Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
10/24/2014
Modernizing the United Kingdom’s nuclear-capable submarines in the near future can be ensured only through the election of a Conservative government to replace the current parliamentary coalition of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties, Lord Des Browne, former UK Secretary of State for Defence and current vice chair of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, told attendees of the Arms Control Association’s annual meeting, held this week. Facing budget austerity, British Prime Minister David Cameron’s successor will likely avoid addressing the modernization of the country’s Vanguard-class subs, and instead defer to experts to research the necessity of modernization, Browne said. “I think that when they look at being the prime minister of a country and having to tell the people of the United Kingdom that a further three, or perhaps five years, of austerity face them with between £20 and 40 billion of cuts in annual expenditure, when a lot of people think we’ve already cut it to the bone, and ‘Oh and by the way, I’m just about to spend £50 billion on replacing these boats,’ that seems to be an improbable result from the general election in the United Kingdom, unless there is a majority of the Conservative party in government,” Browne said. “I think that’s the only possibility that will guarantee that will be the outcome. The likelihood is that if there was a change of prime minister, that that prime minister will reach for the tool that most leaders do when faced with these social challenges, and that is they will have a review.” The UK’s next parliamentary election is scheduled for May 7, 2015.
During an Oct. 23 event at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies focusing on the Scottish independence referendum’s impacts on transatlantic security, Browne again said a future prime minister leading a non-Conservative-majority UK parliament would likely defer the nuclear modernization question to experts to “buy them some time” on making a modernization decision during a period of budget austerity. But funding for replacement of the UK’s four nuclear-capable submarines and their Tridents would be stretched over a construction period of 15 years, a timeframe that could alleviate some financial pressure, Frank Miller, a Scowcroft Group principal and a former defense advisor for President George W. Bush, said at the CSIS event. “Of course the United Kingdom derives enormous financial and economic benefit from being part of the Trident 2 system,” Miller said. “The cost of four new submarines is not that significant. The cost of the UK deterrent, as I recall, over the next three years, is 6 percent of the British defense budget.”
Level of Support in Scotland for Nuclear Weapons
At the CSIS event, Browne underscored that contrary to popular belief, the view that Trident 2’s should be removed from Scottish waters is not shared by a vast majority of Scots. While a report by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament indicated that 60 percent of Scots did not want to invest in the Trident missile system, Browne emphasized a different independent poll reporting that a mere 49 to 50 percent of Scots favor Trident’s removal from their nation. “More independent polling revealed that 51 percent of people in Scotland are happy to see a renewed nuclear system be retained in Scotland and invested in, but 49 of that 51 percent argued for a much smaller, much less expensive system,” said Browne, who served as UK Secretary of State for Defence from 2006 to 2008.
Crisis Averted With Failure of Scottish Referendum, Expert Says
Speaking at the CSIS event, Miller said that through Scotland’s 55 percent “no” vote in the September independence referendum, “a cataclysm was averted.” As relations continue to deteriorate between the U.S. and Russia and as Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to display an “overreliance” on nuclear weapons, UK’s nuclear weapon system—propped up exclusively by four “Vanguard-class” submarines—plays a “critical role in global affairs,” Miller said. “I think that a UK nuclear deterrent is vital to the United Kingdom, it’s vital to the United States, in fact, and it’s vital to NATO. As part of that, I believe that the UK deterrent must always have an SSBN … on prompt patrol. If Scotland had voted for independence, and if the Trident fleet had been expelled from Faslane, it might or it might not have been the end of the UK deterrent,” Miller said. “With sufficient will, and with sufficient money and with sufficient time, London could have found a new home for not only the SSBNs, which is the easy part, but for the warhead storage. But whether that time, will and money existed would have been a very difficult question. So it is something, from a deterrent standpoint, to celebrate.”
Reduced Posture?
Inclusion in international alliances diminishes the need for a robust UK SSBN deployment posture, and nuclear states should share deployment responsibilities “in a much cleverer way” than currently displayed, Browne said. “Thus far, I am not winning the argument with prime ministers, but eventually I think that I will coincide with costs to such an extent that people will start to wake up and smell the coffee a bit,” he said. Continual deployment of UK SSBNs could strain them and deplete their capability, and officials should increasingly emphasize Trident and SSBN training to ensure deterrence capability, Browne said.
Miller agreed with Browne that opportunities exist for increased technical cooperation, but cautioned against the UK relying too heavily on regional allies. “The notion that a French SSBN can provide a deterrent for the United Kingdom is just not on,” Miller said. While he commended French nuclear forces for their initial and ongoing contributions to the international nuclear dialogue, Miller also highlighted the country’s isolated behavior. “The French government cannot even bring itself to sit in NATO councils on nuclear weapons,” he said. “If you can’t even sit in a NATO forum to listen to discussions, there’s no way the French government can allow a British submarine to provide deterrent cover for it, and vice-versa.”
A reduced UK nuclear posture could engender negligence toward potential world threats, Miller added. Using Russia’s annexation of Crimea as an example, he pointed to the poor record of the United States and UK in predicting global conflict and underscored the need to maintain a UK nuclear force level large enough to increase stability. “The Russians have hundreds of ICBMs on alert right now,” Miller said. “The Chinese have ICBMs on alert. Russian SSBNs are now once again on patrol. … So, because the UK has no nuclear bombers, it has no ICBMs, the UK is going to maintain a deterrent 24/7, 365 [days a year], it has to have a submarine at sea.”
