nuclear-news

Just what are the UK govt’s plans for relocating nuclear submarines?

Vote yes for a nuclear free England, January 04, 2013 by Rev. Stuart
Campbell In a slightly surprising development reported late this
afternoon by the Guardian, the Ministry of Defence appeared to
suddenly and officially confirm what most supporters of independence
have asserted for some time: that if Scotland becomes independent the
UK will lose its nuclear deterrent, as it has nowhere else to put it.
In a surprisingly direct response to a question from CND, the Ministry
revealed that “the safety arrangements for Devonport [naval base near
Plymouth, widely regarded as the only possible alternative berth for
the submarines] do not permit the presence of submarines carrying
Trident nuclear warheads”, and that “The MoD’s safety experts are not
considering changing that“.

It was already known that even if the submarines themselves could be
docked in Devonport, there was no possibility of replicating the
Coulport weapons base without years of work costing billions of
pounds, but the MoD’s unexpected revelation, as well as being an
apparent reversal of the Ministry’s position of a year ago, is a
dramatic intervention with radical and complex implications for the
independence debate.
It seems fair to say that the declaration isn’t obviously great news
for any of the parties involved in the referendum. Firstly, the
potential complete loss of the UK’s nuclear deterrent is clearly
disastrous news for the Tories, who might otherwise have been
privately quite relaxed about a Yes vote. In particular, the party
would be horrified at the loss of the permanent seat on the UN
Security Council that allows ministers to continue to indulge their
imperial fantasies.

Secondly, the knowledge that the entire UK would be nuclear-free in
the event of independence is a huge headache for Labour’s
cynically-dishonest Trident policy of pretending to want rid of the
system while simultaneously planning all along to retain and then
replace it. In a BBC debate last year, Scottish Labour’s slippery
“deputy” leader Anas Sarwar tried to sell voters the line that getting
rid of Trident wasn’t justification for independence:

“I don’t simply want to get nuclear weapons out of the Clyde and think
actually, that’s fine, we’ll be fine and we’ll be safe. I don’t think
it’s credible to say ‘Let’s move it a few hundred miles down the M74
and that’s okay’. We want to obliterate nuclear weapons not just from
Scotland, but from right across the UK and right around the
world.”….
We have no idea what the truth is. But it’s almost inconceivable, to
the point of rampant insanity, that the MoD would not only just
casually announce that would Scottish independence result in
unilateral UK disarmament, but that it was blithely refusing to make
any sort of contingency plans for the eventuality. So all reason
points to there being something more to the situation than meets the
eye. http://wingsland.podgamer.com/vote-yes-for-a-nuclear-free-england/

January 5, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, UK