A Briefing Paper adopted by the All Saints Church Kings Heath Social Justice Action Group, Birmingham (Chair: J. M. Hull,. Secretary: M A Cross)

Summary:

Following a short description of the Trident missile and its role in Britain’s Strategic Nuclear Defence Policy, and a statement of the current issue, the case against the renewal of Britain’s nuclear deterrent is set out under six headings: Military, Political, Economic, Legal, Ethical and Religious. It is concluded that the case against the replacement of Trident is overwhelmingly strong. Some of the various organisations opposed to the renewal of the Trident system are referred to, including the views of various political parties, a list of organisations and the policies of several religious bodies. The paper concludes with suggestions about further actions.

Limits of the paper:

The paper does not recommend a pacifist position. Indeed, one of the strongest arguments for the abolition of nuclear weapons is that additional resources could be available to support the peacekeeping role of Britain's conventional forces

The paper does not deal with nuclear power as a source of energy but is confined to nuclear weapons of mass destruction.

The paper is intended for the thoughtful British citizen, particularly those who share in the traditional spiritual and moral values of our culture. Apart from a few Internet addresses, there are no footnotes or suggestions for further reading. All the facts in the paper are in the public realm and can easily be confirmed on the Internet.

The Trident II D5 is the missile used in Britain's strategic nuclear defence system. The system as a whole consists of three elements: the platform, the means of delivery, and the warheads. The platform consists of four Vanguard submarines, one of which is on operational patrol at all times. The submarine can circumnavigate the globe forty times without resurfacing. Each submarine carries twelve Trident missiles (the means of delivery) each missile armed with on the average four nuclear warheads. The warheads vary in their power in order to enable flexible response, but on the average each has an explosive strength 8 times greater than the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Thus the total force available at any one time consists of 48 such warheads, each of which can be independently targeted. The missile is about 44 feet in length and weighs nearly 60 metric tons*. It is discharged while the submarine is still submerged, and fires the first of its three stage rockets within seconds of leaving the surface of the water. It reaches a speed of approximately 2,750-mph within 30 seconds of launch, and finally releases its warheads at a height of several hundred miles above the surface of the earth. These are independently targeted, and impact with an accuracy of about 120 metres.

The submarines were made in Barrow-in-Furness and were brought into service between 1992 and 1999. They are serviced and re-fitted in the naval base at Devonport, Plymouth, on the Tamar estuary.

The war heads are designed and manufactured at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) in Aldermaston and Burghfield, in Berkshire near Reading. Since 1998 this has been managed by a consortium of British Nuclear Fuel, Lockheed Martin, and CERCO, under contract with the UK government. The 10 year contract awarded by the government on the 1^st April 2000 was extended in 2003 to a period of 25 years at a total cost of £5.3 billion which is an average of approximately £212 million p.a. The UK is believed to possess about 150 warheads.

The missiles themselves are made in Sunnydale, California, by the Lockheed Martin Corporation, at a cost of nearly $US30 million each. The missiles made available to the UK are not owned outright by the UK but remain part of the pool of such missiles, and are stored at the US Strategic Weapons Facility (Atlantic) in Kings Bay, Georgia. The UK government is believed to have about 58 missiles. The Vanguard submarines go to Kings Bay to collect their missiles, and return them to be serviced, and ultimately de-commissioned in Kings Bay. The warheads are mated with their missiles either at Kings Bay or at Coulport, part of the Naval base on the Clyde. The three submarines not on active duty are based at Faslane i.e. in naval terms H M Neptune, part of the same naval base, about 30 miles from Glasgow.

*The usual weight of a fairly large truck would be 10 tonnes.

The whole system is ageing and will have to be refurbished or replaced within the next 15-20 years. A decision whether to do this, or on the other hand to decommission the system must be taken in the near future.

The Labour Government has indicated that a decision whether to replace the Trident nuclear weapons system is likely to be made in this Parliament i.e. before the next General Election in May 2010 at the latest. In its manifesto before the 2005 General Election, the Labour Party said ‘We are also committed to retaining the independent nuclear deterrent and we will continue to work both bi-laterally and through the UN to urge states not yet parties to non-proliferation treaties, notably the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty to join.’ In his Mansion House speech on Thursday 22 July 2006, the Chancellor Gordon Brown spoke of ‘a stability founded on our strength to make the right long term decisions. The same strength of national purpose we will demonstrate in protecting our security in this parliament and in the long term; strong in defence, strong in fighting terrorism, upholding NATO, supporting our armed forces at home and abroad, and retaining our independent nuclear deterrent. In an insecure world we must and will always have the strength to take all necessary long term decisions for stability and security.’ On Wednesday 28^th June, in the House of Commons, Tony Blair told MPs a decision on replacing Trident would be taken later this year, saying he favoured the move but he refused to indicate what form a public consultation would take. On 20^th July the Leader of the House Jack Straw announced that there would be a vote, although he did not say when this would take place.

The case against renewal of the UK strategic nuclear deterrent may be summed up as follows. 1. Military, 2. Political, 3. Economic, 4.Legal, 5. Ethical and 6. Religious.

a) The threat.

In the eighties and nineties, when the Polaris and its successor the Trident nuclear strategic defence system was brought into operation, its purpose was unambiguous. The missiles were targeted against the principal cities of the USSR, in order to deter an attack through the threat of an overwhelming response. It is probably the case that the balance of MAD (mutually assured destruction) did indeed prevent the cold war between the western and eastern blocs from breaking out into open warfare. However, the world has changed. On 20^th June 2006 the House of Commons Defence Committee published its report The Future of the UK’s Strategic Nuclear Deterrent. There is no longer a hostile state in the world against which the kind of strategic deterrence represented by the Trident system would be appropriate. It is pointed out that deterrence against potential aggression might take various forms: economic, diplomatic, or through conventional forces. ‘The UK will need to examine whether the concept of nuclear deterrence remains useful in the current strategic environment.’ (para.55) The Ministry of Defence had refused to take part in the proceedings of the Select Committee and the report states ‘We believe that it is essential that, before making any decisions on the future of the strategic nuclear deterrent, the MOD should explain its understanding of the purpose and continuing relevance of nuclear deterrence.’ (para.56) In other words, it is not obvious to this influential and well-informed group of Members of Parliament, drawn from across the parties, what the purpose of the Trident missile system is. They don’t know what it’s for!

b) Terrorist activity.

Security specialists seem to be in agreement that any imaginable nuclear threat is more likely to come not from a hostile state but from a terrorist group. One can imagine a nuclear weapon being taken into a major port by ship. No strategic missile force can be a plausible deterrent to such a threat. A single witness (the Committee describes him as ‘a lone voice’) argued that terrorist groups could only obtain nuclear weapons from states, and that any states with such hostile intentions could be deterred by the threat of a nuclear response (para.90). However, although states could certainly be deterred from using strategic nuclear weapons, the nuclear force of the UK would be unlikely to deter such states from supplying nuclear weapons secretly to clandestine terrorist organisations. The terrorists themselves, being ready for ‘martyrdom’, could not be deterred by fear.

c) Independence.

While the claim is that Britain must have its own independent deterrent, the truth is that as long as the UK uses Trident missiles as the delivery vehicle for its warheads, the system is hardly independent. The Defence Committee distinguishes between independence of acquisition and independence of operation (para.84). We do not have independence of acquisition and it is not clear whether the UK possesses operational independence or not. The Committee calls upon the MOD to clarify the exact nature of the independent status of our deterrent (para.84). in other words, these well-informed and responsible Members of Parliament were unable to ascertain whether or to what extent the British Trident system is genuinely independent.

d) The unknown future.

It is true that we live in a world that is dangerously insecure, and that we cannot tell what threat there might be to the UK twenty or thirty years hence, but the question is whether the world is likely to be a more secure place if the policies of the United Nations for nuclear disarmament are pursued rather than a policy of building up renewed forms of such weapons. It might be argued that continuing to possess our own strategic nuclear deterrent is a sort of prudent insurance policy (para.102). It could equally well be argued that since the unknowable future will certainly become more dangerous if nuclear proliferation gets out of hand, an even more prudent insurance policy would be to discourage such proliferation by decommissioning our own nuclear weapons.

a) The special relationship between the USA and the UK.

Will it weaken relations between the UK and the USA if Britain adopts nuclear disarmament? Such a step would probably be opposed by the USA, in whose interest it is that there should be something that can be called an ‘international alliance’ of democratic nuclear powers. However, friendship between the two countries would doubtless survive. After all, Britain’s support for the American invasion of Iraq has not depended upon nuclear weapons. In many ways, a nuclear free Britain might be able to lend greater support to certain American policies, such as the Human Rights agenda.

b) NATO.

British participation in NATO does not depend upon the survival of the strategic deterrent. Several countries are members of NATO, but have no such force, and yet their loyalty and useful contribution to NATO is not questioned.

c) United Nations Security Council.

The UK is one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, the others being the USA, France, Russia, and China. These are all nuclear powers. It is sometimes claimed that if the UK were not a nuclear power, our place would be lost. However, the report of the Defence Committee (para.60) describes the views of a number of influential witnesses denying that continued possession of nuclear weapons is a condition of membership of the Security Council. The five major powers were those who emerged following the end of the Second World War and the creation in 1948 of the United Nations. Moreover, it is widely believed (para.62) in the developing world that the UK possesses nuclear weapons precisely in order to maintain its position in the world and to enhance its status. It is pointed out that this is a dangerous perception since it leads to a desire for such status creating increased momentum in favour of nuclear proliferation. As far as the status of Britain is concerned, the apparent dependence of the UK’s Trident system upon the USA leads to the view that Britain is a vassal state. The UK should preserve its influence through being a leading industrial nation, with a long and extensive diplomatic history, a secure and well-founded democratic life and because it has more international connections than any other state. The Report concludes (para.65) ‘There is no clear consensus that international influence, is, of itself a reason to retain the strategic nuclear deterrent.’

d) UK domestic politics.

Would a nuclear disarmament policy be politically damaging for a major UK party? A MORI poll published on October 24 in 2005 revealed that 46% of people in the UK are opposed to the renewal of the Trident missiles, and 44% are in favour. In a second sample in which people were not only asked for their opinion but told about the projected cost of replacement, the percentage of those opposed rose to 54%, while only 33% support it.

Such a policy would not necessarily lead to a charge of being soft on defence, since a significant proportion of the saved resource could be devoted on enhanced expenditure on conventional forces.

Current estimates of the cost of the renewal or the retention of the strategic force range from £20 billion to £25 billion. To get this into perspective, one must realise that the profit of Tesco, Britain’s largest retail store, exceeded £2 BN for the first time in 2004; in his budget speech in March 2006, the Chancellor announced an increase in the education budget from £5BN to £8BN, and that he was aiming for a budget surplus of £16 BN by the end of 2010.In 2005, the total cost to the UK taxpayer of the National Health Service was just over £36 BN.

In addition to the projected cost of possible replacement, one must take into consideration the cost annually of maintaining the existing system. Government estimates put the cost of the entire Trident program, including capital and operational costs, at approximately £1.38 billion for 2005-06. This represents 4.5 percent of the defence budget for the same year. This estimate includes personnel, stores, refits, transport, shore facilities, decommissioning and disposal costs plus some of the expense of the Atomic Weapons Establishment. It is understood that the government is preparing a White Paper which will form the basis of public discussion on this question. If tax paying citizens are to engage in this debate with a reasonable understanding of the situation, one presumes that there will be a full and accurate disclosure in the White Paper of both the current and projected replacement costs.

Paragraph 2(4) of the UN Charter declares ‘All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity

or political independence of any state or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations’.

Article 51 of the Charter extends to nation states the right of self defence but this is subject to necessity and proportionality. Moreover, such self defence must comply with universal humanitarian law. This refers to the law of armed conflict, which involves the principle of discrimination between military and civilian populations, and prohibits causing unnecessary suffering. The General Assembly of the UN asked the International Court of Justice to rule on the question ‘Is the threat or use of nuclear weapons in any circumstances permitted under international law?’

On the 8^th July 1996, the court presented its finding. The use or the threat to use nuclear weapons would be inadmissible in an armed conflict unless it was consistent with the rules of armed conflict and with humanitarian law. Several judges ruled that the use of nuclear weapons was inadmissible in any circumstances, however extreme, where even the very existence of a state was at stake.

This ruling is further supported by the Non Proliferation Treaty (1970) especially paragraph vi. All parties bind themselves to eliminate nuclear weapons within a reasonable time scale. The UK is one of the founding signatories of this treaty.

There is a mass of legal opinion and supporting documents on this subject. One can consult, for example, the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy (LCNP.org), the Arms Control Association (founded 1971) with its headquarters in Washington D C, the UN First Committee, which is a subcommittee of the General Assembly dealing with disarmament and international security, the Oxford Research Group, and the Middle Powers Initiative (MPI), a forum dedicated to the elimination of nuclear weapons. This sponsors The Article vi Forum, the first meeting of which took place in the UN headquarters in New York in October 1995. It seeks to study the progress of states in fulfilling their obligations under the article of the Non Proliferation Treaty which requires states to progress towards nuclear disarmament.

There can thus be no doubt that the UK government is required by law to reduce its nuclear weaponry. A start to this was made in the late 1990s, but the renewal or retention of the nuclear force would clearly be an illegal policy. The July 20 Report of the House of Commons Defence Committee reported the view that the future security of the world depends upon the authority and stability of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (para.101). The same paragraph declares that the present Report does not intend to consider the question of legality, but focuses upon the strategic context and the timetable of the decision-making process.

It is clear however that the only British policy compliant with international law would be the continuing gradual de-escalation and decommissioning of the Trident system. It is just as clear that no action, unless illegal on other grounds, which seeks to bring the UK into line with the law, or to prevent the planning, retention or threatened use of nuclear weapons, can of itself be illegal.

It is inconceivable that the use or the threat to use nuclear weapons should in itself be ethical. What could be more evil than the destruction of millions of human beings, and of the environment, and the malformation and sickness of generations yet unborn? Of course, the point of nuclear weapons is not to use them but to prevent their use by others. It could be claimed that the threatened use would be less of an evil than the actual use, and the threat is intended to prevent the actual. The plausibility of the threat, however, depends upon the readiness to use the weapons in response. Would it not be unethical to use them in retaliation, even if others had used them? By then, their purpose of restraint would have failed, so how could their additional use be justified ethically? Since the claim that the use or threatened use of nuclear weapons is morally justified is only credible in so far as such weapons are to be used as a means to avoid a more immoral end, if the end fails, the ethical character of the weapons as means to that end also fails. Such use would be too late to deter and could only be retaliation.

But even if they do succeed in preventing the greater evil, can nuclear weapons be regarded as ethical even as means to an end? Only if there are no other more ethical means of achieving the same end. So what is more ethical, to threaten the use of such weapons, or to seek rational and mutually enforceable means of gradual disengagement?

The major world faiths are united in their belief that the unity of the human species, the human vocation for spiritual development, and the peaceful doctrines of all the great religious teachers must lead to a nuclear free world. A Prominent example is the Declaration toward a Global Ethic, pronounced by the Parliament of the World Religions, meeting in Chicago in 1993.The Declaration begins with the sentence ‘There will be no new global order without a new global ethic’ and goes on to say ‘Every human being must be treated humanely’. There then follow the four ‘irrevocable directives’, the first two of which declare a common ‘Commitment to a Culture of Non Violence and Respect for Life’, and ‘Commitment to a Culture of Solidarity and a Just Economic Order’. Another well known document is ‘A Call for Arms Control and Nuclear Disarmament’ issued by the World Conference of Religions for Peace (WCRP) in March of 2005. This states ‘The claim of several states to a unique right to have and threaten to use these horrific devices is the greatest stimulus to their proliferation’.

Turning specifically to Christian faith, there can be no doubt that the value implications of belief in the living God, the Creator of life, and the world as a creation of God, intended to be the theatre of human flourishing and ultimate salvation are utterly hostile to the possession, use, or the threat of using nuclear weapons. Similar conclusions are irresistibly drawn from the life and teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, leading to the concept of the human body as a temple of the Holy Spirit, and of love for every person, made in the image of God, and a brother and sister for whom Christ died. No interpretation of the nature of the mission of the church in the world can be consistent with the possession of nuclear weapons, whatever the political or psychological arguments for them. Christian faith must therefore resist the claim that the threat to use nuclear weapons can ever be justified, no matter what the claims of purely national security might be, and no matter how strongly the claim is made that possession of such weapons is the lesser of evils in an evil world. A nuclear threat goes far beyond the legitimate role of the state in the preservation of law and security, a responsibility of the state generally recognized by the church, since the use of nuclear weapons, especially the type associated with the Trident missile is incompatible with the demands for discrimination between civilian and military populations, and with the demand for proportionality of response, the two basic features of the theology of the just war.

On military, political, economic, legal, ethical and religious grounds, the case for the renewal of Britain’s nuclear force lacks credibility.

Although as recent statements indicate (see part II above) the governing Labour party is in favour of Trident renewal, the Labour party itself is deeply divided on this issue.

The policy of the Labour Representation Committee is for nuclear disarmament http://www.l-r-c.org.uk/about/ The Conservative Party is in favour of Trident replacement but there are individual voices questioning this policy. The Liberal Democratic Party appears not to have a declared policy on this issue. A yougov poll conducted February 2006 found 55% of Lib Dem members in favour of replacing Trident while 34% wanted Britain to give up its nuclear deterrent. The Green party and the Scottish National Party are firmly opposed to Trident replacement.

CND, Christian CND, Come Clean, Greenpeace, Trident Ploughshares (Norwich), The Acronym Insitute for Disarmament Diplomacy (London), Fellowship of Reconciliation, Pax Christi. Iona Community, Network of Christian Peace Organisations lists 23 organisations all of whom are opposed to Trident renewal.

Note: the WCC is a fellowship of more than 340 churches representing some 550 million Christians.

Roman Catholic Church: in his message for the World Day of Peace, 1^st January 2006 Pope Benedict XVI spoke of ‘those governments which count on nuclear arms as a means of ensuring the security of their countries’ describing these policies as ‘not only baneful but also completely fallacious’. On April 11^th 2006 the 8 Catholic bishops in Scotland released a statement calling upon the UK government not to renew the Trident system and to decommission the existing one. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales is one of the bodies authorising the statement issued by Churches Together in Britain and Ireland (see below).

The position of the Church of England General Synod does not appear to have developed since 1983. ‘It is the duty of Her Majesties government and her allies to maintain adequate forces to guard against nuclear blackmail and to deter nuclear and non-nuclear aggressors’. This policy is clearly out of date since the UK is no longer faced with the threat of nuclear "blackmail" or "aggression" from hostile states. The statement also declared that ‘nuclear deterrence should not preclude multi-lateral efforts towards disarmament’. It is regrettable that the position of the General Synod has not been brought into line with current defence thinking. However, opinion in other sections of the Church of England has made progress. A report of the House of Bishops issued September 2005 stated that ‘the nuclear weapons debate needs to be conducted with much greater honesty and consistency’, and the Mission and Public Affairs Division of the Archbishops’ Council is one of the sponsoring bodies of the statement issued by Churches Together in Britain and Ireland Trident: UK nuclear weapons at a crossroads (June 2006). This document, although intended to clarify debate and not itself announcing a policy, displays a much more urgent sense of concern about this issue compared to the rather formal Synod statement of 1983. On 10/07/06 a letter signed by 19 bishops of the Church of England was published in the Independent newspaper calling upon the UK government not to renew the Trident system.

The Methodist Church: on the 3^rd August 2005, the Secretary for International Affairs for the Methodist church declared that ‘the United Kingdom should take a lead in the effort to eliminate nuclear weapons’. On 26^th June 2006 the Methodist conference meeting in Edinburgh overwhelmingly registered its opposition to the renewal of the Trident defence system.

Church of Scotland: the general assembly meeting in May 2006 confirmed its long history of opposition to nuclear warfare by accepting the report from its Church and Society Council which argued that Trident replacement must be resisted.

A letter published in the Guardian newspaper 30^th April 2005 signed by

the Archbishop of Wales, the General Secretary of the Baptist Union, the President of the Methodist Church, the Moderator of the United Reformed Church, and the Moderator of the Church of Scotland warned the government against Trident replacement.

In 2006 a joint working party of the United Reformed Church and the Methodist Church issued its report Peace-Making: Our Christian Vocation (URC, 2006) . It calls for the non renewal of the Trident system.

The Society of Friends (Quakers), like other traditionally pacifist churches such as the Mennonites, has consistently opposed nuclear warfare.

Please help to distribute this paper. You can send it by email, and you can print as many copies as you can use, and post them. This paper is not copyright: you may copy selections from it, and use them as you wish, provided only that the full title and source of the paper is acknowledged.

Bring this paper before the managing committees or clergy of your own local church, and send it to regional and national denominational offices. Send it to your Member of Parliament, and to your local council. Send a copy of it to your local press, particularly reporting the agreement of some local group.

On the general issue, write to your bishop or other church leader. Write letters to members of parliament, and to the Prime Minister.

If you are not already a member, join several organisations whose policies are to abolish nuclear warfare, such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Green Peace or Trident Ploughshares.

Bring the matter of Trident to a meeting of your Parish Council or other body. Ask them to express a view, and then communicate that view to the press and to other bodies. Ask someone from one of the campaigning organisations to provide a speaker for a local meeting.

Strengthen your own spirituality and political judgement by studying the Bible or the other sacred literature of your tradition, and the teaching of your church on peace. Pray about this issue, and get prayers for disarmament brought before your church services.

Encourage your young people to create posters about disarmament and against Trident. Display these in shop windows and schools.

Watch out for large public meetings and demonstrations, and join them.

Finally, you may feel that direct, peaceful action is demanded.

A civil resistance project focused in Scotland to apply critical public pressure for the disarmament of Britain's nuclear weapons by a continuous peaceful blockade of the Trident base at Faslane. Building on the success of previous mass blockades of the Trident nuclear base at Faslane, there will be a year-long continuous peaceful blockade at Faslane in Scotland. To make this happen, groups and organisations from Scotland, England and Wales, and beyond are being invited to come and shut down the base for at least one 48-hour period each during the year.

The blockade will commence on the 1^st October 2006, the 60^th anniversary of the Nuremburg judgement on those who had carried out crimes against peace in violation of international treaties, agreements and assurances, war crimes and crimes against humanity.