Kamm on Huhne's Nukes

Jock — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 18:42:05 +0000

For some reason I have Oliver Kamm's blog in my daily reading list. I have no idea why - I don't like his style, his politics or his opinions most of the time, but today he has a go at Chris Huhne about that nuclear issue. He says, at the end, that he's "doubtful that the Lib Dem contenders have thought much about this issue beyond their internal party positioning, and I wouldn't trust them anywhere near this country's security policies."

I think that's just wrong. Kamm picks on one word in Huhne's article on Trident..."independent". He says that the Trident system is independent to us - that we bought it once and for all from the Yanks (and saved a whole load of money because we did buy existing technology from elsewhere) and could use it independently. I disagree - I think we are dependent on the Yanks for maintaining the missile system - only the launch platforms, our nuclear submarine fleet, are ours.

Now all of this is a slight side-show. At the moment I cannot conceive of a situation in which the UK might be tempted to initiate an independent, unilateral launch of ICBMs. But if we did, and it was over a cause the Yanks did not agree with us on, would we find that "our" missile system was truly independent? I don't know, but for me all this misses the basic point, and one that Kamm simply sweeps under the carpet. Chris wants, if we can't negotiate multilateral complete disarmament, a different system because the threats today are different. Kamm seems to suggest that buying a system for the next forty years makes such a question irrelevant - the old threats may have returned in that time so we'd be back to needing a system like Trident.

I assume here the question is whether we want submarine launched long-range Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile nukes. And this is where we diverge. The threat is different. We have the existing system for a particular type of threat - that of massed ranks of opposing missiles targeting our cities and mainland installations where it is a good thing that we have our missiles offshore and moving around, albeit slowly, so that in a Mutually Assured Destruction scenario we can still launch when all our land based facilities are reduced to radioactive rubble. The US can have land based Minuteman missiles because they're on the other side of the planet from what was the main threat - the Soviet Union - and can be sure to be able to fire a few off before the USSR's nukes reach them.

Neither are appropriate for the type of threats we now have. Far more useful to us would be the sort of thing the Greenham peace camp was meant to prevent - nuclear armed cruise type missiles that are far more flexible as to launch platform and scenario, so called tactical nukes. Personally I can't see again a reason why we would use such creatures either. Emerging nuclear states have to have two technological breakthroughs to produce weapons that might threaten us or ours - the nuclear warhead and the long range launch platform. We've seen how claims of Saddam's ability to reach Cyprus were found completely untrue, we know that even North Korea's missiles were far from stable. We're more likely to see terrorist launched nukes come in the shape of a suitcase - ground detonated by timer - which no nukes of our own are going to be able to counter.

I am a unilateralist - no doubt someone whom Mr Kamm thinks a lilly livered coward out of touch with the world and its threats. But even if we cannot persuade the rest of the world to get rid of nukes once and for all at the next round of talks, I think the better deterrence nowadays would be a truly independent, multi-platform, tactical device rather than ICBMs designed for a particular cold war scenario of roughly matched opponents and "push button warfare".

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Kamm on Huhne's Nukes