Trident Replacement
submitted by Jim Barnes

The government have more or less decided to buy a new generation of nuclear weapons when Trident comes to the end of its design life, which will be in about ten years time. It will cost us in the region of £23 billion, about 60% of which will be spent in the US, on their systems and equipment. There are a number of serious implications to this, especially for trade unionists.

This isn't’t an abstract moral issue. It’s very much about a balance of advantages verses the disadvantages and if we look properly at these, the conclusion has to be the balance is massively against the replacement.

The TU movement was one of the principle forces who backed support for the Trident programme, with the leadership of the AEEU working hard to make sure there was as little as possible negative reaction within the labour party. In doing so it did this country immense damage. The argument used by right wing union leaders etc. was that Trident would produce job, but in reality it has been part of a process which has cost Britain huge numbers of jobs, although the jobs argument within defence can’t really be divorced from the economic policy overall. For instance Trident produced about 14,000 jobs in Barrow for a while and currently about 2,500 jobs are implicated in its maintenance – one job in manufacturing produces between 2 and 3 others in subcontracting and servicing so the figures would be 35,000 and 8000. It cost £23 billion directly to build and costs about £1 billion a year to run.

The real question about jobs is what would happen if that money was used towards other defence priorities. £1 billion a year into shipbuilding would create about 100,000 jobs directly and another 250,000 in service and supply – 30 times that currently employed on Trident.

One of the problems with nuclear weapons systems is that we, in effect, hire them from the US. All the significant technology is US and they maintain strict control over it. The missiles are even serviced in the US. The argument in favour, supported by union leaders, in the mid 80s was that the US would allow British companies to tender for work on the whole Trident system, but none came our way.

Another problem with defence procurement is that the MOD have been the most strident advocates of privatisation even though it has proven to be considerably more expensive and considerably less reliable than carrying out the work in house.
When the 1997 labour government carried out a comprehensive examination of the defence systems one of its conclusions was that, because the merchant fleet had been so depleted under the Tory government, they needed a number of RORO ferries. Instead of using this order as a springboard to support civilian manufacture, by putting money into safe designs and developing an efficient production facility to build the 12 ships, the government set criteria for tendering for the order which no British yard could fulfil. They ended up being leased from a Danish company who had the ships built in Italy.

Trident itself was probably obsolete by the time the first boat hit the water. Submarines depend on not being seen and are terribly vulnerable once they can be tracked. Nuclear propulsion systems are essentially a heat engine, pushing steam through a turbine, and that heat has to be dissipated once it’s been used. This heat is track-able by satellite, which was ok to some extent in the cold war when they were patrolling under the polar icecap; but elsewhere, with the right equipment, they stick out like a sore thumb.
The other thing is that it isn’t feasible to launch a warning shot with Trident because as soon as one missile hits the surface the other side know where you are. There are similar types of problems associated with all the other means of delivery now.

There might be an argument in favour of nuclear weapons if the assertion that they help defend us could be shown to be logical, but the reality is that there is no real threat that nuclear weapons could be used to counter and there never will be. They contribute nothing to any rational military strategy and were never intended to. They were developed and deployed to put a strain on the Soviet Union, through the immense cost of having to compete and develop nuclear weapons systems like the US. It was to threaten the Soviet Union that the US dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the 2nd world war.

Part of the background to our government’s response is that the US administration is now keen to develop a new generation of bombs. There isn’t anything these things can do which can’t now be achieved with conventional weapons and there are massive costs and problems associated with deploying and using nuclear bombs. So the intention is political rather than to achieve any military task.

For Britain the argument is that they give us prestige and allow us a position on the international stage which wouldn’t otherwise be justified. However, since we are wholly dependent on the US this means that British foreign policy is in practice, shaped around the US interests rather than our own which, as we saw with the war in Iraq, was a very dangerous position to be in.

The fact that Britain and France specifically have refused to honour their treaty obligations and look constructively for encouraging nuclear disarmament has actually undermined our credibility abroad and it has encouraged others to argue that they should be in the nuclear club too and share this prestige. India specifically referred to Britain’s refusal to disarm as one of the reasons they wanted to develop their own nuclear weapons.
Basing international politics on the threat of military action, including a nuclear threat, in the way the US and Britain do, has had an extremely damaging effect internationally. The world faces huge problems and yet the foreign and defence polices based on nuclear weapons exacerbate them rather than help. They are very much part of the problem and have nothing to contribute to a possible solution.

So they cost huge amounts of money, destroy jobs and do immense damage to politics internationally. The government have said there will be a debate on a new generation of weapons but they have already begun expanding Aldermaston to provide a new generation and the senior ministers have made it clear they don’t see a future without them. It will be a disaster for this country if they are allowed to get away with it.

Currently they are refusing to discuss nuclear weapons with the Defence Select Committee in the House of Commons. Unions are being asked to urge their sponsored MP's to press the government to give evidence before the committee and I am asking branches to make sure their local MP's are lobbied with the same request.