School of War - Ep 34: Andrew Corbett on Britain’s Nukes

Episode Date: June 21, 2022

Andrew Corbett, author of Supreme Emergency: How Britain Lives With the Bomb, joins the show to talk about what it’s like commanding one of Her Majesty’s deadliest weapons, how deterrence policy actually works, and why Britain has the Bomb. ▪️ Times  • 01:45 Introduction • 02:12 Why Join The Royal Navy? • 03:31 What’s In A Name? • 05:31 Day To Day Life  • 10:33 Disorienting Conditions  • 12:35 The Fighting Sub • 16:58 The Sound Of Silence  • 21:50 The Nuclear Triad • 24:12 Developments Under The Sea • 26:05 The British And The Bomb • 30:12 Command By Sub-Committee • 32:23 Extreme Secrecy  • 37:35 Morality In Nuclear Weapons  • 45:04 Why Should The UK Have Nukes • 50:07 Who Shouldn’t Have Nukes  • 54:46 Extended Deterrence

The decision to use nuclear weapons in any country is going to come from the top, but somewhere out there is a soldier or sailor or airman with his finger on the button or his hand on the key. And that person is going to have to turn that key and, in an instant, unleash an amount of undiscriminating death exceeding anything seen since the Second World War. Two questions for today's episode. First, what does it like to be that person on call for doomsday? And second, it so happens that our guest today commanded nuclear submarines for the Royal Navy. What does it like to manage such terrible destructive power on behalf of Her Majesty?

What's the rationale for, the strategic thinking behind, a British nuclear arsenal? Let's find out. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinite. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a statement. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds,

we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. I'm delighted to be joined today by Andrew Corbett. Andrew is a teaching fellow at the Defense Studies Department of King's College London. his first career in the Royal Navy Submarine Service spanned the end of the Cold War and included command of two Trident Submarines, capability management in the Ministry of Defense and Development of 21st Century NATO deterrence, a defense strategy.

He's got a PhD in Defense Studies from King's College and then Philan International Relations from Cambridge. Sir, thank you so much for joining the program. Yes, entirely my pleasure. So I thought we would, we've in recent weeks had any number of historians and writers come on the show to discuss, issues. And you are a writer and a historian. Your book that we'll talk about here in a moment is a kind of history of the British nuclear deterrent and the ethical issues surrounding. It's called Supreme Emergency, How Britain Lives with the Bomb. But you are also a practitioner and a naval officer. Could you maybe just tell us a bit about your life and your career? Why did you join the Navy? Why submarines?

Let's start there. Well, at school, I kind of ideas of being an engineer, but I failed all my air levels. I meant I couldn't go to university. And my grandfather was in the Navy. And it kind of that appealed. So I applied and got in, but not as an engineer as a warfare officer, which was probably the luckiest stroke I could have had at the time. The naval training that you do, you spend some time in all the different branches. And I just, I felt like I fitted in submarines.

So my first submarine experience was in a diesel submarine that was about 15 years older than I was. Real sort of Das boot stuff, even I had to duck in most of the places. But the ship's company was really close-knit and the discipline was very much about self-discipline and teamwork. And everybody knew that everybody was just as important as everybody else. And that really appealed to me. So I joined submarines and worked my way through the various posts that you do. So I spent some time in diesel submarines. I had one tour in a Polaris submarine, a couple of tours as in hunter killers. In 2003, I was appointed to HMS Vengeance in command.

HMS Vengeance is one of these great Royal Navy names. There's something about the Royal Navy that's just better at ship names than certainly the United States Navy or others that I'm familiar with. There must be a long line of vengeance going back to the days of sale, right? Yeah, there's seven. And in fact, well, this current vengeance is the seventh. and as it happens, there were two vangences at the Battle of Telfalga,

one on each side. But my favorite submarine name story was that I found out when I was doing the research for the book was that the first of our Polaris submarines was due to be called HMS revenge. But when that was floated to the politicians, the Prime Minister at the time decided

that was a little bit kind of warlike. The second of class was going to be called HMS Resolution. So resolution became the name of the first of class and revenge became the fourth. So they've henceforth ever been known as the resolution class. Vengeance has as certain, as does revenge for that matter, it's almost the quality of the classic definition of a political gaff where you accidentally tell the truth. I mean, does sort of get to the heart of deterrence in the way in which deterrence would actually work

in the, you know, sort of the worst case scenario. Certainly in the time of Polaris. That was definitely what it was all about, yes. And I mean, to this day, I think they, as you say, when you get down to the nuts of just what deterrence is about, it's about the fear of retribution, if you like. And so, you know, vengeance is entirely appropriate as is or was revenge. So I know you'll be restricted a bit, you know, as we move into operational details and the way in which these, these, should I say, boats? How does one refer to a submarine? How these boats operate?

But, you know, within the boundaries of what you can say, I think, you know, listeners will be, interested in the experiences you had. We'll talk about strategic and ethical matters in a minute, but the actual lived experiences you had commanding these two ships. You know, how many sailors are on one of these submarines? What is the day-to-day life like? What are the challenges that confront the captain of a submarine or a ship like this? Sailors are usually the biggest challenge. The hardest question I ever got asked was by a trainee who knocked on my door one day, my cabin doing, middle of the patrol. And he said, all right, if I ask you a question.

I said, yeah, of course it is. And I assumed he wanted to know where one of the safety valves was, because everybody has to learn all the safety valves. There's one inside a cupboard in my cabin. So I turned to show him that. And he said, no, no, I know where the HPR is. What do you do? What was your answer?

Well, I had to send him away for five minutes to work it out. And so he came back and we had a coffee. And I said, I think the best way of this way, what I do is that I just make sure that you've got everything around to make sure you can do whatever it is you need to do. And then sometimes if there's, you know, sort of major decisions that need to be made basically on the hoof, I do them. So that was that was my, my definition of command to one of my sailors. But in terms of what we do, the UK's postures, I think, all continue as he determines. So right now, one of the submarines is on patrol. I don't know which

one or where she is. And come to that, there's only about eight people on board who do know where she is. But the submarine will sail. She goes off into the North Atlantic, and then she'll patrol the North Atlantic, pretty much a walking speed, staying in constant communication so she can listen. She listens for radio signals all the time, using an array of aerials. And she's just at whatever the readiness to fire is that she's been told to be at. and then there's a kind of a routine on board that establishes itself.

There's 163 sailors on board. In my time, they were all men. In 2013, we started having mixed crews. So my experience was very much just with Stag crews. And one of the most demanding things is what to do, because if the patrol is anything but really boring, then there's something gone badly wrong. The idea is that it's just mundane.

So what I would do with my heads of department is work on training programs so that we would have some form of training drills because there's a constant throughput of trainees. So we would have some form of training drills, say for the reactor team on a Monday. We would have a fire or a hydraulic bust or something on a Tuesday. We would do torpedo drills on a Wednesday, you know, missile firing drills. And we would just try and mark the passage of time with a sort of a routine set of drills. that we would then let people train up, not only to make sure that they were competent in their own position,

but once we got to that point, we would then put them into the next position up, so that they were stretched a bit, so that they felt that they could step into that position if something was to go horribly wrong and somebody was to get badly damaged. And then the other key concern was food. The sailors, every sailor is a master chef, or at least a master critic. and you have five, you have five real chefs on board. And they are really good chefs, they're very highly trained.

But their opportunity to show off that training is fairly limited. So we try and give them the odd opportunity to do almost called on blur meals during the patrol. But again, we use the food to mark the passage of time. So you always have great fruit segments out of tins on a Sunday morning for breakfast and different summaries of different routines. We always had a curry on a wedding. Wednesday night. We always had fish on a Friday. We always had steak on Saturday and pizza on Sunday nights. So that all just, it helps. The sailors mark the passage of time. And as I say,

ideally, nothing remarkable would happen during the patrol. And then we would come back and, you know, everybody would go and see the loved ones and then we do some more training. The boat would get maintained a bit. And then either the other crew would take it out again or we would. It is a strange environment to contemplate. And I've never been aboard a submarine. I used to teach at our Naval Academy here in the United States. And I was a Marine. And so I had a role mentoring midshipmen who wanted to be Marines one day.

And a surprising number of midshipmen, I think higher performing midshipmen in the brigade, would often be on the bubble between Marines or submarine service for whatever reason. And it always surprised me because it's hard to imagine, you know, two different lifestyles, really in operational experiences. But I think it appealed to a certain, you know, ambitious sort. And I used to have a running joke. So, well, young man, you know, young lady, you know, go, go stand in the closet over there for a week.

And, you know, let me, let me know at the end if you want to do that for a living. You know, obviously I had an interest in affecting their decision making. But did you, you know, you're a leader of, you're a leader of sailors in these, you know, real, constricted, as you sort of allude to, sort of just temporally disorienting conditions, you know, you talk a little bit about how you mitigated that. But was this really a problem? These are, I presume, 19, 20-year-olds, these are young people stuck in this tube under the ocean.

Not usually. By the time we go on patrol, we've pretty much always taken everybody who's new to it to see for four or five days. And I've only had one occasion when there was a youngster who just couldn't cope with that. And we find him other employment within the service. But we were able to land him before he was condemned

to one. at sea with us. Yeah, understood. So was it always boring? I mean, we're all still here and talking. So obviously the supreme emergency, as it were, did not occur. But were there operational incidents of any kind you can speak to? Or did you manage to keep it boring all those years?

I kept it pretty much as boring as I could in my time there. I'm slightly cheery about talking about any details. There's a wonderful boot by a chap called Peter Hennessy and James Jinks called The Silent Deep. Peter Hennessy is Lord Hennessy. He's a very well-connected historian. And there are chapters in that book that I know about from the other side, but I had to sign into top secret code word compartments.

I'm still not allowed to talk about them, even although they were 30 or 35 years ago. So, I mean, the short answer is, no, actually, most of my patrols were really boring. Okay. Well, we as a global population are grateful for that. Yes, it will read. Indeed, as I'm sure you are. Well, actually, I was about to step back, but that prompts one more question for me.

And again, we may be into territory here that you just can't really speak to. But obviously, you have a core mission there playing a role, a central role in Britain's nuclear deterrent. But you also have a mission to survive. And you have people out there in the ocean and in the skies above who presumably, if the conditions, you know, get to that point, want to do away with you. Talk a bit about that. Talk a bit about how you think about surviving. fighting other submarines or ships should they threaten you, you know, paint the picture of that

piece of the job. Yeah. As I said, every day there's a submarine on what's known as continuous at sea deterrence patrol. It has been since 1969. And the submarine has, if you like, each patrol has one aim, which is to provide the UK's strategic nuclear deterrent. And in order to achieve that, there are various objectives that they try to achieve. I've already mentioned that they stay in communications so that they're ready to fire as and when they're ordered to, if, you know, God forbid that ever where to happen.

And therefore, not only do they have to stay in comms, they have to be materially in a position that they're ready to fire. So they have to maintain the submarine. So sometimes that can get a bit challenging if you get defects and stuff. But the other one, and probably the most long, enduring aspect is keep stealthy. From the moment that the submarines were kind of envisaged, in essence, the Polaris submarines were the stealth platforms of, or the British stealth platforms of the 1960s. And really, it was the, they are decreasing stealth relative to the threat that that meant they had to be replaced. That and Polaris was losing its deterrent capability against an ever increasingly technically competent USSR. So the decision to replace the Polaris submarines, the revenge or the resolution class, as we said, with the Vanguard class was taken.

And one of the key design features, if not the key design feature for Vanguard, the Vanguard class was stealth. So in 2022, we've got these platforms that were designed in the 1980s as, again, the stealth platforms for the 1990s. And so they're really, really quiet. They're designed to be, you know, holes in the water and pretty much undetectable by traditional sensors. And by traditional sensors, I mean sonars, passive sonars or active sonars, or indeed somebody flying around with a radar. So the submarines tend not to go to the surface very often. They would only go there to periscope depth if they absolutely had to. They never transmit on any radio circuits because you can always geolocate that, which means

just going back to the mundane, if you like, that the sailors are out of touch. There's no Wi-Fi or internet on board. So they get a one-way, if you like, a one-way weekly email of 80 words from their family each. And that's pretty much all the contact they get. Sounds delightful in a way. I'm just going to throw that out there. I know that probably seems cruel to the young sailors enduring it, but I would I wish I could enjoy us, just Sabbath-like conditions like that for extended periods of time.

It wasn't so much being cut off from the family, but being cut off from the headquarters. No more stupid questions about how many rolls you'd eaten in the previous Tuesday or all those kind of metrics that everybody tries to impose upon you. So, yeah, so there's that. So radio comms, and that really drives the entire patrol. you would obviously, well maybe not obviously, the submarines get a very, very good intelligence feat. So a pretty much real-time picture of what's where in the ocean. And really, as I said, you know, my job was to make sure that we weren't in the same place as any of that.

So if there was an American carrier group coming across the North Atlantic, we usually got plenty of notice. Every now and again you wouldn't. And that really concentrated your mind. to get off their track as quickly as you could. And obviously, occasionally, there were Russian submarines that would head south through the patrol areas as well. And again, you know, in my time as an exo

in one of the hunter killers, one of the jobs we would do was try and find these things and report on them so that to report the position so that the SSBN submarine or the, you know, was tried and by that stage, could get out of the way. We had no idea where they were. we were just telling where we were. And so that would work.

So the Trident submarines themselves are, you know, really stealthy. But they're being replaced by the Dreadnought class, which are designed to be even stealthier. So they will be the stealth platforms of the sort of the 2030s. So it's just 40 years on of advancing technology. How do you, I mean, what is, what gets these things quieter and quieter? Like how is it actually working? that there's still room to make things stealthier.

Okay. But during the Second World War, you could detect submarines relatively easy because they had to surface pretty much most of the time to charge their batteries. So you could sit there like any other ship and they were vulnerable. During the Second World War, the German Navy developed a thing called the Snorkel, which meant that they could put them, they could stay under the water and just put like two masks up. One would suck air in and one would squat the diesel exhaust out.

And so they could stay under the water. run diesels underwater and charge the batteries and then just remain on batteries. So electrical machinery is really quiet. So once they were on batteries and even today, a diesel submarine on batteries is really, really quiet. However, battery limits your endurance and you can't go very fast. So in the early 1960s, the US Navy started deploying nuclear-powered submarines, which weren't as quiet as a diesel submarine because they were driven by steam turbines. So, you've got very high energy, rapidly rotating big machines. And if you imagine listening to a train as it goes past,

you get that sort of whine associated with any kind of rapidly rotating machine. And that's a very pure noise. So if you can get that into water, that will travel for miles. So in the 1960s, nobody knew that. Then the technology would detect and then track that was developed. again in the West. So as the Soviet Navy, as it was then, was about 10 or 15 years behind and all of these things.

But with spies and stuff, they always seem to catch up. So for most of the 70s and 80s, the West, for one of a better word, enjoyed a significant advantage over Soviet submarines in that they could hear them coming from literally miles away. And again, Peter Hennessy covers that really well in this book. But then there was a spy for one.

once it was the US and not the Brits, who gave the Russians all of that technology. So these all of a sudden got very quiet as well. So then it was, you know, how do we make ourselves? It's even quieter. So we had spent all of those years developing systems that isolated the rotating machinery from the hull and from the sea. So it was very difficult to detect any kind of noise off,

you know, an American or a British or indeed French or submarines. and that technology continues to advance. One of the big differences that Dreadnought is actually offering over the Vanguard class is actually our understanding of the hydrodynamics and the way that the shape of the hull affects the noise has significantly or has been significantly enhanced. So just the water flow across the, the hull of a more modern submarine will be quieter than the others.

So during the Second World War, looking for a shortly after the Second World War, I guess looking for a diesel submarine, you would be probably talking about detections in the hundreds of yards sort of scale. During the height or say the early 1980s, the West would be enjoying detections in the tens of miles. And now it's much more back to that

sort of few hundred yards, less than a mile sort of thing. So it's very much more, if you do detect stuff, you've got to know what you're doing. You've got to be able to react quickly. And one of the reasons that we are so careful about the patrol areas of the submarines and the signatures that they make is that if you once detect a signature, if you were to, if there were sort of four or five people in this room all talking and you'd never heard me speak, it would be almost impossible to figure out which,

which of those voices was me. But now that you've heard me, if I got another four or five people in here and they were all talking, you'd still be able to concentrate on my accent because it's easier to filter once you know what you're looking for. And it's exactly the same sort of technology for looking for signatures, be it, you know, aircraft infrared signatures or submarine acoustic signatures. So the signatures that these submarines make are really, really classified. We're very careful to make sure that nobody knows. We don't share them with anyone. And one of the reasons that we're so pan-inoid about making sure that they don't get detected on patrol is so that nobody else has that and that ability to filter the signature.

And that's why there's a quiet. That's fascinating. And I realize these are sort of 101-level questions, but I personally find this really, really interesting. And, you know, in the United States, when we talk about nuclear strategy, nuclear deterrent, we talk in terms of the triad. And, you know, just to just to spell it out for any listeners who may not be familiar. familiar with the concept, though I know you know, the submarine leg of the triad is the most survivable leg for the simple fact that unlike ICBM launch silos or, you know, bombers, it's much harder to figure out where submarines are. Ideally, the bad guys have no idea where they

are. So whatever happens first, the submarines are always there to hit back. And that's ultimately, you know, kind of almost a cornerstone within a cornerstone of deterrence. The fact that you'll probably not be successful at eliminating all of these submarines preemptively if you, for some crazy reason, you decided you wanted to. Yeah, absolutely. It's not as a assured response. And it's one of the, in my opinion, certainly, it's one of the most stabilizing aspects of the whole nuclear deterrence debate. You know, nuclear deterrence tends to stabilize things. And you might not think that if you're Ukrainian, I guess, but it does. And but within the, that's, as you say, that nuclear returns triad. The idea of an assured second response is simply that there's no point

in trying to do that disarming or disabling first strike because you can't because you know that those other things are there. So that then again dampens down any kind of enthusiasm for so, you know, any kind of ludicrous attempts to sort of win. Well, we hear at school of war certainly believe in the stabilizing effects of nuclear weapons. So you're, you're amongst friends in that in terms of that attitude. But, So this was leading to a question, because I don't know anything about sonar or the technology involved in sort of the hunter-killer tactics of submarine warfare. You know, as it seems you and I agree, and there's general agreement that this is, as it were,

the most stabilizing element of what we hope is an overall stabilizing effect of nuclear weapons. You know, are you at all concerned when you look at the big picture technological trends, are submarines going to stay fundamentally unlocatable if operated? skillfully, you know, for the foreseeable future or are there technological trends? I mean, the power of sensors compared to 50 or 100 years ago, just speaking generally. I mean, it's just light years of advancements. Are we headed in the same direction under the sea? I think the short answer is yes.

As you see, the power of sensors and the power of distributed sensors and, if you like, AI assisted analysis is increasingly a threat to these. which is one of the reasons why the submarines are evolving themselves. But, you know, and I think it was in 1996, I was told by somebody in some authority that the oceans would be transparent within five years and SSPNs would be redundant. And that hasn't happened. But it's the same sort of philosophy. There's always that emerging threat.

And in essence, it's almost, it's not an arms race in there, the sort of the threatening sense. but it is an arms race in the sense of there's an improvement in sensor technology and then there's a there's a corresponding improvement in the stealth technology to counter that sensor whether or not there will be a sensor that someday or at some form of sensor distribution analysis networking capability that suddenly does render the ocean's transparent even if it did the submarines is still a better option for that assured response than what else have we got So still having that stabilizing effect in a slightly less stealthy environment, perhaps would still be a better option than just having more missiles in the silo,

because then you're back to the almost sort of the hair trigger aspects of the coldest parts of the Cold War, with the firing on the four-minute warning, because if you don't, you're going to lose your missiles and you won't be able to fire. Yeah, yeah. Well, let's step back then. You know, listeners may be somewhat familiar with the Cold War in terms of Long nuclear standoff between the United States and the USSR. And our subject today is British nuclear weapons, the British nuclear deterrent.

How did Great Britain, United Kingdom, start to think about getting an atomic bomb? Where does this come from? How did the conversation begin? I think there was always, Britain was intimately involved in the development of the first atomic bombs. The Manhattan Project actually enjoyed an awful lot of input from a lot of European scientists who had fled from that Nazi Germany, firstly to Britain. And then Winston Churchill actually created a thing called the tube alloys just to cover up what they were actually doing.

And then the UK didn't have the money, it didn't have the resources, and it didn't have the space. And it was kind of vulnerable. So the UK and the US joined forces. And the Manhattan Project was the result. However, almost immediately after the end of the war, the U.S. can withdraw cooperation with everybody. This was very much now an American weapon. And this kind of caught the Brits on the hoof because they had rather assumed that they would be part of any ongoing project.

So there are some wonderful stories about just how we managed to achieve a nuclear, well, an atomic weapon. And to say that it would be on a shoestring budget would be somewhat overplaying it. It was really dangling on a thread sort of budget. And almost at every stage, important decisions could have gone either way. And they really were swung by individual people stepping forward at the right moment. The actual, the warhead bit of the first atomic weapon that Britain tested was actually molded by a man who had never molded anything before. because the expert who was going to mold it had got the wrong train and it had to be done that morning. So it was that fragile, if you like.

But it kind of worked. And there's a lovely story about the British Foreign Secretary who was renowned for long lunches. Would that be a nice way of putting it? Three martini lunches, we would say, in the United States. Yeah. And these would have some wine. would usually be involved. Anyway, he was late for a cabinet meeting and most of the rest of the cabinet had just about convinced Clema Dattley, who was the prime minister at the time,

that we didn't need these weapons. We didn't need to invest in the, what's called the atomic pile, the capability to generate the, to refine the uranium to make the bombs. And the foreign secretary arrived a little bit late. And the official cabinet minutes just read, the foreign secretary arrived and the conversation was shifted and it was agreed that we would build the pile, this thing to make the uranium. The not official record of this that is covered in some of the diaries is that partly the foreign secretary came in, banged the desk and said, absolutely not, Prime Minister. We've got to have these things. They've got to be built over here, and they've got to have a bloody union jack on top. So it's always been a little bit

shoestring. And you can see that all the way through the development. So, you know, come 1962, We had our own, the UK had developed its own atomic bombs and its own hydrogen bomb. But we'd never quite, we were building the hydrogen bomb, but nobody quite understood that we'd need airplanes for that. So that all of these things were, they were all being built. And the public, and this is one of the things that really interested me, was the public never really cottoned on. Neither did Parliament.

Parliament knew that they were building a fleet of big bombers, but there weren't many of them. and a lot of questions were, why do we need so few bombers? And they also knew that we were building, or they suspected we were building atomic weapons. But they never actually equated, ah, those bombers are for those weapons. So we had weapons from 1953, but we didn't actually have the bombers until about 1957. It was the first time they were really paired up.

And in the British system, who is ultimately then controlling these production processes and the strategies that they're going to serve? Presumably, it's the prime minister. but what is what is the actual controlling sort of a structure look like it has varied but in essence every prime minister involved in making any of these major decision major procurement decisions instead of it going to the whole cabinet they have all every one of them set up a small cabinet subcommittee of maybe four or five people some of them didn't even include the chancellor but you know usually be the defense secretary foreign secretary sometimes the home secretary and the

Prime Minister. And it could be not much bigger than that. And then there would be a very small team of very senior civil servants who would report only to that. And certainly in 1951, when the full cabinet realized that they were, that Britain was already developing a hydrogen bomb and Winston Churchill hadn't told his own cabinet, they walked out. And again, you know, the meeting closed early in the official minutes. And then they came back the next day and everybody calmed down. and they started talking about it. And there was a similar sort of thing with the debate, well, the lack of debate about in the Thatcher government in the early 1980s,

when they bought Trident from the, well, President Carter had agreed to sell Trident. The full cabinet wasn't aware of the decisions that were being made until they had to be told at the rush, because an American congressman had briefed the CNN or somebody that, yeah, we were going to sell these things to the Brits. And the British cabinet, not even the parliament, but the cabinet didn't know. So they had to have an emergency meeting.

And again, there was quite a lot of discord at the time. I mean, this is obviously the subject of your research, but what is the balance with the secrecy involved here? I mean, obviously there are presumably good operational, strategic, you know, reasons of statecraft to keep this sort of information pretty close. But presumably there are also political reasons and reasons having to do with the management of, public opinion. What's the balance between those considerations? And I suppose it changed over time.

But why so much secrecy as you've described it? That really is a big question. And from what I can tell, there is extreme secrecy where it's not required. It's certainly not required for national security purposes in that sort of decision. The things that need to be secret about the Trident project, if you like, as it was in the 1980s. would be things like when it was going to be delivered, what these capabilities were, how many we were going to get, where the patrol areas were. The sort of the operational things, what the warheads were going to be able to do, how far the missiles could fly.

The fact that we were doing it was kept intensely secret. And one of the, one of the, my core thesis or hypothesis is that the reason for that, you can trace right back to actually debates that were happening during the First World War before anybody he'd ever heard on nuclear fissure. And what was happening in then, what was that in 1915, the German Air Force was using Zeppelins to bomb London at night. And then there were furious rouse in the British Parliament about what we should do to retaliate. And about half of them were saying, we need to do exactly the same. We need to go bomb German cities. And one of the more memorable lines is why would us killing German women and babies stop them or make it the situation any better?

And that, I think, is the crux of Britain's, it's coy really. It's kind of secretive, but it's more about not wanting to talk about it in public, not wanting to air this, because this is what, I think, going right back to the point we started with about the fear. this is what nuclear deterrence is. It's that you engender fear by ultimately convincing somebody that you might just use a nuclear weapon against a city, against their population. And to be glib, that's just not what the Brits do.

We're not like that. We wouldn't do that. And it's very easy to argue in soundbite against that sort of position. but the argument that makes that position either strategically or morally tenable is complex and definitely not reducible to sound bites. So no British politician wanted to be the person in front of the camera with either, you know, the head of the CND or, you know, Michael Foote, who was a very, very anti-nuclear head of the Labour Party in opposition in the early 1980s.

And so there was almost this. fear of British public opinion throughout the development of the weapons on pretty much at every stage. And we saw that in the late 1950s and early 60s, there were massive marches. The first one was 5,000 people, but the last one was 200,000 odd. Marches between Aldermaston, which is where the warheads were made and Trafalgar Square, and then back again the next year, always at Easter coinciding with sort of peaceful or peaceful intent, if you like. And these were, and these were morally motivated. These were about, you know, we don't want to do this, we don't want to wage this kind of war. Fast forward another 20 odd years. And when the decision is being made to replace

the Polaris submarines with the Vanguard class, then there's a similar set of marches. There's a similar upsurgeon anti-nuclear protests and that kind of stuff. But that one was much more related to the way that the Cold War was going at the time. The Russian, the Soviets had deployed SS20 short-range nuclear missiles into what we would now call Eastern Europe. And NATO was deploying the ground launch cruise missiles and the Pershing. And there were huge protests against that. But these were more motivated, I suspect, by, I think, fear. This is the day and age of TV films like the day after or TV in the UK.

We had one called Threads. There was a cartoon called When the Wind Blows. And these were all, if you like, disaster movies based around nuclear war. And the thing that always struck me with them was you never actually got to know what the war was about. It just happened. And then it always dealt with the aftermath. So there's always been this vociferous group in public who are very much anti-nuclear weapons. And because it's easier to argue against them in soundbites,

the British politicians tended to avoid having to. So there was this, in my opinion, over emphasis on secrecy and not not divulging anything unless you absolutely got cornered. Problem then is that you always then appear to be on the defensive and trying to hide something. So you're a theorist and an analyst of these issues now. And of course, you were once in the chair, as it were. So I'll ask you a question that's both theoretical and personal. Theoretical side of it is, I think it's the million dollar question, isn't it? The theoretical side is how could it ever, considering the devastating effects of, you know,

the impact of one of these warheads, how could it ever be moral to fire a nuclear weapon, launch a nuclear weapon? And then as the man who once, you know, had his finger on the trigger, how did you personally live with that responsibility? In terms of the second part, you have to be able to answer the first part of that question before you can do the job. And if you haven't, you're not in the right job. So unless you've actually squared whatever your own moral compasses with your willingness, contingent willingness, I guess, to fire,

then you're not in the right place. And in terms of the how is it ever moral, unless you take an absolute pacifist stance, and I mean, you know, never using violence, then, you know, the use of violence for political purposes is something that, you know, human beings have been doing for literally thousands of years. And as our politics, as our socially groupings have evolved, the way that we control that violence has evolved.

So, you know, by 1945, we were seeing that mankind could exterminate itself on a truly industrial scale before anybody had ever invented nuclear weapons. know, again, the glib numbers, 4% of the American population died during the Civil War in the 1860s. You know, I can't remember. I think it was 1 in a bit percent of the population of the world died during the first world, 1, 2% died during the second. But now it's like 0.001% or something.

So there is a school of thought that actually what's happened is that we're all better people now and therefore the violence is less a part of the way that states deal with each other. Personally, I don't believe that. The drop off in the use of war as a tool of policy is perfectly, so far, perfectly coincident with the advent of nuclear weapons. And there's a French strategist called Bruno Tertres, who wrote a very interesting paper, and he points out that no nuclear weapons state had ever been attacked or invaded.

The only one that you could argue about that would be Israel, but Israel itself was never actually invaded. The point there is that if you've got a nuclear weapon state or nuclear weapon states facing each other, they don't go to war. Well, they haven't yet. And this is where it becomes interesting with them. I'll get back to why this is an important answer to your question in the moment. But the whole thing about if nuclear returns is working in Ukraine, absolutely it's working. because if we didn't have nuclear weapons, does anybody really doubt that NATO would not be more heavily involved in the war in Ukraine?

And we would be seeing Russian bombs on Warsaw and Romania, Latvia, etc. So what the nuclear deterrence aspect of the invasion of Ukraine has done is to contain it so far. And my own opinion would be that it will continue to do that unless somebody really, really makes a bad error of judgment. So how does that then affect, you know, me sitting on in the SSBN with a, it's actually not a, it's not a red button or anything. Actually, the captain has a key and the weapons officer fires, fires each weapon using a trigger. So going back to that, for me, there is a moral good in being prepared to do that in the sense of that deterrence, has that fear of what nuclear weapons would do on both sides. and accepting that it constrains my own leadership and any potential adversary leadership,

that fear has actually instilled a genuine, real, we can look back and count the people who are still alive as a result, fear of using war as an instrument of policy, that the eventual use of, whether it's one or some nuclear weapons, might not outweigh. the actual point at which you fire, you know, it's not something I would ever want to,

I would never want to be there, clearly. But equally, I'm not sure that anybody could ever really work out how that would feel. There's only about three people in the world who could. You know, Paul Tibbets being one of them, the chap who flew the inola Gay, dropped the bomb on Karoshima.

So in terms of answering the question, my own view was, that I was happy that there is an existential benefit from nuclear returns and it's a moral good. There is, I can't remember the right word, I have an ethereal or a more hypothetical risk that you might have to fire. And that's very true. And you have to be prepared to do that in order to gain the moral good that the nuclear

returns imposes. But that is the point. at which you then have to be able to look at yourself and go, actually, you know, this was horrible, but it had to be done. So there comes a point where you end up in a position which gave me the name of the book where you've got a supreme emergency. Normally, if somebody's contemplating using military force, they're going to use military force for a military purpose. They're going to blow up a bridge or a tank or an airplane or whatever it is. And you could describe any war or any campaign as an accumulation of different military effects until you get to the point where

there is a political settlement that is reached. With nuclear deterrence, there is no military effect that would merit using a nuclear weapon. This is, so the nuclear deterrence of the 21st century is very different to the way people talked and thought about nuclear deterrence in the 1980s, when they were just big bombs. You know, both sides had thousands of weapons and they would use them. And if you looked at the operational plans for NATO's use of these weapons, they were against bridges and railway stations and that kind of stuff that you could actually take out with conventional weapons anyway. So the use of a nuclear weapon now is not about blowing up something military. It's about getting to that point where you affect the political decision making directly. And as one of my colleagues at NATO said, it's not the weapon, it's not the target that needs a weapon and nuclear weapon here.

It's the crisis. It's the decision makers need that, that weapon just to calm things down, ironically. But the idea would be that you would use nuclear weapons simply to, that everybody realized that somebody made a really bad mistake, and we need to step back from this. So that's a very long-winded way of saying it. Obviously, it's not a position that anybody would ever want to be in, or if indeed want to feel that they were comfortable in,

but it's a necessary decision and somebody has to do it. I really appreciate your candor there. Since you did such a magnificent job with such a difficult question, I've got another one for you, which is we can debate, you know, people can debate whether or not the world, you know, whether or not anyone ought to have nuclear weapons or not. I, you know, full disclosure, I share your general view of their stabilizing effects. But my question for you is, what is the case for Britain or a country like the UK, but we'll just, let's say the UK specifically to make it a little bit simpler to have nuclear weapons. Why should in 2022 and building for the future the UK retain a nuclear deterrent?

On one level, simply because they've got them, the world is stable, more or less, and there are a number of states that have nuclear weapons that contribute to that stability. There are a number of states that have nuclear weapons that you might argue don't necessarily contribute to that stability. You know, 10 years ago, I think everybody who said that Russia did contribute, but probably don't now. I would say China does contribute, although I think there probably be a lot in the American analysis camp. We would say that that's not true. We could argue about that for weeks, I guess. And then, of course, there are much more volatile security dynamics around the world,

so India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, obviously, where the states have developed nuclear weapons, for various reasons, always associated with their local security dynamic. So those would tend to be less stabilising, although that said, what they have done, of course, is stabilise that dynamic, the local one. So the nuclear weapons continue to enhance that stability. And as long as the UK contributes to that sort of thinking, then I think it's important that there is a little bit of diversity, if you like, so that we don't end up with a sort of a cold war between a revisionist Russia and the USA,

say, again, with only the two centres of decision-making. Because one of the long-standing rationales for the UK having nuclear weapons and for France to set an extent, is this idea that they provide another centre of decision-making to make it more complicated for anybody who might be thinking about using nuclear weapons. And to be brutally frank, that is as true of your ally. as it is of any adversaries. So everybody is involved in these things, which always tends to make things less polarized, if you like.

So in that sort of realist strategic analysis sense, that's one reason. There is a reason that's often derided in the British press that folks say, well, you know, if Britain gave up the nuclear weapons, they'd lose the seat on the permanent seat on the UN Security Council. there's no relation at all between the possession of nuclear weapons and being one of the P5, although obviously all the P5 have nuclear weapons,

but only the U.S.C. had nuclear weapons when it became a member of the P5. The others have all developed them since. So, but even if you accept that that rationale is true, you know, even if you were to accept that if the UK gave up its nuclear weapons, it would have to give up its P5C. and as I say, there is no link, then in and of itself, is that not an argument for retaining them? Because if the UK wants to be global Britain or to have an influence in the world and to shape the future in the way that we want our values to assess, then surely having a permanent seat on the UN Security Council is an objective or a strategy that is worth having.

And therefore, if nuclear weapons contribute to that, then they're not a bad thing. thing that in that sense. Ultimately, it always comes down to the moral question. Is it a good enough thing to outweigh the moral horror that goes with them? And I can only come back to that. It's the moral horror that actually makes them so effective. And we're back to that stabilizing. Just to follow up on the first part of your reasoning there. And this is really less with respect to Britain because I think, you know, certainly here in the United States, we see Britain as a, you know, contributor to global stability and international order and so forth. But there's a way in which I could interpret your logic there that, you know, sort of nuclear weapons are generally speaking of force

for stability, certainly in these local security situations, which I'm not, I'm not sure if I'm willing to go quite that far. And I'm just curious to know your response here. So in Britain's case, sure, the British or, you know, at least in this period of history, French, you know, The way of life and regime and government are preserved ultimately by the existence of these weapons great and so be it. I'm not so sure that in the North Korean case, you suggest we debate China, but let's take North Korea or let's take the potential of an Iranian nuclear weapon, which is obviously on the horizon quite likely. In that case, it seems like we'll be guaranteeing or there will be a strong movement in the direction of a guarantee of regime survival for a country that is an exporter, you know, of instability. through conventional means or terroristic means, non-nuclear means, but they'll then have the shield to preserve their government

and their somewhat unhelpful way of life in terms of their foreign policy while continuing to do all sorts of terrible things to their neighbors and be destabilizing in a variety of different ways. So what's your response to that? And perhaps I'm misinterpreting your line of thought there, or maybe we just disagree? No, I'm not sure I portrayed my thinking there well. then, I don't see, I certainly don't see North Korea is contributing to global stability.

And I think all the efforts with the JCPOA with Iran to try and inhibit their nuclear development exactly in order to avoid that position, negotiating with a non-nuclear Iran is very different to negotiating with Iran with a bomb. North Korea, you know, much the same. But if you try and look at it from their perspective, if they see, if their rationale is that their real rationale is that their regime is vulnerable because their main adversaries on the on the world stage are nuclear armed, then they can make themselves less vulnerable by having nuclear weapons, then to certain extent, well, in fact, to a very good extent, the same argument applies. They would, they would be able to justify that within that rationale as a stabilizing effect.

And it might be trite, but it would be easy for Iran to look at the fate of Gaddafi or Iraq, non-nuclear states, where the regime was changed by essentially nuclear states, albeit using conventional means. So how would that decision calculus, how would the decision calculus in 2003 have been changed if we knew that Iraq did have nuclear weapons, even if they were only simple ones, would Libya have been attacked in 2011 or the Southern NATO intervention if they had nuclear weapons. And I'm not saying that that's a valid thing from our perspective. But if you try and put yourself into their leadership perspective, then that becomes quite a compelling argument, especially if you're North Korea.

No, I take your point. And you know, you can't, as it were, fault the North Koreans or the Iranians were thinking that way. And it's always slightly mystifying to me when American, you know, contribute. to the policy debate try to claim that they're not thinking in that way. I mean, clearly they are. It's a sort of clear, sort of obvious way to think about things. The frustrating, I guess, aspect of it for me is when American contributors to the debate on this matter, usually people who would describe themselves as progressives, but not necessarily seem in some way to think,

you know, while they will argue sort of in the first part of the sentence for the United States to have fewer or ideally no nuclear weapons, they will then excuse the pursuit of nuclear weapons by, say, Iran, seemingly on the grounds that it will make the American pursuit of policy in that region, you know, less likely or more inhibited, which, you know, it may be that we're sort of saying the same thing here and just coming at it from different directions. I've always found that that line of argument to be, to be alarming. I take your point, though, that from the Iranian point of view or the North Korean point of view, the logic is clear. I think there's, you know, I think we probably are fairly violently agreeing.

What I would say, though, is that it doesn't take many weapons to deter. Ronald Reagan was, when he was briefed about the US nuclear arsenal, apparently, was astonished. And he said, thousands. One would scare me enough. And that sort of, the number that you need to deter. And remember, it's not just a, we're going to deter Russia or we're going to deter North Korea, it's from doing what? And so if, if, let's look at China, for instance,

China is very, relative to Russia or the USA, China is very few nuclear weapons. They're increasing them. And so as a proportion of the number of nuclear weapons they have, it's quite a big increase, but it's still very few. And they are a very effective deterrent, I would suggest. The issue that the USA particularly has is that because it offers extended deterrence to a number of allies around the world, not least of which of which, of course, they, you know, the NATO, but also a number of allies in the, in the Pacific. They then have a responsibility to various different allies in various different places, to be able to deploy various different systems at various different times.

And the technologies that you use influence the, so the deterrence strategy that you have. So, you know, you mentioned the triad earlier. if you accept that for the UK, we don't, we kind of, we participate in NATO's deterrence. So to that extent, we offer extended deterrence to our NATO partners or NATO allies. But ultimately, you know, the Trident is an assured response system. It's not a sort of first strike weapon. It's not a sort of nuclear signaling type thing. France has a similar system, but then also some aircraft delivering small,

what you might call tactical nuclear devices. Again, they could be used for signaling or they could be used for a different type of nuclear strategy. The USA has the full panoply of the triad, as does Russia, and that's what China is developing. So there are differences in the strategies that would be employed. So I think probably, in my opinion, the US has too many weapons. They could probably do deterrence with fewer,

but for very good reasons that I don't know. I mean, I know a number of nuclear strategists in the USA and I have a very greatest respect for all of them. And they will talk about things like hedging or different systems and these different commitments. So there are reasons why the USA has a lot of weapons. There are probably similar reasons why Russia has a lot of weapons. And it's easy to criticize them because they got a lot of weapons.

And the, you know, the Nome Chomsky's of this world will always be trying to get the West to reduce. However, when you get down to low numbers, you then start introducing instability anyway, because that idea of first strike can suddenly become viable or attractive. So if the whole world was North Korea with, I don't know, say a dozen weapons, and somebody thought, actually, we can get 10 of them, all of a sudden, and then we would be the only people in the world with nuclear weapons. So it can build in instability when you start getting down.

to low numbers. This is one of the problems I have with the whole idea of nuclear zero. It is fine if you can get to it, but how do you make sure that it's actually zero? And how do you get to zero in the first place without introducing all of the instabilities that we had or we enjoyed in the 1950s? So it's none of those questions ever have a simple answer, which comes back to a certain extent to why the British government never talks about it in public. Andrew Corbett, author of Supreme Emergency, How Britain Lives with the Bomb. It's been really, really interesting to talk with you today.

I just say one of the things I've appreciated the most is your ability to speak to these issues in plain clear language without sort of resort to the usual sort of clichés and sort of strategic, you know, jargon that you so often encounter is just to speak plainly about these issues. And I just want to say, I don't say this kind of thing very often, but, you know, I am genuinely grateful. and I think everyone ought to be, if they understood. I'm generally grateful to you for what you did for so many years in such a central role in a way that you understand better than any of us, a terrible role in the security architecture of the West.

I'm grateful. And also thank you for joining today. It's been a great conversation. Thank you. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.