Originally posted by @CB-Saint
Thats why we need to spend the money - if the russian know all the secrets about our existing detterent, then we need to buy another ultra secret deterrent that they dont know about.
Except renewal will mean getting large components from the US, including the missiles themselves. That worked out for us real well the last time. Not much more than an extension of their power, and there is no fucking way they’d ever work if push came to shove between us and the US.
We shouldn’t buy anything. If an independent deterrent is what we’re after, we need to develop it here without foreign assistance. That’s what independence means. What we’ve had is 50 years of running around after the US on foreign policy, occasionally having the odd Prime Minister that didn’t want to get involved.
A thought, if we refuse to confirm how many nukes we’ve got it tends to suggest that the number is so small that our enemies are more likely to die laughing that be vaporised. If we had a massive amount then I am pretty sure that we would brag about it saying don’t fuck with us, we have 10,000 warheads pointing at your ass
We can refuse to confirm all we like. Our allies, the US, can sell our secrets to the enemy at any time. And that is precisely what they did - quantifying the numbers on our program.
The issue is so cut and dry that Diane Abbott can write an entire article on it, and sound entirely reasonable throughout.
The truth is that the complainers say more about political attitudes during the New Labour era than about defence policy. On the specific issue of Trident, three senior military officers, Field Marshal Lord Bramall, General Lord Ramsbotham and General Sir Hugh Beach, summed up the case against it in a letter to the Times in 2009.
Among other things they pointed out: “The force cannot be seen as independent of the United States in any meaningful sense. It relies on the United States for the provision and regular servicing of the D5 missiles. While this country has, in theory, freedom of action over giving the order to fire, it is unthinkable that, because of the catastrophic consequences for guilty and innocent alike, these weapons would ever be launched, or seriously threatened, without the backing and support of the United States.” This shows how utterly pointless the “finger on the button” question is.
And the generals went on: “Nuclear weapons have shown themselves to be completely useless as a deterrent to the threats and scale of violence we currently, or are likely, to face, particularly international terrorism; and the more you analyse them the more unusable they appear … Our independent deterrent has become virtually irrelevant except in the context of domestic politics.”
