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British Defense Secretary Liam Fox today defended a plan devised by the former Labor Party administration to replace the United Kingdom's submarine-based nuclear deterrent with an equal number of vessels, the Press Association reported (see GSN, July 28).
The Conservative Party-led government is conducting a cost analysis on a $30 billion plan to modernize the country's nuclear force by replacing its four Trident missile-equipped Vanguard-class submarines. Submarine numbers as well as the count of missiles, missile tubes and warheads are all being examined.
Former Prime Ministers "Gordon Brown and Tony Blair didn't choose this particular program because it is the most expensive," Fox told the Metro newspaper. "They chose it because they thought it was the most cost-effective way of maintaining Britain's nuclear deterrent in the first half of this century."
Cutting the deterrent to only three nuclear-armed submarines would make it difficult to carry out the country's long-standing policy of always having at least one vessel on patrol, the secretary said.
"At current levels of technology, it is very hard to manage a continuous deterrent with three submarines rather than four," Fox said.
Fox said the United Kingdom continued to need a strong nuclear deterrent.
"Should Iran become a new nuclear weapon state, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey would be likely to follow suit and we could see ourselves in a new nuclear arms race," he said.
British Treasury head George Osborne today emphasized that funding for the nuclear replacement plan would have to come from the Defense Ministry's central budget. In the past, nuclear force costs have not been included in the core defense budget. The present situation would make it "very difficult" for the Defense Ministry to ensure upkeep of its other systems, Fox said recently.
"All budgets have pressure," Osborne said to Bloomberg. "I don't think there's anything particularly unique about the Ministry of Defense. I have made it very clear that Trident renewal costs must be taken as part of the defense budget."
Osborne's public pronouncement was a blow to Fox, according to the Press Association. The secretary had lobbied heavily out of the public eye to keep the modernization plan out of the main military budget.
Malcolm Chalmers, a former adviser to two British foreign ministers, said Osborne's announcement added to "the pressure to look at the timetable for Trident renewal."
"Delaying that timetable for five years would substantially lighten the pressure on the defense budget up to 2020," said Chalmers, who authored a recent Royal United Services Institute analysis on British nuclear force posture alternatives.
The Scottish National Party has said the Trident program should be cut completely so as to free up monies for the rest of the military.
"Absorbing Trident into the core defense budget is unsustainable and would have a devastating impact for spending on conventional forces, which are already overstretched," party defense spokesman Angus Robertson said (Andrew Woodcock, Press Association/London Evening Standard, July 30).