(F-35B - the most expensive way of getting half the bombload two-thirds the range of F-35C)
Those of you who read this regularly will know that the 2010 Strategic Defensive and Security Review (SDSR) made the sensible choice to replace the Joint Strike Fighter (F-35B) Short Take Off and Vertical Landing (STOVL) variant with the carrier variant for use on the UK's new aircraft carriers. At the time, SDSR said of this (very welcome) decision:
"The last government committed to carriers that would have been
unable to work properly with our closest military allies,"
and
"It will take time to rectify this error but we are
determined to do so. We will fit a catapult to the operational carrier
to enable it to fly a version of the JSF with a longer range and able to
carry more weapons. Crucially, that will allow our carrier to operate
in tandem with the US and French navies."
But as we pointed out in CentreForum's "Dropping the Bomb" paper last week, there is no reason to do this if you were prepared to cancel Trident. Here's the table from page 52:
(Shameless self promotion, I know... deal with it!)
Forgive my lack of posting - I've been totally consumed by getting CentreForum Trident paper finished. And now it is - you can get it here - and there's been lots of interesting media coverage. I'm deeply indebted to many people - the acknowledgements are there for a reason - but the one I most liked was from the UK communist Morning Star; only the comrades know the truth. (NB Irony Alert!) We also made the wonderful ArmsControlWonk - with thanks to Dr. Jeffrey Lewis.
(Ainsworth addresses the Commons
in December 2009 on defence cuts. He might have said
"I've done some sums, and they don't add up. But don't worry, I'm not
going to be here after the election to worry about that.")
Apologies
for the lack of postings from here at SRM HQ - I've been very busy and,
as they say, all will be revealed shortly. Thus, it is with apologies
that this follow up to part one has been delayed - but here we are now.
The
figures are stark: the UK MoD is broke, and despite the cuts from the
2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) that we've discussed here and here
before, there are reasonable grounds to assume that there are more cuts
to come. Indeed, whilst Liam Fox told Parliament on 18 July 2011 that
the defence budget was "broadly in balance", it must be assumed that "broadly in balance" actually means "not actually in balance, so more cuts are required".
But this is not news. Indeed, prior to the 2010 election, Labour belated recognized that they'd blown the budget. This was made powerfully clear in Bernard Gray's report, which famously described the budget as undeliverable under any likely future budget. This was demonstrated in his chart on p. 94:
(Not ever going to work)
Moreover, Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls has made clear that Labour will accept the Coalition's cuts, meaning that Jim Murphy and his team need to meet the same challenge as the Government - find £74bn over ten years to balance the defence budget. And that will mean a proper discussion of what the UK is going to do with it's place in the world, setting the Government's aspirations, and then providing the budget to cover them.
Under
normal circumstances, political U-turns are mocked by political
opponents and denied by the U-turnee. Occasionally, U-turns are
emblematic of a new leaf - classically, Labour's repudiation of Clause IV under Blair in 1994 - and last week we saw something unusual; a Labour shadow Minister in favour of spending cuts, and in particular, defence cuts. Step forward, Jim Murphy MP.
I'll
deal with the specifics of the proposed Labour cuts in a future post -
suffice to say, they are a long way from both a mea culpa for the damage
of the unfunded promises of the Labour 1997-2010 years, but they are a
start for Labour to make a credible economic policy.
But
in reviewing Labour's record, I thought it would be fun to look at how
long Labour's Secretaries of State for Defence were actually in office,
and compare that with their Tory predecessors under Margaret Thatcher
and John Major - ie, back to 1979. The point is that there is such a
steep learning curve as a Secretary of State - especially for those with little or no background
in defence - that the first six months or so Ministers will be learning
as much as doing, with being really effective from about six months in.
So how did they do?
Two
things are striking: first, Geoff Hoon's five-and-a-half years in
office was remarkably - and abnormally - long. It wasn't a complete
triumph, as Hoon presided over the mini Defence Review known as the "New
Chapter" to the 1998 SDSR post the terrorist attacks of 9/11 - and then
allowed the UK's forces to become completely over-stretched in Iraq and
Afghanistan, whilst presiding over the disastrous procurement
performance that would come to dominate the MoD's budget (and with it,
everything else.)
Second,
once you take Hoon out of the equation, Labour Defence Secretaries
served for an average of 65 weeks - suggesting that they may have had
about six months cognizant of the issues to drive the change required.
(John Reid is probably the honourable exception as he had a good defence
background in opposition, but he was still in post for only a year,
meaning that he wasn't about long enough to deliver change.) Worse, as
the budgets reached breaking point under Gordon Brown's premiership, he
was keeping his Defence Secretaries in place for about half the
historical average - as well in Bob Ainsworth having picked a singularly
unimpressive Secretary of State. More damningly, as Ainsworth was the only one who was promoted from inside MoD, he should have had the best handle on the Departmental challenges, but he was probably the poorest of the lot.
So what does this mean? Possibly not much, but it does point to
the comparative lack of importance and oversight that the two Labour
governments gave to ministerial stability after George Robertson got
sent off to run NATO. And that lack of consistent leadership from the
top bears much of the responsibility for the mess that MoD was in by the
2010 Election.
(Commas are important. And box two contains a chameleon; do keep up at the back.)
Grammar? Oh dear.
At the risk of dredging up bad memories for an entire generation, (myself included), I'm sorry to confirm that our 4th-grade teachers were correct: grammar matters. And it is especially important to lawyers when it comes to interpreting legislation and Treaties. For international law, the sacred text in interpreting treaties is itself a Treaty - the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) which came into force in 1980.
"Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control."
This is a very long sentence. With a single comma.
It could be interpreted in a couple of ways:
First, it could mean that State Parties are are obliged to
pursue good faith negotiations on ceasing the nuclear arms race, and
nuclear disarmament as well as pursing a treaty on general disarmament under strict and effective international controls.
Second, it could mean that the State Parties are obliged to pursue good faith negotiations on ceasing the nuclear arms race, and nuclear disarmament within the context of a treaty on general disarmament under strict and effective international controls;
Grammatically, the first interpretation makes more sense than the second, because the comma separates the first clause
"negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to
cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear
disarmament,"
from the second
"and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control"
making it clear that the two are separate notions.
This construction would mean that the Nuclear Weapons States (NWS) were obliged to disarm independent of a treaty on general disarmament. Under this understanding, it would hard to argue that spending £30bn - £100bn between now and 2042 on a replacement for Trident would qualify as "nuclear disarmament", and that as such, such a purchase would be in direct contravention to the UK's international obligations, and would therefore be illegal as a matter of British law.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the UK Government favours the second interpretation, tying as it does nuclear disarmament to a future treaty on "general and complete disarmament". As this happy state of affairs is yet to occur (CCW, CWC and BWC notwithstanding) - and the use of the modifier "complete" sets the bar extremely high - so the logic goes, there is no requirement for nuclear disarmament, however desirable this may be. Conveniently, the second formulation does not make it illegal to procure a replacement to the existing UK Trident SLBM system.
(Minimum deterrence looks a lot like maximum deterrence but with fewer missiles.)
But what's interesting is that over the last decade or so, UK Governments have clung to their tortuous grammatical interpretation whilst publicly demonstrating that the UK is making reductions in its nuclear forces (even as they spend £1bn per annum to reinvigorate the AWE Aldermaston nuclear weapons design and production infrastructure). This appears to be an odd halfway house, as it attempts to demonstrate that the UK is moving towards nuclear disarmament whilst retaining what Whitehall describes as a "minimum credible deterrent".* Moreover, to scrub up its disarmament credentials, the UK draws attention
to its ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), and
the fact that irrespective of the stalled Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty
(FMCT), the UK is no longer producing fissile material for military
purposes.**
Indeed, the UK Foreign Office goes so far as to describe the impact of the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) thus:
"In this Review the Prime Minister, David Cameron, and Deputy Prime
Minister, Nick Clegg, committed the UK to maintaining a credible
deterrence by:
reducing the number of warheads onboard each submarine from 48 to 40
reducing our requirement for operationally available warheads from fewer than 160 to no more than 120
reducing our overall nuclear weapon stockpile to no more than 180
reducing the number of operational missiles on each submarine
These reductions illustrate that whilst the UK believes in
maintaining a minimum credible deterrent this is kept constantly under
review and is fully in line with our international obligations under the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty."
But it is onlyin line with the UK's "international obligations under the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty" if the second, grammatically tortuous, interpretation of NPT Art VI is accepted.
So who is right? And does it matter?
On which interpretation is correct, I'm not sure yet. But it certainly matters, as if the first interpretation is correct, then the UK Government could find themselves explaining a breach of their international obligations. Against this backdrop, I'm very much looking forward to reading Daniel Joyner's new book, especially after some of the critical reviews. I'll write again when I've read it and reflected.
* As mentioned before this blog does not accept the bald assertion that the UK Trident system currently deters anyone or anything, and therefore doesn't use the term.
** The cynics may observe that it's easy to be in favour of a narrow FMCT if you've got all the highly enriched nuclear fuel that you would ever need on hand, especially if it is already outside of IAEA safeguards.
(Hunter PR 11*. Like MoD PR 11 but much more elegant...)
Planning Round 11 - PR11
I accept that it's boring bureaucracy, but process is vital in Government, and never more so than when dealing with budgets and finance. What's critical to remember is that the settlement reached in a Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) / Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) is in a very meaningful sense Churchill's "End of the Beginning", rather that an end in itself: all that has been agreed at this point is the budget "envelope" within which the Department will have to operate for the length of the budget deal.
What then happens is the process of converting the CSR / SDSR settlement into something that actually can (at least theoretically) be implemented by the MoD. This is a critical, and often under-rated / misunderstood step - many a drip slip betwixt cup and lip and all of that. It is also where the painful decisions become crystallised - where the metaphorical rubber really does hit the road.
In the MoD a key part of this process is known by the catchy title of "Planning Round XX". This process costs lots of options, prioritises them, chooses which elements to fund and which cuts to make to make the proverbial quart fit into a pint pot, and ultimately spits out an answer that is the operational annual budget of the MoD; the work for next year is PR 11.
What was done?
The first pass results were announced by Liam Fox on 18 July 2011. As Chalmers points out, this is effectively another Defence Review less than a year after the SDSR was completed, underlining that the SDSR did not resolve the funding dilemma - and was therefore unimplementable. It is hard to imagine a more damning indictment of a review of SDSR's scale and ambition.
Some good news came in July - there was a planning commitment that the MoD equipment procurement and equipment support budgets would increase 1% in real terms from 2014/15. Of course, this is an attempt to bind a future spending review - and indeed a future Parliament in a way that A. V. Dicey et al would decry as unconstitutional interference with Parliamentary Sovereignty - which may or may not work; not the least reason is that if the economy doesn't turn around the pressure on the post-Afghanistan MoD budget will all be one direction.
In return for jam tomorrow, MoD has agreed to make what Chalmers calls "further difficult decisions on capability reductions, notably in Army personnel numbers." Specifically, this means bringing the Army down to 84,000 by 2020, a figure that was bandied about in the SDSR process. But the problem is that what these reductions are to be hasn't been announced, which implies that it hasn't - or at least the phasing and the force mix - hasn't been agreed. The answer to maintaining capability by cutting numbers is to shift to (cheaper) reservists from (expensive) regulars, with £1.5bn over the next decade to fund this. What impact £150m p.a. will have is not yet clear.
UK Future CapabilitiesPit Falls Overspends
(Type 26 Global Cocktail Party Platform Combat Ship)
(F-35C Lightning II - shiney, American, over-budget, late)
(RN Trident II-D5 SLBM Launch. No, you don't get to see the "cool" submarine thing.)
The most obvious risks in a strategic steady state - ie, without any new unplanned for threats or wars - are the three biggest ticket items - replacement submarines for Trident, F-35 Lightning II strike fighters for the FAA and the RAF, and the future frigate, Type 26.
Trident is perhaps the easiest to discuss because it is so binary as a programme - it is largely independent of the rest of the MoD force structure in that though it has supporting assets, at a pretty profound level you either do Trident or you don't. And therefore you can consider the £30 - £100bn bill with a degree of isolation from the rest of the budget. It is also a significant technical risk given that it is a new UK submarine design, as with the unfortunately named "Astute" class, this is an area of significant weakness in the UK defence manufacturing base.
(All of this for 20 sorties a day? Really? Really?!)
F-35C is connected to other programmes, most obviously the carrier. It is also different in that the UK is a bit part player in the US programme, and the US will make F-35 work for the USAF and the USN, because without it, their qualitative edge over "near peer" adversaries will erode. The cost, however, is vast, and initial (optimistic) UK procurement figures of 132-150 F-35s simply will not happen as the unit cost seems destined to be around the £100m mark. At that price, 60 airframes - or enough for just four 12 aircraft squadrons plus a training flight - is a £6bn+ programme - similar to the aircraft carriers.
It is easy to see why Chalmers cites an MoD decision to routinely deploy the UK carrier with only 12 aircraft (versus the 36 originally intended). Unfortunately, 12 aircraft the work of 36 cannot do, and the MoD has scaled back the sortie-generation requirement of the carriers from 72/day to 20. 20?! Given that the cost spiral and delayed service entry date for the F-35C was known and knowable in 2010, it is hard to understand how the carrier programme could have made prioritisation sense if it is only expected to produce 20 sorties per day. Charitably, all that can be assumed is that the planners were planning on having more than four squadrons of F-35C in total, making it more likely that the FAA could have 36 aircraft and crews trained and deployable. Except that if there are only four 12 aircraft squadrons in toto, this is not going to happen. From this, it is hard to understand why the UK is pursuing the carrier programme at all.
(Type 45: Stalin's maxim that "Quantity has a Quality all its own" doesn't work in reverse...)
Type 26 is much easier to argue for and against. The UK needs a new frigate. It is not clear that the UK needs to go to the trouble of developing one for what will never (sadly) be more than 20 hulls, and may well end up being half of that. Given that the Canadians are not interested in a collaborative programme, the Brazilians may buy one and then build their own, and there is lots of competition, it would surely make more sense for the UK to buy off the shelf from Europe (FREMM, Lafayette or F124 would do nicely). And before anyone shouts "HORIZON was a disaster", if we had proceeded with it, the RN should have been able to afford 9 or 10 instead of the 6 Type 45s they're going to operate at £1bn each.
Tough choices. But they need to be made if the UK is going to get maximum value for money from the small defence budget: MoD is not there to create or sustain jobs for BAES.
So, with the greatest respect to Malcolm Chalmers, it is hard to see how he can conclude that, "the MoD now appears to be well on the way to closing its £74 billion funding gap" until the cuts are detailed and the numbers and the underlying assumptions can be independently verified (as the NAO is now empowered to do.) Let's see how they get on, but I'm a long way from convinced.
* Ok pedants, I know the RN used the Hunter PR 11s as trainers and not operationally, and that therefore they should probably been designated T(PR) Mk. 11 - or indeed T(PR) Mk. 12 as they were based on Hunter F Mk. 4 airframes, not the FGA Mk. 9 that begot the RN's GA Mk. 11. If this is a burning concern, I suggest you complain retrospectively to the Chief of Staff (Aviation and Carriers) and Rear Admiral Fleet Air Arm, as he's presumably less busy than he was, given the scrapping of the Harriers and the Carriers...
(Ministry of Deficits? Not quite an anagram, but there you are...)
Prof. Malcolm Chalmers of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI, MoD's favourite thinktank) published a new paper this week on UK Defence spending, and it makes interesting reading. In this post, we'll look at what was said about the numbers and the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR); in the next one, we'll look at implementation through Planning Round 2011 (PR11).
Labour's Legacy
The first (and most important) point is that the the out-going Brown Administration left the MoD in a terrible positon. Depending on how you ask the question, the scale of the 10-year budget shortfall between 2010-11 and 2020-21 was either £27bn (a difficult £2.7bn p.a. - or roughly 8% of the MoD's baseline budget) if you allowed for 1.1% real growth, or a terrifying £51bn (an impossible £5.1bn p.a. or more than 14% of the annual budget) if the budget had been maintained at 2010-11 in real terms. And these were estimates which assumed that this programmes in the budget would (for the first time) run on time and to budget. (Ah. Ish?)
(Bob Ainsworth MP, Labour's last Defence Secretary - "ineffective" might be the politest word.)
In fact, despite Labour's recent attacks on the Government over the cuts, for Labour to close this funding gap, spending would have had to increase at at least 2.2% per annum for the next decade. Ignoring austerity and the fiscal realities that go with this, this is a level of increase unknown since 1985, and more than twice the 1.1% growth that they actually invested over the course of their 13 years in power. As Chalmers notes,
"... as a result, the MoD found it increasingly difficult to fit an ambitious forward programme within a much less ambitious – albeit still slowly growing – budget."
Indeed. Worse, Labour in general and Bob Ainsworth in particular made a number of pledges to purchase equipment late in the Brown Administration that sounded good - e.g. another 22 Chinook helicopters - when they must have known that there was no money to pay for them. This was either breathtakingly cynical politics of the worst kind, (with the results measured in the dead and maimed), or it demonstrated a criminally complete lack of knowledge, competence, control and responsibility. Either should have been a resigning - or sacking - matter.
So not only should Labour apologise for their past record, they should also probably shut up about the whole thing for a decent period, until they've actually got a grip on the big questions (e.g. UK's role in the world, Trident, funding this defence business).
May 2010 - A new dawn. (Or at least a Defence Review)
(We're on the same side. Honest.)
SDSR was the long overdue defence review that built on the hodgepodge of the period since the 1998 Strategic Defence Review (SDR 98) and 2002's New Chapter. And the £51bn hole in the budget over the next decade needed to be addressed at a time of an unprecedented fiscal squeeze. Enter Liam Fox, stage right.
But austerity isn't fun, as the current Government is finding out. Liam Fox successfully fought for a smaller cut than the Treasury wanted, but was only partially successful. Defence did do comparatively well - it had an 8.5% real terms cut by 2014-15 rather than the 10-15% that most external observers were expecting; at some level this is a comparative triumph. However, this was on top of the £51bn that MoD was already in hole over the next decde, and led to two problems.
First, due to the 8.5% cut that the MoD received in the austerity budget of the 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review, the 10-year deficit increased to an eye-watering £74bn.
Second, the Treasury (very sensibly, in my view) got the funding of Trident replacement back into the defence budget, rather than being a freebie provided by the Treasury. This added between £25bn and £50bn to the Departmental deficit through to 2030 - and as the majority of these costs come after 2020-21, they are not included in the £74bn figure. It can be inferred that HMT was trying to achieve two things - first, not to pay for it, and second to make Trident compete against other defence priorities. The first worked beautifully, but the second failed, as Liam Fox moved Trident into the untouchable box, significantly decreasing the flexibility of the overall budge - by at least £7bn over the years to 2020.
Clearly something had to give. Actually, quite a lot of somethings had to give; here's a flavour.
(Nimrod MRA4: all 11 scrapped to save £200m p.a. after spending £4bn. Would have been quite useful, too.)
(Type 22/3 frigate HMS CUMBERLAND - first UK ship to Libya, scrapped on return.* The other three 22/3s went too, taking the surface fleet to 19 FF/DD - compared to 35 in 1998, and 65 in 1982's Falklands War.)
(Harrier GR9 - more mourned by RN rather than RAF, as it ended UK carrier ops until 2022(ish). (Maybe).)
(CVS HMS ARK ROYAL - scrapped, along with her jets.)
(Sentinel R1 - brand new, now permanently deployed to Afghanistan, to be scrapped in 2015)
The eagle-eyed amongst you will note that there is not heavy on land forces - the Army and Royal Marines were largely left alone until after the withdrawal from Afghanistan that has been pencilled in for 2014. This will move the subsequent pain for them until the defence review after the 2015 election. And this ignore the 40,000 MoD civil servants and 22,000 servicemen and women who will lose their jobs in the next three years, along with a slew of new programmes.
(Truth is stranger than fiction...)
SDSR Process
So how did this happen? And why were such apparently random choices made, such that the RN will have one and a spare aircraft carrier, (with no aircraft - cunning, huh?), and the RAF has so many PFI-funding air refuelling tankers that they will have nearly two per fast-jet squadron? Some of the answer will be in the process.
It was long suspected, but Chalmers' paper is the first time that I've seen it (semi-officially) confirmed that the MoD was deeply engaged in Op OSTRICH, ignoring the HM Treasury's (HMT) request that all Departments study the impact of 10% and 20% cuts in their budgets. Until the last three weeks of the Review, MoD appears to have had a single case of 3% cut, and MoD
"believed – or at least hoped – that the Treasury was bluffing, and presented no detailed plan for how to make steeper reductions."**
Ah. Taking on HMT in a game of chicken is always a cunning plan. They will blink! Until they don't. Oh. The effect was predictable... Chalmers again:
"... [this] had the effect of increasing total ten-year required savings by £17 billion. This not only required much deeper savings in 2013/14 and 2014/15, a challenge which the MoD has still not fully been able to meet. As importantly, it reduced the baseline for spending levels for the rest of the decade."***
The MoD may cry foul and grumble about mixed political messages, but the reality is that probably didn't believe things could get this bad, and the culture in the MoD meant that the level of prioritisation that would've been required simply didn't exist, as the subsequent Levene Review into Defence management found. This set the stage for the final stages of the SDSR debacle.
(They have to agree as well, you know....)
SDSR Endgame
Chalmers recounts the MoD's long term plan to meet the Treasury's numbers was intertwined with the repatriation of the Army units from Germany. This would've seen the Army reduced by 20,000 to 82,000 by 2020 primarily by withdrawing from Germany without replacing those numbers - the point being that building a significantly increased infrastructure for the returning Army units would have been prohibitively expensive, which is the primary reason that it hasn't happened since the end of the Cold War. An elegant administrative solution.
Except that Number 10 didn't buy it.
Essentially, No 10 wouldn't go for cuts in the Army whilst there was a war on in Afghanistan. In fact, there were some cuts - 7% of the Army's regular strength to 95,000 by 2015 - but the weight of the cuts went on the RN (14% personnel cuts) and the RAF (17%). It was also in this end game that Nimrod / LRMPA and Carrier Strike (HMS ARK ROYAL and the Harrier GR9s) were binned without replacement. There is reportage that this was all a last minute fix to save the Tornado GR4 strike aircraft instead of the Harrier GR9s achieved by an RAF end-run, but even if true, in operational terms it was probably the correct decision.
All that was left was for the senior leadership to trumpet the strategic nature of the SDSR. But the façade cracked under the internal contradictions - aircraft carrier minus aircraft, doing the same or more with less.
The bigger problem was that all of this pain still didn't close the £74bn gap. This would be the job of PR11, of which more shortly.
*I'm told it is possible to take a phot of a ship without it wiggling about at high speed, but as I was repeatedly told, (as your author is a slow learner) "Tobbes, what's the point of that?"
(A good book. In fact, a great book - go read it.)
In part one and two of these random musings (do they qualify for capital R and capital M at this point? I leave that to you, dear reader...) we looked at the history and the future choices for the UK nuclear weapons. Now, enough of my quasi-academic pontification: what would I actually *do* if I were in charge? And Why?
The first point is that though the world is an unstable place with active proliferation attempts by non-nuclear States that are not UK or western-aligned, it is not clear that the Irans or North Koreas of this world have either the capability or intent to attack the UK with a nuclear armed missile, nor is it clear that they are not deterred by the US nuclear guarantee to NATO.
Really? What surely they're all crazy mullahs / mad Stalinists?
Well, let's assume that Iran successfully builds a nuclear weapon, and successfully integrates it with one of their current missile systems - e.g. Shahab-3 or the Ghadr-110, and then moved these missiles up to NW Iran, could they even hit the UK?
Courtesy of Great Circle Mapper (hours of fun!), here's the range of the 1200nm Shahab-3 (Meteor-3) from Tabriz:
And here's the 3,000km range of the Ghadhr-110:
As you can see, neither can hit the UK, though if they were accurate enough, they could hit Cyprus with the UK's Sovereign Base Areas. I've no idea of the Circular Error Probable over the 780nm from Tabriz to Akrotiri - but given that the Iranian attacks on Baghdad (and vice-versa) during the "War of the Cities" was not notably precise (not surprising as the SS-1 SCUD derivatives used - themselves derived from Hitler's WWII V-2 rockets - are prone to wander off by themselves), it is asking a lot of Iranian missile design to be able to develop a precision strike capability to hit Akrotiri today. As range increase, accuracy falls away sharply, so I would predict that hitting Rome with a Ghadhr-110 will be something of a crapshoot from Tabriz.
Of course, it is likely that given time, money and imported technology from wherever, the Iranians could produce a longer range missile. And according to Wikileaked US State Department cables, Iran has some 19 North Korean BM-25 Musudan missiles, with a range of 4,000km / 2,485 miles. Fired from Tabriz, BM-25 could, theoretically hit Heathrow 2,424 miles away.
(And no, this blog is not advocating urban regeneration of Hounslow and Feltham by Iranian missiles irrespective of how desirable such regeneration may be.)
All of which assumes that the Iranians and North Koreans would want to.
And that's the crux: If Iran had the capability, and was able to prepare and launch a BM-25 with a nuclear warhead against London, and did so, then Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty - all of that armed attack on one is an attack on all business - would presumably be invoked, and Iran would suffer a devastating US nuclear counter-attack.
So: one element of the rationale facing the UK in the £100bn like-for-like replacement of CASD by new SSBNs and Trident is that there may be some Iranian or other nutters who decide on national self-destruction, or who are going to nuke the UK and don't expect the US to shoot back. I would posit that the likelihood that the Iranians decided not to nuke London based on the UK SSBNs is in fact vanishingly small, as the Iranian and North Koreans are - just like the Soviets in the Cold War - focussed on the survival of the regime above all else. (So was Hosni Mubarak. Oops.) But nothing is going to overthrow the regime more surely than lobbing nuclear weapons on rockets at western cities - therefore, it isn't going to happen.
"Ah", I hear the realists cry "But these people are millenarian nutters for who death is not a problem." And thus they aren't rational.
Perhaps.
(V. I. Lenin. Old-skool millenarian nutter. Innit?)
There are two responses to this: first, that the Soviets were ostensibly (and officially) millenarian nutters who wanted to change the world, but yet they were deterred, largely by America's nuclear arsenal. Secondly, if these millenarian nutters are actually not rational, then presumably they can't be deterred, so the UK SSBNs are useless anyway. This second argument obviously also applies to the nightmare scenario of Al Qaeda getting its hand on a nuclear device - because they can't be deterred and they don't have any territory to nuke anyway.
Which leaves proponents of CASD replacement saying something like, "Well yes, but we might need it, and in any event we're a great power and need the accoutrements of Great Powerdom, like nuclear weapons." Which, all you astute readers out there will have noticed, is precisely the circular argument that this debate started with in 1946.
So actually neither argument supports the idea of replacing Trident with CASD. Hooray, we've just saved £100bn.
Or have we?
I think we probably have. My personal position is that there is no obvious, credible threat - threat comprising of technical capacity and intent - to the UK posed by nuclear weapons. Further, the £100bn - and the £20 - 30bn of capital costs over the next decade to replace the existing SSBNs - will totally distort an already badly stretched (read: broke) UK defence budget, and to go ahead with the SSBN replacement will mean that other, useful - and in some cases critical - capabilities will have to be cut to fund it. This is madness.
(WE177 - small. Large bang, however. Make sure you mean it before you let it off; unintentional detonations probably best avoided, and are likely to create lots of paperwork. Paperwork like this is always bad.)
So my solution?
Scrap Trident - indeed, bring the existing SSBNs in now and stand down CASD, saving the current operating costs. Retain the nuclear engineering knowhow and bomb-making capability at Aldermaston and Burghfield to provide technical expertise in disarmament and nuclear verification, and in extremis, the ability for the UK to fabricate an air-dropped nuclear weapon in 12-24 months - after all, the WE177 plans presumably still exist, and if requried, fabricating new weapons should only be an engineering task. In other words, the UK would assume a position similar to that of Japan - no weapons, but a clear technical breakout capability if required.
And this would also mark a coherent step towards nuclear disarmament, making the UK the first Permanent Member of the UN Security Council to give up deployed nuclear weapons.
Well, here we are. I started this blog back in 2008, and never did anything with it - and when I did think about doing something with it, I was constrained by work.
So, in the spirit of fresh starts, here's a new blog.
What do I want to cover? Well, it's going to reflect public policy issues and international law, and we'll start with an analysis of the ICJ Kosovo decision over the weekend, and then move onto an assessment of the UK's options in the on-going Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR).
I don't really have any idea whether anyone will read these musings, but if you've got this far, thank-you, and I hope to turn it into a place for conversation.
