The Truth About Trident by Timmon Milne Wallis;

Author:Timmon Milne Wallis;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910324820
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)
Published: 2020-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

Is Renewal of Trident Affordable?

CONSIDERABLE CONTROVERSY SURROUNDS the expected cost of Trident renewal and what impact that might have on other government spending. For those who believe Trident is essential for national security, the cost is more or less irrelevant. For those who feel Trident is important more for maintaining Britain’s place in the world, cost is more of an issue. And for those who see Trident more as something the UK is lumbered with until such time as it can be safely negotiated away, paying a large amount of money for it to last another 50 years puts the whole issue into stark relief.

To those who say we cannot afford a nuclear deterrent, I say that the security of our nation is worth the price.

(David Cameron, Daily Telegraph 2 April 2013)

When the renewal of Trident was first floated in 2006, the cost of replacing four submarines was estimated to be £11–14 billion at 2006 prices. This price tag had risen to £15–20 billion (in ‘outturn’, or actual figures) by the time of the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review. In the most recent NSS/SDSR, published in December 2015, the figure had risen to £31 billion (in actual figures), with a further £10 billion as ‘contingency’.

Other estimates, meanwhile, have put the figure variously at £76 billion,167 £87.4 billion168 or as high as £100 billion.169 These higher figures include running costs and other capital costs in addition to the submarines themselves. On the basis of answers to parliamentary questions in October 2015, the Conservative MP and chair of the Defence Select Committee, Crispin Blunt, estimated the total cost had now risen to a staggering £167 billion.170

What are we to make of these widely diverging figures and what is the true cost of renewing Trident? Is it a cost that Britain as a nation can afford? And what are the opportunity costs in terms of programmes that will not be funded as a result of spending this money on Trident, both in the defence budget and in the government’s budget at large?

A world of cost overruns

Most people have to balance their books at the end of each month to make ends meet. They work for companies whose profits can suddenly evaporate because of what financial markets are doing on some distant stock market, or work in the public sector and are suddenly faced with cuts that have to be implemented in their department, or work for the charity sector and don’t know if funding for the next phase of their project is going to come through or not. In contexts like these, it is hard to fathom the sheer scale of a military project like Trident, let alone the kind of culture where money is simply not an issue. Who has ever worked on a project where huge cost overruns are simply accepted as the norm, let alone a project where the cost overruns could amount to £10 billion?

The original estimate for the current Trident Vanguard submarines, for instance, was £4–5 billion in 1980,171 when the decision was made to replace Polaris.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.