Scottish CND Trident: Britain's Weapon of Mass Destruction
Nuclear weapons are not a myth or an abstraction. There are real warheads on a British Trident submarine on patrol and there are detailed plans specifying the latitude and longitude of points on the globe against which these weapons are ready to be used. The Navy keeps three Trident submarines armed, with 14 missiles and 48 nuclear warheads on each. There are 50 % more warheads deployed on British submarines today than there were in 1990.
The Labour Governments retention of Trident is inconsistent with the way in which thinking on nuclear weapons has moved - with many former advocates of the bomb arguing that there is an urgent need to abolish these weapons. Some observers say the risk of nuclear war is greater now than it was several years ago. Today more countries have the bomb. Russian nuclear forces are kept on a hair-trigger alert because they are vulnerable to an attack from US Trident missiles.
In the 1950s and 1960s Britain had plans to attack a large number of cities in the Soviet Union using V bombers or Polaris missiles. These plans were later adjusted so an attack would concentrate on targets around Moscow. Today the scale of Britains nuclear capability and the way it is deployed suggest that it remains oriented principally against Russia.
An attack using the warheads on one submarine against likely targets in the Moscow area would result in over 3 million deaths. This type of attack would involve some weapons detonating inside Moscow and others at command posts close to the city. The combined effects of blast, heat and radiation would mean that there would be very few survivors within 1.6 kms of each explosion and large numbers of fatalities 4 kms away. Because the warheads would be detonated close to the ground, there would also be massive nuclear fallout over urban areas. Thousands of people would die over a 4 to 12 week period from this fallout.
Other potential targets are Russian Northern Fleet submarine bases. In Britain there are towns and villages close to every key submarine facility. The same is true of the Russian bases near Murmansk. Trident warheads exploding above these bases would cause devastation over a wide area and in each case would result in thousands of civilian casualties in urban areas.
Trident has an additional "sub-strategic" role. For this a reserve submarine will have some missiles carrying one warhead each. Even if it had a reduced yield, a single one of these warheads would still cause devastation over an area of 30 square kilometres.
In addition to having independent target plans, British nuclear weapons are also incorporated into NATO nuclear planning, which is dependent on US targeting information. The use of all the Trident warheads deployed on three British submarines either in a NATO or an independent attack could result in around 9 million deaths.
In 1996 the International Court of Justice made it clear that nuclear weapons are not exempt from the rules of war. The basis of humanitarian law is that parties to any conflict should seek to distinguish between civilians and the military. In each of the examples considered it is clear that the use of Trident would result in a massive number of casualties across a wide area. It would not be possible to accurately predict which places would be affected by fallout. The inherent inability to distinguish between civilian and military objects means that the threat or use of Trident would be illegal.