Trident renewal costs rise by £6bn, defence review reveals | UK news | The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015 ... ew-reveals

Yes, it's another bang-up MoD procurement effort. And the headline figure doesn't even include maintenance, much less missiles to actually fire. If the mainstream press was doing it's job of course a proper debate could be had.

But don't worry, HS2 will be bang on budget, trust us.

Any other Department would see this be immediately privatised and the French or Chinese would take over. For some reason, it’s still not the done thing to flog this kind of thing off to the lowest bidder.

In all fairness flogging our nuclear deterrent to the lowest bidder isn't likely to be a good idea.
Unless it's the Americans of course, we need them to run the thing anyway as I understand. What could possibly go wrong?

Given the circumstances where we'd actually use the thing are pretty much inconceivable, I think we should at east find the way to chuck the least amount of money down the drain on it.

Of course, we ensured that China will be paying top Yen/Sterling to run our nuclear power stations. Ahem.

Everything is done by the lowest bidder, as Alan Shepard once noted:

That’s how this all seems to be working.


Don’t we need them to authorise us to use them?

My understanding (and I'm perfectly willing to be proved completely wrong here) is that we need access to the military GPS network (which the US owns and runs) in order to target the things properly.
Now, I guess you don't actually need to be that accurate when you're lobbing a nuke but I assume we'd at least want to hit the right area. Mind you, given the US's record on friendly fire, maybe relying on the military GPS network isn't that such a good idea anyway.

It's an interesting hypothetical - if we did want to use a nuke but the target was a country that the US didn't want harmed what would happen then? It can't be called an independent deterrent if you have to rely on someone else to use it.

The people we might actually lob an ICBM at are almost certainly capable of knocking out a few GPS satellites. By the time those things come into play, inertial guidance is likely to be the only option available to anybody.

I expect that there will be more work done in recognising landmarks/street layouts and buildings using AI as well. As said, though,a nuke really doesn’t need to be pinpoint accurate. It probably just has to recognise that it’s heading towards <insert name of city here> and detonate at the appropriate moment.

Well it's all just a box of our own fireworks to bring to the end-of-the-world bonfire party anyway.

The problem is. We don't, on the whole, believe that unilateral disarmament by any or all of the democratic countries that hold these things would suddenly make the likes of Putin decide such weapons are expensive and pointless too. If all the West disarmed, we would rather expect the likes of him to use their giant thermonuclear pile to get lots of concessions we don't think he should have.

With that in mind, is it fair to delegate the responsibility and cost of a second strike nuclear deterrent entirely to the US? I'd prefer the whole thing to be spread out a bit more evenly around the EU as well. But perhaps not as far as Greece.

Depends exactly what you mean by 'a nuke'. ICBMs don't need GPS - they existed well before that did. And even an MIRV warhead is moving so fast on the downward part of it's trajectory that GPS targetting simply isn't viable - by the time you've received the GPS signal, figured out your location and adjusted your trajectory, you've already moved so far your trajectory is wrong again (ICBMS actually have very limited capability to change their trajectory late on anyway). Plus of course ICBMs tend to be strategic grade weapons and as you say, when you're lobbing a megaton of explosives at something, you don't need to be that accurate.

There are two ways the UK nuclear forces might need GPS

1) As a 'check factor' to the sub's navigation systems - you can be accurate with ICBMs as long as you know where both the launch and impact points are to a decent degree. I'd imagine trident subs stick an antennae up every so often to cross reference where they think they are to where GPS tells them they are.

2) Nuclear cruise missiles. They do use GPS, along with intertial guidance and terrain recognition (there's a famous video clip from I think the Invasion of Iraq that shows a tomahawk taking a left turn at a road junction) to allow for very accurate targetting. However, as far as I'm aware, the UK doesn't have any nuclear equipped cruise missiles, in fact we burned through our entire tomahawk stock last time round and they're not cheap to replace...

I have heard numerous justifications over the years about how the UK independent deterrent isn't actually that independent of the US. The fact is though that any such arrangement would be strategically sensitive and therefore never put in the public domain, so we don't actually know one way or another.