posted by
n1
on Friday October 09 2015, @06:02PM
from the best-defence-is-a-good-offence,-unless-you're-the-other-guys dept.
from the best-defence-is-a-good-offence,-unless-you're-the-other-guys dept.
In a speech given in Manchester, UK Prime Minister David Cameron promised that "because our independent nuclear deterrent is our ultimate insurance policy, this Government will order four new Trident submarines." Currently the UK has four Vanguard-class submarines, each capable of carrying 16 American-built Trident II ballistic missiles. The fleet is based in Faslane, Scotland.
Other stories about the announcement:
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UK to Double Down on Nuclear-Armed Submarines
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by isostatic on Friday October 09 2015, @06:09PM
When are we going to use them? We've got one working submarine that will only fire them if the Archers goes off air and the americans let us. It's got 16 missiles. It's a costly willy - Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Italy, Germany, Austria, these countries don't feel the need to have them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 09 2015, @07:01PM
3 of your 6 are not allowed to have them by treaty.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Saturday October 10 2015, @06:51AM
That would not stop the US from doing it.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday October 09 2015, @07:08PM
Who would they target is an interesting question. So the greatest enemy of the UK today is (other then themselves)... The French? Southern Ireland?
I googled it and its a meme thing that the greatest enemy of the UK is (was) George Washington. Maybe they're worried zombie GW is going to raise an army of orcs or something.
My best guess is the USA partially bankrolls and encourages them to keep them around as a semi-deniable lapdog. So if we (USA) ever actually had to nuke someone, short of WW3, obviously, we'd probably strongarm the british into nuking them for us. Think of something like ISIS making a run for the Saudi oil fields, for example.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 09 2015, @09:54PM
ISIS making a run for the Saudi oil fields
...so, they nuke Iraq [yourchildlearns.com]--where there are still Allied troops?
...or Jordan?
...or the northern end of Saudi Arabia--making that uninhabitable for generations. [wikipedia.org]
nuke someone, short of WW3
A nuclear power gets very nervous when another nuclear power launches a missile.
WOPR's simulations dramatized this very effectively.
When war goes nuclear, there are no winners.
FTFS: unless-you're-the-other-guys
Going back to the 1950s with "On the Beach", it was in the zeitgeist that the effects of a nuclear exchange would be global.
In the 1980s, extrapolating from previous models, [wikipedia.org] scientists anticipated the occurrence of Nuclear Winter. [wikipedia.org]
The only way to win is not to play.
This whole thing is guys with small dicks trying to compensate.
Money down a rathole.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 09 2015, @07:35PM
Sweden doesn't have them because they are a vehemently neutral country. Finland and Estonia don't have them because they are very small, and could never have enough of them to effectively deter the aggressions of the Big Bear which lives next door, and would be incinerated to a crisp in about two minutes. Given the option they'd rather submit to invasion. Italy wouldn't know what to do with them because they're never sure whose side they're on. Nobody wants Germany to have them because they have historically demonstrated a bad habit of invading their neighbors. The same is somewhat true of Austria since they're always willing to be Germany's bitch.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday October 09 2015, @09:55PM
When are we going to use them?
Hopefully Never.
Presumably the design used will not preclude tube launched cruise missiles (tomahawk or similar), because otherwise
these additional subs are pretty useless.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday October 09 2015, @10:27PM
Those lazy Austrian bastards. Just because they're a landlocked country, they don't have a navy?! Feh!
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday October 10 2015, @09:01AM
You've got that wrong - this is the 'independent nuclear deterrent', no other party agreement is required for missile firing. Similarly, the French system is independent. There is a very high probability that communication between the UK and the USA would take place before firing - after all, the effects will not be localised - but that does not imply that 'authority' for launch is required from the USA.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DECbot on Friday October 09 2015, @06:19PM
I'm trying to wrap my brain around what is going on here... Nuclear weapons are a deterrent against nuclear and conventional war, but where are they feeling the pressure of these threats? Nuclear weapons does nothing to deter terrorism and unconventional warfare as the UK does not have the fortitude to use them against such aggressors. So where do they feel that there is this need? I figure this is nothing more than a scheme for the politicians to get kickbacks from the shipyards contracted to build these subs but I don't know enough about UK politics to confirm my suspicion.
And why is the US selling nuclear weapons? Didn't their president get a Nobel Peace Prize prior to his election?
Maybe somebody from across the pond can fill me in on what's going on in the UK.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 3, Informative) by n1 on Friday October 09 2015, @06:30PM
I imagine BAE Systems would prefer you didn't make such observations, they have billions of dollars to make from war and this is a nice christmas bonus for them. They've been working hard this year.
Just take a look at one month of BAE DoD Contracts for Sep-15 [boilingfrogspost.com]:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 09 2015, @07:29PM
The third, fourth, and last ones are maintenance contracts for existing systems. What's wrong with that?
(Score: 1) by Snospar on Friday October 09 2015, @06:59PM
I must have wasted too much time watching movies but whenever I think that there must be a back-door government enrichment scheme going on my brain screams "Follow the money!". Why is it so hard to follow the money when it is public money and therefore has to be part of the public record? Or is there just a large entry for £100M labelled "bung"?
(OK, I'm sure they use another label like "Authorised Financial Lubricant (not a bung)")
Maybe they leave the word bung out altogether.
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Friday October 09 2015, @07:07PM
I think the label is "Consultant Services" or "Outside Contractor." Some work gets done, but it isn't required or grossly overpriced. Funny that the owner of the company that had the winning bid happens to be one of your poker buddies... Or at least that's the rumor of how it works, I can't say I know as I'm never invited to poker.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 3, Interesting) by isostatic on Friday October 09 2015, @07:04PM
Nuclear weapons are a deterrent against nuclear and conventional war, but where are they feeling the pressure of these threats
I guess the argument is there's no pressure because the nukes exist.
Imagine the following situation, Britain and France give up nukes. Russia decides to do a russian-invasion, backed by millions of Syrian and other immigrants that are pissed off about being trapped in camps throughout europe. Russia overwhelms uncoordinated european armies and doesn't even need to threaten using it's nukes. It tells the US to stay out of it otherwise they'll find themselves being nuked by some terrorists, and having Russia supporting China in the Pacific, but on the flip side offers the people running the US (the corporations) some booty from Europe. The US suffering from it's own isolationist forces inside, and it's own growing immigrant and underclass sticks it's fingers in it's ears and carries on concentrating on China.
With Britain and France having a nuclear deterrent that scenario is less plausible.
Whether Britain and France would really launch nukes with a slow Ukraine style expansion of Russia throughout eastern and central europe is anyones guess, I guess that we'd be hoping that our 1 submarine would be enough to cause Russia to stop at the Channel, and France to hope they'll stop at the Rhine. Given the massive falling out in europe due in the next 5 years I don't see anyone sticking their neck on the line, and if Russia wanted to they could simply fund a terror campaign that you can't fight back against with nukes in any case.
Remember to that Hiroshima and Nagasaki have faded from the public conciousness, and it will be time to refresh our memories. I assumed this would happen at the start of the 21st century with India and Pakistan, but Sep11th, and the war in Afghanistan, screwed that one up. Back to the old staple of Israel vs the middle east, which will on the good side wipe out mecca (no more silly pilgrimages - how will Islam cope with 10 billion followers - 160 million people visiting an area the size of a football pitch in a 3 day window), but on the bad side will cause even more flow of people out of the middle east.
I figure this is nothing more than a scheme for the politicians to get kickbacks from the shipyards contracted to build these subs but I don't know enough about UK politics to confirm my suspicion.
I don't think our MPs are crafty enough to get kickbacks.
(Score: 3, Touché) by zocalo on Friday October 09 2015, @07:16PM
A whole bunch of them are/were too inept to even get away with fiddling their expenses. In that light, hiding sizeable bungs from defense contractors does seem like a rather large stretch, doesn't it?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 09 2015, @08:14PM
> Whether Britain and France would really launch nukes with a slow Ukraine style expansion of Russia
Your memory is short. What you call a "slow Ukraine style expansion" is really Russia trying to claw back some influence and being slapped down by Europe. Russia has been (correctly IMHO) slapped down massively by Western European eastern expansion in the last twenty years. They are making a belated fight back, but really they are nibbling at the edge of the biscuit, but Europe has baked it. Good for EU, Russian leadership seem pretty crappy (but there is a huge amount of Western propaganda flying against them so I am biased).
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by frojack on Friday October 09 2015, @10:04PM
Given the massive falling out in europe due in the next 5 years I don't see anyone sticking their neck on the line...
I doubt that would be an issue, it would just be a return to the prior normal. But Iran, who insists it has no nuclear ambitions, would seem to be the logical target of suspicion, with Russia a distant second.
(Russia is acting all tough and crazy nowdays, but that is just because Obama is such a wimp. That goes away next year, and Putin probably zips up his pants for a while.
It could just be that GB does not believe the US would honor their commitment and retaliate if GB were hit by some rogue actor.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday October 09 2015, @07:05PM
Job. Money. Men's egos.
The UK developed its own thermonuclear weapons. I don't know who makes the ones inside the UK's Trident missiles, but the point is that the UK would have them even if the US didn't sell the missile. Therefore, see the first answer.
The 51st state ordered their current missiles a while back. A bigger fleet isn't a major policy change, regardless of who's in D.C.
Obama got the Nobel Prize right after he took office and positioned himself clearly, like 3 other NP recipients before him, as "not George W". Not before.
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Saturday October 10 2015, @09:42AM
The UK developed its own thermonuclear weapons.
This was a sore point for quite a while after the second world war. The UK was on track to develop nuclear weapons, but was worried about a German invasion and the Germans capturing the nuclear scientists. To avoid this, there was an agreement with the USA that the scientists would relocate to the US (which wasn't under threat of invasion), and the results of their work would be shared. After the end of the second world war, the US refused to release any of the information from the Manhattan Project and so the UK had to run a separate programme.
I don't know who makes the ones inside the UK's Trident missiles
They're made and maintained in the USA, so they're not really independent - the US could refuse to service them and the system wouldn't last much more than a year.
A bigger fleet isn't a major policy change, regardless of who's in D.C.
Naval supremacy has been UK military doctrine since Elizabeth I (1558-1603). Nuclear subs aren't really part of this though, they're a cold-war relic and you need a lot more than one active to actually work as a deterrent under MAD doctrine: do you think the potential loss of Moscow (and, remember, it's potential - interceptors are a lot better than they were 20 years ago) would prevent Russia or China nuking Britain? Retaliation by the USA might, but diplomatic and trade relations would have to deteriorate a lot before that would even be in the top five reasons for not launching a nuclear strike. Tourism is currently the biggest defence against nuclear weapons: it's effectively impossible to launch a nuclear strike without killing a load of your own civilians.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday October 12 2015, @03:08PM
France and the UK have a second-strike policy. The goal of their weapons was to make the Soviets pay an excessively hefty price should they use theirs, not to ever be a first-strike component. That's why they have 4 subs each, to always have a couple at sea,
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday October 12 2015, @04:33PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday October 12 2015, @05:25PM
True. But it's the UK, so "joint *" isn't something they do well with their neighbors. Egos again...
> It's highly unlikely that a single nuclear submarine counts as an effective deterrence against a first strike by a nuclear power.
I hope the Russians love their children too...
Those subs are hard to notice [wikipedia.org] and each can blow up every major city in a target country. The two in "training maneuvers" may also escape a first strike given realistic detection and flight times. That's a huge gamble even for one of the two big guys (one of which is downwind from its targets).
That's why it's called deterrence, not Guaranteed Safety.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 09 2015, @07:34PM
Sorry about the misleading headline--according to some sources, the intention is to use the four new submarines to replace the existing ones, which were built in the UK. However, Cameron didn't explicitly say that in this particular speech, and the Government can change its mind about such things. A fleet of eight would be impressive, would it not? France has four [wikipedia.org] and the PRC [wikipedia.org] six [wikipedia.org], if Wikipedia is to be believed. I didn't see anything saying that the Americans would be providing new missiles; my assumption was that the existing missiles are to be transferred to the new submarines.
Also, The Independent reports on [independent.co.uk] an interview Cameron gave the BBC, regarding the circumstances under which nuclear weapons shall be used.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Friday October 09 2015, @07:26PM
Good grief. I have no real opinion on whether the Brits should maintain a small fleet of subs. Only having one at sea does seem kinda pointless as a credible threat of raining atomic vengence down on anyone who launched a sneak attack but whatever.
No, I want to point and laugh at the selection of sources. RT? Really. We are sourcing news from Putin now? Then we have the idiots at fas who used to be Soviet shills but now probably still work for Putin. Sputnik looks like yet another Russian news site aimed at the 'foreign' market. Value Walk is who the hell knows but probably Russian too. Wikipedia is open to edit for anyone left of center. And if someone checked, would bet $5 at even odds the submitting IP to solyent was Russian or Eastern Europe.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 09 2015, @08:46PM
I find it interesting that the two main threads in the comments to this article, "Why do we need these?" and, "Why are the sources Russian?" seem to answer each other.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 09 2015, @08:59PM
The same story has been reported in mainstream outlets, and as I explained in "corrected link to speech" I had intended to provide a link to the Mirror as the main one. That's why I used the phrase "other stories" toward the end. Below are links I found via Google News (news.google.com); you could readily have done the same, identified the inaccuracies in the submission, and told us about them, rather than simply providing an ad hominem. If you feel that there are more objective sources explaining what a Vanguard-class submarine or a Trident II ballistic missile is, why not tell us about those, too, and specifically how the ones I provided are biassed or inaccurate on these topics? The submission guidelines [soylentnews.org] say "Wikipedia links are a good source of background information and statistics." They also say "Use at least two source links if possible." When I posted this, the Sputnik News, Value Walk and RT stories were the next few that came up on Google News.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/david-camerons-full-speech-conservative-6589711 [mirror.co.uk]
http://news.sky.com/story/1565350 [sky.com]
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tory-party-conference-2015-david-camerons-speech-in-full-a6684656.html [independent.co.uk]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/11917115/nservative-conference-2015-David-Cameron-social-justice-warrior.html [telegraph.co.uk]
http://www.newstalk.com/reader/47.301/56758/0/ [newstalk.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 09 2015, @09:24PM
Come to think of it, I read this first from RT, then sought other sources.
(Score: 2) by pixeldyne on Friday October 09 2015, @09:28PM
I didnt know that about FAS. I like them because they have accurate (?) specs of weapons platforms. RT is the most obvious anti-NATO, anti-American (basically against anything that Putin hates) company so I dont bother to read them anymore. I still navigate to FAS to check out stats. As for the story, the Mirror link posted appears better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 10 2015, @09:11AM
RT = Radio Times, it is a UK publication. Not sure why you think that it is Putin's propaganda mouthpiece, but I think you are mistaken.
(Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Saturday October 10 2015, @03:49PM
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 09 2015, @08:10PM
The Mirror carried a full transcript [mirror.co.uk] of the speech, and I had intended to link to that, rather than linking to the FAS page twice.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday October 09 2015, @09:37PM
So it's independent, so long as the Americans supply you with the missiles for your defence???
That's like the Americans achieved 'independence' by cozying back up with Britain and saying "can you please keep defending and supplying us"?
Weird independence.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by pixeldyne on Saturday October 10 2015, @12:01AM
Its not indigenous but independent from other weapons systems and commands.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 10 2015, @02:21AM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by juggs on Saturday October 10 2015, @04:21AM
This is nothing more than the political types pandering to the masses with "Look at my muscles, we have big bombs" not that we would ever use them, we'd be a bit fucked if we did - to understate the matter.
This is fodder for the news rags..... I swear some of them think the UK still runs an empire..... guess they lost the memo around 1950.... hello, the UK is a tiny island on the edge of Europe that by fortune alone has some strength in the financial sector - by not regulating any of it.
Does anyone buy this BS?
p.s. I'm English, and none of this is done in my name.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday October 10 2015, @10:25AM
sudo mod me up