The system needs shaking up because much of the Defence budget is wasted. £6bn to build 2 aircraft carriers that we dont have enough small ships to protect is a key example -
Carriers are usually used in action as part of a coalition fleet. There would probably be other Nato ships involved.
just to give jobs to ship workers in Scotland.
Partly correct. Building was a modular construction and shared over the UK. Rosyth did the main assembly.
The Aircraft Carrier Alliance is responsible for delivering the QE Class to the UK Ministry of Defence and ultimately the Royal Navy.
www.aircraftcarrieralliance.co.uk
I'd like some investigation into an alternative to Trident which is far to costly for the threat we face.
It tends to get investigated a lot and it always comes out that Trident is the best for us. Hence why we have it.
First off you could use cruise missiles, but I believe cruise missiles with nuclear tipped warheads are currently banned anyway.
Even if they aren't, it causes other issues. Let's suppose "red forces" are kicking off. You send cruise missiles with conventional warheads at the red forces. The red forces know you have cruise missiles with a nuclear warhead, think you may have just gone nuclear and fire back with their nuclear weapons anyway.
It's for this reason, but coming from the other direction, we never had Trident with conventional warheads. It would work great but if the red forces see a Trident launched, even with conventional warheads they might think it was us going nuclear when it wasn't and then they go nuclear anyway.
So one thing about Trident and nuclear missiles is you can't accidentally mistake it for anything else. Once launched you've definitely gone nuclear, and before launch you definitely haven't.
Other issues are that cruise missiles and what carry them can be stopped. They are slower and have a limited range and can only be fired from certain things that need to get in close enough.
You can overcome that by having a huge amount of nuclear warheads on a huge amount of platforms. Then you will guarantee some will get through and would be a deterrent . But that then shoves the cost right up and you were trying to save money. It also means a lot of stuff to keep an eye on and issues with countries not letting you near them in case your ships etc have nukes. For instance we have Typhoons based in Eastern Europe. If we wanted to be a deterrent we could have nuclear warheads there too but then the host countries might not be happy.
A guide to the UK's nuclear weapons system and the debate about whether or not it should be replaced.
www.bbc.co.uk
What are the alternatives?
Trident's ballistic missiles have a long range, of up to 7,500 miles. One alternative that has been suggested is using cruise missiles based on different submarines. But cruise missiles have a far shorter range, of over 1,000 miles, and are slower and vulnerable to being shot down. The government review concluded this would actually cost more than renewing Trident in its current form, since the UK might have to bear all the research and development costs of its own programme.
Others have suggested using a land-based delivery system, to avoid the cost of building new submarines. That has been rejected in the past as too vulnerable to attack and impractical although the 2013 options review said this could potentially be mitigated by having fewer "silo" sites that were more strategically located.
Some say it would be cheaper to launch missiles from a long-range aircraft. However, the shorter range would again be an issue - and the aircraft could be brought down. The review said "much more work" would be needed on such an idea.
The history:
We were leading the development to nuclear weapons in the 1940s. We then gave the information we'd learned to the US which had the money and was able to develop that knowledge further to successfully detonate a bucket of sunshine. It's not like their country was being bombed or attacked at the time.
Having successfully detonated a bomb they then used variants of it and ended WWII.
Then they decided to keep us out of the knowledge and anyone else. Some scientists worried about the monopoly the US had, shared secrets with the USSR and the USSR was also busy coming up with their own. Probably with good reason, some hawks in the US wanted to take the opportunity to nuke the USSR while they could.
We then decided we would develop our own.
Ernie Bevin, foreign secretary in Clement Attlee's post-war government, 1946.
“I don't want any other foreign secretary of this country to be talked to or at by a secretary of state in the United States as I have just had in my discussions with Mr Byrnes. We've got to have this thing [a nuclear bomb] over here whatever it costs. We've got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it."
We then created our own bomb, the US then said, "fine let's share." They were then developing Polaris and offered us the chance to have it as a joint venture. Which meant we could go from dropping a free falling nuclear bomb to a system hidden under the oceans, had a huge range, and comes in on the final phase at Mach 12. Pretty unstoppable. We've shared development since.
We could have a 100% completely independent system but Trident is good enough. The subs, crew, and warhead are all independent and ours. The missiles are in a central pool in the US for servicing. Development and knowledge is a joint venture with the US and it's unlikely we will ever fight each other.
So it's a top level system at a reduced cost versus a different system which may not be allowed, may not be effective, may not be a deterrent, may cost more anyway.