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UK new Trident nuclear submarine fleet an insane waste of money

Harvey said it would be cheaper for the government to give every worker £2m “so they could go an live in the Bahamas”.

Sea-based nuclear deterrent expensive and ‘insane’ – ex-defence minister Former armed forces minister Sir Nick Harvey urges need for Trident alternatives in evidence to Nuclear Education Trust Nick Hopkins guardian.co.uk,   13 December 2012  Keeping a constant sea-bound nuclear deterrent is “complete insanity” that costs too much and is militarily illogical, a former defence minister has said.

Sir Nick Harvey, who was armed forces minister until September, said the UK had to properly consider other options before any decisions were taken about whether to replace the Royal Navy’s four ageing Trident submarines.

Giving evidence to a research paper compiled by the Nuclear Education
Trust, Harvey made the case for alternatives to “like for like”
replacement vessels, insisting the government needed to accept the
world had changed, and so had the UK’s enemies.

“Continuous at-sea deterrence is, it must be said, complete insanity,”
he told the trust. “At [the] height of the cold war, when the Soviet
Union had us in its sights and we had their cities in ours, then at
least it had some logic. Now, 20 years after ‘de-targeting’, what
possible logic can there be in having a continuously available arsenal
aimed at nothing in particular? The costs of continuous at-sea
deterrence are also extreme – a vast financial premium.”,,,,,

He said 1,000 jobs would be lost, but that it was “not feasible in the
current financial climate, and given the pressures within the MoD for
other equipment, to spend approximately £100bn on weapons of mass
destruction in order to save 1,000 or so jobs.”

Harvey said it would be cheaper for the government to give every worker £2m “so they could go an live in the Bahamas”. This option was,
he said, not entirely flippant.

“I would have thought [it was] not unwelcome to the employees as well
as affordable to the government given the scale of the potential
savings.”

“I am very clear the government does have a moral responsibility to
step in and make some kind of injection into the local economy,
including a considerable financial commitment.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/dec/13/sea-nuclear-deterrent-trident-expensive-insanity

December 14, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | UK, weapons and war