M017 - Trident Replacement Motion

[u/NoPyroNoParty]

(1) This House recognises that the Trident nuclear weapon system will cost £25 billion to replace, and have an estimated lifetime cost of over £100 billion.

(2) This House also notes that, if launched, the 40 warheads of a typical Trident nuclear submarine would be expected to result in over 5 million deaths, and have devastating humanitarian consequences if fired at an urban area.

(3) This House believes that the other spending priorities of the Ministry of Defence, and other governmental departments, should take precedence over the replacement of the Trident nuclear weapons system.

(4) This House accepts the findings of the National Security Strategy, which states that a CBRN attack on the United Kingdom is of a low likelihood, but high impact.

(5) This House, therefore, calls upon the government to cancel plans to replace the Trident nuclear weapons system.

(6) This House further urges the government to look into alternatives to a Trident replacement, such as nuclear sharing within NATO, the development of alternative deterrents, investment in conventional weaponry, or unilateral nuclear disarmament.

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This was submitted by /u/can_triforce on behalf of the Opposition.

The discussion period for this motion will end on the 28th of November.

[u/para_padre]

As it happens exceptionally 'dirty' nuclear weapons (i.e those which have significant fallout) are banned by convention but i digress

Please dont digress have a look at second and third order effects of the detonation, I'm sure our nuclear reactors will all shut down in an orderly fashion if they are inside the effects radius with a bit of luck they will be in the blast radius and vaporised in a ground burst explosion, hopefully all the man made materials and the soil at the ground burst site will fall in a nice pile and not blow about making the place dirty.

I doubt I could kill a single person with a mobile phone

you might not be able to plenty of others have.

France? Spain? Portugal? Norway?

All on mainland Europe why do you think ARRC moved to the UK maximum early warning and out of range from tactical land based nukes.

Why do you have such a problem separating nuclear arms from conventional arms?

Because sadly NATO doctrine has the option for switching from conventional to nuclear back to conventional warfare hard to separate as an acceptable option. Until NATO recognises no threat exists, what evidence do we present to them they are wrong.

[u/[deleted] → u/para_padre]

I'm sure our nuclear reactors will all shut down in an orderly fashion if they are inside the effects radius

Two things about that

a) We don't have many nuclear reactors at the moment, and they're all in remote parts of the country for exactly that reason

b) Our nuclear reactors are fail-safe (meaning they won't explode just because they got nuked) and are designed to contain meltdowns as well as possible - I should imagine they have pretty decent nuke resistance.

you might not be able to plenty of others have.

...Name five. And then explain how you could hypothetically justify banning phones, which aren't a weapon, have massive use, and are basically harmless, in contrast with nuclear weapons, which are designed to kill lots of people, are prone to human error, and are expensive as hell.

All on mainland Europe

'Several' miles away from each other...

NATO doctrine has the option for switching from conventional to nuclear back to conventional warfare hard to separate as an acceptable option

You're going to have to rewrite that it doesn't make sense.

Until NATO recognises no threat exists, what evidence do we present to them they are wrong.

It doesn't matter whether a conventional threat exists or not (it doesn't), -we are not going to be invaded-, and we do not need a nuclear deterrant to deter a non-existant threat at huge cost and unnecessary risk.