What is Trident For?

SO WHAT IS TRIDENT FOR?

To find that out we need to go back half a century and remind ourselves of a point in time not long after the Bomb had been used as a weapon on Japan, and just after the know-how had been passed to Soviet Russia.

At that point we faced a new and terrible problem. This was that if the things continued to be regarded as military weapons, then war itself, as well as becoming inconceivably devastating, would cease to be effective as a means of settling human political disputes, simply because all concerned would very soon be dead. As it was known that this fact alone would not be certain to stop wars happening, it was imperative to find a way to remove nuclear devices from the military arena as soon as possible.

We were also, quite frankly, terrified.

That terror inspired the Nuclear Arms Race. To assert that taking part in an ongoing competition to have ever more and larger nuclear ‘weapons’ than ones potential enemy - ie, to possess a superior hypothetical capacity to blow up even more of the already dead - would somehow bring security, was absurd. But it was basically a pretence, a response to the perceived need to appear to be doing something to provide safety.
Years later, under the umbrella of that presumed security, the NATO doctrine of ‘flexible response’ was developed. This reconnected the nuclear threat to the military arena by proposing that so-called ‘battlefield’ nuclear weapons would be deployed for use as a back-up to conventional forces.

That was in some ways even more frightening, especially when the young Michael Heseltine told us that, as we, the British People, all had nerves of steel, we were going to confront any invasion and forge resolutely ahead, with all the weapons at our command, secure in the knowledge that at the nuclear brink our opponents would pull back - while presumably our opponents would also, with nerves of steel, be forging ahead, secure in the knowledge that at the brink... etc!

That was true insanity. It was obvious to anybody who could think in real terms rather than sanitised jargon that such a collision would risk an immediate scream-reaction of intercontinental button-pushing that could bring the world to its end. No doubt it was hoped that the very irrationality of that doctrine would itself act as a deterrent. This meant that, in order for it to be convincing, we had to appear to mean it, down to the last hair- trigger button.

If you remember, it was a time when it seemed that a flock of geese flying past the Early-warning station in Yorkshire might automatically trigger off World War Three!
A way to defuse this universally terrifying situation lay in a return to deterrence as it was originally conceived. It was suggested that by creating a static, minimal installation, accepted by all sides as being an adequate deterrent, a stable situation could be established in which there would be no point in classifying or counting instruments of mass destruction as if they were usable weapons of war.

A possible key to this return was provided, almost inadvertently, by a new development in the Nuclear Arms race.

One of the prime movers of The Nuclear Arms race had been each superpower's need to ensure that the launching-pads and silos containing their land-based missiles would be safe from attack. Putting them into submarines meant that they would be definitively out of reach. Doing this helped to make the situation static and reduce the need to continue the astonishingly expensive land-based missile competition.

Putting the missiles in submarines also provided a definitive way to ensure that no power-mad despot would be tempted to try to hold the world to ransom by producing and threatening to ‘use’ some of his own nuclear bombs. The risk that this might possibly happen had always been the main objection to the stance of absolute ‘unilateral nuclear disarmament’.To have some mutually-accepted facility lying in wait somewhere out of reach had long been seen as the most sensible way to deter any rogue state from being so tempted. Trident provided that facility.

After that the world began to change. Gorbachev and Reagan at last felt able to see sense. The Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet bloc is no more. The mass of obsolete intercontinental ballistic missiles is now little more than a deadly embarrassment but, strangely, the Trident submarine deployment has remained.

Why has it remained?

The essential and only characteristic of Trident is that it is a deterrent, not a weapon of war. It has no military role. Its function is solely to ensure that the nuclear peace is kept; that no madman will ever be tempted to open Pandora’s Box again.

That, I believe, is what Trident is for - and so long as its role continues to be respected and it does not mistakenly become classified as a potential weapon-system, I believe it should stay.

To what extent Trident has already been effective as a deterrent will probably never be known. Although its presence is said to have discouraged certain rogue nations from attempting to threaten the world, it has not deterred other, excitable ones from developing their own ‘nuclear weapons capability’. But these appear to have done so for reasons of pride rather than with any intention to ‘use’ them, perhaps because they seemed to believe that being a member of the “nuclear club” might give them greater political clout. There is no logical reason why it should do that. Also, in a world where terrorists, being out of reach of deterrence, are lusting after nuclear weapons with which to do more than just threaten the world, for such nations to develop more of them simply for fun or honour seems to be a dangerous indulgence.

However, there may be reasons why those nations have decided they need their own ‘nuclear capacity’. These may well have arisen from the sad fact that Trident’s non-military function seems not to have been convincingly respected.

Sauce for the goose being sauce for the gander, it follows that, if it is to remain a credible universal deterrent, Trident must deter the nuclear weapon ambitions of all nations. However, because Trident’s host nations, the US and the UK, have their fingers on its triggers, they have only a moral obligation to keep faith with Trident’s universal deterrent role.

They have not kept that faith.

For many years the US and the UK have gone on quietly refining the processes and have produced numerous specialised ‘nukes’, many of which have low ‘yields’, some perhaps even less than the one that destroyed Hiroshima.

While claiming that their nuclear weapons are held passively ‘as a last resort deterrent’, they have been busy allotting strategic military roles to these. We, who live in the affluent West, cannot imagine them ever being put to that purpose. But other nations, less convinced of our benevolence, may, to put it delicately, not share that confidence, and perhaps that makes it understandable that they might feel a need to be able to threaten some nuclear retaliation on their own account.

The obvious lesson from this is that the policy of introducing ‘nuclear elements’, however minor, into our military arsenals is essentially a betrayal of deterrence. The policy makes hypocritical nonsense of our righteous attempts to discourage proliferation and directly invites other nations to follow suit, an invitation which could trip the world back into a new growth of nuclear threat and counter threat, or even unleash the chain-reaction of mutual suicide.

The time for such follies is over. ‘Battlefield nuclear weapons’ are still, as they were in the 1980s, potentially the triggers of Armageddon.

It is imperative, especially now that the situation in the middle-east has become so inflamed, that they should be scrapped.

Oliver Postgate

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