Global Security Newswire

British and Scottish officials continued to squabble over the future of a Trident ballistic missile submarine base at Faslane that some leaders in Scotland would like to see relocated should the country vote in 2014 to separate from the United Kingdom, the London Daily Telegraph reported on Friday (see GSN,  Jan. 17).

The leading Scottish National Party favors evicting the nuclear-armed submarines from Faslane in the event of a secession vote. However, British Defense Secretary Philip Hammond warned that forcing out the Vanguard-class vessels would lead London to cancel plans to station a separate fleet of submarines at Faslane in 2017. That would be a major loss for the Scottish base, which presently has 10,000 employees.

"You get them all or you get none of them," said Hammond, a member of the British Conservative Party, which opposes Scottish secession. "That is the simple logic with submarine bases.

The defense secretary reaffirmed that Scotland would be obligated to pick up a portion of the massive cost of relocating the Trident missile submarines should they be sent away from Faslane.

"It would be an enormous exercise to rebuild the facilities that are at Faslane. It would cost billions of pounds and it would take many years," he said. "And obviously the cost of doing that would be a factor that had to be taken into account in any reckoning on Scottish independence, if that is the way it goes."

Scottish First Minister and SNP leader Alex Salmond charged back that "only somebody with the arrogance of a Westminster politician would say to the Scottish people, apparently in all sobriety, that you'd place and station weapons of mass destruction in Scotland over a period of half a century, impose substantial cleanup costs and then try to send Scotland the bill."

The Scottish National Party would reject any bill sent by London for Trident relocation costs, according to defense spokesman Angus Robertson. "If London really cared so much about nuclear weapon systems perhaps they should have considered public opinion in Scotland decades ago. They didn't and now they are asking themselves what are they going to do with it."

The United Kingdom's arsenal of submarine-launched nuclear warheads is maintained at the Royal Naval Armaments Depot at Coulport, also in Scotland.

Former Royal Navy First Sea Lord Alan West said relocating the nuclear weapons from Coulport "would be a huge, huge complex operation" (Simon Johnson, London Daily Telegraph, Jan. 20).