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Prestige, but not real usefulness, from UK and France’s costly nuclear deterrents

France and Britain Weigh the Price of Nuclear Deterrence International Herald Tribune By HARVEY MORRIS , 27 sept 12 LONDON — There were reports on Thursday  of stirrings within the British military about the need to scale back the country’s nuclear deterrent in order to spend the money on confronting more conventional threats.

It is part of a continuing debate in Britain and France — Europe’s two nuclear weapons powers — about the cost to their overburdened budgets of maintaining nuclear independence.

In the post-Cold War world, does it make sense to have nuclear capacities that were designed to deter the Soviet Union?

From a diplomatic viewpoint, nuclear weapons are seen as money well spent, allowing both countries to punch above their weight in the international arena. However, economic factors mean the two countries would now like to keep the weapons but cut costs in a process that has been described as “deterrent lite. ” Although Britain and France have fallen to the status of second-tier powers, they are still among the big five that hold a veto in the United Nations Security Council alongside the United States, Russia and China. That authority stems in part from the fact that both maintain independent nuclear deterrents.

As world leaders gathered at the United Nations this week for the annual opening of the U.N. General Assembly, the supremacy of the big five, a legacy of World War II, was once more under attack as a global anachronism……

Michel Rocard, a former French Socialist prime minister, was widely criticized  this year for suggesting France should abandon its independent deterrent, saying the money spent on maintaining it “serves absolutely no purpose.”

The latest debate in Britain was spurred by remarks from Sir Nick Harvey, a Liberal Democratic former defense minister in the Conservative-led coalition government. He was dropped this month from a post that included reviewing Britain’s nuclear capability. He said senior military commanders had expressed reservations about the costs and benefits of maintaining the country’s current level of nuclear deterrence after the country’s aging fleet of nuclear-armed Trident submarines is scrapped.

Sir Nick told members of his party  that there were opportunities to scale back the level of the deterrent without actually scrapping it.

He said Britain had the technology to “simply put it away in a cupboard and keep it as a contingency in case there ever were to be deterioration in the global security picture that might need the U.K. government to take it out of the cupboard.”

September 28, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | France, UK, weapons and war