Upgrading
Armageddon
Trident is well-named, in that it is a three-pronged system. It consists of British-built Vanguard submarines, nuclear warheads made at Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, and, the weak point that renders it not so independent, US missiles, dependent for guidance on the US satellite navigation system, and so on US permission to launch. Replacement concerns all three of these separate but inter-dependent parts, upgrading any one of which is a step towards upgrading the whole. Similarly, a chain being only as strong as its weakest link, upgrading one part whilst leaving the others unaffected may not be an effective upgrade at all.
It is difficult
to imagine exactly of what an ‘upgrade’ consists. Will it be a result of making the warheads
more powerful? But that is absurd, as
the warheads are already unimaginably powerful.
Will it consist of making the warheads less powerful – an idea currently
being considered in the
Will it consist
of upgrading the capability of the submarine part of the delivery system? But this is unlikely, and has not so far been
mentioned in the scanty press coverage. Making
the submarines faster, or more difficult to detect, would make a very marginal
difference, and in any case not be relevant to the forthcoming debate in
parliament. Finally, as for upgrading
the missiles that carry the warhead, that is a
So what will be
the focus of the debate on upgrading
As the upgrade
has been costed at around £25 billion, evidently
details of the upgrading have already been decided. Certainly, new facilities
are being installed at Aldermaston, in advance of the ‘decision’ being taken by
parliament. I suppose mention will be
made of the ‘ageing’ warheads, and their ‘unreliability’, but to a non-technical
observer this hardly makes sense.
Plutonium has a rather long half-life, measured in many thousands of
years, and a renewal of the conventional explosive trigger cannot be the focus
of the coming discussion, as it would cost but a trivial amount. Each warhead has the explosive power of eight
Altogether, it
will be interesting to follow the debate in parliament. It is to be hoped that the level of debate
will rise above ‘We don’t want to give up our big stick, in case others with
big sticks will come and beat us’. Does