You all forget the UK's biggest conventional deterant, Submarine launched TLAM. We can hit any land mass in the world, we never had that capability before.
The political pressure having 1 or more Nuclear boats sat of a foreign coast is massive. Look what Conquerer did in the Falkland and that was without any land strike capability.
Stick a T boat of the Argie coast with 30 TLAM and watch them back right off. Same with other potential problem states.
I hate seeing our war fighting capability being measure only in our surface fleet which is redundant in the modern theatre. The Ark should have gone years ago i am glad they have finally seen sense and thank god they are not scrapping the Astute project.
And yes i was a sun dodger and probably highly biased
