Dan Snow's History Hit - Trident: Does the Nuclear Deterrent Work?

Episode Date: September 8, 2021

With the release of the nuclear submarine TV series, Vigil, Dr Nick Ritchie, Senior Lecturer at the University of York and the UK’s leading expert on Trident, joins James for this episode of our sibling podcast Warfare. Nick gives us a step-by-step history on the multilayered missile system, which is said to act as deterrence. Earlier this year, Boris Johnson’s government agreed to increase the amount of nuclear weapons in the UK by around 40%, and it’s still unknown where the warheads would be stored if Scotland secure a second referendum and vote to leave the union. Hear why the UK first got nuclear weapons, whether they actually work as a deterrence, and find out the many challenges which lie ahead.Nick’s book, A Nuclear Weapons-Free World?: Britain, Trident and the Challenges Ahead, is available now.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We have an episode of one of our sibling podcasts. We've got several podcasts in our network here. We've got a Tudor-y one, could call it even Renaissance. Anyway, Susie Lipscomb's one. Then we've got a medieval one. We've got the ancients, about ancient history. And of course we've got warfare, about military history. And this is an episode of warfare. We're talking about Trident. Does the nuclear deterrent work? Feels like something we should know. Feels like a podcast we should listen to. If the final line of defence for your state is the Trident nuclear missile system,

with its intercontinental ballistic capability, acquired and sustained at gigantic costs, it feels like it's a question we should know the answer to. It's a question that I always assumed the answer to was yes. But Dr. Nick Ritchie from York University is here to tell us if that is indeed the case. It's fascinating stuff. So is what's going on at History Hit TV at the moment. We've got a whole load of programs going out. People are loving it over there at the moment. It's crazy. Lots of programs being watched. head over to historyhit.tv for the world's best history channel no aliens in sight you'll be glad to know head over to historyhit.tv you get 30 days free if you sign up now and then for a small subscription you get all these podcasts without the ads and you also get hundreds of hours of

history documentaries go and check it out but in the meantime here's our episode of warfare with dr nick Ritchie. Enjoy. Hi, Nick. Thanks for coming on the Warfare podcast. How are you doing? I'm doing very well. Thanks, James. And thank you for inviting me on to talk about the things that we're going to talk about. Yeah, not a problem at all. Now, you're a politics prof at the University of York. Me and Nick used to work together at the University of York. I do absolutely love that city. And it's got a brilliant nuclear bunker museum. Have you been? Do you know what? I haven't. I mean, I know where it is. I haven't been down there. I looked into

taking a bunch of my students down there because I teach a third year module on the global politics of nuclear weapons but this was just as Covid hit and it was kind of a bit of a no-go but I haven't been it's an English heritage Cold War bunker but they do tours organized tours and so on but no I haven't been there yet I mean I don't live in York itself live just about 20 miles away I think my first visit will be when we take a bunch of those students down. Oh yeah, you've got to go. It was the Regional Command Centre for measuring radiation that would have been emitted in the event of a nuclear bomb being dropped on the UK. And the projections show that it would have been dropped on Manchester and then radiated out. And then I think they had something like 64 smaller bunkers across Yorkshire. Each one would have been inhabited by two people who would have measured the radiation and then reported it back to the Central Command. They quite viscerally depict what the experience of a nuclear war would look and feel like for, you know, everyday folk. was quite shocked by it, reportedly. And Threads was shown on the BBC in, I think it was 1984, depicting the destination of some Russian or Soviet hydrogen bombs in Sheffield. And then

the more that one kind of learns about the practices and procedures put in place to try and ensure some continuity of government in light of a, you know, a Cold War nuclear exchange. The idea of having a couple of people in bunkers across Yorkshire reporting back to some central authority, I regard with some degree of scepticism as to whether there will be any hope of a functioning central authority in existence. In that sort of nuclear exchange scenario and in that sort of second iteration of the Cold War in the early 1980s. I mean, all this Peter Hennessy details it in lots of fine detail. The UK historian and Lord Peter Hennessy in his book, The Secret State, where he goes into quite a lot of detail on the command and control processes, the continuity of government, how governments try to plan against what would just be the worst possible scenario of a major hydrogen bomb attack by the Soviet Union against the UK.

So that bunker in York is of that era, of that vintage, yeah. Well, all happy thoughts to start the warfare podcast. It's always a cheery experience, you know, when you meet some new folk and you're down the pub and you say, what do you do? I teach at the University of York. What do you teach? Well, my interest is in nuclear weapons and nuclear disarmament. And people are interested, but about 30 seconds into the conversation, you know, the seriousness and the gloom descends. And you kind of think, shall we maybe change track on this conversation? Well, we're not going to change track because I'm interested. I know our listeners are interested.

So let's dive into this. Let's look at nuclear war or at least nuclear weapons, because our topic of discussion today is Trident. So tell us, what is Trident? In terms of the British state's nuclear weapons capability, we have one nuclear weapon system. We call it Trident, but really it's a, I suppose, a three or four part system. It consists of four nuclear powered, nuclear armed submarines that are equipped with the Trident 2D5, to give it its full title, missile, which is an American submarine launched ballistic missile. So the Americans deploy these on their nuclear armed submarines. And the UK reached an agreement to lease a certain number of these missiles from a common pool of these missiles that are

kept and maintained in the United States. So we've got four submarines, access to a stockpile of American designed and built Trident missiles. And then we've got the warheads that are mounted on those missiles that are designed and built in the United Kingdom, but are based on, well, very closely resemble a particular warhead of American design that the Americans deploy on their Trident missiles. And then I guess the fourth part, I mean, so those are kind of the three parts of the system that we often refer to as Trident, the missiles, the warheads and the submarines. And then I guess the fourth part that I alluded to is the much broader command and control

complex to manage the deployment of the submarines and targeting and any actual use firing of the weapons. Okay, so what's the logic behind this? Why do we possess this incredibly powerful nuclear weapons system? So the logic behind it is the logic of nuclear deterrence. And for the successive British governments, certainly into the post-Cold War period, the Trident system has been routinely referred to as the ultimate insurance, the guarantee of protection of the British state. It's not a set of arguments that I concur with. But the logic is that in a world in which other potentially aggressive and adversarial states deploy nuclear weapons. The traditional threat has always been the Soviet Union and then Russia, and remains so today with,

for some, China looming on the horizon. So long as adversarial states retain nuclear weapons that can be targeted at the United Kingdom, its allies, threaten what the government of the day considers to be the country's vital national interests, then the UK must have a nuclear capability with which it can threaten credible retaliation in the event of an enemy considering a nuclear attack against the UK, its allies, or its interests. And the logic of nuclear deterrence, as it developed through the 50s and 60s, primarily in the US as an intellectual set of ideas, an ideology, if you like, argued that the most credible and stabilizing way in which you can deploy your nuclear weapons is to do what the UK does, deploy them at sea

in submarines that still remain undetectable at sea and can't be destroyed in a preemptive first strike, preemptive nuclear first strike, and therefore some degree of retaliation can be guaranteed. So the scenario is a conflict escalates, gets out of control, nuclear weapons are used, probably low yield at the warfighting level. Conflict escalates further to the use of nuclear weapons against the countries involved, homelands. And in that event of the UK in a Cold War context, I mean, I find it incredibly fanciful to think that this is even a remotely exotic possibility today. Others will obviously disagree with that. But in the Cold War context, the scenario was perhaps a bolt from the blue attack from the Soviet Union, but more likely escalation. The Soviet Union is preparing to

fire nuclear strategic nuclear warheads against NATO countries, including the UK and perhaps the US as well. And the United Kingdom government can be assured then that no matter what the Soviet Union does, there will be a submarine, a British submarine at sea able to fire a retaliatory strike against the Soviet Union, in particular against Moscow. And that then would deter the Russians, the Soviet Union from considering a first strike in the process. So in order for that to make kind of that logic to make sense, sort of internally based on those premises, then the UK government has operated a nuclear strategy, a posture called continuous at-sea deterrence, CASD, and has done so through thick and thin since middle of 1968, continuously. And that means there is always

one of our four nuclear-armed submarines at sea on operational patrol, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Through the Cold War up to 94, it might have been the Strategic Defence Review in 98. But through all of the Cold War, until things start to change a bit in the early post-Cold War period, the single submarine on operational patrol at sea was held at 15 minutes notice to fire on what was called quick reaction alert. So within 15 minutes of a command coming in via the Prime Minister and then via the command and control system through the Ministry of Defence, then the submarine will be able to release its arsenal of missiles and their warheads within 15 minutes. Now the policy formally was changed, I think it was in

the 1998 Strategic Defence Review under the new Labour government of Tony Blair, that changed to 48 hours notice to fire. But my understanding is that's a maximum. And depending on where the submarine on patrol is actually in the Atlantic, which is where these submarines patrol, it could be a lot less. I mean, it could be sort of an hour or so. So that's kind of the system that the UK has had. Throughout the Cold War, we had other nuclear weapon systems too, shorter range, air deliverable systems. But after the Cold War, a lot of those were retired and we went down to the single Trident system that we have now. The four submarines that are called the Vanguard class, the US Trident missile, and the warhead for those is called the Holbrook Warhead

that was designed and developed through the 1980s. And so are these still on patrol today? Is there always a British submarine gliding silently beneath the waves somewhere in the world? Yeah. I mean, they're in the Atlantic, as far as I'm aware. I don't think I mean, we probably wouldn't know in terms of detail that is released mainly under freedom of information requests from the British government. But yes, that policy still stands. For those that are interested, it's called Operation Relentless. And it is still standard practice for the Royal Navy to have on patrol permanently one of its four nuclear-armed Vanguard-class submarines ready to fire. At the moment, the policy is, and this was a policy

change that came in in 2010, the boats deploy with up to 40 Trident warheads, each of which is reckoned to have, I mean, the figure's never released, reckoned to have an explosive yield of somewhere between 90 and 100 kilotons. To put that in perspective, the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were estimated at around 14 and 18 kilotons. So these are about seven or eight times more explosive than the bombs that leveled those two cities in August 1945 at the end of World War Two. So there's always a boat permanently on patrol on operational duty. I mean, it's the job of that crew to be out there for a couple of months at a time ready to receive orders to fire and do so if, should that horrific

eventuality ever occur. Now, I've gone through a lot of the archival documents that try to justify the use of these weapons or try and justify new strategies behind their use, especially those debates between people like the big cigar-smoking General Curtis LeMay in the US during the 1950s and his massive retaliation. His push to try and get JFK to potentially even use nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And even then, it was up for debate whether or not JFK would have ever used those missile systems. When I was going through McNamara's diaries and letters, he was saying that JFK said we wouldn't even fire back straight away if a single Soviet missile had been sent to us. Instead, we'd check, confirm, and then we'd try and communicate and see if it was a mistake or not. This was the point where you tried to avoid that mega death, as it was called

at the time. So why do we still have these today? The Cold War is over. In fact, we're even moving to a point where our number of trident nuclear warheads are set to increase under Boris Johnson's government. Why is this the case, Nick? Well, the argument essentially rests on one of future uncertainty. So it's a particular reading of world politics. And I think the interesting thing for one of the interesting things about what nuclear weapons do is whether they necessarily construct a view of world politics in order to justify the existence of these weapons and their potential use, or whether you think they are more of an objective sort of response, reflection to the world as it is.

So the argument is that we live in, I mean, it's a broadly realist argument, that we live in a world of competing adversarial states in which you cannot discount the possibility of a nuclear-armed predatory state using its nuclear weapons to try and coerce or blackmail or otherwise threaten its enemies into doing things that they would otherwise not wish to do, or even attacking other states with nuclear weapons or attacking them with other types of weapons, non-nuclear, and then threatening nuclear retaliation if there's conventional retaliation and so on. And the only way in a nuclear armed world of adversarial states, the only way in which you can protect yourself is to be able to threaten retaliation in kind. I mean, that's the logic.

There's a strategic rationality in there that's based on an awful lot of assumptions about how people, states, and the international system works. I think the real challenge with nuclear deterrence as a system of thought is that it's not possible to prove or disprove it. The arguments for nuclear deterrence, the arguments for what's been called the nuclear peace, and the argument here goes that pre-World War II, world politics was characterized by endemic conflict at the heart of the international system between the major powers of the day. And then after World War II, it's not, and we've enjoyed this period of relative peace between the world's major powers since 1945. Of course, we saw plenty of very horrific conflicts during that period, what were described as proxy conflicts during the Cold War, particularly Korea and Vietnam, with massive loss of life, as well as other major conflicts, for example, in the Congo, with massive loss of life. So this

isn't to argue that, you know, everything's been relatively peaceful in terms of war in world politics. But the argument is that it's nuclear weapons that have transformed the incentives for war between the major powers at the heart of the international system. And those arguments are also based on a lot of premises that are contestable. But the challenge of engaging with the logic of nuclear deterrence is that to make the case for nuclear deterrence, you are being asked to accept a proof of a negative, essentially, accept that certain things didn't happen because of the presence of nuclear weapons, rather than being able to demonstrate that certain things didn't happen because of the presence of nuclear weapons, rather than being able to demonstrate that certain things did happen in terms of how nuclear weapons cause certain things to happen in world politics. What the claim of nuclear deterrence is that certain things didn't happen because of the presence of nuclear weapons,

where otherwise they would have done. And that's the challenging bit, because an awful lot Otherwise, they would have done. And that's the challenging bit, because an awful lot changed after. And you'll know this as well, James, of course. An awful lot changed through the two world wars and into the post-Cold War period. The devastation that was wrought by World War I and then World War II, it was widely accepted, irrespective of the two atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that such a war just could not, should not ever be fought again. That kind of industrialized total warfare was something that was brand new, right? And horrific on many, many levels.

So we had that kind of learning experience from World War II. We also had through the two world wars, and particularly afterwards, a continuation of the process of decolonization in world politics, which has been one of the major transformations of world politics over the last 200 years. And that continued, arguably up until the collapse of the Soviet Union, where the end of the last sort of formal European-ish for the Soviet Empire. With the advent of the United Nations, this started to fundamentally reshape the structures of world politics. And then we had what we come to know now as sort of globalization,

starting really in the 1970s, global interdependence, economic globalization, and everything that's gone with that. We're in this era now of really complicated, complex integration and interdependence. So we've got all that going on. And overlaid above that, if you like it, this is how I suppose I picture, overlaid above that is the arguments for the necessity and legitimacy of doing this thing, practicing this thing called nuclear deterrence,

is an idea, well, you've got doing this thing, practicing this thing called nuclear deterrence, is an idea, well, you've got all this stuff, but there's still this starkly realist world there where states can and almost certainly will go to war up to and including doing another World War II if the threat of nuclear violence isn't there to hold those impulses in check. So that's kind of where the argument is. You've got that starkly realist view justifying necessitating nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence and the potential for cataclysmic civilization ending nuclear omnicide. And at the same time, lots of explanation is being heaped on

that. The argument is we need that to hold these impulses check because that view of world politics is the reality of world politics. And yet at the same time in the nuclear era, you've got these other really important dynamics in world politics that see world politics in a quite different way, in which the question for which nuclear weapons are presented as the answer, the question kind of doesn't make sense. One way of getting at that then, I suppose, is that there are questions over whether how much explanatory weight we can legitimately place upon the effects of nuclear deterrence in this post-Cold War period of relative peace. Whether the juxtaposition of our post-World War II kind of relative peace between

the major powers compared to a very violent pre-World War II history is really right, because it's more complicated than that. There were periods of quite extensive peace between the then powers at the heart of the international system, pre-World War II. And then going back to kind of the absolute horrors of World War II, forget about the atomic bombings, which were horrific in their own ways. But you know, those six years that built up to that point, the horrors of that, the question that we need to ask that often doesn't get asked, and this comes from my friend at Sciences Po in Paris, Benoit Palopidas, is what really is and sort of how can we know what the added deterrence value of nuclear weapons is? Because there is an

awful lot to deter states allowing their conflicts and their violent conflicts to escalate up to something like World War Two, you know, industrialized total war at the heart of the international system. There's an awful lot in place that deters that anyway. What's the added deterrent part that nuclear weapons are meant to bring to this? So I've probably gone around the houses a bit there, but there are these kind of concepts in play around the nuclear peace, houses a bit there. But there are these kind of concepts in play around the nuclear peace, nuclear deterrence, a particular reading of world politics, through that realist sense, since World War Two, and the extent to which that characterisation reflects many other important dynamics in world politics since then. For me, the answer is that nuclear weapons don't make sense.

But for others, there are plenty of others who argue that they really do. And they'll make sense until there's some kind of radical transformation of world politics to the extent that the nation state doesn't exist anymore, which means living with them in perpetuity, right? Yeah, I guess. And you raise some really interesting questions, because people ask when it comes to Trident or the next missile system that will replace it, when it comes to Trident or the next missile system that will replace it, is it really worth spending that much of taxpayers' money on these incredibly expensive missile systems when the

country is racked in debt and trying to recover from COVID? And at least a government or a military response would be, well, yes, because they're always working. You know, it's not a question of whether or not, you know, we would press that nuclear red button, so to speak, but it's the threat that we could. And they're always there. And they're deterring other nuclear countries, such as Russia or China, or perhaps a North Korea or Iran, who may potentially use these weapons against us.

Am I right? Is that the justification? Yeah, broadly so. But it's really problematic, right? Because, you know, I hear this argument that nuclear weapons are being used all the time. And my response is, well, where's your evidence to support that? Where's the evidence that particular countries and political leaders, the military elites in Beijing or Pyongyang or Moscow are being actively deterred by the fact that the UK or the United States or whomever has nuclear weapons deployed and demonstrably ready to use in fairly short timeframes. There is a real susceptibility to conflating causation with

correlation here. Other critics describe it as the logic of voodoo. You practice kind of witch doctor medicine, certain things don't happen or do happen. And you say, well, that's down to my witch doctor medicine. In fact, the lines of causality are for completely different reasons. So I mean, that's the tricky thing. Nuclear deterrence does become something of an article of faith. I consider nuclear deterrence to be an ideology. And I know ideology can be used in a pejorative sense, and I don't mean it in a pejorative sense. I do mean it as in it's almost necessarily a set of, it's a system of meaning, a structure of beliefs and so on. And I guess a fundamental reason why it's a system of beliefs into which people become socialized is because,

fortunately, we don't have an empirical database of nuclear wars and the collapse of nuclear deterrence resulting in nuclear violence. If we did have a database, there probably wouldn't be anyone here to use it. We have to go on faith in many ways. The empirical evidence that we do have is, well, we've got Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the concepts of nuclear deterrence were just about tentatively starting to emerge in the cadre of strategic theorists at the time, but it wasn't established in any significant sense. And it wasn't a nuclear war because it was entirely one-sided. And it was understood in the context of the conventional strategic bombing that had been perpetrated by both sides in that war in Europe and then by

the US Air Force against Japan. And we've fortunately had nothing since. There have been no nuclear wars, lots of nuclear tests, some pretty severe crises, not least the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which has been thoroughly dissected. But we continue to learn lots of new things about that. If you are a believer in the ideology of nuclear deterrence and the arguments that stem from that about the legitimacy of nuclear weapons and the necessity of nuclear weapons, then you will put the lack of that empirical database data set down to the successful functioning of nuclear deterrence itself. Others from a more critical perspective will question that. And I come from that critical perspective, question that in terms of the difficulty of

marshalling a sufficiently compelling body of evidence that moves from correlation into something. You're never going to be able to unequivocally prove things in social and political science. The world doesn't work that way. But a sufficiently compelling body of evidence to demonstrate that it really is the perceived threat of nuclear violence that has held in check actions that would otherwise, you know, really have been enacted. And I think, and this is pertinent to the Cuban Missile Crisis, you know, that nuclear weapons haven't been the cause of nuclear crises themselves, which arguably in the Cuban Missile Crisis, they were. Nuclear weapons were a significant cause of the Cuban Missile Crisis itself.

If you listen to Dan Snow's history, we've got an episode of Warfare on about Trident, the nuclear deterrent. More after this. More after this. epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. There are new episodes every week.

This is still very much a live problem that is being deliberated and debated in your own mind and in the minds of so many academics and policy makers and military personnel across the world. But that's the deterrence aspect and the international aspect. But are we missing something here? Is there a domestic element to Britain's need for Trident? And here I'm kind of cheekily pushing towards the importance of Scotland. Yeah, okay. So to come back to the UK then. So we are in the process of recapitalising the Trident system. So the submarines, the missiles, the warheads, starting with, and this

was kicked off by the Tony Blair government in 2006, starting with the commissioning, the design development, commissioning of four new ballistic missile submarines. They're called the Dreadnought class, and they're going to replace the Vanguard class. The first of those is being built at the Barrow shipyard in Cumbria in the north of England now. The first of those is due to be commissioned into service in the early 2030s. That's as specific as the government is getting now, early 2030s. And that's been delayed a lot. It was going to be 2024, back in 2010, then 2028, and now it's early 2030s. And so there's been a lot of debate in the UK at various times since around that decision in 2006, particularly around

the general elections in 2010 and 2015, and around the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, about the case for investing an awful lot of money in these incredibly expensive, very sophisticated machines that are capable of delivering catastrophic horrors upon whomever they may be fired against, particularly, I suppose, Moscow. The Labour Party in the UK has been split on this and the Conservative Party have in this period and historically taken good political advantage of that. and historically taken good political advantage of that. And the Scottish National Party, which is the party of government in the devolved administration in Edinburgh in Scotland, is vehemently opposed in principle to nuclear weapons. The debate has been around lots of domestic political stuff.

It's been around cost. It's been around just in terms of numbers. So the figure at the moment is 31 billion for the recapitalisation programme It's been around cost. It's been around just in terms of numbers. So the figure at the moment is 31 billion for the recapitalization program, plus another 10 billion in reserve because these things always overrun. Ministry of Defense has proven itself troubled, let's say, to bring in big projects on time and on budget. So it's a big amount of money. And there's been lots of discussion around

opportunity costs, both for the Ministry of Defence, you know, if you're spanking a load of money on these ballistic missile submarines, then what are you being asked to cut? And that's affected the Navy quite a bit, but also wider social opportunity costs. You know, if you're spending this much on nuclear armed submarines, how many nurses could that buy? How many schools could that build? How many hospitals could we afford with that? And so on. So that's been kind of the nature of the debate. There's a lot of politics around the shipyard at Barrow.

The unions are well on board for building these submarines because these represent very high-end manufacturing design jobs. represent very high-end manufacturing design jobs that the unions are very keen to support their members' ability to retain these high-end manufacturing jobs, particularly in the context of the UK that's really hemorrhaged manufacturing infrastructure and jobs through the late 70s, 80s, 90s, and so on. And then there's the politics of nuclear weapons in the UK where you cannot escape the ways in which nuclear weapons get wrapped in the flag. It's been a feature of debates past and it's been a feature of what's been called the Trident Replacement debate, which kicked off, like I say, back in 2006 with the Blair government. We routinely hear narratives from through the media and from

our politicians and our political and military leaders that associate Britain's ability to continue to deploy nuclear weapons with a sense of what sort of a state Britain is in world politics. People talk about status, but it's a bit more nuanced than that, I think. It is about sort of national identity conceptions, and the sense in which, to use Tony Blair's term, Blair framed and discussed the UK in terms of a pivotal power, accepting that we weren't a global power anymore, you know, akin to the United States, or how China is becoming, or how the Soviet Union was in the Cold War. We're not a global power, but we are a pivotal power, as Blair framed it then, with lots of kind of things associated with

that sense of soft power, membership of the EU, as well as membership of NATO, UN Security Council permanent member, and part of that was being a nuclear weapon state. So within that context, for many, I think of our policy elite, say, the idea of the UK not having nuclear weapons is really to challenge that idea of what sort of a state the United Kingdom is. That's really deeply embedded. Here you're getting into the culture of nuclear weapons in a country. A lot of the discussions and debates that are centered around the language and ideas and meanings of nuclear deterrence aren't able by virtue of the language that they use to engage with the importance of the domestic politics of a nuclear culture, which rarely gets formally sort of surfaced in policy documents, but it's there if you look for

it. Once you start to look for it, you kind of see it everywhere in the narratives, formal narratives, media narratives around nuclear weapons. So there's a lot of that politics there. And the gendered aspect of this is important as well. Because we have statements that quite routinely associate nuclear disarmament within the UK with emasculation. Some are more nuanced, some can be really quite explicit. And in that sense, when you have the Labour Party under Ed Miliband, a little bit under Gordon Brown, certainly under Jeremy Corbyn, toying with or actively supporting the idea of getting the UK out of the nuclear weapons business, and legitimising that in terms of the broad support in world politics from the majority world for delegitimizing nuclear weapons and prohibiting and eliminating nuclear weapons,

then what tends to be a fairly right wing media and the Tory party and supporters of nuclear weapons within the Labour Party, frame those individuals and those narratives as weak, kind of emotional and emasculating, frame disarmament in those very gendered terms. And by extension, frame the retention of nuclear weapons with kind of strength, protection, status, influence. And so that's kind of a bit of a background around some of the politics of this. Again, going back under Tony Blair, you can see a lot of this starts with the Blair government that came into office in the Westminster Parliament in 1997. So Blair came in and the Labour Party's manifesto included a referendum on devolving powers, in particular to Scotland. That referendum was held and it was won and a devolved administration

called, I think initially the Scottish Executive, then it was known as the Scottish Government, was established in 1999 and the Scottish Parliament was reconstituted. I once made the mistake of saying the Scottish Parliament was established in 1999. No, there was a Scottish Parliament a long time ago. The Scottish Parliament was reconstituted. A slightly different voting system there in terms of elections to the Scottish Parliament, whereby there is an element of proportional representation that we don't have for the Westminster government, which was meant to ensure that no single party would enjoy an overall majority in the Scottish Parliament. single party would enjoy an overall majority in the Scottish Parliament. Labour won the first two elections, I think the first two elections to the Scottish Parliament, but then started to lose ground. A bit of background here, really Tory support over the 1990s completely evaporated in Scotland. On the back of Thatcherism and its effects in Scotland, which were fairly

devastating in many respects, the trialling of the much hated poll tax by the Thatcher government in Scotland. And so we saw Tory support in Scotland fall away fairly dramatically through the 1990s and 2000s. A lot of support still for Labour, won those first two elections to the newly formed Scottish Parliament in the late 90s and then in, I don't know, when was it? Maybe 2003. And then there was a kind of growing disenchantment with the Blair New Labour Project, and we started to see Labour support really fall away, particularly on the back of the decision to go into a rap with the Bush administration after 9-11, in fact, in 2003. And then what you had in the next election, I'm going around the houses now. In 2007, the next Scottish Parliament elections, the Scottish National Party gained a majority

there. Well, it gained, I think, one more MSP, Member of the Scottish Parliament, than Labour. So it didn't have a majority in Scottish Parliament, but it won the vote. So it ran a minority government in 2007 and said then, at the next elections in 2011, if it won those with a majority in the Parliament, then it would push for an independence referendum. And that shouldn't happen, the system was designed so that no one party could gain a majority. And what did the SNP do in 2011? They won that hands down. They cleared the board, really. And now you had a majority SNP government in Edinburgh, and they pushed forward with their plans for a referendum. And the David Cameron government, the United Kingdom government, the Conservatives in Westminster agreed to that. And the referendum was held in 2014. And the SNP lost that or the coalition in support of independence lost that

it was about 45% to 55%. And the SNP, as I said earlier, have been consistently vehemently opposed to nuclear weapons. And this matters because where are all of the UK's nuclear weapons based? They're based at the Clyde Naval Base on Gareloch in about 10 miles or so, 15 miles west of Glasgow. So all of the UK's nuclear armed submarines are home ported at the Clyde Naval Base in Scotland. And there are many nuclear warheads, most of our arsenal of nuclear warheads that aren't on the submarines are stored at that naval base. And so this has long been a thorn in the side of the SMP who are vehemently against nuclear weapons in principle, supportive of global nuclear disarmament efforts and want to use independence for many things

one of which is to see the repatriation of UK nuclear weapons out of an independent Scotland to somewhere else that remains the policy of the SNP today was the policy under the SNP leader Alex Salmond who stood down when they lost the referendum in 2014 and by his successor, Nicola Sturgeon, who is still the leader of the SNP and the first minister of the Scottish government. And that is the manifesto commitment for the elections, which are taking place tomorrow for the Scottish government. Well, when we're recording this now, it's an election tomorrow. You guys listening to this will know the result of that. So in the event that the SMP win a majority in the elections, then they are going to push ahead again for a second independence referendum. And the polls are a bit tighter at the moment. It remains to be seen if

they'll get that majority or whether they'll form a coalition with the Greens or a minority government. I think if they're really going to be able to push for a second independence referendum, they'll probably need to get a full majority. If they do, the Boris Johnson Conservative government in Westminster has said that they're not going to allow this. But that raises all sorts of incredibly difficult constitutional questions on which I'm not an expert, but I think it will be very, very difficult to essentially say to the Scots, you want independence in this union of equals, but we're not going to let you because it's within our gift. So it's not a union of equals really. And we're essentially going to force you to stay in the union. That becomes incredibly difficult. So if there is a second independence referendum and the SNP and the coalition in support of a yes vote for that

independent win, then we have a very difficult process ahead of us. We've already experienced Brexit and the fantastic web of lies that was woven around that and the incredible complications that have arisen. As we're seeing now, for example, in Northern Ireland, you know, lots of knock-on effects. One important knock-on effect has been to increase support in Scotland for independence. But there'll be lots of things in the mix here to try and extricate Scotland from some aspects of the union and not others, and others completely and others to a degree in that mix will be what on earth to do with the Trident nuclear weapons system that is based at the Clyde Naval Base in Scotland. referendum. If they win, then if assuming having won independence, and then winning an election to be the first government of an independent Scotland, assuming they win that, and they are now the government of an independent Scotland, they stated, Nicola Sturgeon stated, others in the SMP

stated, they would want to see UK nuclear weapons removed from Scottish territory within the first term of a new Scottish Parliament. So that would have been by 2020. So you're talking about a five-year timeframe there. So where are these things going to go? The answer is there isn't anywhere for them to go. The UK government would be faced with, I think, three options. The first would be to try and negotiate an extended territorial lease in the form of a sovereign base of the naval base in Scotland. That brings all sorts of complications

because it's not just the naval base. You've then got to have sovereign control of Scottish territorial waters. of Scottish territorial waters. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed.

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the place where they are maintained, which is in southern England, in Berkshire, at the atomic weapons establishment, Aldermaston. There are routine convoys of nuclear warheads up the motorways of England, northern England, through and around Glasgow to the naval base there. This would now be going through an independent country. So how are you going to manage that? It's pretty inconceivable that a UK government would be comfortable or that the Royal Navy will be comfortable with operating with the degree of assurance required, an independent nuclear weapons capability without absolute guarantees that it can essentially do what it needs to do when it needs to do at all times with the warheads,

the naval base, all the support infrastructure and transit of submarines, use of other facilities in the waters in and around the naval base is central to the operation of the submarines themselves. That's difficult, right? And you'd be talking at what sort of timeframes then? Maybe 50 years? 50-year lease to see out the lifetime of the new Dreadnought-class submarines that are currently being built. When you've got the SMP talking about five years and get them out,

one option is 50-year sovereign base and all these other things that come with it. That's difficult. Okay, so could you take them, relocate these facilities somewhere south of the border? I guess the answer is, I suppose, technically yes, but it's very difficult to see where you would put them. You'd have to rebuild facilities for a much more extensive submarine base. And more importantly is finding a place where you could build the warhead storage facility.

Now, this is built over quite a large area into the granite rock in Scotland at the Clyde Naval Base. Replicating that somewhere in the UK that's going to be co-located with where the submarines are is very difficult. Bearing in mind that there is a very, very tight set of safety requirements around where you can first of all host and dock submarines that have nuclear reactors, then submarines that have got intercontinental ballistic missiles on them, which has got an awful lot of explosive propellant in them. And then with nuclear warheads on them, or nuclear

warheads stored ashore in a hardened facility, you can't really build that stuff today in the contemporary era compared to when these facilities were first built in the 60s and then upgraded in the 90s. You can't build them near residential areas. And pretty much all the places, in fact, all the places where you could dock your submarines and potentially build or expand on a submarine base and near residential areas. So, you know, it's an incredibly challenging idea that the UK government in the event of Scottish independence will be able to negotiate and this would be accepted by the Scottish people,

a very long term lease, not just of the base, but everything else that went with it in Scotland, or replicate these facilities that would take minimum of 15 years, maybe 20, 25 years to build at vast expense for reasons of nuclear deterrence that have less support now than they did in the Cold War for it, let's say. It's borderline fantastical, I think. So what on earth would a UK government do that is committed to being a nuclear weapon state? Ideas about co-locating them with the French nuclear submarine base Ile de Long in Brittany?

I don't think there's much chance of that. What about going over to the United States then? We take our missiles from the shared pool. Can we not just take our warheads over there as well? Well, that's incredibly difficult for all manner of legal and political reasons and sovereignty reasons. So this was looked at in quite a bit of detail in and around the 2014 referendum. A couple of parliamentary committees, including the Scottish Affairs Committee, around the 2014 referendum, a couple of parliamentary committees, including the Scottish Affairs Committee, had a good look at this. And there are zero straightforward options. They're kind of all borderline, politically and economically impossible. So then a UK government

would either face trying to negotiate something that's going to be incredibly hard, or take the decision to get out of the nuclear weapons business. But the UK government or the Ministry of Defence took a decision to homeport all of its submarines, whether they carry nuclear weapons or not, because we've got a fleet of what are called attack submarines, are nuclear powered, but just have conventional weapons, took a decision over a number of years, which has now done to homeport everything up at the submarine base in Scotland. And so essentially, through the 2014 referendum, and this decision to shove all those submarines up there, the Ministry of Defence, the Navy, and successive governments have essentially, whether they acknowledge this or not, are placing

a bet that over the period of the life of these submarines, the life of the new submarines that they're building now that haven't even come into service, and over the life of the new attack submarines, so the nuclear-powered submarines that don't have nuclear weapons, over the lives of those. So now you're getting out into the kind of 2060s, 70s, maybe into the 2080s.

They kind of put a bet down on the table to say we bet that scottish independence won't happen because we know the challenges of relocating all of this stuff even just the submarines back to the uk will mean building new submarine port facilities let alone all the nuclear weapon stuff we know all the challenges of that. And yet we're doubling down on the bet, essentially, that Scotland will not vote for independence between now and let's say the 2070s. Talk to people in the Ministry of Defence in that terms, and they say, well, these things were taken for kind of programmatic cost saving reasons at the time and so on. Okay, fair enough. But that is essentially what they're doing. They've put down a bet to say we're going to put all our eggs in this basket in Scotland for the submarines and the nuclear weapons.

We know it's going to be practically impossible to do anything about it if Scottish independence occurs. And therefore we are de facto betting that it won't. And that strikes me as a that's a serious gamble that they've made there. Wow. So some stark implications for an election that is happening over today and tomorrow. And by the time that this airs, we'll have already had its results come out. So either Nicola Sturgeon's done really well and all of these problems have resurfaced and this history has come back to life, or the SNP hasn't done so well and these issues have been put to bed for a short time perhaps at least. Now Nick thank you so much for taking us through this vast history and bringing the well the dilemmas and issues of Trident back to life and showing why they are so

important to understand today. Where can people read and learn more about this? I mean I've written a fair amount of stuff on the Trident replacement debate. I guess those that are interested in the more academic scholarly side of stuff, I wrote a paper for the Non-Proliferation Review back in 2016 on this issue of Scotland, Trident and nuclear identities. So people can take a look at that. If you want to get kind of a sense of some of the nuances of the debate, then like I say, a lot of this was gone into in quite a lot of detail around the 2014 independence referendum. So the Scottish Affairs Committee at the time did some good reports on

this. Scottish CND, the late John Ainslie, who was one of the UK's real experts, I mean, from a nuclear disarmament perspective, but one of the UK's real experts on UK nuclear weapons policy, wrote a number of reports on the challenges of what on earth the UK would do with the Trident nuclear weapon system in the event of Scottish independence. So the Scottish CND website will have a lot of information on that. If you want to find out about the history of the UK sort of submarine surface, there's a great book by Peter Hennessy and James Jinks called The Silent Deep. And the latter parts of that book give you a lot of this more recent history around the Trident replacement process

and give you a sense of the submarine complex and the nuclear weapons complex that's kind of wrapped around that. I mentioned Hennessy's The Secret State earlier too, which is a really good read if you're interested more in some of the Cold War history and practices of the UK nuclear weapons complex through that period and then into the post-Cold War period. I think he takes it up and through 9-11 too. In terms of some NGO websites, then the British American Security Information Council, BASIC, is a good place to start for sort of policy-oriented

reports on different aspects of UK nuclear weapons policy and nuclear disarmament. And the European Leadership Network, ELN, produces short policy reports on a range of nuclear-related issues, and some of that we'll touch on in the UK debate too. Great. Thank you so much, Nick. And you can go and read Nick's books as well, like A Nuclear Weapons-Free World, published by Powergrave. And you can follow him on Twitter at Dr. Nick Ritchie. And of course, you can go and study a degree at the University of York, where Nick will go and take you around some nuclear bunkers. Sounds good, doesn't it, Nick? Yeah. And I'll teach you global nuclear politics in your third year too. Nick, thank you so much.

You're always welcome on the Warfare podcast. Cheers, James. Thanks very much. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history,

our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Well, that, folks, was an episode of Warfare with Dr James Rogers. We've extended the remit of Warfare to First and Second World War but also the Great Wars of the 18th and 19th

centuries. So I hope there'll be something in the Warfare feed for you all to enjoy. If you want to subscribe to Warfare just head over to wherever you get your podcasts, search Warfare and feel free to give it a rating and a review as well thank you you