Arms Trade	Drones	Environmental Costs of War	General Dynamics	Hiroshima	Nuclear Treaties

TRIDENT

/

The Nuclear Chain
HMS Vigilant	The nuclear litany goes like this - Pakistan must have a nuclear bomb because India has a bomb India must have a bomb because China has a bomb China must have a bomb because America and Russia have bombs Russia must have a bomb because America has a bomb. You can equally repeat this incantation in reverse - America must have a bomb because Russia and China have bombs China must have a bomb because India now has a bomb India must have a bomb because Pakistan now has a bomb Finally pariah states - North Korea, Iran and Israel - believe they too need nuclear weapons because they understandably feel threatened.
Where does Trident fit into this dangerous pattern?
	Trident adds nothing to our security.. The missiles have a poor record of reliability. Note the danger of transporting nuclear components by road. One pretext on which Britain might possibly use Trident is to give legitimacy to a US nuclear attack by participating in it, (just as Tony Blair legitimised George Bush's invasion of Iraq). In a crisis the very existence of our Trident might make it harder for a UK prime minister to refuse to take part. The truth is that Trident is not an independent deterrent. Essential components are leased from the US. UK Trident submarines have to return their missiles regularly to the US for maintenance. The UK-US Agreement for Cooperation in the Uses of Atomic Energy for Mutual Defence Purposes, which governs this arrangement, was due to expire in 2024. On 25 July 2024, three weeks after Keir Starmer became UK prime minister, he visited Washington and agreed, without reference to parliament, to delete the longstanding "sunset clause" which required the agreement to be renewed every ten years. This removed the opportunity for parliament, once a decade, to debate and reconsider America's role in Britain's nuclear programme. It violates the duty of both governments, under the 1970 Non-Proliferatiom Treaty, to avoid transferring nuclear weapons and to promote nuclear disarmament. Note the implications of the use of Artificial Intelligence in military decision-making. Britain is no longer forced to be part of the Nuclear Chain. We would be safer without Trident. Its principal role now is to secure our seat at the Top Table. The alternative would be to scrap Trident, rethink the nature of "security", and place Britain at the head of the non-nuclear powers - the majority of the countries in the world - in support of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).
The future
	The current generation of Vanguard nuclear submarines is to be replaced by Dreadnought submarines. See the current programme.
Explore the decision flow-chart on the morality of nuclear weapons.