I also said we’d never use trident in the sub-strategic role, so I still don’t think we need to waste money on the sub-strategic role.
I agree one can just decide to forego using nukes in a tactical manner and just use them for MAD.
Let’s be honest if we were ever considering just a tactical strike, it’d likely not be against a peer with ballistic detection technology and the ability to retaliate in kind, otherwise the situation would escalate to strategic MAD pretty quick (as everyone always knew it would if the Cold War went hot). So if we assume that to be true and we were desperate for a sub-strategic level weapon for someone below a peer level opponent we could still use trident since they are unlikely to be able to detect and respond.
True, but say, for instance, that a missile is lauched at Iran because Iran created a dirty bomb that it detonated in the UK. How could you be sure Russia wouldn’t be alarmed by the lauch of a trident, and retaliate by mistake?
But again, I don’t think we’d ever use nukes for anything but MAD, so we don’t need to waste money we don’t have. In a perfect world we wouldn’t need any nukes, in a slightly less perfect world we’d have more money for defence and could afford to waste money on an air launched missile and launch system, but we don’t, so we can settle for what we have now.
Using nukes only for MAD is fine. I was just making the point that strategic assets can’t be turned into tactical assets that easily for political reasons.
Nic
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