The change from Trident to a cruise based platform, would enhance the UKs independence, in a lot of ways freeing the UK from US targeting systems. while we're shackled to those we are in effect providing the USA with four SSBNs for free, and abasing ourselve in foreign policy matters, not always to our advantage for the right to continue to do so. As we are paying, why shouldn't we take up the call of "No taxation without representation" and declare our full independence?
I have argued here before that the British Deterent exists soleley to keep the seat on the security council, I dont see that you particularly disagree with me, but dont see that much of an argument as to why the UK actually needs to do this? Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
But the argument isn't that by getting rid of Trident you'd remove the second strike capacity, it is suggested instead that the second strike role could be filled by naval forces with nuclear armed cruise missiles instead.
It's not like the Royal Navy has that many ships, and even fewer which have or could be given the capability to carry missile with a range long enough to hit their very distant targets. The ships would have to be specially built to carry big enough missiles, and such modifications would radically reduce their conventional capacity. Which is why there are dedicated vessels to carry these weapons, namely nuclear missile submarines.
The problem with cruise missiles is that they have short range, at best 1000 km, while Trident clocks in at 7360 km.
If you for example wanted to reach Moscow, the entire nuclear armed Royal Navy surface force would have to be stationed in the Gulf of Finland... With Trident, you can reach even Vladivostok or Beijng practically while lying at the quay in Faslane, or at least from positions in the Norwegian sea. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
The fact that the missiles have a 1000 to 10,000 knots speed is truely irrelevent, whereas the 30 knots of the ships is highly relevant, You have a roughly 15 minute flight time from launch to impact, so youre looking at trying to destroy something that will be somewhere random within a 7 1/2 NM radius, even with large warheads, thats not an easy job. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
You are also arguing from the point that the first strike would be launched solely from missile silos inside Russia, while the task force might just as well be destroyed by nuclear torpedoes or AShM fired from hunter submarines shadowing the surface vessels, or from strike aircraft.
The only way to avoid a nuclear strike is by not being targeted by it. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
I was only arguing on the basis of missiles launched from silos on the basis of flight speeds you were quoting
The only way to avoid a nuclear strike may be to not be targetted by it, but Strategic Missiles have a horendously high failure rate, you'd need to be certain that you would kill every possible retaliating ship. This lack of certainty is where deterrence lies. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
Unless you have subs. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
I remember some information on the topic during the north corea crisis: they have missiles, they have nuclear bombs, but they don't have (seemingly) nuclear bombs on missile. A free fox in a free henhouse!
So you take out the UK's entire deterrent and a few cities. Taking out London and maybe Birmingham and Manchester would be enough to put the UK back a century, because so many business and government records, communication systems and infrastructure management systems are based there.
Food deliveries would stop almost instantly, emergency rations would last a few months at the outside, and the UK would be dead as a country. Even without bombing the other cities, you'd lose anything up to 75% of the population over the next year or so.
So - then what? Even if there's enough of a government left to surrender formally, are you going to march in an occupy what's left, and create a new government? Why would anyone bother?
The Soviets had ideological momentum, so it wasn't completely impossible to imagine them wanting to invade Europe and the UK.
Modern Russia, not so much, except as an act of machismo and political spite. Likewise for China.
Iran, India, Pakistan, and NK might all want to try, but they wouldn't have the resources to launch a decapitation first strike - they'd go straight for the cities.
So really if Trident has a purpose at all, it's as a revenge weapon, guaranteeing retaliation against these second and third rate players. And they'd be just as vulnerable to a cruise-launched bomb run as they would be to an SLBM, so the submarine-launched angle starts to look slightly unconvincing.
Even if every ship in the fleet was dispersed in a random pattern, it would be trivially easy to organise precise targetting. You can solve the movement problem by boxing each ship's current position with multiple warheads.
Stealth subs and space launchers are the only defence against this.
Space launchers are officially banned, but I would be hugely surprised if that meant that there weren't any in orbit.
The problem is reliable command and communication. You want to make sure that a second strike happens after reliable first strike notification, even if the first strike takes out your main HQ - but also that you don't launch a first strike by accident just because someone's radio tunes into Radio 1 instead of the emergency launch code channel.
I'm not sure what kind of failsafes are used in C&C. It probably isn't a simple problem.
Of course this requires having a number of fixed and mobile land-based platforms on constant hairtrigger alert, which may not save all that much money.
I'm unsure how cruise missiles would work out for strategic warheads. I'm thinking they don't.
Hence, a 1 megaton bomb dropped on a Soviet motorised infantry division is a tactical strike, while a 10 kT device droppen on the Kremlin is most definitely a strategic strike. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
During the Cold War, the term "weapons of mass destruction" was primarily a reference to nuclear weapons. At the time, the US arsenal of thermonuclear weapons were regarded as a necessary deterrent against nuclear or conventional attack from the Soviet Union (see Mutual Assured Destruction), and the euphemism "strategic weapons" was used to refer to the American nuclear arsenal. ... An additional condition often implicitly applied to WMD is that the use of the weapons must be strategic. In other words, they would be designed to "have consequences far outweighing the size and effectiveness of the weapons themselves".[24] The strategic nature of WMD also defines their function in the military doctrine of total war as targeting the means a country would use to support and supply its war effort, specifically its population, industry, and natural resources.
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An additional condition often implicitly applied to WMD is that the use of the weapons must be strategic. In other words, they would be designed to "have consequences far outweighing the size and effectiveness of the weapons themselves".[24] The strategic nature of WMD also defines their function in the military doctrine of total war as targeting the means a country would use to support and supply its war effort, specifically its population, industry, and natural resources.
The problem with Tripwire is that it has never completely gone away. It took a long time before proportional response was taken seriously as an alternative. And we still have idiots trying to get Georgia into NATO, with the inevitable outcome that the entire nuclear-tipped alliance will become involved in local Russian politics.
Frank Delaney ~ Ireland
Thousands of weapons were to be used in the initial strike at the dawn of the invasion. As many as two hundred(!) were reserved for strikes against Swedish targets. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
