Quote:
Originally Posted by roughbeast
How about Russia and China then? Clearly, they could wipe us off the face of the earth in minutes. What damage could we do them, without the USA? Given their anti-missile systems could easily take out our 160 operational nuclear warheads I don't actually think trident, on its own, would stop them attacking us with a first nuclear strike. (Each submarine is armed with up to 16 Trident II missiles, each carrying warheads in up to eight MIRV re-entry vehicles.) The real deterrent is the USA, with 1900 operational warheads and 4500 in total. So what is the point of having our own nuclear weapons? We could never go it alone, so why have them?
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Moscow criterion.
No ABM system that we're aware of could handle our warheads, decoys and other penetration mechanisms.
It has never taken many warheads in the grand scheme to wipe us off the face of the planet. We have more nuclear targets per square mile than any other nation in the world.
At the height of the cold war Russia was believed to have hundreds of high yield weapons aimed at the UK, with upwards of half a gigaton of total yield.
Killing basically every man, woman and child in the UK would've required ~15% of the Soviet arsenal.
It would be illegal for us to ramp our nuclear weaponry back up - we have been multilaterally disarming for years, so the Moscow Criterion or similar are what we have.
---------- Post added at 21:23 ---------- Previous post was at 21:19 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by ianch99
I find it difficult to believe that after so many years relying on the US to provide the delivery vehicle, the UK would have retained the highly specialised expertise when there was no ongoing requirement.
Also, didn't the US force the Trident programme on the UK when they decided, unilaterally, to wind up the Polaris programme?
I think the bottom line is Trident relies on the cooperation of the US whether we like it or not and it would be disingenuous to claim otherwise.
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We have the delivery vehicles in our possession, and since we received them we have been trading missiles with the US for refurbishment, borrowing from one another's stockpiles.
They didn't force Trident on us, the decision was made to lease Trident when Polaris was obsoleted.
We definitely have the technology to make our own launch vehicles. Aside from our known expertise in propulsion, guidance (we were to supply computer cores for a certain major US space project), etc, you seriously think we haven't had a
really close look at Trident?
---------- Post added at 21:26 ---------- Previous post was at 21:23 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by TheDaddy
The bit that jumped of the page for me was the trident replacement white paper 2006 'the Pentagon has the UK hog tied, over a barrel but that's cheaper than a fully independent deterrent. It could be that guys full of it and that paper or that part of it never even existed but if it did realism and pragmatism can shove right of imo
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Thanks for that. Indicates that if the UK wanted / needed to we could produce a fully independent deterrent, but choose for cost reasons to lease Trident from the USA.
Of course Lockheed Martin are making money from it. Military industrial complex...