Well, in defence spending as in so much else, yer pays yer money and takes yer choice.
You can either upgrade our nuclear missile capacity in the hope that it will deter currently-unknown enemies from launching a first strike against us, or have a properly funded conventional army, navy and airforce to do the kind of jobs we already are asking them to do, but you can't do both on the current budget. For that, you'd have to just about double defence spending!
Incidentally, building an atom bomb from scratch is still quite a big proposition - it requires some serious industrial processes, not just a chemistry set and a heap of uranium ore. It can be done, though, and Iran may well be doing it. However, building intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of delivering that atom bomb to (say) Birmingham is an even bigger project, if anything. That kind of capability doesn't appear overnight - it takes decades!
More worrying is the possibility of a small 'dirty' bomb constructed from parts purchased on the black market, transported into Britain in (say) the back of a container lorry and then exploded in a city centre, terrorist-fashion. However, if somebody did that to us I truly don't see how us having a bunch of Trident subs sitting under the Arctic Ocean or wherever is really going to help.
Us having Trident might deter somebody from firing intercontinental ballistic missiles at us because radar tracking would mean we knew where the missiles had come from and might retaliate for the deaths of millions of innocent Britons by incinerating millions of innocent citizens of (fill in country here) in return. However, as I've tried to explain, that isn't a threat we face right now and is one that would appear gradually, over years, allowing us time to re-think our strategies if necessary.
So let's spend the dosh where it might actually do some good instead.
|