PETER HITCHENS: Horrifying reality about nukes and Britain that no one talks about

It is time for us to copy the French and build a truly independent British nuke. It might be a little more expensive, or we might go for something cheaper and more compact. So what good is a very expensive nuclear strike force if we don’t really have the final say on whether we use it? Because we don’t actually have our own nuclear deterrent force.

Here’s why. I won’t soon forget the day Margaret Thatcher exploded in a 150-megaton mushroom cloud; because someone had told journalists the terrible truth about Britain’s so-called independent nuclear deterrent. The Trident missiles at the center of the matter are not actually ours. The incident took place in late October 1987, and for weeks afterwards it was rumored in the corridors of the Ministry of Defense that the Iron Lady ‘wanted blood’. Like all the best and truest stories, this one was officially rejected immediately.

There was even a clash in Parliament over the leak; Meanwhile, the missiles were claimed to be like Calor Gas cylinders that were replaced when they were empty. This ugly comparison did not change the facts. We were sacrificing a significant part of the independence of our nuclear deterrent to save money (about £700 million in the long ago days). We also ran the risk of British Trident missiles being caught up in a future disarmament agreement between the US and Russia. Because Moscow can scoff that ‘our’ missiles aren’t even ours, they’re just part of Washington’s arsenal.

The truth was revealed by a senior officer. The new Trident missiles we were preparing to purchase would not actually be British property. They were to be leased from the USA only. Most people know very well the difference between owning a property and being a tenant. This was a big step forward from the agreement made with the United States in the 1960s for the Polaris rockets we owned and maintained. That’s why this information was never supposed to come out.

The official revealed the facts to defense reporters at the Coulport weapons depot, a highly classified part of the Faslane nuclear submarine base. He said: ‘The missiles are American… we don’t have to buy the missiles from the Americans. We share these.’ He added: ‘With Polaris we own the missiles and process them in the UK. We rent Trident missiles. ‘We pay for it but we don’t buy it, we rent it.’

Worse, he compared the arrangement to renting a car. The fact is that British nuclear submarines were, and still are, supposed to line up in Kings Bay, Georgia, to deliver Trident missiles for maintenance. Then they need to be given fresh ones by the USA. It’s not really independent. What if an American president were so cold and hostile towards us that he blocked the deal and left our Trident submarines empty and defenseless? In 1987, few people could imagine such a president. It’s not that hard anymore.

A scandal in 1987 revealed that our new Trident missiles would not be owned by the UK but would only be leased from the US. (Image: A Trident missile is test-launched from a US Navy submarine)

Remember, Britain’s nuclear arsenal was originally built to tell the US where to land. In 1946, our stern Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin returned from America furious at the bullying he had been subjected to by his opposite number, James Byrnes.

During a key Cabinet committee he grumbled: ‘We must have this… I don’t care for myself, but I do not want any other Secretary of State of this country to speak to, or be spoken to by, a Secretary of State in the United States of America, as in the conversations I have just had with Mr. Byrnes. ‘We’ve got to keep this thing here no matter what the cost… We’ve got to put the damn Union Jack on it.’ He won the argument. The bomb was built.

Since then, thanks to technological failures, American changes of heart, and economic crises, the Union Jack has become somewhat faded and worn. Rather than reasserting our sovereignty, British politicians chose to hide our shortcomings in this regard.

The 1987 fight, which remains etched in my memory for many reasons, is now largely forgotten because the Soviet Union collapsed soon after and the fear of World War Three faded. And when Labor came to power in 1997, the party The country, which had been crammed with nuclear disarmers for the past decade, was now completely relaxed about the bomb. I’ve always thought that they only object to our nuclear weapons because they target Communist Moscow. Once Moscow was no longer communist, they didn’t care.

But now the issue is much broader. Britain spent an enormous fortune making its own bomb and keeping the capacity to make it alive. He spent a second fortune building and operating the submarines that carried this bomb; He spent a third fortune to first buy Polaris and then rent Trident, the missiles that would drop the bomb. In a world that becomes more tense and dangerous every day, it would be madness to throw away what we have. Only then might it make sense to ensure that our deterrence is entirely our own.

Our columnist envies the ‘huge, silent black hull of the French ballistic missile submarine Le Temeraire’ seen here at the Ile Longue base in Brittany

Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey made this point over the weekend and deserves credit for it. The two main parties have long stopped thinking about this issue, and new thinking is sorely needed.

I was quite jealous a few days ago when film emerged showing French President Macron standing in a vast hangar on Ile Longue in Brittany, with the huge, silent landmass of the French ballistic missile submarine Le Temeraire beneath and behind him. Before singing La Marseillaise alongside hundreds of men and women from the French army, he simply declared: ‘To be free, we must be feared. And to be feared we must be strong’, which is the basis of good defense in any language.

Unlike our American-equipped nuclear missile submarines with their rented rockets, Le Temeraire and the rest of the Triomphant class carry 16 M51 missiles, all designed, tested and manufactured in France. The same goes for warheads, although Britain’s nuclear warheads are, to put it politely, very close to US designs. French submarines are supported by a fleet of Rafale fighter-bombers capable of delivering nuclear bombs, the capacity Britain abandoned in 1998. They now also carry air-launched nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. France’s nuclear ‘Force de Dissuasion’ is not subject to any command outside France, not even NATO. The President of France alone decides when and where to use it.

Yes, the French force is much more expensive than ours. But ultimately it is definitely a much more convincing deterrent. And the huge cost of keeping and renewing Trident, some say as much as £205bn, is a huge price to pay for a system the key to which is effectively owned by the Pentagon.

In any case, there is certainly an argument for Britain to retain a smaller, more compact and less ambitious nuclear force than Trident, which is essentially a scaled-down superpower cold war system. Israel, which everyone must recognize as facing more immediate dangers than Britain, has a much more modest nuclear arsenal. The danger of leaving things as they are is that we may end up not being able to afford a gun that isn’t ours.