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We should get rid of Trident.


Park Life
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It's all gonna become immaterial in 20 years time when global warming surpasses 2 degrees and the shit starts to really hit the fan with the effects of climate change. We should be redirecting the trident money at renewable energy along with the rest of the planet instead of sleepwalking to a toasty oblivion.

 

We should be focussing on adaptation and resilience. The wedge thrown at renewables is too little too late.

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The Guardian's Biggest Story In the World campaign is good if you're interested in this sort of thing (and not to sound like Swampy, but every fucker should be). They are doing a series of short podcasts to document the campaign which are interesting and worth the listen.

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Well......this should be interesting now.

 

 

Conservative majority vs. SNP landslide in Scotland

 

Defence of the realm vs. representative democracy

 

 

Personally, I think Trident is a worthwhile deterrent system, certainly better than any alternatives, be they nuclear based or happy thoughts based. Is it effective against modern threats like ISIS? No. But neither is anything else we have in our Armed Forces apparently. There's frankly no point measuring Trident's effectiveness or indeed cost against things it can't effect, but the value of it becomes clear when you consider the potential for conflicts unsanctioned by the international community, like Syria, Ukraine, the Falklands, to go south very fast. I've no doubt that last resort deterrent systems like Trident act as a sharp dose of strategic reality to nutjobs like Putin, who are arguably only as bold and contemptuous of international law as they are because they have nukes themselves.

 

I certainly don't want it to ever be used, and wish nukes had never been invented, but we are where we are. It takes years to procure, design and build a replacement, less time than it took for Russia to go from Ukraine's best mate to their mortal enemy. It's ironic in the extreme that Russia persuaded Ukraine to give them back their Soviet era nukes in exchange for security guarantees. And that's a part of the world which our defence analysts supposedly knew something about, not a complete mystery like N Korea, from whose own nukes we would only protected from by one thing if Trident did not exist, distance. The same can't be said for many other states which ether have, or want to acquire, nuclear weapons.

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Well......this should be interesting now.

 

 

Conservative majority vs. SNP landslide in Scotland

 

Defence of the realm vs. representative democracy

 

 

Personally, I think Trident is a worthwhile deterrent system, certainly better than any alternatives, be they nuclear based or happy thoughts based. Is it effective against modern threats like ISIS? No. But neither is anything else we have in our Armed Forces apparently. There's frankly no point measuring Trident's effectiveness or indeed cost against things it can't effect, but the value of it becomes clear when you consider the potential for conflicts unsanctioned by the international community, like Syria, Ukraine, the Falklands, to go south very fast. I've no doubt that last resort deterrent systems like Trident act as a sharp dose of strategic reality to nutjobs like Putin, who are arguably only as bold and contemptuous of international law as they are because they have nukes themselves.

 

I certainly don't want it to ever be used, and wish nukes had never been invented, but we are where we are. It takes years to procure, design and build a replacement, less time than it took for Russia to go from Ukraine's best mate to their mortal enemy. It's ironic in the extreme that Russia persuaded Ukraine to give them back their Soviet era nukes in exchange for security guarantees. And that's a part of the world which our defence analysts supposedly knew something about, not a complete mystery like N Korea, from whose own nukes we would only protected from by one thing if Trident did not exist, distance. The same can't be said for many other states which ether have, or want to acquire, nuclear weapons.

I agree with that except I'm actually glad they were invented, because I'm fairly sure this deterrence had avoided a third war in Europe. We could all be dead or not born had it not been for this.

 

I see in the news today that North Korea has successfully launched a missile from a submarine. They already have fission technology. I really feel we need to renew Trident personally.

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Indeed, Kim was obviously reading Toontastic and saw the chance to scare the shit out of us. It's beyond insane that NK are possibly capable of deploying a submarine launched nuclear weapon. The only things we have to counter that sort of threat are all the bits and pieces that are the first to be dispensed with in defence cuts brought in as part of the Cold War peace dividend.

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Well, for one, I doubt you know for sure. And two, I said "possibly" for precisely that reason. NK might well not have a nuclear capable sub, but we now know for sure that they have nuclear warheads, missiles and submarines that can fire them, which is all you need to make one.

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I agree with that except I'm actually glad they were invented, because I'm fairly sure this deterrence had avoided a third war in Europe. We could all be dead or not born had it not been for this.

 

I see in the news today that North Korea has successfully launched a missile from a submarine. They already have fission technology. I really feel we need to renew Trident personally.

 

 

This is actually a very good point. I'd not thought about that before.

 

Also agree on North Korea, although I think China would descend on them like a ton of bricks if they ever actually did anything directly aggressive. NK will be sorted out regionally and without our involvement. Russia is a different story, and Mako is likely correct in thinking that Putin checks his actions because of our capabilities (amongst others in NATO, if not the UK on it's own).

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Wow. That's a long read, only just finished it now. If even 10% of it is accurate, it's scary stuff.

 

Basically a Trident trainee started to get concerns even before his first patrol, and by the time he'd finished it (3 months at sea) he says he'd seen enough to want to do a Snowden. It's all a bit rambling and badly constructed, but skip to the end to read the bits that explain his motivations and (imho unrealistic) expectations of what this leak will achieve. He did say he would hand himself in, but the BBC seems to think he's currently on the run.

 

His concerns are wide ranging - lax security both on shore and in the boat, fast tracked training and staff shortages and potentially unstable crew members, crews not following proper procedures - both security and engineering safety wise, the boats have multiple maintenance issues including various fire risks, and basically a culture of taking short cuts due to cost/convenience, both by the crew and the higher ups. And perhaps most significantly strategic wise, the boat he was on couldn't even fire its missiles at the end of the tour even if it wanted to, due to the various technical issues it had.

 

He is basically saying that it is only by sheer luck that we haven't lost a boat yet or had a serious loss of life due to an accident. Even worse, he makes a quite convincing argument that, in the environment today where terrorists are extremely committed, intelligent and not too worried about martyring themselves, we are at very real risk of one of them being able to turn one of these boats into a dirty bomb while docked in Faslane. To his credit he doesn't say anything stupid like claiming they could launch a missile, but he comes close to claiming they could even cause a misfire while at sea.

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Read it

 

old kit, badly maintained, sloppy procedures brought about by overfamiliarity, anyone raising issues suffers from career degredation

 

probably true - the yanks have found similar in their B52 force and the Minutman missiles - and we all know how brilliant the Russian armed forces are

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