Could Trident ever be used?

Since when did MPs make all decisions in war?

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A deterrent is not a deterrent if it cannot or will not be used. If we faced sufficient aggression, it absolutely would be used and would send a clear message to the world that nuclear war is undesirable. Though I think Trident is excessively expensive, unnecessarily so.

The whole point of deterrence is not knowing. The enemy must believe that if they ever launch a first-strike, they are playing Russian Roulette with a few dozen nuclear warheads aimed at them.

I'm not going to claim to be an expert on the technical specifics of Trident but I have absolutely no idea why being launched from a submarine makes a missile any faster than if it were launched on land.

NATO policy and doctrine is that any strike against its members could result in nuclear retaliation. The Soviets always invited NATO to abrogate the use of first strike (as they themselves did), but that would mean an overwhelming conventional force could win a war against us with the nukes still in the silo.

Good point. My own view is that the existence of the variable yield (particularly the 0.3 kiloton option) lowers the threshold for use in a way that makes it a plausible deterrent.

The danger with lower yield and/or 'tactical' nuclear weapons has been that it somehow made a nuclear war winnable and therefore more likely - if a state believed that they could survive the exchange they might be more likely to begin one

It's not at all clear where that came from, whether it's a straw man or you are simply confused.

In any case, why would you propose to move the nuclear deterrent to land-based silos? That makes no sense at all, it contributes nothing to your claims about arming long-range ballistic missiles with conventional explosives (which is a useless system for reasons that have already been explained, and which was the basis of your claim) or using cruise missiles instead (which are much slower than ballistic missiles, whether launched from land or sea)

It's also not a matter of dispute that land-based MIRVed ICBMs are inherently destabilising in a way submarine-based missiles are not. Such systems place a premium on first-strike, because of how a single MIRVed land-based ICBM can take out perhaps ten land-based ICBM silos. Land-based ICBMs place you in a situation in a nuclear confrontation just short of war where you must "use them or lose them". That increases the likelihood of use compared to submarine-based missiles where you don't have to worry about using them to avoid losing them.

The other reason submarine-based systems were favoured by the UK is that it would be politically impossible to find a community which would accept ICBM silos in their area, or to find an area where the silos are not geographically proximate to large cities or important strategic sites.

Anyway, your tangent into land-based missiles seems odd given it really has nothing to do with your claims about an alternate, conventional-explosive warhead ICBM/SLBM system that could replace Trident. It doesn't sound like you've thought this through

Not entirely (or even substantively) true. The submarines and their nuclear reactors are made in the United Kingdom. The missiles are manufactured by Lockheed Martin in the United States, and the Royal Navy leases missiles out of a common pool from the American SSBN base at King's Bay, Georgia.

The "physics package" of the warhead that are placed on the missiles are designed and produced at the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Berkshire based on the W76 warhead design but with significant design changes (to allow a greater safety margin, and also allow variable yield).

AWE Aldermaston and Los Alamos are working very closely on the design work that will lead to the replacement warhead and are essentially a partnership. The nuclear relationship between the UK and the US is unique. It would make no sense for the UK to develop its own delivery system from scratch if it can get in on advanced American technology at a very reasonable price.

You've ignored 95% of what I've written, including my main argument, I don't really get why you're getting so hung up about this matter unless you're trying to throw this conversation.

Responding to your points though, do you have any reason to believe that an event which would require the delivery of a warhead significantly more quickly than a cruise missile is likely enough to happen to justify the immense extra costs associated with maintaining and building ICBMs? Your entire argument assumes that this is the case, but I've not seen any evidence that this is actually true. You've thought up a scenario involving biological warfare but any such scheme would have taken years of planning. What is the chance that we only just find out about it a couple of hours before deployment? Do you seriously think it is worth spending billions on ICBMs just for that absolutely tiny possibility when instead you could probably spend that money infinitely more effectively on protective measures to stop these people developing biological warfare in the first place?

I suppose it can be viewed through the counterforce/countervalue distinction.

The counterforce strategy of targeting Soviet missile silos, leadership bunkers, suveillance radars and microwave communications links was considered to be much more warlike than the countervalue strategy of targeting Soviet population centres to deter an attack, But a counterforce exchange would result in far fewer casualties, and I believe it was a much more credible nuclear posture as it directly targeted the means of making nuclear war.

I believe that variable yield provides us with a credible deterrent and it provides policy-makers with options. Say 30 years from now an even more extreme faction of Shi'a radicals have come to power, and Iran has developed weaponised nuclear weapons to place on the long-range ballistic missiles they already have. Say we detected signs they were preparing to launch, and this new faction had insane views about the apocalypse, the 12th Imam returning to earth and all that madness.

Say their missile silos were located close to population centres in Iran. A variable yield warhead would allow us to target those silos without risking tremendous damage to nearby population centres. And I do honestly believe that a more flexible system will be perceived by an adversary as more likely to be used and thus more of a deterrent. If we only had 50 megaton warheads, then the threshold for use would be so high that it simply wouldn't be a credible deterrent.

Would you like to tell me how much of that is actually trident itself, given that we're looking at VANGUARD class submarines, not trident class

and a variation on the W76 warhead, not the trident warhead

oh yes, the Trident is the missile

Well he seems to not even know the differences beyond trajectory of a cruise missile vs an ICBM, given an ICBM travels 10+ times the speed and has a range 10+ times that of a cruise missile

This is where an understanding of the technical characteristics of delivery systems helps. A "long-range missile" (by which you presumably mean a cruise missile) would take up to 10 hours to reach a target in a remote area of Central Africa or the Middle East.

Yes. The ability to place large amounts of firepower at short notice to any point on the Eurasian continent is not a capability that could be provided by TLAM. And that capability is not the only justification for the Trident renewal, it is one among others (the most important of which is providing a general nuclear deterrent)

Another is that if we give up the Trident system we really can no longer justify our permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Countries without a permanent seat often have to wait 10 or 15 years between their 2 year terms, and getting elected to one of those 2 year terms takes a huge amount of lobbying. A permanent seat provides us with a permanent voice at the top table of international affairs, and the Security Council veto that comes with it. That UNSC seat alone is worth the 0.4% of our annual government spending that goes to maintaining Trident.

When has that ability been needed in the past 50 years?

Where is it written that our seat on the UNSC is dependant on our having nuclear weapons?

You could make the same argument about nuclear weapons generally. That's not a substantive argument against having them. The scenario I offered up is just one, it's to get people thinking about flexibility in the deterrent and the particular characteristics that Trident has which could be useful in the future.

It's a practical reality, and one with some link to international law given the five permanent security council members are the only five countries permitted by NPT to possess nuclear weapons.

If we give up Trident, what serious claim do we have to being a top five country in the world? Germany would have just as much claim to sitting on the Security Council. India certainly would.

"A practical reality" in your mind, maybe.