26 Mar 2016 8:56 PM:
Ash Carter, the US Defense Secretary said - Feb 2016
The UK’s deterrent is an important part of the deterent structure of NATO, of our alliance with the UK, and helps the United Kingdom to continue to play that outsized role on the global stage that it does because of its moral standing and its historical standing.
“It’s important to have a military power that matches that standing”, he continued “and so we’re very supportive of it. And of course we work with the United Kingdom, we are intertwined on this program, mutually dependent. We are partners in this very strongly.
He then added that Trident was “part of the special relationship” of the UK and the US.
So exactly why is it so important to the US? Of course there is the financial aspect of the matter. The cost of the missile system with warheads is likely to come out in the region of £5-10 billion. US contractors are also likely to do well out of the submarine contracts, since the new nuclear reactors are to be built to a US design.
UK Parliament’s Select Committee on Defence back in 2006, assembled by Greenpeace from various expert sources. It states:
In practice, the only way that Britain is ever likely to use Trident is to give legitimacy to a US nuclear attack by participating in it. There are precedents for the USA using UK participation in this way for conventional military operations.
The principal value of the UK’s participation in the recent Iraq war was to help legitimise the US attack. Likewise the principal value of the firing of UK cruise missiles as part of the larger US cruise missile attack on Baghdad was to help legitimise the use of such weapons against urban targets.
The most likely scenario in which Trident would actually be used is that Britain would give legitimacy to a US nuclear strike by participating in it.
So what exactly is the UK’s “outsized role on the global stage”? This is a clear reference to the UK’s military attacks on other countries, invariably in support of US campaigns. Think Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria. The US values the UK’s military support for the ‘legitimacy’ that it provides and the sense that the US forms part of an ‘alliance’ and is not acting unilaterally.
And the role of Trident is clear: to allow us, while engaging in further military attacks on other sovereign nations, to deter retaliation by threatening a nuclear strike in response. This has nothing to do with defending the UK against some ‘mad dog’ dictator irrationally determined to destroy us. It is all about providing cover for our own military adventurism and that of the US. (gr)
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£167bn now
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