early 2030s, postponing the withdrawal of Vanguard submarines at least 10 years beyond their expected operational life. …

Until last autumn, the generally accepted figure for the price of the entire Successor programme – and the one used by its critics, such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – was £100bn. This is the cost of building and then arming, running and repairing four nuclear submarines over 40 years of operational life, followed by their upkeep as decommissioned hulks until the navy decides how to dispose of them. (A safe way of scrapping a nuclear submarine has still to be found; the 19 that the Royal Navy has so far withdrawn from service – the oldest of them in the 1980s – are all still laid up in navy dockyards at Rosyth and Devonport.)

But in October, the Tory MP Crispin Blunt, a Trident sceptic, used information contained in a parliamentary reply from a junior defence minister, Philip Dunne, to estimate a far higher figure. Dunne had said that the in-service cost of the Successor programme would be about 6% of the annual defence budget over the project’s lifetime. Nobody, of course, can know what the UK’s defence budget will be in 20 years’ time; Blunt’s calculations presumed that it would not fall below 2% of GDP, which is the present government’s promise, and that GDP would grow at the rate expected by the government and the International Monetary Fund. On that basis, and on the assumption that in-service costs would run from 2028 to 2060, Blunt concluded that Successor would cost £167bn – a price, he said, that would consume double its predecessor’s proportion of the defence budget and was now “too high to be rational or sensible”. …

On 3 September 1986, Margaret Thatcher laid the keel of the first Trident submarine, HMS Vanguard, at Vickers’ shipyard in Barrow. Earlier that year, the most eloquent case for its cancellation had been made by the first episode of Yes, Prime Minister, the BBC comedy series written by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn in which a fictional prime minister, Jim Hacker, is in perpetual battle with his most senior civil servant, Sir Humphrey Appleby. “I’ve decided to cancel Trident,” Hacker tells an astonished Sir Humphrey. He intends to divert some of the savings into conventional forces and reintroduce conscription, and “at one stroke” solve Britain’s balance of payments, educational and unemployment problems.

Sir Humphrey [scandalised] : With Trident we could obliterate the whole of eastern Europe.

Hacker: I don’t want to obliterate the whole of eastern Europe.

Sir Humphrey: But it’s a deterrent.

Hacker: It’s a bluff. I probably wouldn’t use it.

Sir Humphrey: Yes, but they don’t know that you probably wouldn’t.

Hacker: They probably do.

Sir Humphrey: Yes, they probably know that you probably wouldn’t. But they can’t certainly know.

Hacker: They probably certainly know that I probably wouldn’t.

Sir Humphrey: Yes, but even though they probably certainly know that you probably wouldn’t, they don’t certainly know that, although you probably wouldn’t, there is no probability that you certainly would.

Hacker: What? …

We drank our coffee. Dalton said that submarine crews were just as sceptical about the independent nuclear deterrent as he was; many of them believed its purpose was political rather than military. “I knew for 15 years that Trident was about keeping Britain as a permanent member of the UN security council and most of the men I served with knew it too,” he said. “We had an acute sense of, ‘If we mess this up, the UK will lose its place at the big boys’ table.’” The UK was “still concerned with projecting global power”, he added, whereas an independent Scotland would be concerned with “projecting global justice and peace”. …

There were strategic questions, too. Addressing the Royal United Services Institute in December 2013, General Sir Nicholas Houghton argued that defence spending should be refocused on the threats posed by terrorism, cyber warfare and climate change. His reference to the danger of stretching “insufficient resources” to buy “exquisite equipment” did not mention Trident, but the renewal programme stood out as the most obvious target of his criticism. …

A growing number of military analysts think that technical developments are moving quickly in that direction. One of them is Paul Ingram, the director of the British American Security Information Council, a non-proliferation thinktank. According to Ingram, the “underwater battle space” will be transformed with the massive deployment of cheap sensors that will operate the sound equivalent of a net across relevant parts of the ocean. Additionally, shoals of underwater drones could be positioned or dropped at the entrance to the Firth of Clyde (or perhaps by that time, off Cornwall), ready to peel away and follow any submarine setting out on patrol; sensors that are acutely sensitive to unnatural water movement, many miles distant, could pinpoint a revolving propeller. How the Successor submarines would be able to avoid detection in this new environment was far from clear, Ingram said.