Trident: What is it For? Challenging the Relevance of British Nuclear Weapons Dr. Nick Ritchie, April 2008
The report is supported by an in-depth online Research Report that provides more detailed arguments for the briefing's main conclusions and is available to download as a pdf.
The report argues that:
1. The ‘logic’ of nuclear deterrence is fallible. British nuclear weapons do not provide an ‘insurance’ or a guarantee of protection against nuclear threats or enduring stability between nuclear-armed adversaries.
2.The long-term trend in relations with Russia and China, the two nuclear-armed major powers that might threaten the UK, is positive and conflict with either would be deeply destabilising, costly and counter-productive to British security.
3. The credibility and legitimacy of threatening nuclear destruction in response to the use of WMD by ‘rogue’ states is highly questionable and British nuclear weapons offer no guarantee that military intervention against a WMD-armed ‘rogue’ can be kept at a conventional level.
4. The Government has focused on only a handful of issues to the exclusion of other important factors. These issues need to be brought into the mainstream debate and the wider implications of the decision subjected to a full and balanced analysis.
5. Nuclear weapons have no role to play in deterring acts of nuclear terrorism whether state-sponsored or not.
6.The wholesale destructiveness of a British nuclear attack will have little relevance to complex future conflicts characterised by diverse and interdependent sources of insecurity and ‘hybrid’ wars set out in the Government’s March 2008 National Security Strategy.
Download the report here
Dr. Nick Ritchie
Department of Peace Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford UK
BD7 1DP
Email: n.ritchie@bradford.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1274 236860
