The nuclear warning symbol on the door is rusted away. There is still an electrical contact on the handle, even after all these years. Once it would have sent a message to the control room telling them it was open. But there is no one in the control room anymore, or anywhere else in this facility.
Behind the door is a tiny room with a hole in the floor, which, decades ago, housed part of Britain’s nuclear deterrent. Now these outposts are maintained as faded military monuments in an industrial estate in Norfolk.
Britain didn’t change its mind about nuclear weapons, but it did about the delivery system. In the early 1960s the nuclear bombs in outposts like this were superseded by missiles. There was no function for these strange, ominous little rooms anymore and the site fell into disrepair.
They represent the perils of military commissioning – you have to make decisions today on weapons you hope you will still be using in 30 years’ time.
Later this month there will be a vote in parliament on whether to replace Trident, but the new system will not enter service until 2028. It could easily become the modern equivalent of these rusted bomb rooms.
There are people whose job it is to imagine these future wars of the 2030s and work out if Trident is really a solution to them. One of them is Malcolm Chalmers, deputy director-general of the Royal United Services Institute. He has to imagine how a conflict with Russia could trigger World War Three.
One day, the Russian president would warn that a particular city – maybe London or Berlin – is a potential target. The chaos would be instant. Millions would flee, bringing the country to a standstill.
It would start in the Baltic states, or perhaps Belarus or Moldova. Vladimir Putin or his successor would launch an act of aggression – less to retake the country than to humiliate Nato. But Nato’s response might be more vigorous than he anticipated.
“Russia has an initial advantage because it’s in its own neighbourhood,” Chalmers says. “It has significant conventional superiority. But within weeks the Americans would gain the advantage as they brought their airpower to bear, along with the German and British army.”
The crucial point would come when fighting spills into Russian territory. At first, Nato would take a hands-off approach, but once American casualties were reported due to artillery launched from Russian territory, all bets would be off. If that happens, the stakes would change. “The Russians have always been clear,” Chalmers says. “One of the roles of their nuclear force is de-escalation.” In practice, that means you use nukes to limit your losses.
Slowly, a nuclear shadow would fall over events. Before they even used them, Russia could cause havoc by just alluding to the idea they might. One day, the Russian president would warn that a particular city – maybe London or Berlin – is a potential target. The chaos would be instant. Millions would flee, bringing the country to a standstill.
“It’s not Russia being crazy,” Chalmers says. “It’s Russia using that threat to make Western leaders limit their objectives and negotiate a peace settlement more on Russia’s terms.”
But if that did not work and Russia decided it was facing an existential threat, the apocalypse poker game would begin. This is where Trident comes into play. Russia would be wary of attacking a nuclear-armed state because of the likelihood of retaliation. It would be much smarter to target somewhere like Italy or Poland. Maybe Britain and the US would respond in kind on their behalf. Maybe they would not. Either way, it would be a safer bet than targeting a nuclear weapon state.
Trident makes these kinds of conflicts safer for Britain. The country is already involved by its membership of Nato. Having a nuclear deterrent provides an additional layer of protection.
War in South Asia
But not all nuclear wars would feature Nato. Consider India and Pakistan, arguably the most likely site of a nuclear exchange. This scenario changes the risk calculations completely. It would probably begin with a series of terror attacks in India linked to the Pakistani state. India would then send in ground troops in retaliation.
This is more dangerous than it might appear, says David Lewin, deputy director of the Henry Jackson Society. “The Pakistanis are capable at the very low level and the very high level, but in the middle there’s nothing. They can send terrorists to blow up the Indian parliament, they can take a bit of border here or there. And at the very high level they have nuclear weapons. But in between they’re screwed. So if you retaliate with proper military operations, the Pakistanis can’t stand up to it. The next escalation they have is nuclear.”
India and Pakistan are connected to bigger players – India to the US and Pakistan to China, who are both likely to get involved. Suddenly you have nuclear-armed states acting as proxies for nuclear-armed superpowers.
Once you get into a nuclear scenario, so much changes. What seemed like a paranoid fantasy very quickly could become reality. The risk calculations change very sharply. People might well be prepared to roll the dice.
Not only that, but Pakistan has an unpredictable chain of command. They worry that the Americans would try to ‘decapitate’ their high command to remove the country’s nuclear capacity. To counter this, their war plans involve dispersing the authority to order a nuclear strike to more junior army posts. The order for first strike could come from anywhere.
“Once you get into a nuclear scenario, so much changes,” RUSI’s Chalmers says. “What seemed like a paranoid fantasy very quickly could become reality. The risk calculations change very sharply. People might well be prepared to roll the dice.”
The UK could easily be drawn in. Westminster would be under strong pressure from the American government, firstly to make declaratory statements and then to be involved militarily. The Americans know that if it ever got to the point of nuclear exchange, they would need Britain and France on side to make it look like a coalition decision, not a unilateral one.
Britain’s ability to refuse is limited. It prides itself on its special relationship with the US, and the two countries’ conjoined intelligence systems would be difficult to disentangle. But there is another level of pressure. The Americans can tell the British that if they will not help out, they will kill off the UK’s nuclear deterrent.
This is one of Trident’s dirty little secrets. While it is operationally independent, it is not industrially independent. Without US manufacturing support, the UK could barely maintain it to the end of the year.
“The missiles are made by [US arms firm] Lockheed Martin,” Dr Luc-André Brunet, deputy head of the Cold War Studies Project at the LSE, explains. “They’re maintained by the US Navy at the naval submarine base in Kings Bay, Georgia. The missiles are leased to us. The warheads are produced in the UK, but even they’re based on US designs.”
Battle ready: WOZ Johnston in the weapons room on HMS Vigilant, one of the UK’s fleet of four Vanguard class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines carrying the Trident nuclear missile system. Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
Britain’s reliance on the US gives it huge leverage to push the British government into at least making a declaratory statement at the start of hostilities, which would then start the slippery slope to participation. The UK would then automatically be included in the strike plans of Pakistan or China.
In this scenario, Trident is not a deterrent, but rather drags the UK into a conflict that it could otherwise have avoided.
How much?
There is another way in which Trident could potentially prove a threat to British security: price. It will cost the taxpayer anywhere between £23 billion and £100 billion. That price tag demands big savings in the rest of the defence budget, diminishing the military’s strength in non-nuclear conflicts.
It is far from inconceivable that the UK could become embroiled in another war in the Middle East. A major terrorist attack on British soil could trigger an intervention.
“It takes very little for terrorist attacks to change the political atmosphere completely,” Dr Reinoud Leenders, a Middle East expert at King’s War Studies department, says. “There’d be a call for greater British intervention in the region, just as there was in France following the Paris attacks.”
Maybe that posturing would be restricted to air support. But if the attack was severe enough and evidence emerged linking it to a specific training camp, it could lead to boots on the ground. Except this time the UK would not be able to take the back seat in a coalition. It would be front and centre, and its limitations would be laid bare.
“All we can really do is guard a port while the Americans deal with the problem,” major general Patrick Cordingley, the commander of the Desert Rats in first Gulf war, says.
“The thing which brings it home to me is that we couldn’t sort Basra out during the second Iraq war. Why? Because we didn’t have enough troops. The poor old generals out there kept asking for more reinforcements which didn’t come. We didn’t have enough. If we had a force of 60,000, which is probably the entire deployable British army, we could have sorted Basra out. But we didn’t.”
Localised conflicts between armed groups operating under a loose umbrella organisation – such as the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front – could drag in state actors, including the region’s major powers, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and maintain a second front by launching terror attacks on British streets to compliment military operations in theatre.
Military experts say that this kind of scenario demands a more flexible, nimble military which is able to respond to threats rapidly. The cost of Trident – which would be redundant in the event of such a complex threat at home and abroad – could slow or prevent the evolution of the armed forces.
Nuclear weapons are likely to still to be good at the things they’re good at. The question is: Are the things they’re good for becoming so irrelevant that spending this proportion of our defence budget on them becomes pointless?
Strategists are being asked to make decisions now about security threats decades into the future. It’s an impossible task.
“You can’t be certain what the world looks like 30 years out,” Dr James Strong, fellow in foreign policy analysis at the LSE, says. “It’s hard to predict anything at all five years out.”
“The insurance policy argument still holds. If you have nuclear weapons, you can deter a nuclear aggressor. Nuclear weapons are likely to still to be good at the things they’re good at. The question is: are the things they’re good for becoming so irrelevant that spending this proportion of our defence budget on them becomes pointless?
Main Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
