Nuclear Deterrence

What is Nuclear Deterrence?

The strategic concept of deterrence aims to prevent war. It is the justification virtually every nuclear state uses for maintaining nuclear arsenals, including the UK.

The concept of nuclear deterrence follows the rationale of the 'first user' principle: states reserve the right to use nuclear weapons in self-defence against an armed attack threatening their vital security interests.

Possession of nuclear weapons could be seen as the ultimate bargaining tool in international diplomacy, instantly giving any nuclear state a seat at the top table.

The UK's nuclear policy, outlined in the 1998 Strategic Defence Review, is to keep one nuclear submarine constantly at sea, carrying 48 warheads. The Strategic Defence Review installed a lower state of alert than previously maintained as the missiles are not targeted and are usually kept at several days 'notice to fire'.


Background

Prime Minister Clement Attlee authorised a British nuclear weapons programme in 1947, two years after the USA dropped its first atomic bombs on Japan.

Already in 1945, a general purpose Atomic Energy Research Establishment had been set up at Harwell and in early 1946 a production facility based at Risley was established. In June 1947, Windscale on the Cumbrian coast was named as a safe site for the production of plutonium.

On October 3 1952, the UK conducted its first successful nuclear test, in the Monte Bello Islands off the north west coast of Australia - and Britain became a nuclear power. The Blue Danube air-delivered bomb entered service in 1953.

A 1958 agreement gave the UK access to American nuclear weapons design information, and in 1962 the US agreed to provide information about its submarine-launched missile system, Polaris. The first Polaris submarine, HMS Resolution, went to sea in 1968. Polaris was later modified in the early 1970s to a uniquely British system known as Chevaline.

In 1980, the Thatcher Government announced plans to purchase the new US Trident missile system, to replace Polaris. The final replacement took place in 1996, and left the UK entirely dependent on US technology for its nuclear submarine technology.

Labour announced plans in the 1998 Strategic Defence Review to scale down the UK's nuclear arsenal: to reduce the stockpile of warheads from a maximum of 300 to under 200 (along with 56 missile bodies). The last of the RAF's WE177 nuclear bombs were taken out of service in March that year.

In December 2006, the government proposed that after Trident expired in the 2020s, the number of nuclear warheads should be cut further from 200 to a maximum of 160 and the number of submarines reduced from three to four.

Although the UK's nuclear arsenal guaranteed its continued global influence in the Cold War, it was the nuclear deterrence developed between the USA and the USSR - the belief that any attack would lead to massive nuclear retaliation and 'mutually assured destruction' - that maintained the temperature between the 1950s and 1990s. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 provided a stark example of both the precariousness and effectiveness of deterrence at the time.

Efforts were made during the 1960s and 1970s to reduce superpower nuclear arsenals and to prevent nuclear proliferation. 187 countries signed up to the 1968 Non Proliferation Treaty, including the five nuclear powers of the day: the USA, USSR, China, France and the UK. The Treaty aimed to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons technology and to encourage peaceful nuclear co-operation.

However, a number of other states have developed nuclear weapons since the 1968 Non Proliferation Treaty. Israel, India and Pakistan are known to have nuclear weapons, and a number of other states claim to have them.


Controversies

The threat to humanity as a whole from nuclear weapons has led many to oppose them since their development.

In the UK, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament waged a long campaign that was most famously embodied in the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, which protested outside the RAF base chosen as a base for US ground-launched missiles from 1981 to 2000. From 1960 to 1989, the Labour Party was committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament.

Nonetheless, deterrence and Mutually Assured Destruction did prevent nuclear war between the USA and USSR, until the collapse of Communism.

Since the end of the Cold War, the nature of the nuclear threat has changed dramatically. The greatest nuclear fear today is that nuclear weapons find their way into the hands of terrorists or 'rogue states', either through autonomous programmes of development or technology passed on, particularly from the former Soviet Union or China.

A policy of deterrence is useless against terrorists, and is less useful against 'rogue states' such as Iran and North Korea, both of which are believed to possess nuclear weapons, because their motivations are not easily understood.

The UK maintains a sub-strategic 'tactical' nuclear capability: 'battlefield' nuclear weapons that are not part of a deterrent strategy. In the past, this role was performed by air-delivered WE177 bombs, today it is performed by Trident.

Although the Strategic Defence Review says the shift from WE177 and Polaris to Trident has reduced the UK's megatonnage of warheads by 70 per cent since the 1970s, Trident is a much more powerful weapon that its predecessors. It has a range of 4,600 miles (compared to 2,500 for Polaris and Chevaline), three times the targeting capability, permitting each missile to hit 48 targets.

When the government was drawing up plans to replace Trident in 2006, anti-nuclear campaigners and many in the Labour party argued Britain should abandon the weapons system altogether. They argued against replacing Trident on moral grounds, they said it would breach the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and also questioned the cost - about £1 billion a year between 2012 and 2027. However, the government insisted nuclear weapons were a vital part of Britain's defence.



Statistics

At the end of 1997 there were an estimated 36,000 nuclear warheads worldwide, 14,000 of which were awaiting dismantlement

In the ten years up to 1998, there was a five-fold decrease in the number of nuclear weapon storage sites worldwide

The total cost of replacing Polaris with Trident was £12.4 billion, plus £280 million a year running costs. This made up three per cent of the defence budget in 1998.

Statistics 1 and 2: (Source: Natural Resources Defense Council, 'Worldwide Nuclear Deployments', 1998); Statistic 3: (Source: Strategic Defence Review, 1998)



Quotes

"Nuclear weapons, whose terrible effects are suffered, indiscriminately and inexorably, by military forces and civilian populations alike, constitute, through the persistence of the radioactivity they release, an attack on the integrity of the human species and ultimately may even render the whole earth uninhabitable."

Tlatelolco Treaty, Preamble, 1968

"The government wishes to see a safer world in which there is no place for nuclear weapons."

Strategic Defence Review, Chapter 4, 1998

"In the final analysis, the risk of giving up something that has been one of the mainstays of our security since the war, and moreover doing so when the one certain thing about our world today is its uncertainty, is not a risk I feel we can responsibly take."

Prime Minister Tony Blair, House of Commons, November 2006