Scots slam nuclear submarine plan as Trident contract announced

Scottish ministers today reaffirmed their opposition to nuclear submarines, as UK Defence Secretary Philip Hammond announced the first big contract of the Trident replacement programme.

The 1bn contract is for an 11-year refit of the Rolls-Royce plant in Derby, enabling it to supply new nuclear cores for the UK submarine fleet. The contract includes an order for two initial cores, the first for a conventionally armed Astute-class boat, and the second for Trident’s successor fleet.

Bruce Crawford, Scotland’s Cabinet secretary for parliamentary business & government strategy, said a majority of Scottish civic opinion was opposed to the Trident replacement: ‘Independence is the only constitutional option which gives Scotland the powers to have Trident removed from Scottish waters.

‘A normal country with the power to decide its own defence and security policy would never be pushed into spending billions of pounds of taxpayer’s money on unwanted nuclear weapons,’ Crawford said. He called the UK government’s decision to press ahead with replacement ‘an obscenity’.

He backed the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s plan to rid Scotland’s waters of the submarine. Scottish CND’s report, Disarming Trident, lays out a two-year timetable for recalling the Trident fleet to its base at Faslane on the Firth of Clyde, and putting the weapons beyond use. It says that all 220 warheads, including those stored at the nearby Coulport facility, could be disabled within eight days, then transported south for dismantling.

Crawford said that the plan had the backing of international experts: ‘The suggested timetable is a welcome indication of how quickly Trident could be removed once Scotland has the powers to decide its own defence and security policy.’

A Scottish Sunday newspaper report suggests that the Ministry of Defence is secretly urging the UK government’s ministerial and legal teams to gear up to meet the threat posed to the future of the Trident programme by the Scottish National Party’s long-held commitment to banish the weapons from an independent Scotland.

Hammond’s more immediate concern, though, is to manage stresses within the UK coalition over replacing Trident, which many in the Liberal Democrats oppose.

What has become known as the ‘main gate’ formal decision on committing to replacement will not be made until 2016, but Hammond has argued that the long lead times involved make it necessary to begin tooling up industrial facilities now.