A Place to Stand

old outdated virility symbol that maintains the illusion

We hear continuously that replacing Trident will cost £100 billion. Every time some "leftist" politician is challenged to say what cuts they would actually go for to cut our £165 bn annual deficit their mantra is "cut Trident". So is it true. Well the £100 bn claim is technically true but deliberately misleading & putting it forward as a serious cut is deliberately dishonest.

The original government figure for a replacement was £15-20 bn so how did it metamorphosis? This unusually useful 2007 article in the Herald says:

"A new analysis of projected spending based on official figures suggests that the cost of buying and operating a successor to Trident will be around £70bn. Added to that, there is the £30bn it will cost to keep the existing warheads in service until 2023.

This contrasts with the £15bn-20bn highlighted by Blair and other ministers as the cost of buying a replacement to Trident. "Tony Blair is trying to persuade parliament to sign up to his nuclear insurance policy without revealing its true cost," alleged John Ainslie, the co-ordinator of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).

"The government is trying to con the taxpayer into spending over £100bn on weapons of mass destruction that we don't need and don't want. It will be our schools and hospitals that will suffer if this plan is approved."

In the past, ministers have said that maintaining Trident absorbed no more than 3% of the total defence budget. But recently, they have increased this figure to 5%-6%.

In evidence to the House of Commons Defence Committee last week, the defence secretary Des Browne admitted that the cost estimates had been revised. "We went through an exercise recently to make sure that we were identifying as accurately as we could the costs that are associated with our nuclear weapons systems," he said.

He accepted that it was "perfectly legitimate" to assume that Trident would continue to absorb 5%-6% of the defence budget. On that basis, calculations suggest, the total cost of maintaining and replacing Britain's nuclear weapons between now and 2054 will be between £90bn and £110bn.

The Ministry of Defence did not reject these figures, and reiterated that costs were expected to remain at 5% or 6% of the defence budget. "To try to extrapolate running costs for the whole 50-year period from that is inevitably highly speculative," an MoD spokesman said, adding that the cost was less than 0.1% of gross domestic product, and a "price worth paying for continued security".

"Three-quarters of Scottish people oppose spending billions of pounds on new nuclear weapons," said Greenpeace's disarmament campaigner, Louise Edge. "Yet the majority of Scottish Labour MPs are either not saying how they will vote, or have made it clear they will vote to replace Trident."
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So the overwhelming majority of cost is day to day running costs not a new build replacement & it is 6% of the military budget. £100 bn spread over 47 years comes out at £2.1bn annually & the amount we could expect the Scots budget to go up would be, on a population basis, 8% of that at £170 million annually.

£170 million is not be sneezed at but neither is it the sort of spending cut that will keep the country solvent. It is according to the pdf mentioned here 1/4 of our rail subsidies & 1 1/2 times our ferry subsidy (p61), 5 times the NHS anti-alcohol awareness programme (p63), almost exactly matches the legal aid budget (p69) & a little less than the Scotland Rural Development Programme (p71). So not money we should waste but not the primary consideration for Trident. Note that though the LudDems want to cut Trident they want to keep a nuclear programme so the running costs would be comparable. By that argument getting rid of NERC (government environmental catastrophe propaganda unit costing £400 million) would save £19 billion (over 47 years - not a figure ever seen in print.

There are good arguments for getting rid of Trident both ethical & practical. Under the Non-Proliferation Treaty we have undertaken to quickly (in 1970) take steps to reduce our weapons. Us keeping our full capacity "because we need it to deter" clearly justifies Iran & North Korea, who are in rather greater danger of invasion, saying the same. Thus by keeping it we make the world more dangerous. With the recent US/Russian START treaty cutting their nukes to 1700/2200 by 2012 our 200 odd starts to become a quite significant & destabilising part of the world total.

On the practical front these nuclear submarines are very much fighting the last war. Their only use is in retaliation for, or to deter, a massive all out nuclear city bombardment by the USSR. Modern nukes are actually much smaller than the traditional ones & designed for use in tactical battlefield or military hardened targets. That means delivered by steerable missiles able to hit to within, at worst, a few feet - ie cruise missiles. Trident type ICBMs are accurate to half a mile or so & thus only of use against cities. If, for example, it were ever decided to take out North Korea we would be targeting the military & possibly the Presidential palace & if nukes were used it would be kiloton jobs. We wouldn't want to destroy NK's civilian population because best guess is they don't like Kim any more than we do & he wouldn't care much. For that reason there are almost no circumstances under which Trident could be used which is a serious argument for not having it. This does not preclude having a smaller number of cruise missile launched Bombs.

There is a genuine national debate to be had on our nuclear weapon programme but neither side wants to have it. Opponents have focused on the clearly dishonest cost aspect exaggerating it out of all sense because they think the public will be fooled. If it were a useful adjunct to our national power it would be well worth 6% of our defence budget. Equally Trident supporters are unwilling to think about our military needs & prefer an old outdated virility symbol that maintains the illusion we are the same world power the British Empire was half a century ago.

And for my own personal hobby horse may I point out that for £265 million (1/8th of what the UK spends on Trident & 1 1/2 times what Scotland does) we could have a Space x-Prize Foundation which would make us the world leader in space development (or our money back) & thus not only produce spectacular economic success but also allow us a head start in a large number of military applications (observation satellites, the Thor orbital which, bombardment system) which rather than being a purely decorative & false national virility system would be the real thing.

Labels: British politics, space, X-Prizes