Renew Trident? It’d make more sense to put Dad’s Army on the case

[Denzil_DC]

...

I am mystified. How did Hilary Benn, Maria Eagle, Charles Falconer and Paul Kenny, among others, come to choose the Trident nuclear missile as the totem of revolt against the Corbynites? Amid all the rubbish the Labour left espoused, defence has stood out as a beacon of sanity.

...

When the late defence chief Michael Carver famously asked of Trident, “What the bloody hell is it for?”, an informed guess was that roughly half his senior colleagues agreed, including most army generals. Former defence secretaries Des Browne (Labour) and Michael Portillo (Conservative) have come out against Trident. So have military experts from Hugh Beach to Patrick Cordingley. So has the formerly pro-nuclear defence pundit Michael Howard.

...

Historians such as Richard Rhodes and Andrew Alexander have catalogued the Nato mendacity and fear-mongering that was the cold war arms race with Russia. Rhodes’s Arsenals of Folly showed such recklessness raised rather than lowered the risk of nuclear miscalculation. The blatant use of fear by Cameron and others today is no less disingenuous. Any thinking person must know that the only defence against any sensible risk to British security today is a well-equipped ground force. Implausible and unusable weapons are pure waste.

When, back in 2007, Tony Blair was first pondering the renewal of Trident, he wrote in his memoir that he found the case dubious – and Gordon Brown agreed. Switching the money to something else “would not have been stupid”. But he then tried to imagine getting up in parliament to say he was giving up the British bomb, and merely thought, “We’re not going to say it, are we?” In other words, why bother with the right thing, when you can go on buying toys with other people’s money?

Given the history of nuclear scepticism within Labour, where Trident was long seen as a virility symbol of soundness on defence, it is bizarre of Corbyn’s foes to use this, of all policies, as a stick with which to beat him. For once he is right. Support him.


Full article in all its incendiary glory: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/13/renew-trident-dads-army-jeremy-corbyn-labour?CMP=share_btn_tw

[non sociopath skin]

1. Can we add General Sir Nick Parker KCB CBE, the former Commander-in-Chief, Land Forces ....

.... to that list?

You can hear him making exactly that point during questions following this lecture at Newcastle University.

http://www.ncl.ac.uk/events/public-lectures/item.php?sir-nick-parker

The Skin

[Bad Dog]

2. Paranoia trumps common sense

Remember all the talk back in the late 80s about Labour defence policy being guerrilla fighters post Soviet invasion? A unilateralist position didn't work then because it was drowned out by paranoid tabloid headlines.

I think it's a vote loser, and I'd rather see a pro Trident Labour party get in in 2020 than a pro Trident Tory one.

[LeftishBrit]

3. Good article

[Denzil_DC]

4. A neat long read backgrounder from Ian Jack at the Guardian:

Trident: the British question

At this moment, a British submarine armed with nuclear missiles is somewhere at sea, ready to retaliate if the United Kingdom comes under nuclear assault from an enemy. The boat – which is how the Royal Navy likes to talk about submarines – is one of four in the Vanguard class: it might be Vengeance or Victorious or Vigilant but not Vanguard herself, which is presently docked in Devonport for a four-year-long refit. The Vanguards are defined as ballistic missile submarines or SSBNs, an initialism that means they are doubly nuclear. Powered by steam generated by nuclear reactors, they carry ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads.

The location of the submarine – both as I write and you, the reader, read – is one of several unknowns. Somewhere in the North Atlantic or the Arctic would have been a reasonable guess when the Soviet Union was the enemy, but today nobody could be confident of naming even those large neighbourhoods. Another unknown is the number of missiles and warheads on board. Each submarine has the capacity to carry 16 missiles, each of them armed with as many as 12 independently targetable warheads; but those numbers started to shrink in the 1990s, and today’s upper limit is eight missiles and 40 warheads per submarine. Even so, those 40 warheads contain 266 times the destructive power of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.

Vickers (now BAE Systems) built the submarine hulls at Barrow; Rolls-Royce made the reactors in Derby; the Atomic Weapons Establishment produces the warheads at Aldermaston and Burghfield in Berkshire. All these inputs are more or less British (less in the case of the Atomic Weapons Establishment, which is run by a consortium of two American companies and Serco), but the missile that they were built to serve and without which they would not exist is American: the Trident D5 or Trident II, also deployed by the US navy, comes out of the Lockheed Martin Space Systems factory in Sunnyvale, California.

According to the Ministry of Defence, a British ballistic missile submarine has been patrolling the oceans prepared to do its worst at every minute of every day since 14 June 1969, when the responsibility for Britain’s strategic nuclear weapons passed from the Royal Air Force to the Royal Navy. Over the course of 46 years, many things have changed. Resolution-class submarines with Polaris missiles were replaced with Vanguards and Tridents nearly 20 years ago. The submarines are far bigger – a Vanguard submarine is twice as long as a jumbo jet – while the missiles have enormously increased their range and the warheads their precision. 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.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/feb/11/trident-the-british-question?CMP=share_btn_tw

Includes a decent profile of my own stomping ground on the Clyde.