Keeping the U.K.’s Trident Nuclear Weapons System is in the national interest, according to a report by the Trident Commission released Tuesday.
The Trident Commission, consisting of politicians and former ministers, said that the missile system could help deter future threats to the U.K after the commission undertook a three year study to examine UK nuclear weapons policy.
“We need to pay close attention to the relevance of possible emerging threats and to our national capacity to meet them in an effective manner," the report said.
It went on to say, “If there is more than a negligible chance that the possession of nuclear weapons might play a decisive future role in the defence of the United Kingdom and its allies, in preventing nuclear blackmail, or in affecting the wider security context within which the U.K. sits, then they should be retained.”
The report cites possible scenarios where a nuclear deterrent would be useful in the future and references the current situation with Russia, it says, the “re-emergence of a nuclear threat from a state with a significant nuclear arsenal and overwhelming conventional capabilities, and with an aggressive posture. The only current example of this possibility is Russia. NATO allies are currently reassessing their posture and capabilities, and there is uncertainty over whether and how an independent British nuclear deterrent could become relevant to the NATO-Russia relationship in the future."
There are four trident submarines armed with ballistic missiles that are able to fire thermonuclear warheads. The decision on the renewal of Trident has been postponed until after the 2015 general elections after opposition from the the Liberal Democrats - the conservative coalition partners.
The cost of the Trident is £2.9 bn a year and this is likely to increase in the 2020s to around £4bn a year (according to 2012 prices). The Trident system is based in Scotland, with one submarine always armed and at sea and two at port. The Scottish National Party (SNP) said in their white paper published last year that if they gain independence in September’s referendum, they will scrap Trident. The party claims that the majority of Scottish people are against the renewal of Trident and have referred to the weapons as “unwanted, and abhorrent weapons of mass destruction”.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) criticised the report and said it was “stuck in the past."
CND General Secretary Kate Hudson said, "It is lamentable that three years of hard work has not moved on the debate around Britain’s weapons of mass destruction."
"The Trident Commission should have listened to the majority of the British people who oppose the replacement of Trident, and the overwhelming majority internationally who want to see a world free of these monstrous and outdated weapons. Instead the Commission has produced a rehash of Cold War thinking which fails to acknowledge that the world has moved on," Hudson said.
She continued that the Government’s own National Security Strategy downgraded the likelihood of a state-on-state nuclear attack: prioritising terrorism, climate change and cyber warfare. "To suggest that the UK should spend £100bn on a weapons system which we could never use and which doesn’t meet the threats we face is mindboggling," she said.
"Britain must not remain stuck in the past: which is exactly what the Trident Commission recommends that we do."
