Global Security Newswire

A British lawmaker has said the city of Plymouth is prepared to host the United Kingdom's Trident ballistic missile submarines should the vessels be evicted by Scotland following a vote for independence, the Plymouth Herald reported on Friday (see GSN, Jan. 20).

Top officials with the Scottish National Party are calling for the nuclear-armed submarines to be expelled from the naval base at Faslane if Scotland secedes from the United Kingdom. A vote on independence could be held as soon as 2014.

Conservative Party member Oliver Colvile, who represents Plymouth and Devonport in England, proposed that his district should house the Vanguard-class submarines during a parliamentary debate. His offer was greeted warmly by the government.

Devonport has been considered as a potential new home for the Trident submarines as it possesses the specific infrastructure and specialized personnel required to service present-day and future submarines. The city presently houses three Trafalgar-class atomic-powered submarines that are slated to be relocated to Faslane.

"Rest assured of this, Plymouth is ready to pick up the baton should the Scots be in the process of thinking they do not want to have the nuclear deterrent or nuclear submarines," Colvile told fellow lawmakers. "We should be very welcome to open negotiations to ensure we have that" (Nick Lester, Plymouth Herald/This is Plymouth, Jan. 27).

Labor Party lawmaker Nick Brown, though, urged his colleagues to recognize the United Kingdom is no longer a global force and should give up its nuclear arsenal, the Press Association reported.

Brown, a former government minister in the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown administrations, said the nation's fiscal budget crisis necessitated reallocating to other government programs the approximately $31.4 billion it would take to modernize the Trident submarine fleet.

Other estimates of the government plan to replace the four Vanguard-class submarines have put the price tag as high as $40 billion. The Conservative Party-led coalition government has said it would postpone a final decision to build the submarines until after the 2015 election. A decision is also pending on replacing the nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles carried by the vessels (see GSN, Oct. 24, 2011).

"The question that faces us is whether an independent nuclear deterrent is a good use for such a large sum of public money in the present circumstances," Brown said.

As a member of NATO, the United Kingdom is already covered by U.S. extended nuclear deterrence so it is not apparent "why Britain needed to duplicate" that protection, he said.

Funds allocated to renew the Trident fleet could "substantially bring down the tuition fees of every student," and cutting a generation adrift from higher education poses a bigger threat to our nation than the idea that a foreign power with nuclear weaponry would uniquely threaten to use them against us," according to the legislator.

A nuclear arsenal would not prevent terrorists or enemy nations from attacking, Brown asserted.

"I also think that other countries might like us more if we stopped punching above our weight in the world," Brown said.

"I think we might be better thought of by the international community if we settle for being the medium-sized European nation state that we are, rather than the imperial power that we used to be," he continued (David Hughes, Press Association, Jan. 26).