Imagine if North Korea decided to boost its economy by renting out nuclear deterrent, “Dictators: keep the US away with Credible Deterrent(tm) warheads! (first strike capability not included)” – with Iran, Nicaragua, and Taiwan being their first customers.
There would be great horking shit-fits in Washington because, in spite of the fact that if it didn’t include a first strike capability, it would reduce the US ability to dominate every diplomatic situation it walks into. That assumption – that the US should be dominant – is built in at every level of the world’s non-proliferation regime. While a credible deterrent might stop the US from attacking or interfering in a country’s elections, so long as there was no first strike capability, it would only serve to decrease the likelihood of major conflict.
Of course it’s hard to build a nuclear arsenal that is purely defensive; there are too many ways to game that, but stick with this as a thought experiment.
Before we go any further let me ask you: do you believe that renting out a nuclear strike capability is a violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty?
My opinion is that it would be hard to come up with something that was more “proliferation” short of putting spare nukes in a box by the roadside with a sign that reads “free.” Rent (without an option to buy) means that you can drive down the cost of a system by not requiring the customer to pay the full amount – they can just amortize it over time. With this system a dictator wouldn’t need a full-up nuclear program and all that nonsense – all they’d need is a couple hundred million dollars for a Credible Deterrent, and they could immediately join the nuclear club.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that this is what the US has been doing for decades: renting Perfidious Albion a Credible Deterrent consisting of nuclear-armed Polaris(tm) missiles. When I first stumbled across this tidbit I thought that what was being described was a high level of compatibility between US and UK weapons and delivery systems – but, in fact, the US just flat-out provides the UK with MIRV’d sub-launched nuclear ballistic missiles.
And the US has the epic, highly enriched gall to complain about proliferation. Can we finally drop the pretense? The complaints are that other countries with a credible deterrent are a threat to US global nuclear hegemony.
The aptly-named HMS Vengeance
Various discussions we initially encounter in the press, regarding the US/UK Trident program make it sound sort of like that the UK built compatible Polaris-capable submarines, so they could take advantage of US innovations in the field of global carnage. But then when you read closer, it turns out that the ‘launcher modules’ are US-made. The obvious next question is “what about the missiles?” Well, they’re US-made, too. The Guardian is typical of the sort of indirect approach on this issue: they don’t come flat out and mention that the missiles are a turnkey solution, provided by the US [guard] or that the subs periodically have to travel to a military base in Georgia for missile maintenance or upgrades.
It does sound so absurd – the US is constantly complaining about proliferation – and meanwhile it’s running a rent-a-nuke program. [politico] I’d say “this is the kind of hypocrisy we have come to expect in the post-truth world” but it has been going on, quietly, since the 90s. [wik] Even the wikipedia entry is subdued – it describes how the US provided the “Trident system” it doesn’t mention the warheads. There’s a lot of extraneous discussion about the UK’s attempt to build their own delivery systems, and how expensive a failure it turned out to be, before the US stepped up with its rent-a-deterrent.
The Polaris Sales Agreement provided an established framework for negotiations over missiles and re-entry systems. The legal agreement took the form of amending the Polaris Sales Agreement through an exchange of notes between the two governments so that “Polaris” in the original now also covered the purchase of Trident. There were also some amendments to the classified annexes of the Polaris Sales Agreement to delete the exclusion of penetrating aids. Under the Polaris Sales Agreement, the United Kingdom paid a five per cent levy on the cost of equipment supplied in recognition of US research and development costs already incurred. For Trident, a payment of $116 million was substituted. The United Kingdom procured the Trident system from America and fitted them to their own submarines, which had only 16 missile tubes like Polaris rather than the 24 in the American Ohio class.
That’s fairly typical reporting of the arrangement. It sounds like a compatibility deal – very nice. Here’s another description that’s a bit more direct:
In 2006, Parliament’s Select Committee on Defense presented a White Paper to Parliament containing a granular analysis of the Trident program. Although it is now almost a decade old, NATO sources have confirmed that the paper remains the benchmark for non-classified information on Britain’s nuclear weapons, as very little has changed since. And it lays bare the extent of the UK’s nuclear reliance on America.
The report makes for striking reading. The UK does not even own its Trident missiles, but rather leases them from the United States. British subs must regularly visit the US Navy’s base at King’s Bay, Georgia, for maintenance or re-arming. And since Britain has no test site of its own, it tries out its weapons under US supervision at Cape Canaveral, off the Florida coast.
A huge amount of key Trident technology – including the neutron generators, warheads, gas reservoirs, missile body shells, guidance systems, GPS, targeting software, gravitational information and navigation systems – is provided directly by Washington, and much of the technology that Britain produces itself is taken from US designs (the four UK Trident submarines themselves are copies of America’s Ohio-class Trident submersibles).
Let that sink in, and keep it in your back pocket the next time some American starts complaining about proliferation.
Elon Musk could afford to lease a Credible Deterrent(tm)
Everyone, basically, who matters, (including Putin) knows that this has been going on. It’s necessary to downplay it in order to maintain the lie that non-proliferation is not simply a cover for hegemony. The whole “non-proliferation” dance we are treated to is simply a cover for a much uglier reality: the US is trying to maintain its near-monopoly on global catastrophe.
Amongst pretty much anybody who’s even slightly interested in such matters in the UK, it’s long been known that our “independent” nuclear deterrent is absolutely nothing of the sort. AFAIK, the only real questions are whether we can launch them without US approval (doubtful), and whether the US can launch them without our approval (plausible).
Bonus fun points: the fact that we have an “independent” nuclear capability is one of the few things keeping us at the top table of international diplomacy, such as on the UN Security Council… Where we usually go along with whatever the US wants, for some reason.
Ken McLeod in the Star faction series of Novels had one of the post USSR states inheriting some of the the nuclear weapons which they rented out as an insurance policy for the leasing nation.
Dunc@#1:
whether the US can launch them without our approval (plausible)
I think that’s doubtful. There are a lot of things that have to happen surrounding a launch, for it to be successful – the boat has to be at the right depth, level, still, and there are a bunch of other things that need to be set up, I believe – pressurized air needs to be shunted in, etc.
[pm]:
I would not be at all surprised (in fact, I would be disappointed as hell) if the US arsenal’s on-board control systems didn’t take into account GPS location before they detonate. You know, geo-fence the continental US out of the allowed detonation zone. But perhaps the missiles are programmed by southerners, and the warheads will still detonate if they are north of the Mason-Dixon line.
Jake Wallis Simons (Politico):
Given what follows, he either didn’t read it very closely, or he’s deliberately distorting what it says. In what follows the quoted sentence, he presents the (Simons-interpreted) opinions of some witnesses to the inquiry as established fact, ignoring witnesses who disagree. And the bit about Vanguards being copies of Ohios is a bloody joke.
You can read the relevant part of the 2006 government paper here, and the index to the whole thing is here.
Shooting something that weighs 120,000lb from inside your submerged boat – that’s a real trick.
In The Yard [wc] there is a pretty good description of some of the engineering problems for a missile-launching destroyer (Arleigh Burke class) – you know, there are stability issues when you suddenly fire a significant percentage of the ship’s weight off of it – it affects bouyancy and all the things.
Marcus, @ #3:
The idea that the US might be able to launch without our approval implies the idea that they might be able to take control of the boats.
I don’t know if anybody else thinks it’s plausible – that’s just my assessment. Much of the technology is “borrowed” from the US, so I’m assuming that everything is backdoored to hell and back. I could be entirely wrong. I hope I am.
Rob Grigjanis@#4:
he presents the (Simons-interpreted) opinions of some witnesses to the inquiry as established fact, ignoring witnesses who disagree. And the bit about Vanguards being copies of Ohios is a bloody joke.
They’re shorter, and that does change everything. I am not highly knowledgeable about naval engineering (just know what I’ve read) but it makes sense to me why there are $75,000 toilet seats on naval vessels: huge amounts of the design are precisely customized and therefore there are lots of one-offs (The Yard explains the toilet seat – it’s a machined aluminum piece that had to be an exact shape in order to lift up properly because the toilet was in a room about the size of a coffin – a standard seat would not work) Like on a fighter jet, one does not simply change the design and build the thing – everything needs to be adjusted, re-routed, re-balanced, re-thought – it winds up being a whole new design with shared components.
What should we do when we are dealing with material that is not published because it’s secret, and all the sources have an incentive to lie? I’m not inclined to take something a Greenpeace spokesperson says as literal truth, but I’m not inclined to take something a naval officer says as true, either. This is yet another example of how government secrecy is implicitly anti-democratic – The People cannot have a clue what is being talked about, which is a problem when the subject of the discussion is quite important to The People.
The Federation of American Scientists describes the Trident missile arrangement as “a co-mingled pool” [fas]
Fractional nuclear reserve banking.
Nuclear deterrent as a service.
Blockchain-based mutual assured destruction.
NukeCoin.
dashrdash@#8:
Fractional nuclear reserve banking.
If you have enough bitcoin you can buy operational control of a nuke, in 1/10,000 of a warhead increments. I hear they’re going to shift currency from being fiat, to being tied to milli-warheads. Plutonium’s precious metal and it’s harder to come by than gold.
Dunc@#6:
I’m assuming that everything is backdoored to hell and back
Me too. I think it’s plausible that the US could trigger missiles to just cook off inside a sub and rip it apart, Kursk-style, but in order to do all the other stuff, you’d need to be able to treat the sub as, basically, a drone – unless that was an autonomous capability, you’d have a big uplink/downlink of command and control that would be pretty detectable.
The soviets solved this by having a “political officer” on board the boomers. The political officer’s mission might not always align with the rest of the crew’s. I wonder if the US has a person in each UK boat; that would make sense.
Marcus @7: My comment wasn’t so much about the trustworthiness of Greenpeace or MoD spokespersons (as far as one could throw, etc), but about shoddy journalism. In comments, Simons defends his use of “leased” by saying it’s explicitly in the report, and providing a link. If you click on the link, you see a page in the report with “Annex B” at the top. Click “previous” a couple of times, and it’s clear you’re reading a memorandum from Greenpeace which was included in the report for reference. If that’s not shoddy, I don’t know what is.
@ 7 Marcus
why there are $75,000 toilet seats on naval vessels…. The Yard explains the toilet seat – it’s a machined aluminum piece….
If it is anything like the US aircraft industry the cost accounting is also probably buggered. For any number of “legitimate” reasons, middle managers may be obfuscating costs to protect their resources.
Reportedly, Boeing was unable to accurately cost how much a wing cost back in the 1980’s due to middle management doing some strange things to avoid the senior management wiping out a skilled workforce through layoffs.
Pakistan is already renting its nuclear weapons out to the Saudis, allegedly. Possibly since the 1980s.
On the British nuclear subs, of what is publically available about how it would works, the assumption is that by the time the sub found out that there had been a nuclear strike on the UK, anyone in the UK able to give orders to that sub would be very dead. The subs then have a sealed order locker with direct instructions from the prime minister. The captain can arm warheads/fire the missiles without outside input
Rob Grigjanis@#11:
In comments, Simons defends his use of “leased” by saying it’s explicitly in the report, and providing a link. If you click on the link, you see a page in the report with “Annex B” at the top. Click “previous” a couple of times, and it’s clear you’re reading a memorandum from Greenpeace which was included in the report for reference. If that’s not shoddy, I don’t know what is.
That’s problematic.
I’ll say – I try to get to original sources but sometimes it’s hard. The Greenpeace memo uses phrases that match the FAS report. My immediate assumption was that FAS was the original source but now I am not sure. I suppose I should go back and look at report dates.
“leased from a common missile pool” is in a FAS report dated 1998 [fas]
I am imagining a tool that generated “document DNA” – build a tree of common text chunks in documents and anchor at the first place where it’s seen. You’d need Google-style resources plus wayback machine-style resources. It’d be tremendous fun for identifying plagiarism, too.
peasant@#13:
Pakistan is already renting its nuclear weapons out to the Saudis, allegedly. Possibly since the 1980s.
I had not heard of that. There are, as you say, allegations. I.e.: [bbc]
I’m not sure I’d trust anything the Israeli intelligence (former or active) said about Iran and nuclear weapons – or, for that matter, Iraq and nuclear weapons. They appear to have helped the US dupe itself into the WMD search in Iraq.
There are several states that are considered to be ready to go nuclear very quickly if they have to. Including, sadly, Japan. The A.Q. Khan network traded a lot of engineering designs for parts, so the Pakistanis could make their bombs.
Markus @#10:
I dunno. Back in the 80s I stopped watching some TV show when they had an episode in which a sub was taken over by altering the pings returning from their sonar. At the time, that was absurd. Now, everything is so interconnected and insecure that you could probably disable an entire fleet of nuclear subs by sitting on the surface with a pinger emitting the Morse code for
Robert;DROP TABLE launch_codes;--