Re: Corbyn's kerfuffle
 

Pierre is right, additionally Cold War soviet planning maps show that Russia wasn't interested in us in any way, only one. Which was to turn the UK into a glass carpark (not even hard given our small size) So forget your Red Dawn fantasies, Soviet Russia only wanted to remove UK as a staging point for the US.


All this bs about disarmament is great, if every Country was civilised & Westernised, sadly its not. It wasn't then, and it's even less now.

Now we have places like Pakistan with Nuclear capability, North Korea, Iran won't be far behind, if anything it's a more dangerous world than in the Cold War. We'd have to be crazily stupid to give it up now.

And for the people suggesting we un nuke the subs & convert them to attack subs, thats a non starter, boomers have a completely different profile, range, depth, speed, well you name it to an hunter killer sub (pretty obvious really or we'd just make one type and either put in missiles or torpedoes wouldn't we...)

I can't recall from the top of my head for sure, but I believe nuclear tipped tomahawk Cruise missiles were all removed too, as they contravened one of the SALT treaties (intermediate range) They too were US 'owned' btw.

And as far as nuclear capability in NATO goes, it's only really Germany that did not have native ability, US, French, UK do, Boxheads understandably not, as NATO was formed not long after WW2 and the Germans were still a bit... suspect.

Re: Corbyn's kerfuffle
 

My God we used to chat about this unilateralist guff when I was at school well before Bruce Kent was running CND whilst living in cloud cuckoo land. Its supporters were as naïve and misguided then as they are now.

Events leading up to WWII ought to teach people that the US cannot be relied upon to come to the UK's aid. Had it not been for Pearl Harbour and IIRC some serious errors of judgement by Hitler and the weather, the UK would very likely have been invaded and the US would have looked on.

Re: Corbyn's kerfuffle
 

Neither did Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin & Mao :D

He has changed his views though. He was the most rebellious MP for all those years but as soon as he got into power he's changed his ideas about rebellion in the ranks! :dozey:

---------- Post added at 12:45 ---------- Previous post was at 12:42 ----------

:)

Re: Corbyn's kerfuffle
 

Why indeed

http://blogs.channel4.com/alex-thoms...dependent/9293

Re: Corbyn's kerfuffle
 

comments in the blog thankfully negate much of the nonsense spouted in the blog.

Re: Corbyn's kerfuffle
 

I thought it was common knowledge that the missiles themselves are leased from the United States?

Given the navigation system on the missiles is entirely self-contained and programmed locally, not remotely, and we produce the warheads including their self-contained inertial guidance system at Aldermaston what kind of dependence did you have in mind beyond that the US supply us the launch vehicles?

Were they to withdraw their co-operation we would produce our own, however as it stands I know of no evidence to suggest that we cannot independently target and launch SLBMs.

Re: Corbyn's kerfuffle
 

Common knowledge amongst anyone who could be bothered to look, I'd bet the vast, vast majority thought our independent deterrent was entirely British though. In one or two ways it is entirely British, in that we cozy up to the world's only super power and do things on the cheap, what could go wrong with that policy

Re: Corbyn's kerfuffle
 

Sorry but that's sounding a bit desperate Daddy, seeing as everything bar the missile bodies itself is ours, not really 'one or two things' I'd have thought it wouldn't exactly be.. pardon the pun 'rocket science' to make our own, if need determined us too, in fact just down the road from me we have Roxel who are particularly good at rocket motors.

I don't think it would be as catastrophic as you insinuate. Every major player in the World (yes us too) is fairly realistic and pragmatic about 'special relationships' in our case, seeing as we do all but the launch vehicle, I'd say we are not in a bad position.

Re: Corbyn's kerfuffle
 

The bit that jumped of the page for me was the trident replacement white paper 2006 'the Pentagon has the UK hog tied, over a barrel but that's cheaper than a fully independent deterrent. It could be that guys full of it and that paper or that part of it never even existed but if it did realism and pragmatism can shove right of imo

Re: Corbyn's kerfuffle
 

Are we not forgetting that one of Corbyn's motives for unilateral nuclear disarmament is to restart the global process of disarmament?

At the point of the break up of the USSR, initiated under Reagan and Gorbachev, we had a wonderful opportunity to pursue disarmament apace. Gorbachev was whole-heartedly for getting rid of nuclear weapons altogether. Unfortunately we blew it. Subsequent western leaders acted in a triumphalist way, accepted ex-USSR states into NATO and / or the EU thus rubbing Russian noses in it. Gorbachev's agenda was shuffled away with the likes of Putin, determined as he is to restore Russian pride. Any chance of ridding the 3 superpowers of nuclear weapons was gone. Thanks for that NATO! Thanks for protecting us!

Folk here have raised the issue of the nuclear threat of small rogue nations like Korea and Pakistan. These remain a non-existent threat to us whilst they do not have long range delivery system. With nuclear weapons gone from the hands of Russia, China and NATO we could have jointly exerted moral, economic and, if necessary, military pressure on those states, ie. taking out their missile systems and warhead production with overwhelming conventional power.

We have managed to persuade Iran not to pursue a nuclear weapons programme largely only with economic pressure and even without us being able to negotiate from the moral high ground. The military option was clearly there, but was, as far as we know, unspoken in negotiation. So, let us not worry about small nation nuclear threats.

How about Russia and China then? Clearly, they could wipe us off the face of the earth in minutes. What damage could we do them, without the USA? Given their anti-missile systems could easily take out our 160 operational nuclear warheads I don't actually think trident, on its own, would stop them attacking us with a first nuclear strike. (Each submarine is armed with up to 16 Trident II missiles, each carrying warheads in up to eight MIRV re-entry vehicles.) The real deterrent is the USA, with 1900 operational warheads and 4500 in total. So what is the point of having our own nuclear weapons? We could never go it alone, so why have them?

Just picture the situation. Russia threatens to attack us with conventional weapons as part of an invasion force. (Can't think of a more likely reason.) We threaten with a nuclear strike to stop that, because our conventional forces are so puny we have nothing else to willy wave with. They say, "So what?" We call Washington. If we are lucky, the USA waves their bigger willy. Russians back off!

Returning to Corbyn's notion of nuclear powered submarines with conventional weapons, this is not such a mad idea given that Corbyn is not a total pacifist and recognizes that we must defend our homeland and other assets in a dangerous world. ( He is only a pacifist in that he is determined to settle disputes using diplomacy and the UN to their absolute limit. He knows that violence begets violence. ) We already have nuclear-powered hunter killer subs in service, being built and under commission. Converting and maintaining our nuclear ballistic missile launchers to conventional warheads or cruise missiles would keep our workers in employment whilst beefing up our conventional power.

BTW. Sentiment against the use of nuclear weapons isn't a wholly 'lefty' notion. In a 2005 Mori poll people were asked "Would you approve or disapprove of the UK using nuclear weapons against a country we are at war with?". 9% approved if that country did not have nuclear weapons, and 84% disapproved. 16% approved if that country had nuclear weapons but never used them, and 72% disapproved. 53% approved if that country used nuclear weapons against the UK, and 37% disapproved. So it seems that the only time most people would want to fire nuclear weapons is if we have already been attacked by nuclear weapons. I guess that by then they figured that the human race would be doomed so we might as well do a good job of it!

Re: Corbyn's kerfuffle
 

I find it difficult to believe that after so many years relying on the US to provide the delivery vehicle, the UK would have retained the highly specialised expertise when there was no ongoing requirement.

However, it has been pointed out that we cannot rely on the US:

Also, didn't the US force the Trident programme on the UK when they decided, unilaterally, to wind up the Polaris programme?

I think the bottom line is Trident relies on the cooperation of the US whether we like it or not and it would be disingenuous to claim otherwise.

Re: Corbyn's kerfuffle
 

Moscow criterion.

No ABM system that we're aware of could handle our warheads, decoys and other penetration mechanisms.

It has never taken many warheads in the grand scheme to wipe us off the face of the planet. We have more nuclear targets per square mile than any other nation in the world.

At the height of the cold war Russia was believed to have hundreds of high yield weapons aimed at the UK, with upwards of half a gigaton of total yield.

Killing basically every man, woman and child in the UK would've required ~15% of the Soviet arsenal.

It would be illegal for us to ramp our nuclear weaponry back up - we have been multilaterally disarming for years, so the Moscow Criterion or similar are what we have.

---------- Post added at 21:23 ---------- Previous post was at 21:19 ----------

We have the delivery vehicles in our possession, and since we received them we have been trading missiles with the US for refurbishment, borrowing from one another's stockpiles.

They didn't force Trident on us, the decision was made to lease Trident when Polaris was obsoleted.

We definitely have the technology to make our own launch vehicles. Aside from our known expertise in propulsion, guidance (we were to supply computer cores for a certain major US space project), etc, you seriously think we haven't had a really close look at Trident? ;)

---------- Post added at 21:26 ---------- Previous post was at 21:23 ----------

Thanks for that. Indicates that if the UK wanted / needed to we could produce a fully independent deterrent, but choose for cost reasons to lease Trident from the USA.

Of course Lockheed Martin are making money from it. Military industrial complex...

Re: Corbyn's kerfuffle
 

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2016...n_9041776.html

Re: Corbyn's kerfuffle
 

Re: Corbyn's kerfuffle
 

We got Labours message: Unelectable on so many fronts and now even more so.