It is an interesting time to assess British attitudes toward nuclear weapons, since it appears that something is afoot in Westminster, at least in regard to UK positions on nuclear arms control. Senior British political figures made major speeches calling for nuclear disarmament in each of the years 2007, 2008, and 2009.
In 2007, speaking at a conference in the United States, the foreign secretary at that time, Margaret Beckett, called for a new disarmament initiative based on two separate but mutually reinforcing elements: vision (by which she meant a scenario for a world free of nuclear weapons), and action (by which she meant progressive steps to reduce warhead numbers and limit the role of nuclear weapons in security policy).1
Addressing the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva in February 2008, former secretary of state for defense Des Browne said that “the international community needs a transparent, sustainable and credible plan for multilateral nuclear disarmament.”2
In March 2009 Prime Minister Gordon Brown included a call for a serious commitment to disarmament by nuclear weapon states in his speech to a conference on the international nuclear fuel cycle in London.3 In his speech Brown promised to publish a credible road map toward disarmament by all the nuclear weapon states, through measures that will command the confidence of all the non-nuclear weapon states, in the summer of 2009. In July 2009 the UK published a document called “The Road to 2010,” containing what the prime minister called “an ambitious but achievable set of reforms across the entire nuclear question” intended to “re-invigorate the bargain at the heart of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.”4
As recently as December 2006—six months before the speech by Margaret Beckett—the UK published the result of a major policy review focused on the future of the British nuclear capability. The main conclusion was that under present circumstances it was necessary for the UK to retain “the minimum nuclear deterrent capability necessary to provide effective deterrence.” To that end, the UK has put in place the first elements of a program to sustain national nuclear forces for the indefinite future by preparing the ground for a decision to build a new class of submarines to carry nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles and by revitalizing the scientific and engineering capacities of the atomic weapon research establishment. Speaking at the 2009 summit meeting of the G8 industrialized powers, Prime Minister Brown emphasized that there was no need to adjust the current UK plans to modernize nuclear forces at present, stating that “we have to show that we can deal with this by collective action. Unilateral action by the UK would not be seen as the best way forward.”5
In June 2009 the leader of one mainstream UK political party, the Liberal Democrats, indicated that he would not support renewing Britain's nuclear deterrent with an equivalent modernized system should his party form the next government.6 Although it seemed extremely unlikely at the time that the Liberal Democrats would come to power, following the May 2010 election they joined in a coalition government with the Conservative Party. A strategic defense review was announced immediately, but nuclear weapons were not on the table. On publication in October 2010, Securing Britain in an Age of Uncertainty: The Strategic and Defense Security Review,7 had to take into account a difficult context. The government has to examine defense policy against a background of reduced resources, extensive commitments, and a current approach that does not adequately explain how the present UK force posture and operations by UK armed forces support national security. If there is a threat to maintaining the independent UK deterrent it might come from the combination of financial pressure and what Cornish and Dorman call “campaign tribalism”—the tendency to shape medium- and long-term decisions about force posture based on the short-term needs of current operations.8
The UK government takes a long-term and incremental approach to nuclear disarmament, and does not see any inconsistency in making the political case for arms reductions and developing specific proposals intended to further that objective while still modernizing national nuclear forces.
It is legitimate to ask whether recent public diplomacy signals a change in approach in thinking about the role of nuclear weapons or whether it is aimed at heading off national and international criticism of what is essentially continuity in nuclear policy.
The framing of nuclear policy would logically have become more complicated with the passage of time after the end of the Cold War. Even within the framework of deterrence it would have been necessary to reconsider the threats to which a nuclear deterrent might apply and to ensure that the threat to use nuclear weapons in any identified contingency (however remote) remains credible in the mind of any potential adversary. However, from what can be seen in public documents, recent reviews have not engaged in detail with the issue of what role nuclear deterrence should play in British security and defense policy. Instead of an explicit rationale, nuclear policy has been based more on a widely held and essentially unchallenged assumption that possessing nuclear weapons must confer some benefit in an uncertain world.
The end of the Cold War could have been a watershed in British thinking about nuclear weapons because the rationale for maintaining a nuclear deterrent was exclusively put forward in terms of the threat from a nuclear-armed Soviet Union. The official report on which the 1980 decision to modernize British nuclear weapons was based used an intelligence assessment that nuclear planning need take into account only the nuclear threat posed by the Soviet Union.9
The decisive argument in favor of an independent nuclear capability was the need to maintain a second center of decision-making in Europe in order to create uncertainty in the mind of Soviet military planners. According to this line of thinking, any Soviet planners who doubted whether the United States would in reality use nuclear weapons in defense of European allies would have to take into account the risk that in extreme circumstances the UK could launch a nuclear strike in defense of its own vital interests.
The use of British nuclear weapons could have been either strategic or sub-strategic. For the British the substrategic use of nuclear weapons in the Cold War context would have been for purposes of war termination once hostilities with the Soviet Union had broken out. Nuclear weapons could have been used, as Michael Quinlan has put it, to transmit to the enemy “the political message that he had underrated NATO’s resolve and that for his own survival he must back off.10
In a strategic sense, the function of nuclear weapons during the Cold War was war avoidance. From a British point of view, the general line of thinking was expressed by Michael Howard in a 1964 lecture when he noted that
those Powers which possess sufficient wealth, scientific expertise and industrial capacity have developed weapons systems which poise the threat of inescapable and unacceptable destruction over the heads of their rivals even in time of deepest peace; and for nations so threatened military security can no longer be based on traditional principles of defence, mobilization and counter-attack. It can be based only on the capacity to deter one’s adversary by having available the capacity to inflict on him inescapable and unacceptable damage in return.11
The critical parameter for “inescapable and unacceptable damage” in UK planning was to retain the technical capability to destroy completely a target in the Soviet Union of central importance to Russian decision-makers—normally believed to be Moscow.
In the early 1990s UK decision-makers were very reserved in modifying this rationale for retention of nuclear weapons, for example by ascribing them a role in deterring “new threats” of the kind suggested by the discovery of the full extent of Iraq’s illegal nuclear weapon program. Speaking in 1993, Minister of Defence Malcolm Rifkind argued that, once outside the existing bilateral East-West framework, “it is difficult to be confident that an intended deterrent would work in the way intended, in the absence of an established nuclear deterrent relationship.”12
At the same time, the Cold War ended at the point where the UK was just about to begin deployment of its new submarine-based nuclear deterrent (the Vanguard Class submarines armed with Trident D5 missiles tipped with a British-designed warhead believed to be adapted from the U.S. W76 warhead).13 Thus, at the point where the rationale of an independent nuclear deterrent might have been questioned, the financial burden of acquisition had already been absorbed and the anticipated running costs for the Trident force were rather low (probably around $1 billion per year).
This does not mean that nuclear posture went unchanged. On the contrary, UK nuclear forces were extensively rationalized and streamlined as a result of decisions taken after the end of the Cold War. In the early 1990s the UK nuclear forces were not limited to submarine-launched nuclear-tipped missiles. At that time artillery regiments of the British Army were trained in the use of Lance missiles and nuclear-capable 155-millimeter field guns—delivery systems that would have been supplied with nuclear weapons by the U.S. Army for use on the battlefield in certain contingencies. After 1992 the UK participation in these sharing arrangements was ended in the context of the September 1991 U.S. Presidential Nuclear Initiative (PNI) under which George H. W. Bush pledged to withdraw all ground-launched short-range nuclear weapons deployed overseas and destroy them along with existing U.S. stockpiles of the same weapons.
The Bush PNI went further and promised to end the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons on surface ships, attack submarines, and land-based naval aircraft under normal circumstances. Shortly afterward the United Kingdom decided to eliminate all maritime nuclear capability other than Trident, so that the capability of Royal Navy surface ships to carry or deploy nuclear weapons (in the form of nuclear depth charges to be used against submarines) was removed. The Royal Air Force owned several hundred WE177 gravity bombs for delivery by Tornado bombers, and a decision was taken to phase out all UK air-launched nuclear weapons. In 1993 the UK cancelled plans to develop a nuclear-armed air-launched cruise missile, and the nuclear mission was finally taken away from the dual-capable Tornado bombers in 1998.
At the same time, the UK determined that there was still a need for a substrategic nuclear capability, and in future this task would necessarily be allocated to Trident—as the only British nuclear system available.14 From the mid-1990s UK submarines were armed with a mix of some Trident missiles with multiple warheads and some with only one “live” warhead. Moreover, it was decided that those warheads to which a substrategic role was ascribed would be configured to allow for an explosive yield significantly lower than the 80 to 100 kilotons believed to be the norm for each UK Trident warhead.
The rationalization of nuclear systems led to a decrease in the number of UK nuclear warheads from roughly 450 during the 1980s to approximately 225 by 2010.15 Taking into account U.S. nuclear weapons earmarked under sharing arrangements, UK nuclear forces are said to have been reduced by 75 percent since the end of the Cold War.
The UK decision to rationalize and reduce nuclear forces was taken in the context of a change in NATO thinking about the role assigned to nuclear weapons. The nuclear sharing arrangements involving British armed forces were obviously keyed to Alliance contingencies, while half of the roughly 100 British nuclear-capable Tornado bombers were based at RAF Bruggen in Germany.
The next chronological “decision point” for nuclear weapons policy oc curred after the change of government in 1997 that brought the Labour Party into power, led by Tony Blair. While the incoming government was committed to carry out a Strategic Defence Review, the terms of reference for the 1998 review were dictated by the determination of the Labour government to implement election manifesto pledges. During the election campaign, Labour made a commitment to maintain a national nuclear deterrent in order to reduce a political vulnerability that had plagued the Labour Party in previous election campaigns. Therefore, the working groups set up to conduct the defense review limited themselves to considering how existing nuclear capabilities and support could be adjusted to meet Britain’s needs in the changed strategic environment. Given the rationalization and reduction of UK nuclear forces already noted above, in 1998 there was only scope for further trimming of the Trident force. To that end it was announced that each submarine on deterrent patrol would in future carry no more than forty-eight warheads (as opposed to the capacity of ninety-six) and that no more Trident missiles would be bought beyond those already delivered or on order.16
The 2003 Defence White Paper (the first after the terrorist attacks of September 2001) did not contain any change to nuclear policy or force posture, but did highlight the need “to be prepared to prevent, deter, coerce, disrupt or destroy international terrorists or the regimes that harbor them and to counter terrorists’ efforts to acquire chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons.”17
The Labour Party election manifesto in 2005 included a commitment to retain an independent nuclear deterrent, and on re-election the government began to consider the options for replacing the Trident system. The future of the British nuclear weapons establishment was one area of concern. Michael Clarke has noted that the workforce within the atomic weapons research establishment of the UK was shrinking and aging to the point that “as engineers retire and leave the workforce it is not clear that the essential skills will still exist after 2010 without a specific design programme on which to work.”18 One of the first decisions made by the new government in 2005 was to allocate roughly £1 billion to refurbish the atomic weapons research establishment at Aldermaston and recruit a new generation of scientists and engineers.19
In this political environment the decisions about when and how to modernize strategic nuclear forces have been driven primarily by technical factors. For planning purposes officials have worked on the assumption that the normal lifecycle of the strategic nuclear weapons in the British arsenal was expected to be around twenty-five to thirty years, and roughly fifteen years has been estimated as the lead-time needed to design and build the first replacement submarine. Applying these rules of thumb meant that a first replacement for the Vanguard Class submarine would be expected to enter into service around 2023 and, counting back from that date, a decision to begin the process would be needed around 2008.20
In 2005–6 the government established an Official Group on the Future of the Deterrent to prepare a decision on how to sustain the UK deterrent over the period 2020–50. The group considered four generic options for a replacement to the Trident system, and concluded that the most sensible would be a new generation of submarines equipped with Trident ballistic missiles. The work of this group led to a government decision, published in a white paper in December 2006, to build a new class of submarines and to participate in the U.S. life extension program for the Trident D5 missile.21 In February 2010 the government published a discussion document laying out the elements of a future defense review. In that document “the provision of an operationally independent strategic nuclear capability, including its protection” was included as a defense planning assumption.22
Following the May election, the new coalition government decided to retain and renew the independent nuclear deterrent but, citing the need to obtain value for money, reduced the number of operational launch tubes planned for each submarine from twelve to eight, and the number of warheads carried by each submarine from forty-eight to forty.23
On November 2, 2010, the British and French governments signed a path-breaking treaty on collaboration in the technology associated with nuclear stockpile stewardship.24 Under the terms of the treaty the UK and France would construct and operate two facilities, one in each country, by 2015. According to the Treaty, French and British scientists will cooperate, including through the exchange of relevant classified information, on the safety and security of nuclear weapons; nuclear warhead stockpile certification; and countering nuclear or radiological terrorism.25 The program of work at the facilities will measure the performance of relevant materials at extremes of temperature and pressure, allowing the scientists to model the performance and safety of British and French nuclear weapons without carrying out nuclear explosive tests—which are illegal under the CTBT that both France and the UK have ratified.
The Treaty does not require cooperation on substantive aspects of the work program (though cooperation is not excluded), but facilitates independent work needed for national programs in a safe and security environment at the lowest cost. Under the terms of the Treaty both joint facilities must include the necessary features to guarantee the security of national information and operations. In the statement accompanying the signature of the Treaty, the UK Minister of Defence underlined that nothing in the agreement with France in any way weakened British nuclear cooperation with the United States.
The previous section has underlined that the British nuclear force structure has changed very significantly in the past twenty years. However, while the question of “what” is available in terms of nuclear forces can largely be answered using official public documents, it is more difficult to answer the questions “why” and “how” weapons might be used from the same sources. To what extent has thinking evolved about the military contingencies in which nuclear weapons might have to be used? Is there evidence of a change in the nuclear mission?
There appears to have been relatively little discussion of the nuclear dimension of strategic issues since the early 1990s. There has certainly been little emphasis on initiating a wider public debate on nuclear weapon issues other than the need to prevent further proliferation. As noted by Michael Quinlan in 2006,
Government ministers, while giving several indications of a disposition towards continuance, have declared the government’s readiness for full and open debate—by implication, in advance of a firm decision rather than, as in 1980, in examination and defence of a decision taken. It has as yet, however (at the time of writing), neither entered debate in any substantial degree nor provided much information to sustain that debate knowledgeably.26
In June 2008 four senior political figures published a newspaper article intended to stimulate discussion and debate in the United Kingdom around options for nuclear arms control. Subsequently the issue of nuclear arms control has been taken up by a cross-party group of sixteen senior parliamentarians.27
Senior politicians in the Labour Party remain committed to maintaining nuclear forces primarily on the grounds that giving up the national nuclear deterrent would give domestic political opponents an argument to be deployed in a general election. Thinking in the Conservative Party is also normally described essentially in terms of domestic politics. As one veteran commentator on military affairs put it in 2009, “The Tories are most unlikely to make waves about Trident ahead of an election, because they see no votes in it. If [then party leader] David Cameron committed himself to dumping the deterrent, he would merely provoke a gratuitous and possibly fatal party split.”28
It is widely believed that the current nuclear force is as small as it can be without giving up the requirement that nuclear weapons will be available for use on a permanent basis. As noted above, the submarine platform and ballistic missile delivery system are widely agreed to be the best way of reducing vulnerability to a disarming strike and ensuring a relatively secure second-strike capability.29
As a result, decisions have been driven mainly by technical questions about replacing equipment as it becomes old and sustaining a minimum deterrent at the lowest cost. Issues related to nuclear weapons do not appear to impinge greatly, if at all, on British thinking about how military force can and should be applied after the end of the Cold War. Arguments in official documents have been put forward in general terms.
The National Security Strategy of the United Kingdom, published in 2008, included the judgment that
no state currently has both the intent and the capability to pose a direct nuclear threat to the United Kingdom or its vital interests. But we cannot rule out the risk that such a threat will re-emerge over future decades. We also monitor: the possibility of nuclear weapons or material or technology (including commercial) falling into the hands of terrorists, who we know have ambitions to acquire it; and the proliferation of the technology behind ballistic missiles, which increases the chance of either new states or non-state actors being able to threaten the United Kingdom directly in the future.
Consequently, the maintenance of the UK nuclear deterrent is explained as necessary because “we cannot rule out a nuclear threat to the United Kingdom re-emerging over the next 50 years.”30 No specific rationale is put forward and no information is supplied about how nuclear weapons might be employed to enhance UK security.
During the Cold War great effort was put into minimizing any risk that the armed forces of the two adversarial blocs would confront each other or engage in military operations in close proximity to one another partly because any risk, however small, that escalation could lead to a nuclear conflagration was unacceptable. The critical threshold was between peace and war because of a lack of certainty over whether and when other thresholds (between conventional and nuclear weapon use, and between battlefield use of nuclear weapons and attacks on cities in the homeland of nuclear weapon states) would be crossed.31 On occasions where confrontations did occur, even if by proxy, the two main adversaries went out of their way to reduce the possibility for escalation or misunderstanding by ensuring communication with each other and among their respective allies and partners.
With the end of the Cold War the very cautious approach to the use of force and high emphasis on deterrence has progressively given way to a different kind of discourse. The use of force has come to be seen as a tool to be used actively to promote beneficial outcomes (that is, beneficial to the user), rather than a last resort to be employed only in the most extreme circumstances. Beginning in 1991, with the use of a large multinational coalition to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait under the banner of the United Nations, peace operations became both more frequent and more varied. Subsequently, the line between peace operations and other forms of use of force were blurred, first in 1999 in the Western Balkans and then in 2003 in the Persian Gulf.
Current UK military planning is predicated on being prepared for operations outside the Euro-Atlantic area, sometimes under a United Nations mandate and sometimes as part of a looser U.S.-led coalition of states. Looking out to 2030, the Joint Doctrine and Concepts Centre (JDCC) within the UK Ministry of Defence forecasts that
international law will remain subject to interpretation, with the most powerful Western states providing the will and the means to enforce international law on behalf of the “international community.” Other states, in particular the least developed and non-state actors, may refuse to comply with its strictures and may increasingly contest claims that the West equates to the “international community.” International law will become increasingly permissive about when outside force can be used to intervene in a nation’s domestic affairs, if there are strong humanitarian grounds for that intervention.32
The thinking of the JDCC was perhaps influenced by what was seen as a successful intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000 when British forces rapidly broke the resistance of the irregular forces of the Revolutionary United Front that had humiliated UN peacekeeping forces and defeated the forces of the government of Sierra Leone. British forces were then able to withdraw after an operation that lasted less than two years.
While the UK has developed a capability for operations against a range of nonstate actors, thinking is based heavily on operating alongside the United States in other contingencies. The 2003 Defence White Paper noted that
expeditionary operations, involving intervention against state adversaries, can only plausibly be conducted if US forces are engaged, either leading a coalition or in NATO. Where the UK chooses to be engaged, we will wish to be able to influence political and military decision making throughout the crisis, including during the post-conflict period. The significant military contribution the UK is able to make to such operations means that we secure an effective place in the political and military decision-making processes. To exploit this effectively, our Armed Forces will need to be interoperable with US command and control structures, match the US operational tempo and provide those capabilities that deliver the greatest impact when operating alongside the US.33
To summarize, the prevailing view at the time of the last significant defense review in 2003 was that the UK armed forces would be called on fairly frequently, but that operations would involve relatively small numbers and be of fairly short duration. This has not turned out to be the case. As one recent analysis has pointed out, in contrast to expectations, large numbers of UK forces have been tied down in two locations, Iraq and Afghanistan, for an extended period. This was not the scenario envisaged, and as a result military planning has been driven by the day-to-day management of events in an “apparent vacuum at the political/strategic level.”34
The change in thinking about the use of force should logically have had an impact on UK nuclear policy if only because of emerging evidence that a steady proliferation of materials, technologies, and equipment might increase the number of nuclear armed states in proximity to places where UK forces might reasonably expect to be deployed in the future.
Cold War planning was tailored to the need for rapid military action in the face of aggression because conflict scenarios left little time to evaluate options and reformulate strategies. Preplanning for many possible scenarios was one factor that created demand for large numbers of nuclear weapons and a diverse range of delivery means, but it also required procedures for rapid delegation of authority to use nuclear weapons to military commanders. With the end of preplanned nuclear operations, signaled in the NATO Strategic Concept adopted in 1991, Allies now emphasized the need “to modify the principle of flexible response to reflect a reduced reliance on nuclear weapons.”35
The 1991 Strategic Concept recognized that NATO no longer faced a situ ation of numerical inferiority in key conventional weapon systems, as well as the dramatically improved security environment. While NATO remained committed to maintain an appropriate mix of nuclear and conventional forces based in Europe, the dissolution of the Warsaw Treaty Organization in 1991 and the beginning of the withdrawal of Soviet armed forces from Central Europe meant that the role of nuclear forces was to ensure the prevention of war. Since conventional forces could now be relied on in most contingencies, the theories of escalation that had underpinned flexible response in conditions of forward defense became redundant.
In spite of these developments, the progressive elimination of UK short-range nuclear forces did not eliminate the need for what UK officials in the past had dubbed substrategic nuclear weapons. However, while shorter-range delivery systems for nuclear weapons were seen as an important element in flexible response during the Cold War, after 1991 the task assigned to substrategic nuclear delivery systems remained keyed to the risk of a major confrontation between nuclear-armed adversaries—which in effect meant that they were a “hedge” against any dramatic deterioration of relations with Russia.
In 1993 Malcolm Rifkind, the minister for defense at that time, underscored that
the ability to undertake a massive strike with strategic systems is not enough to ensure deterrence. An aggressor might, in certain circumstances, gamble on a lack of will ultimately to resort to such dire action. It is therefore important to the credibility of our deterrent that the United Kingdom also possesses the capability to undertake a more limited nuclear strike in order to induce a political decision to halt aggression by delivering an unmistakable message of our willingness to defend our vital interests to the utmost.36
In the past, the UK approach to the use of short-range nuclear weapons was limited to this support for strategic deterrence, and no other scenario appears to have been used in planning. For example, when the Royal Navy diverted ships to help recover the Falkland Islands from illegal Argentine occupation in 1982, the nuclear depth charges on board were transferred to other ships in mid-Atlantic and returned to the UK.37
After the end of the Cold War senior officials continued to play down the role that nuclear weapons might play in any contingency outside the Euro-Atlantic area, including in one case—Iraq in 1991—where an adversary was known to possess a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. The fact that Iraq had large quantities of chemical weapons was known in 1991, and it was also widely suspected that Iraq had developed biological weapons, even if the full extent of the biological weapons program was not fully understood at that time. However, asked about the possibility of nuclear weapons being used in any scenario in 1991, Prime Minister John Major replied that “we [do] not envisage the use of nuclear weapons.” After a short pause Major added the more categorical “we would not use them.”38
During the period in which the UK participated in the political and strategic buildup to the invasion of Iraq in 2003—ostensibly to prevent and guard against the emergence of a new and dangerous arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East—the role of nuclear weapons in such scenarios was periodically discussed in public.
At different times statements by the minister of defense in the United Kingdom appeared to give nuclear weapons a new core mission in strategic planning: namely, to deter or respond to attacks by a non-nuclear weapons state armed with chemical or biological weapons. This tendency appears to have been a largely subjective and psychological response after the mass impact terrorist attack on the United States in 2001, rather than the product of strategic analysis. Political leaders were suddenly forced to come to terms with the idea that a small and poor opponent might acquire capabilities against which there is no defense. In a period when the UK was contemplating the more frequent use of force, the thought that an essentially weak player might be able to paralyze stronger players by acquiring unconventional weapons, and even severely wound them by actual use, was an uncomfortable one. The combination of mass-impact terrorism and the proliferation of nuclear and biological weapons knocked political decision-makers in major powers off balance, and this began to be reflected in their public statements.
In March 2002, when the invasion of Iraq was already under active discussion in public, British Minister of Defence Geoff Hoon told a parliamentary committee that states like Iraq “can be absolutely confident that in the right conditions we would be willing to use our nuclear weapons.” Two days later, appearing on a television current affairs program, Hoon told presenter Jonathan Dimbleby, “[If] there is a threat to our deployed forces, if they come under attack by weapons of mass destruction, and by that specifically chemical or biological weapons, then we would reserve the option in an appropriate case, subject to the conditions that I have referred to when I was talking to the select committee, to use nuclear weapons.”39
The remarks made in 2002 led to public discussion about how an attack using chemical or biological weapons on British armed forces in the field far from the United Kingdom could ever meet the criteria of last resort or extreme self-defense. When later asked to clarify his comments in an official setting, and presumably having had the time for consultation with officials, Mr. Hoon qualified his remarks and used a formulation closer to the more established understanding of the role of nuclear forces. In the House of Commons Hoon said that “the use of nuclear weapons is still a deterrent of last resort. However, for that to be a deterrent, a British Government must be able to express their view that, ultimately and in conditions of extreme self-defence, nuclear weapons would have to be used.”40
At around the same time several strategic analysts inside and outside government published papers that considered what role, if any, nuclear weapons might play in expeditionary operations. All of the papers concluded that the military rationale behind a role for nuclear weapons in such operations was unconvincing at best, while the political barriers (internal as well as international) to thinking in these terms were high.41 In 2009 the UK confirmed that “the use of any nuclear weapon would be strategic in nature,” and therefore British officials have “stopped using the terms ‘sub-strategic,’ ‘tactical,’ ‘non-strategic,’ or ‘battlefield’ nuclear weapon.”42
Public information in official documents asserts that any decision to use British nuclear weapons could now only be taken in a matter of weeks from the time the executive received a request from an operational commander.43 Whereas previously authorization to use a weapon could be obtained in twenty-four hours, there does not now seem to be any procedure that would allow the use of a Trident missile within that time frame. This discussion raises a number of questions over how British nuclear weapons would be employed in practice. Given what was said above about assumptions underpinning military operations, a request from a British commander in the field would presumably come in conditions where UK forces were operating alongside U.S. counterparts—since there is no circumstance where an operation of the Sierra Leone type could require a nuclear response. The request might also come in the framework of operations undertaken as part of NATO. In either case there would have to be extensive consultations about whether and when the use of a nuclear weapon might be authorized.
At an operational level, in contrast to the Cold War, there are no existing plans involving preplanned targets for nuclear weapons. To the extent that there are standard procedures for NATO consultations on the use of nuclear weapons, they seem to consist of annual desktop exercises involving all allies (the exercises are known as Able Ally and were carried out at least through 2006).44 The United Kingdom also maintains a liaison cell within the United States Strategic Command with a direct link to the UK nuclear operations center. However, while a system for technical communication between the UK, the United States, and NATO still exists, the need for extensive political consultation over when and how nuclear weapons might be employed would presumably contribute to the period of several weeks said to be required for authorization of use.
Given the central priority accorded to operating in tandem with the United States, UK thinking must also have been influenced by the emerging approach of the Bush administration. In his speech at the National Defense University in May 2001 the president identified a need to “seek security based on more than the grim premise that we can destroy those who seek to destroy us” and called for “a new policy, a broad strategy of active nonproliferation, counterproliferation, and defenses.”45 This way of thinking was later reflected in the Nuclear Posture Review report released in January 2002, which developed the idea of a “New Triad” in which a greater role would be allocated to non-nuclear strategic capabilities “to strengthen the credibility of our offensive deterrence.”46
The logic of the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review was that the United States could not respond in kind to an attack using chemical or biological weapons and therefore the risk of a nuclear response to a mass casualty attack was unacceptably high. The review recommended developing improved non-nuclear capabilities (including conventional weapons, but also information warfare options) to substitute for some missions for which nuclear weapons were earmarked. In common with the UK approach, the U.S. documents did not specify in any detail how nuclear weapons might be used in any given circumstances. However, the issue of whether a threat based on the first use of nuclear weapons in a limited conflict could be credible in the eyes of the target was clearly one important problem that U.S. planners were addressing. As one analyst expressed it, “[T]he NPR recognized that large-scale nuclear attacks in response to some actions taken by some adversaries are simply not credible.”47
The U.S. approach was consistent with British preferences in that it focused on pushing the role of nuclear weapons into the background and de-emphasizing their role in security policy, while retaining a smaller but very modern nuclear arsenal. At the same time there is little in the public literature to suggest that the UK has any interest in discussing the nuclear dimension of tailored deterrence in detail, given that there is no longer a set of operational plans in place for how to use nuclear weapons, no established procedures for timely in-conflict command and control of nuclear forces, and very limited flexibility in the nuclear force structure.
Future thinking about deterrence in the UK is likely to retain the central element of a conditional response to aggression based on calculation of costs and benefits and backed by the threat of punishment. However, in addressing the cost/benefit calculations made by future adversaries, as well as the instruments available to punish aggression, nuclear weapons are unlikely to play a central role.
The UK position is therefore to emphasize that nuclear weapons have a purely political role, taking as a starting point that significant nuclear arsenals remain in the world (some of which are being modernized and expanded) and that the number of states possessing nuclear weapons and ballistic missile delivery systems for them has continued to grow incrementally. Therefore the government has reached a very broad judgment that “we cannot rule out the risk either that a major direct nuclear threat to the UK’s vital interests will re-emerge or that new states will emerge that possess a more limited nuclear capability, but one that could pose a grave threat to our vital interests.”48 The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government elected in 2010 has the same commitment in declaratory policy as the previous Labour government: to work to create the conditions for eventual nuclear disarmament but in the mean time to maintain a modern and effective minimum deterrent.49
As noted in the introduction, the UK has recently come out strongly in support of a revitalization of nuclear arms control. This has included strong support for efforts to resume U.S.–Russian bilateral negotiations after a roughly fifteen-year hiatus in which the only accomplishment was the 2002 Moscow Treaty, which was regarded by most analysts as an inadequate basis for transparent, verified, and irreversible arms reductions. The government has made it clear that there is no objection in principle to the UK giving up its nuclear weapons entirely under the right circumstances.50 Moreover, while it is not an official document from the UK government, a study sponsored by the UK Foreign Office and carried out by the London-based IISS perhaps gives an indication regarding what these conditions might be.
To give up its nuclear weapons (in the framework of a binding commitment by all nuclear weapon states to do the same) the UK would require a “watertight” nonproliferation regime, a highly intrusive verification system, and a new package of political, military, and institutional arrangements that would provide adequate collective security guarantees.51 The overall set of arrangements would have to gain the support of all states with nuclear weapons, not only the nuclear weapon states in the sense of the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).
The UK has also strongly supported some of the specific incremental steps along the way to the long-term vision of a nuclear weapon–free world. The UK has strongly supported the entry into force of the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and has supported the negotiation of a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT), but with a much more reserved position in regard to a verification protocol for the treaty. While the reservations about FMCT verification during the Bush administration partly reflected a desire not to be out of step with the United States, the UK has proposed a technical conference for representatives of weapon laboratories in the P5 countries with a view to starting the process of thinking about the verification of global nuclear disarmament. Objections to FMCT verification may not continue now that the Obama administration has come out in favor of negotiations on such measures.
The UK thinking about arms control is partly motivated by concerns about the risk that over the medium to long term the number of states with nuclear weapons will continue to grow. If the nonproliferation regime suffers a series of setbacks, then the value of the regime as a source of security becomes progressively more questionable. At some point the norms against proliferation might be reversed, with states arguing that the norm for security in a world where nuclear weapons continue to play an important role is proliferation, rather than nonproliferation. Widespread proliferation is most likely to occur in conditions where nuclear weapons come to be seen as not only acceptable but essential. The probability would increase still further if nuclear weapons were believed to have an overall positive impact on international security.
As the probability of this worst-case being realized has grown, the UK has increased its support for processes that might reduce the salience of nuclear weapons in the thinking of states. This also explains the publication of national statements and policy documents that underline the diminishing role ascribed to nuclear weapons in UK planning, the increased efforts to strengthen international regimes and processes, as well as British support for the development of new forms of international cooperation that might erect new technical, political, or legal barriers in the way of nuclear weapon development.
The UK authorities have concluded that a new commitment to multilateral arms control must be one element in a strategy to head off this potential proliferation dynamic, or at least reduce its extent. Furthermore, they have concluded that in order for the multilateral approach to deliver its full potential there must be a new commitment to rebalance the underlying bargain between nuclear weapons states and non-nuclear weapons states contained in the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). In the speeches by Foreign Minister Beckett the need for a new effort to reduce nuclear weapons by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council was highlighted. In the speech by Gordon Brown great emphasis was also placed on the need to ensure that the commitment in the NPT for cooperation in the peaceful use of nuclear technology is fully respected by all parties to the treaty.
In light of the changes in UK thinking about how armed forces might be used, the interest in strengthening the nonproliferation regime also becomes both pragmatic and logical. Although senior decision-makers sometimes underline that “all options are on the table” in scenarios where nuclear weapons may be present, in fact the spread of nuclear weapons and ballistic missile delivery systems for them to more states in the region where UK military planners believe that forces are most likely to be used—the Middle East and Southwest Asia—would undoubtedly be a major complicating factor in any future military operations.
As noted above, analyses suggest that the UK national deterrent may not confer any particular advantage on the UK vis-à-vis potential adversaries in regional scenarios, and UK forces would in any case only be committed alongside the United States. However, managing the transatlantic dimensions of a confrontation with a country that has nuclear weapons and a delivery system that could target Europe but not North America would raise new issues for extended deterrence. Or perhaps more accurately it would raise the old issues of credibility and solidarity in a very new context.
The brief survey of British nuclear policy presented above suggests that there is currently a political space opening up in which a thorough and detailed review of the case for British nuclear weapons might be undertaken. However, there is also considerable evidence for the view that political, technical, and in dustrial issues create a very large inertia that would have to be overcome before the current decision to maintain a national deterrent could be reversed. While it was always true that the most probable outcome of the review of nuclear policy planned for 2010 would mirror the deliberations conducted in 2006—which were limited to discussing what type of nuclear deterrent is needed—there are a few factors that might lead to a different decision.
The first is that senior political leaders in the UK appear to have a genuinely open mind on the long-term goal of eliminating nuclear weapons, though policy is still based on a conviction that this is not a realistic objective for the short or medium term. A great deal of activity was aimed at creating the best conditions for advancing the preferred UK proposals at the 2010 conference to review the NPT. This included an effort to strengthen nonproliferation instruments that are regarded as a necessary adjunct to the anticipated expansion in the nuclear industry worldwide. Therefore, significant progress in nuclear nonproliferation and reductions in the arsenals of the largest nuclear powers would have a strong impact on UK nuclear policy.
A second factor is the pressure exerted on nuclear planning by the combination of the immediate operational needs of the armed forces and a financial situation that demands close scrutiny of all discretionary spending. If the view that nuclear forces were not central to UK security became widespread, then the large investment in new platforms and delivery systems for nuclear weapons might also come to be seen as unaffordable.
1. Margaret Beckett, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons?” Keynote address to the Carnegie International Nonproliferation Conference, 25 June 2007, at http://www.carnegieendowment.org/events/ index.cfm?fa=eventDetail&id=1004.
2. Des Browne, Secretary of State for Defence, “Laying the Foundations for Multilateral Disarmament,” Conference on Disarmament, Geneva, 5 February 2008, at http://www.labour.org.uk/des_browne_conference_on_nuclear_disarmament.
3. Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, opening address to International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Conference, 17–18 March 2009, at http://ukinaustria.fco.gov.uk/en/uk-mission-un-in-vienna/meetings-and-conferences.
4. 16 July 2009, at http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/reports/roadto2010.aspx.
5. Patrick Wintour, The Guardian, 9 July 2009, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/ world/2009/jul/09/britain-nuclear-stockpile-summit-obama.
6. Patrick Wintour and Nicholas Watt, The Guardian Online, 16 June 2009, at http://www.guardian.co.uk.
7. Securing Britain in an Age of Uncertainty: The Strategic Defence and Security Review, Command Paper 7948 (London, October 2010).
8. These issues are explored in particular by Paul Cornish and Andrew Dorman in their articles International Affairs 85, no. 2 (March 2009); and “National Defence in the Age of Austerity,” International Affairs 85, no. 4 (May 2009).
9. Peter Hennessy, Cabinets and the Bomb, British Academy Occasional Paper 11 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 345.
10. Michael Quinlon, Strategic Analysis 33, no. 3 (May 2009): 345.
11. Michael Howard, “Military Power and International Order,” International Affairs 40, no. 3 (July 1964): 399–400.
12. Malcolm Rifkind, UK Defence Strategy: A Continuing Role for Nuclear Weapons? Speech to the Centre for Defence Studies, London, November 16, 1993.
13. Michael Clarke, “Does My Bomb Look Big in This?” International Affairs 80, no. 1 (January 2004).
14. Statement to the House of Commons by Minister of Defence Malcolm Rifkind, 9 February 2003.
15. Of these warheads no more than 160 are in operational deployment with the remainder undergoing routine maintenance or held in storage. James Blitz, Financial Times, 27 May 2010, p. 2, at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d204db92-6925-11df-aa7e00144feab49a.html.
16. UK Ministry of Defence, “Modern Defences for the Modern World,” Strategic Defence Review (July 1998).
17. Delivering Security in a Changing World, Defence White Paper presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Defence, Cm 6041-I, December 2003, p. 3.
18. Clarke, “Does My Bomb Look Big In This?”
19. Peter Hennessy, Cabinets and the Bomb, British Academy Occasional Paper 11 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 331.
20. The decision to purchase Trident was taken in 1980 and the first submarine became operational around 1994.
21. UK Ministry of Defence, The Future of the United Kingdom’s Nuclear Deterrent, 4 December 2006.
22. Adaptability and Partnership: Issues for the Strategic Defence Review, presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Defence, Cm 7794, February 2010, p. 47.
23. Securing Britain in an Age of Uncertainty, p. 5.
24. Secretary of State for Defence Liam Fox statement to the House of Commons on Defence Treaties (France), Hansard, 2 November, Column 780.
25. Treaty between the United Kingdon of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the French Republic relating to Joint Radiographic/Hydrodynamics Facilities, London, November 2, 2010.
26. Michel Quinlan, “The Future of United Kingdom Nuclear Weapons: Shaping the Debate,” International Affairs 82, no. 4 (July 2006).
27. Douglas Hurd, Malcolm Rifkind, David Owen and George Robertson, “Start Worrying and Learn to Ditch the Bomb,” The Times, 30 June 2008. For more information on the Top Level Group of UK Parliamentarians for Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament and Non-proliferation see http://toplevelgroup.org/.
28. Max Hastings, “If Defence Is to Be Strategic Rather than Politically Expedient, Dump Trident,” The Guardian Online, 19 January 2009, at www.guardian.co.uk.
29. In 2009 the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) convened a Commission on National Security in the 21st Century that included many eminent names from the British defense establishment. The IPPR commissioners did challenge the view that a submarine-based deterrent was the best alternative and called for a review. However, it is not clear on what grounds such a review would overturn the technical analysis made by the Ministry of Defence as recently as 2006. Shared Responsibilities: A National Security Strategy for the United Kingdom, final report of the IPPR Commission on National Security in the 21st Century (June 2009).
30. The Cabinet Office, The National Security Strategy of the United Kingdom: Security in an Interdependent World (March 2008).
31. For a British view on escalation during the Cold War see Lawrence Freedman, “Escalation and Arms Control,” in Nuclear Strategy and World Security, ed. Joseph Rotblat and Sven Hellman (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985).
32. Joint Doctrine and Concepts Centre, Strategic Trends, Ministry of Defence (March 2003).
33. UK Ministry of Defence, Delivering Security in a Changing World (December 2003).
34. Paul Cornish and Andrew Dorman, “Blair’s Wars and Brown’s Budgets: From Strategic Defence Review to Strategic Decay in Less than a Decade,” International Affairs 85, no. 2 (March 2009).
35. The Alliance’s New Strategic Concept, agreed by the North Atlantic Council, Rome, 7–8 November 1991, at http://www.nato.int/docu/comm/49-95/c911107a.htm.
36. Malcolm Rifkind, speech delivered at King’s College, London, 16 November 1993, quoted in Bruce D. Larkin, Nuclear Designs: Great Britain, France and China in the Global Governance of Nuclear Arms (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, 1996), p. 38.
37. Rob Evans and David Leigh, “Falklands Warships Carried Nuclear Weapons, MoD Admits,” The Guardian, 6 December 2003.
38. Major quoted in Hugo Young “Hoon’s Talk of Pre-emptive Strikes Could Be Catastrophic,” The Guardian, 6 June 2002.
39. Richard Norton-Taylor, “Bush’s Nuke Bandwagon,” The Guardian, 27 March 2002. The transcript of the interview from the ITV Jonathan Dimbleby Show is available at http://cndyorks.gn.apc.org/news/articles/uknukepolicy.htm.
40. Hoon’s response to a parliamentary question is reproduced in the House of Commons, Hansard Debates for 29 April 2002.
41. See, for example, Commander Robert Green, “Conventionally-Armed UK Trident?” RUSI Journal 147, no. 1 (February 2002); and Michael Clarke, “Does My Bomb Look Big in This?” On this particular point the conclusions reached in this period were very similar to those arrived at by analysts ten years earlier. See Nicholas K. J. Witney, The British Nuclear Deterrent after the Cold War (RAND Corporation, 2005).
42. UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Lifting the Nuclear Shadow: Creating the Conditions for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons (9 February 2009).
43. Ibid.
44. Patrick A. McVey, Joint Exercises and Training Division/J37, USSTRATCOM Joint Exercise Briefing (9 February 2005).
45. George W. Bush, Remarks at the National Defense University, 1 May 2001.
46. Elements of the Nuclear Posture Review Report submitted to Congress on 31 December 2001 at http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/policy/dod/npr.htm.
47. M. Elaine Bunn, “Can Deterrence Be Tailored?” Strategic Forum (January 2007).
48. UK Ministry of Defence, The Future of the United Kingdom’s Nuclear Deterrent, 4 December 2006.
49. “Securing Britain in an Age of Uncertainty: The Strategic Defence and Security Review,” Command Paper 7948, October 2010, p. 37, at http://www.direct.gov.uk/prod_ consum_dg/groups/dg_digitalassets/@dg/@en/documents/digitalasset/dg_191634.pdf.
50. Sir Lawrence Freedman, “British Perspectives on Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Disarmament,” in Barry Blechman, ed., Unblocking the Road to Zero: Perspectives of Advanced Nuclear Nations, Stimson Center February 2009, p. 24.
51. George Perkovic and James Acton, Abolishing Nuclear Weapons, Adelphi Paper 396 (London: IISS, 2008).