UK Continuous At Sea Deterrent
Unwise? Unaffordable? Unethical?
In 2006, during Labour’s third consecutive term in office, the UK government committed to replacing the Royal Navy’s fleet of four strategic missile submarines. Known as ‘Trident’ after the missile system deployed on each boat, the fleet constitutes the UK’s Continuous At Sea Deterrent (CASD). The replacement decision was approved in Parliament in 2016 under the Conservative government. The four replacement submarines – the Dreadnought class – will be built over 15-20 years. Three were under construction by 2024 and the first will enter service in the early 2030s. The submarines will deploy the life-extended US Trident II D5 missile fitted with a new warhead developed and made in the UK. In the run-up to the 2024 general election the Labour Party pledged its support for CASD with a ‘Nuclear Deterrent Triple Lock’: maintain the UK nuclear deterrent; build four new nuclear submarines; and make all necessary future upgrades. Since it is difficult to imagine CASD performing very well with either a ‘double lock’ or a ‘single lock’, the Labour pledge amounted simply to a recognition of the fact that all three ‘locks’ are necessary preconditions for CASD and to a recommitment, therefore, to the Dreadnought programme in full.
Governments can, however, moderate their commitments or change their mind completely, particularly when finances are tight. The UK nuclear deterrent has always been controversial, for several reasons, and it is inconceivable that CASD, or some element of it, will not come under scrutiny as the new government juggles its spending commitments. This essay[1] addresses three propositions that are sure to figure prominently in any such scrutiny:
1. The Dreadnought programme is unwise as it will provoke nuclear proliferation.
2. It is unaffordable.
3. It is unethical.
Unwise? Nuclear Weapon Proliferation
How many nuclear warheads (NW) are there, and who owns them? Figures to the left of the table below, taken from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists ‘Table of Global Nuclear Weapons Stockpiles, 1945-2002’, show the rate at which the Permanent Five (P5) members of the UN Security Council reduced their NW holdings over eight years spanning the end of the Cold War. The baseline for these reductions is 1986, when Cold War NW holdings were at their peak. Covering an eight year period to the present, figures on the right are taken from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute:
These data prompt several observations:
· P5 NW holdings reduced rapidly after the Cold War: a gross reduction of 57 per cent by 1994.
· The P5 also continued to make reductions in NW holdings in the more recent period, but at a much slower rate of 19 per cent over eight years to 2024.
· There has been ‘horizontal proliferation’ (for several decades there have been more members of the so-called ‘nuclear club’ than the P5), and several states are increasing, rather than reducing their NW stockpile (a practice known as ‘vertical proliferation’). The global ‘NW story’ is clearly not the exclusive preserve of decisions made by the P5.
· In 2024, several decades after the end of the Cold War, there are still several thousand NW in the world. And there are also ‘opaque’ nuclear proliferators to consider; countries believed to be on the threshold of nuclear weapon status, as well as some extremist groups that have expressed an interest in acquiring a weapon or radiological device of some sort.
These trends in NW holdings suggest two further thoughts. First, there does not appear to be a causal connection between the programmes of NW reduction undertaken by the P5 and the prevention or discouragement of nuclear weapon proliferation. The data seem to suggest precisely the opposite: NW reduction has been taking place, but so too has NW proliferation. It does not follow, therefore, that proliferation would not have taken place had Cold War stocks been reduced to zero. Second, neither does there seem to be a necessary correlation between the retention of diminished NW holdings by the P5 and the decision by some non-NW states to proliferate and acquire NW. If there were such a correlation, why is it that so few states have become proliferators?
In an influential article published in 2011, George Schulz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn argued that ‘continued reliance on nuclear weapons as the principal element for deterrence is encouraging, or at least excusing, the spread of these weapons, and will inevitably erode the essential cooperation necessary to avoid proliferation, protect nuclear materials and deal effectively with new threats’. But the evidence for this assertion is patchy. It could just as reasonably be claimed that the reduction of NW stockpiles by established NW states has not affected the calculation of NW-inclined proliferating states but might even have reduced or limited proliferation by persuading some non-NW states not to proliferate. The larger point is this: established NW states suffer from cultural/strategic conceit if they assume that NW proliferation is entirely within the scope of their control. It is not necessarily these states’ ideas, declarations and actions that determine the proliferation (or non-proliferation) decisions of others. The evidence suggests, instead, that other governments around the world can make up their own minds on this matter, for their own reasons and at the point at which they have passed the necessary economic and technological thresholds. Persuasion or dissuasion by P5 countries might well influence that decision-making process but seem unlikely to be the sole determining factor.
Unaffordable? The Cost of Dreadnought
Estimates of the financial cost of the Dreadnought programme over its expected lifetime of up to 40 years (2030s-2070s) have varied considerably. In 2006 a UK Government study suggested that the capital cost would be £15-20bn, with lifetime annual costs of five to six per cent of the defence budget. Other assessments of the overall cost (i.e., capital plus lifetime) have varied between £97bn (Greenpeace, 2009), £80bn (RUSI, 2013) and c.£167bn (Reuters, 2015). The current (2024) assessment by the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) is that the capital cost (i.e., design and manufacture) will now be £41bn (including a £10bn contingency reserve but excluding an additional sum needed to cover the cost of a new warhead). As in 2006, the MoD continues to set the lifetime running costs of the Dreadnought fleet at approximately six per cent of the annual defence budget. But given that projections of government expenditure are always hostage to national economic performance and inflation, and that defence spending is a politically determined proportion of GDP, then the real size of the defence budget and, by extension, the real size of per centage allocations from that budget, are probably best understood as variable.
We can, nevertheless, make an estimate that includes the main categories of expected expenditure. If the capital cost of the Dreadnought programme is increased to £50bn (to include development and production of a replacement warhead), and if the in-service cost is assessed at six per cent of the defence budget (currently c.£50bn) per annum for 40 years (i.e., £3bn annually for 40 years - £120bn), then the overall cost of the programme could be in the region of £170bn, very close to the assessment made by Reuters. The sum of £170bn is, of course, considerable. Even when spread over the expected 40 year lifetime of the Dreadnought system, an annual outlay of £4.25bn is not trivial.
But where is the threshold at which expense incurred outstrips value gained? If value is defined as the ratio of function to cost, is £170bn too much to spend on 40 years of nuclear deterrence (assuming it works as promised), and if so by how much? A cost/value assessment should be made not just in absolute but also in relative terms. Over the 40-year lifetime of the Dreadnought fleet, what proportion of UK GDP would have been spent on the programme if the total cost were indeed to amount to £170bn? UK GDP in 2024 is expected to be c. £2,400bn. A rough estimate would therefore suggest that UK GDP during the lifetime of Dreadnought could be in the region of £96,000bn (40 x £2,400bn). At £170bn the estimated lifetime cost of the successor programme would then represent just 0.18% of total GDP. Does this represent opportunity cost (and if so, to the detriment of what other areas of government expenditure, and to what extent) or affordable expenditure?
Unethical? The Morality of Nuclear Deterrence
In the nuclear deterrent debate in the House of Commons on 18 May 2011 Cathy Jamieson MP asked whether the Secretary of State for Defence understood ‘that many people will find it shocking that we are talking about value for money in the context of weapons of mass destruction, for which no moral case can be made.’ This essay is not the place to reprise the highly developed debate concerning the possession and use of nuclear weapons – a debate that has occupied moral philosophers, theologians and strategists for several decades. It would, nevertheless, be appropriate to suggest that an ethical case for the retention of an independent nuclear deterrent can in fact be made, and to sketch such a case in terms of intention, consequences and stewardship.
Intention. In the context of the 1960s debate on nuclear ethics, the theologian Paul Ramsey observed that if it is wrong to do evil then it must also be wrong to threaten to do that evil. Ramsey’s point amounts to a principled and very robust challenge to Western nuclear weapon strategy, combining the ethics of intention with the test of proportionality. If nuclear weapon use might result in indiscriminate mass death and destruction, out of proportion to any political or military aim, then it might fairly be described as ‘evil’. And if use is evil then so is the intention, or threat, to use. But the intention behind the nuclear deterrent threat is different: the threat is made not in order that in might be carried out but in order that it will not. In other words, a grotesque (‘evil’) threat is made only to prevent an unimaginably grotesque event – nuclear use. The proportionality test inverts the ethical assessment: rather than judge a threat in terms of the moral cost of the associated action, the threat should instead be judged against the moral benefit of the intended inaction. If a nuclear weapon threat can prevent or dissuade a nuclear attack and the devastation that would follow, then the intention is moral and the proportionality test is passed with flying colours. Something evil can be threatened precisely because the intention is not to have to carry out that threat. As Michael Walzer, the philosopher of the just war tradition argued, ‘We threaten evil in order not to do it, and the doing of it would be so terrible that the threat seems in comparison morally defensible.’
Consequences. Ethical objections to the possession of NW are also challenged by a more practical, consequentialist argument put forward by Michael Quinlan in Thinking about Nuclear Weapons. In calling for a more careful assessment of the ‘moral acceptability of possessing nuclear weapons’, Quinlan observed that some limited use of nuclear weapons could ‘serve to deny an aggressor the attainment of intolerable aims without entailing unlimited catastrophe, and so could lead to an outcome that might legitimately be termed successful and worth the costs.’ It should be said that Quinlan was not making a crude argument for nuclear use by the UK or any other state, but for more careful ethical reflection rather than impulsive ethical dogma. After all, as I have suggested it is conceivable that the leaders of non-nuclear weapon states could draw Quinlan’s conclusion for themselves, articulating their own diplomatic, strategic and moral case for legal nuclear weapon acquisition. If such a case were to be made, how would it be answered, particularly by those who insist that ‘no moral case can be made’? How could a government that had recently renounced its possession of NW make the case persuasively to other governments that the threat of NW use is one that is valid only for as long as the threat is never carried out?
Stewardship. Developing the point just made, this is to suggest a contrasting version of the ‘good example’ argument which is often advanced by those who believe the UK’s abandonment of its nuclear deterrent would persuade others around the world to do something similar. Rather than dispose of a very limited NW stockpile in the almost certainly vain hope that countries such as Iran and North Korea would be so impressed as to follow suit immediately, the example to be set by the UK is instead that of calm, accountable stewardship of a technology and a weapon system which will be with us for as long as human beings have a memory, can read and do mathematics. In what some might call a ‘fallen’ nuclear world it is surely ethical for some governments to show that this devastating capability – which, again, will never be ‘disinvented’ or forgotten – can be maintained in special circumstances for specific tasks and not regarded as simply a ‘big weapon’. This is practical, ‘real-world’ ethics, as the Polish scholar Krzysztof Sliwinski wrote in 2009: ‘The British nuclear deterrent should, therefore, be perceived as a general deterrent with a positive effect on [the] international community and international security overall.’
Last Word
The increasing availability of the materials, technology and expertise needed to make nuclear weapons could mean more weapons proliferation, regional nuclear arms races and, possibly, even nuclear use. If the world is approaching the point at which the use of these weapons is no longer unthinkable then there is surely no room for reassuring ourselves that this is ‘someone else’s problem’.
But what to do? The Cold War ended over 30 years ago and the complex rationales by which NW possession was justified during that conflict are fading fast. What is needed now are not reflexive objections to nuclear weapons, resurrected from the Cold War years, but serious attempts to discourage the acquisition and use of nuclear weapons in the far less structured post-Cold War environment. CASD is neither axiomatically unwise, unaffordable nor unethical – in this essay I have shown that the contrary argument can be made in each case. Yet as well as modernizing warheads and weapon platforms, nuclear weapon powers like the UK need also to modernize their arguments for retaining these devices. NW possession can be rationalized in two ways. First, it can prevent NW use against the UK and its allies by direct deterrence; surely a threat worth making – morally, legally, financially and strategically. Second, it can deter acquisition through responsible stewardship, exemplifying the strange but necessary argument that the only reason to possess NW is in order not to use them.
What is needed is more stability through deterrence, rather than the illusion of stability through disarmament or the disaster of instability through acquisition and use. But there is no better way to end than with an extract from Nigel Biggar’s ‘Living with Trident’, published in 2015:
Would that nuclear weapons had never been invented! But they have. Would that they could be disinvented! But they can’t. Would that a single, bold, brave, clean act of unilateral self-purification would so inspire international trust as to stimulate global, multilateral renunciation! But it really wouldn’t. […] Hope remains… that, as in the past so in the future, the careful management of nuclear deterrence will continue to discourage tyrants from chancing their aggressive arm; that the incremental strengthening of international norms and institutions will bolster trust and relax tension; that more non-nuclear states can be dissuaded or stopped from acquiring nuclear weapons altogether; and that the stockpiles of those already armed can be further reduced. … while we needn’t learn to love Trident, we ought to learn to live with it.
[1] This essay is a corrected and updated version of a paper presented to the Labour Party International Policy Commission in May 2016.