UK's nuclear future: Beyond Trident

Vanguard-class SSBN - one of the UK's four current SSBNs

Part 2 of 3

In which we look at the options..


Current Position

Today, somewhere at sea, one of four Royal Navy Vanguard class nuclear powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs in Navy-speak) is currently busy avoiding detection, carrying 48 warheads on 12 Trident II D-5 SLBMs. Having at least one UK SSBN at sea ready to fire has been maintained since 1968, so-called Continuous At-Sea Deterrence (CASD), a very proud record for the RN. Indeed, mathematically the RN required 5 SSBNs to achieve CASD, so achieving this with four SSBNs for more than 40 years is from a technical and operational perspective very commendable - well done them.

The British submarine's 48 warheads are independently targetable, which makes an SSBNs nuclear payload both highly survivable and enormously destructive. As detailed in SDSR, the UK's warhead stockpile will decline from 225 warheads today to no more than 180 by mid-2020s, and the total number deployed at any one time will decline to 40 warheads on 8 missiles. The UK claims that this is in line with the UK's commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT).

The Vanguard class entered service in the early 1990s, and were designed for a 25-year life. Given a nine-year life extension programme as currently anticipated, the submarines will need replacement from 2028. Building nuclear submarines is a complicated business, meaning that the UK needs to make a decision no later than late 2015; helpfully, this is immediately after the next election (May 2015), which allows the Conservative Lib-Dem coalition to avoid a divisive decision on the future of the UK nuclear weapons programme; the Tories want a like-for-like replacement of Trident, and the Lib-Dems do not, but what the Lib-Dems do advocate is not entirely clear. Some, like the out-going Labour Government want to reduce the SSBN fleet to 3, making CASD probably impossible to maintain, others favour a cheaper cruise missile on existing attack submarines (SSNs) or aircraft, and yet others advocate getting out of the nuclear weapons game altogether. I'll use the NAO's 2008 Trident Replacement study and the House of Commons library's papers for the policy and the numbers.

What, then, are the UK's options? Fear not, we'll return to the UK's needs in part 3.

UK Options
Ignoring impossibly expensive options, like building a full nuclear triad of land and submarine based missiles and manned bombers, there are five main options. First, like-for-like replacement of Trident, maintaining CASD. Second, limited Trident replacement not including CASD. Third, nuclear tipped cruise missiles either from attack submarines or from aircraft. Fourth, air dropped bombs. Fifth, no fielded capability, but with a breakout capability whereby the UK could have a an air-dropped bomb in 12 - 24 months.

(No, not no to cruise. No to nuclear cruise - conventional cruise is much too useful to be jeopardised).

We can reject the third option immediately - nuclear armed cruise missiles. This is because the UK's existing cruise missiles - Tomahawk from submarines and Storm Shadow from Tornado aircraft - are useful in their different roles, and though each were designed to have an optional nuclear payload, it would be extremely dangerous to have both conventional and nuclear tipped versions of the same cruise missiles.

Why?

Simple: if you're on the receiving end of a cruise missile attack, and you cannot tell whether the missiles are conventionally or nuclear armed, then the incentive is to assume you're about to get nuked and therefore fire your nuclear missiles off. This is called the "signalling problem" and actually makes the world materially less stable. Consequently, the UK should not invest in nuclear cruise missiles for as long as it has conventionally armed cruise missiles. And it will for a long while as conventional cruise missiles are very useful.

Option One: Like for Like Replacement, maintaining CASD
Replacement - with four SSBNs and 12 - 16 missile tubes, each containing an upgraded Trident II missile, and mounting four independently targeted warheads. These could be based at Faslane as now, or to save some money, move them to Devonport, Plymouth or Portsmouth, closing HM Naval Base Clyde, Faslane. Likely bill - £20bn for the submarines, £100bn or so over 30 years for the whole system to 2045.

Option Two: Smaller replacement, breaking CASD
It is suggested that the UK could make do with three - or possibly only two - SSBNs, by electing not to have CASD. This would see SSBNs in port or at sea for training, and sortied for deterrent patrols at a time of heightened tensions. The level of savings is unclear, and it provides no guaranteed survivability against a first strike. This option also has signalling problems as the fact that an SSBN was put to sea in a time of tension could be interpreted as a major escalation.


Option Four: Free Fall Air Dropped Bombs
A return to Britain's starting point in the nuclear weapons arena, this option would see the RAF - and possibly the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm (FAA) off the carriers in future - using manned aircraft dropping free-fall nuclear bombs. In the short to medium term this would from Tornado strike aircraft or from multirole Typhoons, and in the longer term the Joint Strike Fighter. This would be considerably cheaper than the SSBN option as it would be an additional role for existing aircraft used primarily in other roles, but would be much less survivable from a surprise first strike, could require forward basing rights to strike targets at intercontinental ranges, and compared to an SLBM, aircraft are significantly easier to attack en route to target.

Option Five: Exit the nuclear club
If the UK does not need to have nuclear weapons, then it would be considerably cheaper to exit the nuclear club and retain a breakout capability at Aldermaston. This would mean the ability to fabricate existing designs on air-dropped nuclear weapons with 24 months notice, and in the meantime the scientists and technicians could be put to work in disarmament verification and cooperative threat reduction.

So, some options. In part 3, we'll look at the UK's needs and make recommendations.

99% vote for a Referendum. No, really!

 
In possibly a world first, it seems that a 99% majority in a referendum could be correct, rather than merely symbolic of massive fraud symptomatic of the worst authoritarian regimes. To no-one's surprise, it was the margin of South Sudan's vote for independence. I was a little surprised that 1% of South Sudanese voted for continued union with the North.

So, South Sudan will become the 198th State in the summer. Let's hope that this can be accomplished peacefully.

Can I get posted to Juba? Please?

I'm in charge. Let there be billboards!

Ok, so after Tunisia, and now in Egypt, we see riots of repressed people shouting for freedom and the possibility of overthrowing authoritarian regimes. But freedom and democracy, whilst instinctively attractive, would have certain downsides, including the loss of the principal point of one-party states: the cult of the Maximum Leader, Imperator, Man of Destiny, and with it, his image everywhere. (I can't think of a female dictator. Margaret Thatcher could only dream of this level of sycophancy...) Let there be billboards!

Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi was always a reticent wallflower....

Whereas in Yemen, you get to buy your own Ali Abudallah Saleh. ("Buy one, get one, free?"; soon enough, "Buy one, get one, flee..")

Hosni Mubarak smiles benignly from Egyptian streetlamps...

...but no-one compares with Gaddafi-as-multifaceted-visionary

Royalists don't need to feel left out - here's Jordan's King Abdullah II bin al-Hussein keeping an eye on things in Amman...

 

... but in this selection, only Syria's Bashir al-Assad gets to watch over his people night and day.

UK: Is it time for a post-Trident future?

 

May 26, 2009 - HMS Victorious fires an unarmed Trident II-D5 SLBM

This is a post I've been mulling over for a while. Regular readers will have seen lots of posts on SDSR and the current orientation of UK defence and security policy, but nothing in depth on the budgetary elephant in the room - Trident, the UK's sole nuclear weapon / Weapon of Mass Destruction programme. (It's always struck me as amusing that "we" have nuclear or atomic weapons for "deterrence"; "they" (presumably North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Libya) have "WMD".)

In this first post, I'm going to canter through the "how we got here" elements of UK nuclear policy, and then I'll follow up with UK future nuclear choices.

Ancient History

The history of the UK's independent nuclear deterrent is well known. It started early in WWII with British and European emigres as Tube Alloys and became a junior partner at Las Alamos in the Manhattan Project; indeed, so the story goes, the code name meant that it was lost in the US Navy's archives for some months as the code name was assumed to be the (not very interesting) subject. After the end of the Pacific war, the US cut off nuclear cooperation in the 1946 McMahon Act, and an impoverished UK Labour Government under PM Clem Attlee and Foreign Secretary Ernie Bevin started an indigenous programme without bothering to tell the rest of the Cabinet, let alone Parliament or the British taxpayers.

The important question is Why?

The argumentation in 1946 was similar to today, and is impressively circular. 

1. Great Powers have the most advanced and most terrible weapons.

2. Nuclear Weapons are the most advanced and most terrible weapons.

3. The UK is a Great Power, therefore the UK must have nuclear weapons.

Or, in the words of Bevin at the time, "We've got to have this thing. I don't mind it for myself, but I don't want any other Foreign Secretary of this country to be talked at or to by the US Secretary of State as I have just been... We've got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs ... We've got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it."

Canny readers will note the absence of anything to do with the Soviet Union - or, pace Jim Hacker, even the French. Since inception, UK nuclear policy and posture has been far more about perceptions of national standing than about military utility. As such, it plays on the most neuralgic elements of Whitehall's psyche - what Dean Acheson scathingly referred to in the 1960s as the result of "Britain losing an Empire and [being] yet to find a role".

(Why build one bomber when you can build three? Top to bottom, Victor, Valiant and Vulcan. Remarkably, all entered service. There was even a fourth prototype - the Short Sperrin - in case these three designs failed.)

In 1952, the UK thus became the third nation to conduct a nuclear detonation after Australian kindly volunteered the Monte Bello Islands as a nuclear test site, and in 1956-57 the UK and Australia followed up with a joint test series at Maralinga, South Australia. Combined with the development of the V-Bombers, the Royal Air Force fielded a nuclear strike force that would grow to more than 120 bombers by 1964. This was largely indigenous but there were some borrowed US freefall bombs and the RAF also operated 20 Squadrons of American Thor IRBMs between 1959-63. At the tactical level, the UK also developed the indigenous WE177 series of free fall atomic bombs and nuclear depth-charges. WE177s were in service from 1966 to 1998, and their retirement meant that Trident SLBMs are now the UK's only atomic weapons. 

The Polaris Sale Agreement, December 1962

(SuperMac hoodwinks Kennedy, or something.... Nassua, December 62)

Unfortunately, just as this massive investment was coming into service in 1960, Gary Powers inconsiderately got himself shot down over the USSR, and the threat from surface to air missiles (SAMs) made it increasingly unlikely that an independent UK bomber offensive against the Soviet Union would meet minimum UK deterrence - guaranteed destruction of Moscow, known in suitably Clancy-esque terms as "The Moscow Criterion". Therefore, the UK, which had terminated its' indigenous ballistic missile programme in 1960, attempted to buy missiles from the US for the bombers - the ill-fated Skybolt programme - and when Skybolt was cancelled by the US, PM Harold Macmillan sweet-talked President Kennedy into supplying Polaris submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) at Nassua in Dec 1962 immediately after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The deal was that the UK would build the submarines and the warheads, crew the submarines and lease the missiles. (If you fire it, you pay for it. We know where you live.) In return, the UK would commit them to NATO under all circumstances except the undefined "supreme national emergency". Quite what this was or how it could break out without it being a reasonably serious day for NATO as a whole was never defined. 

(HMS Renown, a UK Polaris submarine. Dull. Much less interesting than shiny aeroplanes.)

From Polaris's introduction in 1969 onwards, the notion of the UK having an independent strategic nuclear capability was questionable. Could the UK fire some missiles without telling the US? Probably, and more importantly, the other side couldn't know that you couldn't or wouldn't, creating at least the potential for a second decision making hub and removing the fear of strategic decoupling - namely the European fear that the US may ultimately renege on the nuclear shield, and let conventional Soviet forces run riot in Europe as long as the Soviets didn't target American cities.

Chevaline to Trident
In US Navy service, Polaris was superseded by the longer-range Poseidon, and both were replaced by Trident I or II by 1992. In the UK, Polaris was retained, but the Moscow-criterion was under threat by the deployment of the Moscow Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) System, which used nuclear armed interceptor missiles (eek!) to knock out incoming ICBMs.

(Roan Antelope - Antelope Chevaline)

The UK therefore developed a series of decoys and penetration aids under Project Chevaline, keeping UK Polaris in service until the mid-1990s. Technically, Chevaline - so named because an official rang London Zoo asking for the name of a large antelope - was a fiasco, running a decade late and £1bn (in 1979 money - £3.6bn today) overbudget, not a penny of which was disclosed to Parliament under either successive Conservative, Labour or Conservative administrations. In fact, so great was the Parliamentary outcry when the costs and disaster that was Chevaline came out, that it led Parliament to instruct the UK National Audit Office to produce an oversight report, now called the Major Projects Report.

Policy Implications

The crucial point is that the UK's "independent" nuclear deterrent since 1969 has been continuously reliant on the US for production, testing, engineering support and development work in support of this "independent" deterrent. There have been benefits on both sides - the UK saved a colossal amount of money by buying American rather than following the French route and building it all at home. And the US shared the costs of the missile section of the submarines - the Common Missile Compartment, CMC - as well as effectively gaining an additional ballistic missile submarine on patrol that someone else was paying for.

But in my view, the undisclosed price the UK paid was the fear that the US would cut nuclear cooperation a second time meant that UK foreign policy options were constrained for fear of offending the USA. As a result, the paradox of the independent nuclear deterrent was that it appears to have seriously constrained independent UK foreign policy.

Tomorrow, we'll look at the current situation, and the costs and options for future UK nuclear policy.

Stuxnet: Implications of Weaponising Cyberspace?

(Ahmadinejad tries the old Jedi mind-trick: "These are not the enrichment centrifuges you're looking for....")

A couple of weeks ago, the NY Times published a remarkable article on the apparent use of an advanced computer virus allegedly developed by US and Israeli computer scientists designed to specifically target and destroy Iranian uranium enrichment centrifuges at Natanz, by targeting the Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) control systems.

Over on OpinoJuris Professor Duncan Hollis of Temple Law School followed this up with a discussion of whether Stuxnet constitutes the use of force in violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter or an “armed attack” giving the victimized state a right of self defence under Article 51 of the Charter. Interestingly, Hollis suggests that Stuxnet falls under Article 41 of the Charter, and therefore could be legal as the UN Security Council has authorised limited sanctions.

Ignoring the small point that Article 41 explicitly requires Security Council authorisation, and that it is far from obvious that a Stuxnet attack on Natanz is covered by the applicable UNSCRs, Stuxnet raises a series of very interesting international law questions - and specifically Law of Armed Conflict questions over what constitutes the use of force in the networked era.

What is the appropriate basis for determining whether or not there has been an armed attack under Article 2(4)? There is an extensive literature on this, and on the related question of the pre-emptive use of force; however, there is little to guide on us on Stuxnet. My preference is that the definition of an armed attack is by definition somewhat fluid in all but the mental elements - the specific intent of the attacker is to achieve an effect on the target, which is usually, but not limited to, destruction, damage or degradation.

On this reading, what matters is the intended effect on the target, irrespective of the of the method used. Presumably the attacker will use the method most likely to be effective at the minimum cost to him/herself - if this is a bomb dropped by an aircraft so be it, or if it is a computer virus that spins nuclear centrifuges to destruction, then what matters is the intention of those creating and releasing the computer virus.

If true, and this is a developing area of the law, then State Responsibility doctrine applies, and the right of self-defence also applies if a State developed and deployed this virus, or sheltered a non-State actor which did. Therefore, if Stuxnet did operate as claimed, targeting only specific Siemens controllers clustered in groups of 984 as in Natanz, though it is an undoubtedly massive technical achievement, it was also intended to cause the effect of slowing the Iranian enrichment programme through causing technical malfunctions of Natanz's centrifuges causing them to self-destruct - and would therefore meet the effect's based doctrine of an armed attack.

The implications of this are vast. First, if the NY Times article is accurate, then the US and Israel have conducted an armed attack against Iran, which has the legal right to defend itself. Consider the outcry if Iran responded by attacking US Navy ships in the Persian Gulf, or lobbed a missile at the Israeli nuclear facilities at Dimona? But faced with the reverse scenario of Iranian hackers successfully interdicting a critical element of the US or Israeli nuclear programme, I'm sure that the US and Israel would take the view that this constituted an attack, and would not rule out a forcible response.

Second, the State Responsibility doctrine relating to non-State actors is going to be much harder to enforce in cyberspace than in the physical world. It was straightforward to how in 2001 that Al Qaeda were based in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan: the camps were physically there, and the Taliban in effect admitted that Bin Laden et al were in territory that they controlled. This acceptance provided the legal mandate for the use of force against the Taliban who were held responsible for the actions of the AQ leadership.

However, consider the position of a group of disaffected hackers in the UK who were able to create a Stuxnet style virus which destroyed the electricity grid in China. Not sponsored by the UK Government, it is quite possibly the UK would have no idea that they were operating from UK territory. If this were an armed attack, either the UK itself would take on responsibility for the action of the non-State group (hardly appealing), find and suppress the organisation (likely to be difficult) or would have to submit to Chinese actions against the hackers on UK soil (as the UK was unwilling or unable to stop them - also unattractive.) If nothing else, this possibility raises the possibility that States will want to have better information about who is doing what on their territory, raising further challenges for civil liberties.

Finally, western infrastructure is heavily, and increasingly, dependent on automation through SCADA controllers: it is much more efficient to have a computer opening and closing valves and controlling power grids than using a telephone to call an engineer in the middle of the night. Consequently our societies are intrinsically more vulnerable to this sort of attack than those which are less technologically advanced with fewer integrated control systems.

So Stuxnet marks a legal watershed as well as a technical triumph. What follows will be very interesting to watch as the law attempts to catch up with the technological advances.

And I wonder if I've just found a PhD topic?