By IRNA,
London : The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) has questioned how vast spending on Britain’s Trident nuclear missiles can be justified following the publication of the government’s security strategy.
‘It is utterly absurd for the government to go ahead with spending upwards of £76bn on replacing Trident when the threats it is meant to address don’t even feature amongst the top risks faced by the UK,” said CND chair Kate Hudson.
Hudson said that the threats it is designed to combat have been officially classified in the strategy, which preceded Tuesday’s publication of the government’s defense review, as falling outside the top rank of security concerns faced by the UK.
“The only nuclear threat to feature as a Tier One risk is that from terrorists, yet Trident can do nothing to deter such groups who would surely welcome it were Britain to respond with a nuclear strike,” she said.
The security strategy defines the scenario in which Trident is designed to be used – to combat attacks by other states – as a Tier Two risk, alongside an upsurge in organised crime. A military attack on the UK by another state is classified in Tier Three.
In Tier One, it lists four possibilities of the threats to the UK, including hostile computer attacks, international terrorism, a natural hazard such as a flu pandemic and an international military crisis between states that draws in the UK.
Hudson said the security strategy has identified such a large number of significant risks, from climate change and cyber-attacks to pandemics and terrorism, that “giving the go-ahead for Trident replacement seems like an exceptionally expensive after-thought, lacking in any genuine rationale.”
Given that the government accepts that ‘no state currently has the combination of capability and intent needed to pose a conventional military threat to the territorial integrity of the UK’ it is obvious the “continuous patrols of the Trident submarines should end,” she said.
“This would reduce tensions, boost disarmament talks and diminish the chance of accidents – not to mention saving millions of pounds a year,” the CND chair said in a statement obtained by IRNA.
Other campaign groups as well as church leaders and trade unions have called on the government to spend the billions that could be saved on Trident on health care, education and jobs.
Hudson said “every pound squandered on Trident is a pound unavailable to deal with genuine threats to British security, which go far beyond potential military threats to include survival issues like climate change.”
“With the running costs of the current Trident system – let alone building a replacement – equal to the whole running costs of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ combined, it is no surprise that the majority of the public, along with a growing number of military leaders see nuclear weapons as a costly distraction,’ she said.