How I learned to start worrying and stop loving the bomb.
(With apologies to Dr Strangelove)
Dr Simon Sneddon, Senior Lecturer in Law writes:
On Monday night, at just before 11pm, the House of Commons voted overwhelmingly in favour of renewing Britain’s ageing Vanguard class nuclear submarine fleet, along with the Trident nuclear missiles. In this blog post I discuss the vote, the design of the system, MAD, and the legality and practicality of using nuclear weapons in the 21st century.
The Vote
To say this was a contentious decision would be to underplay it. The Labour Party appears to have embraced the Trident vote (a free vote, as Jeremy Corbyn says the current party policy is “under review”) as another tool to use in tearing the party apart. Even the Unions were divided. Tim Roache, head of the GMB wanted Labour to back renewal, and the commensurate 45,000 jobs whereas Len McClusky of Unite backed a ban.
The SNP, despite polls which show that voters in Scotland are split roughly 50/50 on the question, voted unanimously against renewal, on the basis that this was a project born of perfidious Albion or, as Brendan O’Hara put it “the intolerable position of having weapons of mass destruction that we do not want foisted upon us by a Government we did not elect. It is an intolerable situation, and I question how much longer it can continue.” (Hansard, 18 July, Col 598). He also said that “the SNP has never and will never advocate the closure of Faslane” (Hansard, 18 July, Col 597) and that the base had a bright future as a shipyard in an independent Scotland, so that’s OK then.
For the sake of completeness, all eight Liberal Democrat MPs voted against renewal, as did Sir Crispin Blunt, who was the sole Conservative MP to do so.
The System
The existing Vanguard fleet each carries 16 Lockheed UGM-133 Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missiles (also called Trident-D5), each of which carries eight thermonuclear warheads. The warheads may be either the 475kt W88 designed in the 1970s, or the smaller 100kt W76, designed in the 1980s. This means that each submarine carries warheads with a combine yield of between 12,800kt and 60,800kt. That is between 800 and 3,800 times larger than the 16kt bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945.
The missiles are accurate to 90m, over a 7,500 mile range, which is a wholly unnecessary degree of accuracy given that “even” the Hiroshima bomb caused complete destruction up to a mile from the blast site. That sounds like a lot (and the human cost of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was colossal and the effects are still being felt today) but to put the explosive power into perspective, as Physicist John McPhee said in 1974:
“the largest bomb that has ever been exploded anywhere was sixty megatons, and that is 1/1000 of the force of an earthquake, 1/1000 of the force of a hurricane.”[1]
I remember speaking to someone in the Armed Forces a few years ago, who pointed out that since 1993, when the Vanguard class submarines first entered into active service, one of the four (Vengeance, Vigilance, Vanguard or Victorious) has always been out at sea, patrolling the deep. That much is public knowledge. What I hadn’t realised, and I suspect a lot of other people hadn’t either, is that from the moment the submarine slips out of Her Majesty’s Naval Base Clyde (or Faslane, as it is generally referred to), and into the Firth of Clyde, no-one has ever detected them, anywhere, by any means. This is a staggering feat of engineering, and operational strategy.
MAD
As a child of the Cold War, I grew up believing in the cockeyed wisdom of the US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s arguments is a 1967 speech, which have come to be referred to as “Mutually Assured Destruction.” This is the idea that, in the era of two main nuclear-armed superpowers, neither side would launch a nuclear attack because they knew that to do so would trigger such a massive response that neither side would survive. I spent my youth as pro-nuclear, both weapons and power. I am still pro nuclear power, but that is for another time.
Fear is a recurring theme here — soon after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Professor Phillip Morrison of Cornell University said:
“We have a chance to build a working peace on the novelty and terror of the atomic bomb” [2]
This was echoed, four decades later, by Professor Paul Boyer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who said:
“The strategy of manipulating fear to build support for political resolution of the atomic menace helped fix certain basic perceptions about the bomb.”[3]
McNamara’s speech, and MAD, existed in a time where there were only four nuclear weapons states — the USA, USSR, UK and China. France joined the club in 1969, and these five remain the only countries allowed to possess nuclear weapons under the terms of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) 1968.
This treaty has been, of course, more honoured in the breach than in the observance, and there are probably another four nuclear armed states (India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel, although the latter refuses to admit or deny the existence of a nuclear stockpile).
Legality and Practicality
In addition to the essentially irrelevant NPT, the International Court of Justice looked into the “Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons” in 1996.[4] The ICJ essentially said:
“There is in neither customary nor conventional international law any specific authorization of the threat or use of nuclear weapons” (Para 105(2)(A))
“There is in neither customary nor conventional international law any comprehensive and universal prohibition of the threat or use of nuclear weapons as such” (Para 105(2)(B))
“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” (Para 105(2)(E)
The ICJ ruling is far from precise, and gives a considerable amount of room for manoeuvre when it comes to nuclear deterrent.
Having, a large nuclear stockpile sort of made sense when the “enemy” was a big, fixed state which also had nuclear weapons. MAD worked. Yesterday, the Prime Minister said she would be willing to push the button to launch a nuclear strike. Michael Fallon MP, the Secretary of State for Defence said that having a nuclear deterrent would put “doubt” in the minds of our enemies.
The problem is, however, much we might like to play the role of a global military leader, our stockpile is so comparatively insignificant that we are not really there. The Federation of American Scientists estimates the UK’s total number of nuclear warheads is 220. This compares to 1,790 for Russia and 1,930 for the USA.[5] Add to this the fact that our current enemies are mainly terrorist groups. How would we use a nuclear weapon against ISIS? Where would we aim it? Raqqa? Paris? Brussels?
I believe that the vote to renew Trident was wrong. Not legally, not even morally (though many will disagree with me on both counts) but just in terms of practicality. Spending up to £400bn on renewing Trident today would be akin to spending money on mammoth-proofing the London Underground.
A colossal misapplication of money to protect from a threat that no longer exists.
[1] McPhee, J., 1974, The Curve on Binding Energy. New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, p5
[2] Morrison, P., 1946, Beyond Imagination New Republic, (February 11, 1946): 180
[3] Boyer, P., 1985, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn on the Atomic Age, New York, NY: Pantheon
Originally published at blogs.northampton.ac.uk on July 20, 2016.
