UK’s nuclear arsenal completely dependent on USA

War With The Ghosts Permaculture Research Institute of Australia, George Monbiot, 26 March 2010, What are our nuclear weapons for, and who controls them?, “…….. Sharing our [UK’s] nuclear deterrence with France is out of the question. Last week the government slapped down a French offer to reduce the costs of our submarine patrols, by taking turns to prowl the same seas rather than duplicating the effort and occasionally crashing into each other.

This proposal, it said, would cause “outrage”, on the grounds that it’s an unacceptable erosion of sovereignty(1). Using a system leased from the United States, on the other hand, presents no such difficulty. When the government says our sovereignty is threatened, it means that another nation might disrupt the orders it receives from Washington.

So we must maintain the pretence that this is ours alone, and sustain our extravagant doctrine of “continuous at-sea deterrence”. Deterrence against what? Nazis? Aliens? Killer jellyfish? Our Trident missiles, due to be replaced and deployed at a cost of several tens of billions(2), have no visible strategic purpose. They are the reification of a fantasy: a fantasy that the United Kingdom is still a defining world power and that our enemies present an existential threat. As usual, the government is preparing for the last war, building a fantastical Maginot Line against the enemies of a previous century, the ghost armies that haunt the official imagination.

we have no independent deterrent. Since 1943, when the UK joined the Manhattan Project, our nuclear weapons programme has relied on crumbs from the US table. The US has granted us a franchise on parts of its programme, which it has graciously allowed us to rebrand with the Union flag. Our Trident missiles are currently leased from the United States. The warheads they carry are based on a US design (the W-76) and manufactured at the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Berkshire. Its factory is a copy of a nuclear plant at Los Alamos and it is two-thirds owned by the US companies Lockheed-Martin and Jacobs Engineering(4). The firing system is designed and built in the US; so is the missile guidance system(5). The missiles are aimed with the help of US satellites. The subs themselves are designed and built in the UK, but use US components and US reactor technology(6)…….
Our dependence doesn’t end there. In 2003 the then UK defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, announced that he would restructure the armed forces to make them “inter-operable” with those of the US(7). The idea that our government, which has renounced sovereign control of its forces, could launch a nuclear attack without the blessing of – or instructions from – the United States is ludicrous. Yet it will not contemplate even sharing patrols with France.

War With The Ghosts | Permaculture Research Institute of Australia