Published: September 23, 2009 by The New York Times
LONDON — Prime Minister Gordon Brown will use a speech at the United Nations Security Council on Thursday to offer the possibility of Britain’s reducing its fleet of ballistic nuclear missile submarines as part of a new global pact on nuclear weapons, aides to Mr. Brown said on Wednesday.
The British proposal envisions cutting back on a $33 billion, 20-year program to replace the Royal Navy’s Trident missile fleet, which has constituted Britain’s nuclear deterrent force since the mid-1990s. Instead of replacing all four Vanguard-class submarines in the fleet, the Downing Street aides said, Mr. Brown will suggest that Britain build only three.
If effected, the reduction would be Britain’s first move in decades to reduce its nuclear force. But Downing Street aides were quick to say the cut was not part of a plan to revert to the 1980s Labour policy of unilaterally dismantling Britain’s nuclear force, a policy that contributed to the party’s political decline. The scrapping of that policy in the 1990s was an important step toward returning the party to power in 1997.
In a speech on Wednesday afternoon to the General Assembly of the United Nations, Mr. Brown offered a preview of his proposal, calling on the world’s leaders to "accept that we are at a moment of danger." He described the plan as a "grand global bargain" between nuclear and nonnuclear states.
"If we are serious about the ambition of a nuclear-free world,"Mr. Brown said, "we will need statesmanship, not brinkmanship."
Earlier, in a BBC interview in New York on Wednesday, Mr. Brown cast his proposal as a step toward increasing Britain’s influence in a new round of international negotiations on nuclear weapons. President Obama gave his own push to that effort in a speech on Wednesday, telling the General Assembly that the United States would move ahead with a broad effort to curb nuclear weapons, including a "nuclear posture review" aimed at achieving deep cuts in the American nuclear arsenal.
Downing Street aides said Mr. Brown’s proposal would depend, among other things, on progress in persuading other nations that have nuclear weapons or are seeking to acquire them to accept cuts and constraints of their own. One focus is Iran, which has so far resisted international pressure to abandon elements of a nuclear program that Western intelligence experts believe to be aimed at producing weapons.
In the BBC interview, Mr. Brown said that nuclear weapons powers, including Britain, "have to make some contribution to the reduction of nuclear weapons" as part of the process of revising and extending the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which will culminate in a review conference next year that is seen as central to efforts to curb nuclear arsenals.
His aides said a watershed for the British proposal would come before the end of this year, when a powerful national security council, including the heads of the country’s armed forces, makes its own assessment of the proposal. Crucial to that decision, the aides said, will be a judgment on whether a fleet of only three submarines will be enough to ensure that Britain can maintain one submarine on deep-sea patrol at all times, as it has for the past 40 years.
One important political hurdle appeared to have been crossed when the opposition Conservatives endorsed the Brown proposal, virtually assuring it would not become a contentious issue in the next general election, which must be held by June 2010. For months, opinion polls in Britain have pointed to the strong possibility that the Brown government will be defeated by David Cameron’s Conservatives.
Liam Fox, the Conservatives’ shadow defense minister, said in another BBC interview that Mr. Brown’s proposal seemed "reasonable and sensible," as long as experts determined that a three-submarine force would be enough to keep one vessel at sea at all times. The Trident submarine fleet, based at Faslane in Scotland, near Glasgow, commonly has three of the four vessels in or near home port, undergoing maintenance or sea trials, at any time. The vessels carry a total of 160 nuclear warheads, making Britain the world’s fifth largest nuclear power, after the United States, Russia, China and France.
Mr. Fox also noted a factor that Downing Street aides played down in flagging Mr. Brown’s proposal: the possibility of Britain’s achieving significant defense savings. The need has been accentuated by two separate developments. One is the economic pump-priming undertaken by the Brown government to ease the current recession, which has plunged the country into the heaviest levels of debt since World War II. The other is a defense review that has concluded that Britain must devote more resources to the war in Afghanistan.
But many in Britain’s defense establishment doubt that the Brown proposal for a one-vessel cutback will be either operationally practicable or a significant source of savings. Some experts said on Wednesday that cutting one vessel might save as little as $4 billion, perhaps less, and that is not counting the possible social costs of cutting the 5,000-member work force that would build the submarines at the Barrow-in-Furness yards in northern England, with the first submarine scheduled to enter service in 2024 and the fourth two years later.
John Hutton, a senior Labour Party figure who quit as defense minister this summer, sounded his own note of caution, saying that the submarine deterrent worked like an insurance policy, and that previous reviews had shown that four submarines were the minimum needed to keep one permanently at sea. If cutting the force to three vessels meant that Britain would be protected "for only three-quarters of the day," he said, it would be tantamount to having no deterrent at all.
The prime minister has told the United Nations that he is willing to cut the UK's fleet of Trident missile-carrying submarines from four to three.
Gordon Brown told the General Assembly the UK was proposing a "grand global bargain" as a way to halt the spread of nuclear weapons and reduce stockpiles.
The suggested cuts come as the government searches for ways to reduce the massive deficit in public finances.
However Number 10 said keeping the UK's nuclear missiles was "non-negotiable".
At the UN, Mr Brown said nations needed to come together to achieve the long-term ambition of a nuclear-free world.
He said his proposal was a "grand global bargain between nuclear weapon and non nuclear weapons states".
"If we are serious about the ambition of a nuclear-free world we will need statesmanship, not brinkmanship," he said.
"All nuclear weapons states must reciprocally play their part in reducing nuclear weapons as part of an agreement by non nuclear states to renounce them.
"This is exactly what the Non-Proliferation Treaty intended. In line with maintaining our nuclear deterrent I have asked our national security committee to report to me on the potential future reduction of our nuclear weapon submarines from four to three."
He added the UK would insist non nuclear states proved they are not developing weapons and could offer civil nuclear power to non nuclear states which were ready to renounce any plans for nuclear weapons.
But he said one of the greatest risks was that terrorists would acquire nuclear weapons.
Mr Brown also warned Iran and North Korea that the world would be even tougher on nuclear proliferation and was ready to consider further sanctions.
Nuclear warheads
US President Barack Obama is chairing a Security Council meeting as part of the process of drawing up a replacement for the Non-Proliferation Treaty, designed to stop countries developing nuclear weapons.
He has said he will try to negotiate with Moscow to reduce US and Russian nuclear warheads - which make up the vast majority of the world's total - from more than 2,000 each to 1,500.
The UK government says it has cut its stockpile of Trident warheads from 200 to 160 but many Labour MPs would like it to scrap the weapons altogether.
Earlier, Mr Brown told BBC Radio 5 live there were "no proposals at the moment about warheads".
The government estimates the cost of renewing Trident at about £20bn but Greenpeace says it could cost £34bn and, once lifetime running costs are included, would cost nearly £100bn in total.
Professor Ron Smith, a defence economist at Birkbeck College, told the BBC that reducing the number of submarines would probably have little effect on Britain's nuclear capability because one was essentially "a spare".
He added that losing one submarine would only save "a couple of billion" in about 2020 as there were a lot of fixed costs upfront and each boat cost less to build than the last one.
At-sea patrols
Foreign Secretary David Miliband said: "We reject unilateral nuclear disarmament for ourselves precisely because the world cannot end up in a situation where responsible powers get rid of their weapons, but the danger of nuclear proliferation by other powers remains."
But the former defence secretary John Hutton, in whose Barrow and Furness constituency the submarines are built, said it was "very, very important" that Britain could have "absolute confidence and the knowledge that we can maintain one of those submarines - at least one of those submarines - on continuous deterrent patrol".
The existing Trident submarines are housed at the Faslane naval base on the Clyde, but the Scottish National Party has firmly opposed their replacement.
Shadow defence secretary Liam Fox said reducing the number of submarines was not a new idea as it was an option set out in the government's 2006 White Paper.
He told the BBC: "If we can maintain our nuclear deterrent and make a contribution to disarmament that's all very well but the prime minister is not planning to reduce the number of warheads from 160 ... merely to have them in fewer submarines."
He said it was "reasonable and sensible" to look at doing that if the technology was available to make it possible.
The Liberal Democrats say they would not seek a "like-for-like replacement" for Trident - which is due to need replacing by 2024.
Leader Nick Clegg said it was good the prime minister had acknowledged the need for alternatives to a "like-for-like" replacement but he might have to go "a lot further".
However the party's foreign affairs spokesman Edward Davey told the BBC that the suggestion "looks like tinkering at the edges" of the nuclear weapons issue.
Bruce Kent, the vice-president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, said multilateral reductions "don't mean anything".
He added: "What does it matter if you have 100 nuclear weapons or 200 nuclear weapons - you could do horrendous damage, numbers don't really matter at all."
"British nuclear weapons have no function, apart from encouraging other people to get nuclear weapons."
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