BLAIR'S PLANS FOR A EURO-BOMB
Britain's independent nuclear deterrent is neither independent
nor a deterrent, says Andrew Gilligan, so now the PM wants to share it with France PERHAPS one of our government's most touching qualities is its wish to find every- one, even the most hopeless in our society, a useful role to perform. From the royal family to the 'socially excluded', from New Deal teenagers to Mr Michael Heseltine, those unfortunate elements left behind by the march of modernisation and progress have been gathered into Tony Blair's big tent and put to work for Britain. So it came as no surprise to learn, as I did just before Christmas, that New Labour has similar designs on Trident.
Very little in our national armoury can be more of an anachronism, at least mili- tarily, than Britain's 'independent nuclear deterrent'. As British forces find them- selves involved — four times in the last decade — in Third World and peace- enforcement operations, Trident is among the remnants of the Cold War. It has become an asset almost impossible to use because it is simply too big a weapon for any of the enemies currently in stock. Even if a new superpower threat did arise, it is inconceivable to imagine our using it on our own initiative. Our ene- mies know all this. We know they know. Trident is therefore neither independent nor a credible deterrent.
In the government's recent defence review nothing was excluded from consid- eration, except Trident. As tanks came home from defending Germany and new, rapidly deployable reaction forces were cre- ated, Trident remained more or less as it always had been: the still centre of a turning world. The very word 'deterrent' shows it to be a relic from the days when the main job of the military was to sit (or sail) around and look threatening to the Russians. Now that the job of the military is once again to fight, Trident contributes to the drain on funds from front-line troops. We continue to spend between £300 and £900 million a year on maintaining the £15 billion nuclear deter- rent, while the Paras advance into Kosovo with inadequate guns and broken radios.
Now New Labour has thought of some- thing to do with this blunderbuss. Accord- ing to senior naval sources, the government is preparing plans to share some of it with France. Trident, combined with Paris's own nuclear 'force de frappe' will, it is hoped, add a plutonium-charged frisson to the exciting new plans for bilateral and pan-European defence co-operation recently unveiled by President Chirac and Prime Minister Blair. Mr Blair may be in a muddle over the euro; indeed, there is deep impatience among our EU partners at his failure to campaign for the end of the pound, which is why he hopes to allay their wrath with a romantic, symbolic gesture: a step towards the Euro-bomb.
For France, it is the culmination of years of trying to interest Britain in a bilateral nuclear relationship. In 1992 the then French prime minister, Pierre Beregovoy, called for co-ordination of nuclear-arms policies as a step towards creating a Euro- pean deterrent, and a joint commission on nuclear policy and doctrine was established. Movement was slow, however, until the arrival of Mr Blair's government. Now there is likely to be much greater co-operation, with the two countries sharing above all research and development facilities. British submarines would be based regularly in French ports (and vice versa), and perhaps even embark on shared patrols, with only one nation's vessels at sea at a time. Patrolling is already co-ordinated to some degree, and the number of exchanges of personnel between the two nuclear pro- grammes has been greatly increased.
Not everyone in the Royal Navy is happy about these developments. 'It is potentially very damaging to our key strategic relation- ship with the USA,' said one of my infor- mants. 'We have as much to lose as to gain.' That, indeed, is the main objection to the government's increasing enthusiasm for Euro-defence. Britain proclaims, apparent- ly sincerely, that any Euro-capability should always be subordinate to Nato, mean- ing that there should be no threat to America's role. But the French have rather different ideas. Beregovoy's original call for nuclear co-operation was explicitly based on an appeal to resist the over-mighty USA, and only last autumn President Chirac publicly proclaimed that the object of the European defence identity was to `contain' the United States. As to what the Americans themselves think of it all, it would be fair to say that they are still making up their minds. The US deputy secretary of state, Strobe Talbott, tells people that Washington supports the Euro-initia- tive in principle, but is watching close- ly to see whether it becomes a threat to Nato. He doesn't mention the bomb, but it is hard to imagine any sort of nuclear co-operation going forward without at least grudging Ameri- can acquiescence.
What the Euro-bomb saga demonstrates, perhaps, is that Trident's purpose is essen- tially political, not military. It is a signal of the kind of nation we wish to be seen as, and it is the largest and most expensive ele- ment in Britain's associate membership sub- scription to the big boys' club. Our rulers appear to believe that no capability to rain nuclear death on Minsk equals no perma- nent membership of the Security Council. This may, or may not, be true. Of course, underwriting one's political power is a main purpose of all defence spending, and quite rightly so. But most weapons have at least some military utility; Trident has none. Even if Iraq or Libya were to launch a bio- logical-warfare attack on Britain it would be disproportionate and counterproductive to respond with a nuclear strike. There was a brief flurry of excitement during one of the Saddam crises when the Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, seemed to hint that such a response was possible. But he had been misinterpreted. Military plans for a biologi- cal attack in fact specify a number of 'semi- Domesday' options at the topmost end of conventional warfare, such as bombing dams to flood cities or bombing chemical- weapons plants to release the deadly poi- sons on to their own manufacturers.
It is just possible to conceive of a return to the days of nuclear superpower rivalry with a more aggressive Russia and an expansionist China, though there is present- ly no evidence for either. Even then, howev- er, it is unimaginable that Britain would ever find herself required to fire nuclear weapons on her own. We can't perform the meanest offensive operation unaided, let alone fire a nuclear weapon.
Two years ago, a group of people signed what became known as the Canberra Decla- ration, possibly the most interesting thing ever to emerge from the Aussie Milton Keynes. This declared, in essence, that in the new world order the theory of nuclear deterrence was dead; dead, because no power now believes that another power is prepared to go for the nuclear option. The interest lay not so much in the text as in the names beneath it. They included Robert McNamara, the former US secretary of defence, and General Lee Butler, who until the year before had been the commander of all the USA's nuclear weapons. Even among the denizens of the nuclear bunkers, there is a fascinating scepticism about the purpose of their work; and in the wider military, hollowed-out by years of cuts, there is open questioning. Last year General Butler visited Britain in this new role as an anti-nuclear lobbyist. He was received by no less a figure than the chief of the defence staff, General Sir Charles Guthrie.
The politicians may be right that the British people want their country to be a member of the big boys' club, even at the cost of paying for Trident. As a symbol of sturdy national self-reliance, however, Britain's bomb is hopeless. HMS Vanguard, the very submarine which first took the sys- tem to sea, was two thirds built in the Unit- ed States. The three following were copies from the US design and even then the Americans supplied the missiles. Trident's warhead is British but relies heavily on US expertise, and goes back to the USA for some testing and maintenance. Well over 50 per cent of Britain's spending on the Trident programme has been spent in the United States.
Perhaps most importantly, the communi- cation systems which control the missiles' fir- ing and flight are run by the Americans. Britain could, in principle, deploy Trident without them, but it could not fire at very short notice and would not be able to hit anything much in particular. We might hit the suburbs of Moscow, for instance; we could not guarantee to hit the Kremlin. And the greater part of the system's major servic- ing and testing is done in King's Bay, Geor- gia. William Peden, of Greenpeace, `If USA-UK relations broke down, the nuclear deterrent would collapse in about six years because we wouldn't be able to refur- bish the missiles.' There are limits to our national self-abasement. In the 1970s, the United States made a determined bid fought off only at prime ministerial level to choose and vet the Royal Navy's subma- rine crews.
As a symbol of the UK's determination to work for world peace, Trident is not ideal. The Indians and Pakistanis — ironi- cally rather more independent atomic pow- ers than ourselves — are fond of using it to justify their own nuclear proliferation: ('Why can't we have the bomb if Britain and France do?') Apart from providing club membership of the Security Council, there is one other argument for Trident: it helps keep the Americans happy. Not only is it good busi- ness for US companies, its existence keeps Washington, engaged in Europe and diffuses resentment at having to shoulder the entire burden of the strategic nuclear force. There may be something in this. But given the choice between Trident and greater Euro- pean spending on conventional defence, the USA would probably prefer the latter. Labour's refusal to consider Trident in its defence review was understandable, given the party's past troubles on the nuclear issue. But as the world of the 1980s recedes, it looks increasingly like political cowardice. Some reductions were made last year in Trident's readiness state, and the missiles now carry about 20 per cent fewer warheads. But the changes simply under- line the fact that further and deeper change is now possible. If Labour wins the next election, some sort of action will prob- ably be forced on it, since ministers will have to decide whether they wish to start building Trident's successor.
You don't have to be a unilateralist to be sceptical about Trident. You may recognise that nuclear weapons can never be uninvented. You can continue to sup- port the American atomic umbrella, a spoke of which is stationed in Suffolk. But for a nation such as Britain, possession of a Rolls-Royce nuclear deterrent is per- haps just a little flash — like someone buying one of those two-seater, country- estate-type lawnmowers for his suburban back garden. As with the mower, the only thing you can really use it for is to drive around a bit and hope to impress the neighbours; or even offer, as a gesture of friendship at a difficult moment, to turn it into a joint mower, to be used on alternate Sundays.
Andrew Gilligan is defence and diplomatic correspondent of the BBC's Today programme.
Previous page
