Who or What are we Deterring?

It must be 20 years since I watched a British-launched Trident missile leap from the sea off the coast of Florida, and begin its long journey downrange across the Atlantic. It was an astonishing sight – the rockets are belched from their pods in the submarine by a blast of ‘gas and steam’, which appears in a plume, as from nowhere, then hang, apparently suspended, actually fighting gravity,  while their rocket motors ignite in mid-air and blast them off into the far heaven.  

 

I viewed the whole thing from a US Navy warship, the launch clearly being in most respects a US operation, and we were pursued and harried throughout the day by a Greenpeace vessel, which failed in its aim of disrupting the launch.

 

That evening, back in Cocoa Beach, near Cape Canaveral,  I watched HMS Vanguard slipping back to port, her mission accomplished. In the twilight, the huge boat (these beasts are as big as Channel steamers, underneath)  looked extraordinarily menacing, black, sleek and secretive ( I once spent a weekend mainly submerged aboard one of her predecessors, the Polaris submarine HMS Repulse, but chances to see inside the Trident boats are very hard to come by).

 

But in those days I still believed ( and indeed was prepared to spout) the justification that if Saddam Hussein and North Korea were developing such bombs,  we needed one too. Though I do recall thinking even as I said it that it really wasn’t anything like as good a case as I had often keenly made for Polaris during the Cold War. That case – that the existence of those weapons kept the Soviet Army from moving one inch further westwards, for fear of what they might start - was, I still think, pretty good.

 

And it still seems to me that, having spent so many billions of our nuclear weapons capacity, we would be foolish to abandon it altogether. The question is really what kind of weapon would be convincing and useful in our hands. Against major nuclear powers with vast land areas, such as China, Russia and the USA, our ‘deterrent’ simply isn’t one. Our small and densely-populated island could be devastated by a very small number of nuclear strikes, in a way we couldn’t hope to replicate against such powers, even assuming that our submarines are as well-hidden as we like to think and aren’t sunk in the first few seconds of war against other naval powers. I mean, if the Russians or the Chinese had learned how to track our Trident subs, they wouldn’t let on, would they? But acoustic technology never ceases to improve.

 

Mutual Assured Destruction, in such cases, isn’t available to us. We’re too small. They’re too big. It wouldn’t be credible as a threat, let alone effective as an action.

We could only hope to deter attacks from far smaller threats. And for that we simply don’t need a Cold War armoury of submarines

 

 If it comes to the point where nuclear threats from big powers are real, we can’t deter them with Trident. Mind you, try as I may to imagine the circumstances in which this might matter, I cannot.

 

This is now a problem for those who want to keep Trident. Paradoxically, it was the problem of the disarmers in the Cold War. They had to try to hide the fact that deterrence works, and that it was extremely unlikely that there would have been a nuclear exchange. Both the favourite films of ban-the-bombers in that era , ‘ The War Game’ and ‘The Day After’, are very vague and feeble about how such a war would actually start. They only get into their stride once it comes to portraying the horrors that would follow once it had started.

 

I found this an effective point, when, as a NATO enthusiast, I used to go along and argue the case for the bomb at CND meetings in the 1980s, at which ‘The War Game’ would be shown.  It was also interesting to see the effect when I pointed out that the bombs they had just seen exploding over the English countryside were *Soviet* weapons, whose deployment and use they could not influence, rather than the British and American ones about which they were protesting.

 

Perhaps some of my readers might like to construct a realistic and credible set of circumstances, in which Britain might find a nuclear weapon useful in the post-Cold War world. I’m prepared to accept that there might be one, which is why Id keep some warheads and some means of delivery . But I wouldn’t make my whole defence budget and strategy revolve around it. But I wouldn’t be especially keen on Trident, designed as it is, and immensely expensively and cleverly designed,  to evade Moscow’s anti-missile screen, when Moscow is (in my opinion) inconceivable and incredible as a target.   I struggle more and more to think of what sort of target, in the absence of the USSR’s huge Cold War armies against which we were otherwise defenceless,  , could be conceivable or credible. This is mainly because I can see no military logic in it, but partly because, having visited a (Soviet) atmospheric nuclear testing site, I am rather well aware of what these weapons actually do.  

 

I would also want it to be genuinely independent, which I don’t believe Trident to be. Trident is almost wholly dependent on the USA, for the manufacture of the rockets and their maintenance, and (I believe, though this is disputed) for the targeting satellite systems on which their accuracy depends. I was once on the edges of a vast row which blew up when an unwise civil servant suggested to a group of Defence reporters that Trident missiles were, in effect, leased from the USA and not ours at all. Because it was true, but politically unwelcome that our national virility symbol was not actually ours at all, , that statement got all kinds of people into desperate trouble.

 

So I urge caution about the row which has been stirred up by my old mate Michael Fallon (I covered his first by-election, before he had a  single grey hair, and have always enjoyed his dry humour and lack of soppy sentimentality) .

 

The bomb isn’t the same issue it was back in the 1980s, when Mr Fallon and I first met. Perhaps the clearest sign of that is that, then rightly defying conventional wisdom among my peers by being a keen Cold Warrior, am now rightly defying conventional wisdom among my peers by being a keen opponent of the New Cold War.

 

But there are other differences, notably the vanishing into the air of the giant GSFG (Group of Soviet Forces in Germany) which once lay so heavily on East German territory that you feared that cramped country might sink under the weight. I recall that too.  Venture into the East German countryside and you couldn’t move for them, grinding about in their lorries and shaking the buildings with their sonic booms, occupying huge tracts of land for their tanks and heavy artillery.  I think it was the biggest ever to exist in Europe.  It’s gone, utterly and completely, and it isn’t coming back. Nor is the Warsaw Pact.

 

So a renewal, at a cost of at least £20 billion over perhaps 12 years, is quite a commitment, and really needs to be discussed without political rancour. Plenty of serious defence experts reckon the money could be better spent – if our objective is the defence of these islands.

 

I suspect they are right. What’s funny is that the Labour Party which opposed nuclear weapons when we really needed them, is new probably even more afraid than the Tories of having a sensible discussion on them, when the need for them is in fact hard to demonstrate.