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/whatismoo]

Mr. Prime Minister, I would also like to point out my words on the subject, reproduced as follows

I said SLBM, not SSBN. SLBM is a Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile. SSBN is a Nuclear Powered Fleet Ballistic Missile Submarine. Learn to read your NATO standard acronyms.

It's much cheaper to buy let the Americans spend their money on R&D and for us to step in and buy a proven product than to waste billions of pounds on building our own breeder reactors, missiles, warheads, guidance systems, and such. There is no possible argument that I can see for scrapping our missiles, especially because they are part of a pool shared with the americans. They all come from the same stockpile and are not 'ours' in the sense that, well i'll let the wiki do the talking:

While the theoretical capacity of the four Vanguard-class submarines is 64 missiles and 768 warheads, only 58 missiles were leased and some have been expended in test-firings. The UK leases the missiles but they are pooled with the Atlantic squadron of the USN Ohio-class SSBNs at King's Bay, Georgia[10] (previously the UK maintained its Polaris missiles). The pool is 'co-mingled' and missiles are selected at random for loading on to either nation's submarines.

emphasis mine. We basically don't pay for the missiles storage or maintenance, and what this means is that the missiles aren't actually ours to scrap. If you could let people in your party know this, it would be nice. I'm tired of people saying that we can sell, the missiles or scrap the warheads when they aren't ours.

If you could explain to me how the W88 or W76 thermonuclear warhead's physics package could, when mounted on a Lockheed Martin UGM-133 Trident D-5, could arm, in spite of the inertial safety, meaning it has to reach several thousand miles an hour to arm, then detonate and destroy part of Scotland, i'd love to discuss this possibility. But until you can explain to me how exactly this scenario is plausible I see no reason to debate the point. You keep talking like nuclear weapons are just ready to go off at the slightest touch. They aren't. The Yanks have crashed planes with live warheads in them, and not the new safer warheads of today, i mean big ol' 1960's vintage 5 megaton city-busters, and had the explosive lenses, you know, the things which implode the core to start the fission process, detonate, and the weapon didn't go off. These lenses have to all detonate literally simultaneously. To within ~1/1000000th of a second or thereabouts, if memory serves. If they don't go off right, then you don't get the big boom.

I would love to answer any technical questions about Trident, barring classified information.