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The Future of Britain's WMD

Introduction

The UK government has stated that, during the 2005-2010 Parliament, a decision will need to be made on a successor to what it calls the UK ’s Independent Nuclear Deterrent.¹ The current system is the American Trident submarine-launched ballistic missile fitted with nuclear weapons, which is expected to be worn out by the late 2020s.

This study explains the key issues of the UK WMD programme in their historical context. It details the UK ’s unique dependence on the US for supplying and using WMD, and its importance in modern politics. As Chris Bellamy writes:

the British deterrent is probably the least independent of any…could this be one reason why Prime Minister Tony Blair has been at such pains to support US foreign and strategic policy over the past eight years?²

I also review the current debate in Britain over the Trident renewal.

The UN,³ governments and the media describe nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and ballistic missiles⁴ as Weapons of Mass Destruction. The term WMD will be used in this study to describe UK operated nuclear weapons and the weapon systems that carry them. Only nuclear weapons blow things up and poison through radiation, making them far more powerful and reliable than both biological weapons which rely on the deliberate use of disease and chemical weapons which are poisons.⁵

Perspectives on possessing Weapons of Mass Destruction

For some people, the question of keeping Britain ’s Weapons of Mass Destruction should be answered with a clear ‘Yes’. These people believe that we should have an Independent Nuclear Deterrent, the ultimate guarantee of the nation’s safety against enemies known and unknown – essential in case the nation ever finds itself alone, as it was in 1940. They argue that Trident (and its predecessors and succesors) meets what I call the ‘1940 requirement’ for a system that the nation can rely on if it stands alone.

The main argument of this report is that past, present and future system can never meet this requirement because of UK dependence on the US .

However, even if one believes that Britain did have an Independent Nuclear Deterrent, there are arguments for and against maintaining it. The South African minister Abdul Minty expressed the view of the majority of nations that::

Those who rely on nuclear weapons to demonstrate and exercise power should recognise that such dependence on weapons of mass destruction only serves to increase insecurity rather than promote security, peace and development.⁶

The most authoritative rejection of deterrence as a delusion masking irrationality and instability has come from General Lee Butler who commanded all US nuclear forces and drew up the US plan for a possible nuclear attack on Iraq in 1991.⁷

Sir Michael Quinlan has expressed the pro-nuclear argument as a choice between a nuclear free world and a war free world.⁸ General Butler was presented with Quinlan’s work at a meeting with the then Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Charles Guthrie and Kevin Tebbit, the then MoD Permanent Secretary. Butler handed the work back, saying that he had taught elementary logic at the staff college and the proposition was simply a syllogism,⁹ that is to say there is no logical reason why ‘nuclear free’ and ‘war free’ should be contradictory. For Butler , a world free of WMD was arguably both practical to achieve and far safer than a world of nuclear armed states. For Butler , deterrence is a slippery word used to sanctify any manner of otherwise nonsensical ideas for the potential use of nuclear weapons.

An example of what Butler describes is the argument made by Sir Malcolm Rifkind, that wars can only be prevented if we declare that we are ready to turn a conventional war into a nuclear war. ‘I remain deeply sceptical that NATO, or the United Kingdom , should make a declaration of no-first-use of nuclear weapons. The clear implication of any such declaration would be that conventional aggression could be undertaken without the fear of crossing the nuclear threshold. Put crudely, it implies, if it is believed, that conventional war is a safe option. For all its superficial moral attraction, therefore, a no-first-use declaration would take us out of the realm of war prevention into the realm of war limitation.’¹⁰ Deterrence boils down to arguing that the more dangerous things are the safer we are. Rifkind also argues simultaneously against small, accurate war-winning nuclear weapons and for small nuclear weapons to send political signals to end war.

More recently, it has become fashionable to say that the Communists were rational and could be deterred but deterrence is no use against religious fanatics, who must be fought – if necessary, pre-emptively.¹¹ In fact, during the Cold War, Western and Communist leaders portrayed each other as fanatics, Ronald Reagan famously characterising the Soviet Union as the ‘Evil Empire’ who had no respect for human life. Winston Churchill was concerned that the Americans might launch preventive war against the USSR in the 1950s.¹²

There is also a strong argument that possessing nuclear weapons is illegal. The advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice states that nations with nuclear weapons had a legal obligation to eliminate them through multilateral negotiation.¹³ This undermines the argument that nuclear weapons are needed for Britain to keep its seat on the UN Security Council. As a non-nuclear state, the UK would enjoy more, not less, support from the international community.

Many states such as South Africa point out the indirect transfer of nuclear weapons from the US to the UK detailed in this study is a violation of Article 1 of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which prohibits such transfers.¹⁴

Regardless of the power-political considerations, nuclear weapons are immoral. Peregrine Worsthorne, once editor of the Sunday Telegraph argued in 1998:

That an individual could proudly say this - give me liberty or give me death - is more than understandable. But we armchair Cold War warriors in the West were saying more than this. We were saying that the whole human race, the greater part of which was neutral in the Cold War, should be put at risk to preserve Western liberty. How could we have believed anything so preposterous?¹⁵

Perhaps the most common view of nuclear weapons is that simply by having them we will never have to use them, rather like the thug who ends up in court, arguing that he never meant to use his gun, and only had it as a status symbol. The head of the RAF bomber command in the 1960s put it bluntly:

It is no good taking refuge in the claim that the job of a deterrent is to deter, not to fight; nothing could be more dangerous than to base a policy on bluff, on a threat you don’t really believe you will ever have actually to implement .¹⁶

Weapons of Mass Destruction in the world today

Today, thousands of American and Russian nuclear weapons are ready to fire in less than 45 minutes,¹⁷ although the UK reduced the operational readiness of its submarines following the 1998 Strategic Defence Review.¹⁸ Robert Joseph, now President Bush’s Under Secretary of State for Arms Control, wrote in 1998that no action should be taken to make an agreement with Russia to ensure greater safety and security since:

De-alerting undermines a basic principle of deterrence; namely, the ability to retaliate promptly so as to prevent any aggressor from assuming it can achieve a ‘fait accompli.’ In this context, assertions that de-alerting of U.S. strategic forces would eliminate fear of surprise attack have not been demonstrated…. De-alerting should not be allowed to become a back door to unilateral nuclear disarmament.¹⁹

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the continuation of the hair trigger alert is the risk of Armageddon by accident, a problem made worse since the public and political leaders alike are mostly unaware that the nuclear threat still hangs over them (see Figure 1).

The US continues to build Trident missiles, Russia has introduced the Topol 26 and 27, France the new M-51 and China may have new missiles. India , Israel and Pakistan are also all adding to their nuclear arsenals. Other states, perhaps Japan²⁰ or Egypt ,²¹ may

Figure 1: World Nuclear Weapons 2005²²

 

*Some 10,000 of these weapons are in storage

**The UK ’s weapons are US-sourced

***Some 5,000 of these weapons are in storage

choose the nuclear option. There is considerable public and official concern over the possibility that terrorist groups may obtain WMD. This proliferation problem is a serious matter. Indeed, as is discussed below, both America and Britain are prepared to use their own WMD – nuclear weapons – against such groups, possibly pre-emptively. Nevertheless, the great difficulty of finding a terrorist target to shoot at with nuclear weapons effectively removes this issue as a justification for the UK ’s own WMD. Prevention and police-type actions are the principal means of tackling the problem of terrorist access to WMD.

Arms control and disarmament has been an international priority since the Second World War. Between 1987 and 1996, a range of treaties came into force that regulated and removed tens of thousands of tanks, guns, warplanes and missiles, banned nuclear testing and chemical weapons. Now these achievements have been forgotten. No new agreements are underway. Instead, a programme of sanctions and possible military action is being contemplated against the nuclear small fry – Iran and North Korea . There is an urgent need to restart the multilateral disarmament process, and without leadership from Washington , European states must take a lead. I discuss how this might be done in my paper A Strategic Concept for the Regulation and Removal of Arms and Proliferation.²³

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¹ UK Defence White Paper, 2003, Cm6041-1 Par 3.11, http://www.acronym.org.uk/docs/0312/doc08.htm.

² ‘British Nuclear Forces, the decision that dare not speak its name’, C. Bellamy, The World Today , May 2005.

³ UN Security Council Resolution 1540 on Weapons of Mass Destruction refers to: ‘nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, as well as their means of delivery … Means of delivery: missiles, rockets and other unmanned systems capable of delivering nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, that are specially designed for such use.’

⁴ Ballistic missiles follow a curved bullet-like trajectory. Cruise missiles are small pilotless aircraft relying on their aerodynamic qualities to keep them in the air.

⁵ See for example, ‘What Next For Trident?’, T. Hare, Journal of the Royal United Services Institute, April, 2005, Vol 150, No 2.

⁶ South African Statement to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, 2005, http://www.un.org/events/npt2005/statements/npt03southafrica.pdf

⁷ http://www.cdi.org/issues/armscontrol/butler.html

⁸ ‘Thinking About Nuclear Weapons’, M. Quinlan, Whitehall Papers, Royal United Services Institute, London , 1997.

⁹ Private information.

¹⁰ Malcom Rifkind, 16 November 1993 .

¹¹> National Security Strategy of the United States , 2002.

¹² ‘The Secret State ’, P. Hennessy, Allen Lane/Penguin, 2002.

¹³ ‘It follows from the above-mentioned requirements that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in particular the principles and rules of humanitarian law; however, in view of the current state of international law, and of the elements of fact at its disposal, the Court cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defence, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake; there exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control’, ‘Legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons, International Court of Justice, Advisory Opinion, 8 July 1996, http://www.fas.org/nuke/control/icj/text/index.html.

¹⁴ http://www.comeclean.org.uk/articles.php?articleID=125

¹⁵ ‘The Old Bombers who are now for Banning the Bomb’, P. Worsthorne, Spectator, 7 March 1998 .

¹⁶The Times, J. Slessor, 6 January 1963 .

¹⁷http://www.ippnw.org/RXDealert.html; http://www.ieer.org/russian/pubs/dlrtbk-e.html

¹⁸ In 1994, Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin and Prime Minister Major announced that their weapons had been ‘de-targeted’, a meaningless gesture since in war the first action is to re-check the targets that weapons are pointed at. When a former US launch control officer, Bruce Blair pointed this out in the Washington Post, Clinton flew into a rage with the advisors who had convinced him that de-targeting would have real effect.

¹⁹ ‘US Nuclear Policy in the 21 st Century, Final Report’, R.G. Joseph, R.F. Lehman, Project Directors, National Defense University/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Washington , D.C. , 1998.

²⁰ ‘The Beauty Queen’s Guide to World Peace’, D. Plesch, Politico’s, London , 2004, Chapters 2 and 8.

²¹ The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) discovered that Egypt had secretly created a plant capable of making weapons grade radioactive material. The IAEA and the US are both satisfied with Egypt 's assurances.

²² Natural Resources Defense Council and International Institute for Strategic Studies

²³ http://www.psr.org/documents/psr_doc_0/program_4/scrrap.pdf