The Trident Gamble
Friday 10 July 2009 at 03:56 Planning for the Strategic Defence Review appears to have started. There is widespread acknowledgement that national security is going to be conducted under conditions of austerity.
The initial study, covering policy but not equipment, will be produced by early next year. It will then feed into a full review after the election. Getting even this rather mealy-mouthed approach agreed has been like getting blood out of a stone.
Throwing Trident Into The Pot
Both the military and the defence industry have been desperate for guidance, but these special interests have been stymied by a much more powerful one – the desperation of the New Labour elite to get itself elected.
At some stage between the next party conference and the early summer, Gordon Brown has to go before an extremely miffed electorate. He needs no bad news from now on, only good news. His mass death-dealing nuclear weapons system is grist to this mill.
The Government now wants the cover of the US-Russian arms limitation treaty to reduce the number of nuclear warheads deployed by the UK. This is grandstanding of a higher order.
This cover is needed because the UK must create the illusion that its arms cuts are a positive decision for world peace rather than present the grim reality that the country is weakened and cannot immediately afford the luxury of a large scale nuclear capability.
To get to this point though, the Prime Minister has had to raise his hand in the poker game by stating (at the G8 Summit) that there is no question of the UK unilaterally abandoning its 160-warhead Trident arsenal or the upgrade of its submarines.
The implicit offer is to throw these weapons into an American pot as a bargaining tool, which rather presupposes that the Americans want them there and that the Russians will accept the offer at face value.
It also presupposes that domestic circumstances will not force the Government’s hands before the December deadline set for the US-Russian strategic arms treaty.
The Odds Of Success
This is a fairly good gamble by a desperate player. There is every reason to believe that the US and the Russians will come to a bargain although the missile shield may cause a crisis that could lose the deal just as Start 2 and Start 3 were lost.
Brown could then announce a weapons reduction as part of a global peace initiative in the next Parliamentary Session as the first step in the electoral unification of the centre-left for a hard-fought election in the Spring against an increasingly unimpressive Tory Party.
We still consider the main problem for the Government to be the justification of Trident’s sheer cost in a country faced with possible mass unemployment and a degradation of public services.
The political class, however, seems to be far more interested in the wrong signal that it sends to the rest of the world about nuclear proliferation.
If the US and Russia are cutting back on arms and the Europeans expect states like Israel and Iran to denuclearise, then mid-sized powers like the UK and France should really be offering an example of withdrawal from WMDs rather than holding on to their expensive rights.
But the status that WMDs gives this declining state is not easy to abandon – the act of arms reduction, if mishandled, may not look noble at all, merely a confirmation of the weakness of the country both to foreign powers and to its own population.
Meanwhile, there is still no love lost between the British and the Russians. This is much more deep-seated than a conflict between State institutions. Both the Duma in Russia and the House of Commons have a tendency to rattle their cages.
The latest rattlings come from the British side where Parliamentarians (House of Commons Defence Committee) have asked the Government to get tough with unauthorised Russian military aircrafts' incursions into the airspace surrounding the UK.
This Anglo-Russian tension may be truly counter-productive for Brown’s ambitions. A Russian assessment may be that the opportunity for a fresh start with a realist bunch of Tories suspicious of the European Project is too good to miss.
Assisting Mr. Brown present himself as a global peacemaker may just not be good politics for Moscow. As so often, we shall have to wait on events …
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