from Sunday Herald, 18 July 2010
A crunch spending decision on the £20 billion plan to replace the Trident nuclear weapons system has been postponed for a third time, creating new doubts about government defence funding.
UK ministers originally said that a major decision on the investment in new nuclear submarines to carry Trident missiles would be made last September. But then it was delayed to December, and then again to this month.
Now, however, the Secretary of State for Defence, Liam Fox MP, has said that the decision will only be made “towards the end of 2010”. The delay comes as government departments are engaged in a fierce wrangle over how to pay for a new generation of nuclear warheads.
Mr Fox is battling with the Treasury to try and prevent the cost of Trident being funded from the core budget of the Ministry of Defence (MoD). But Treasury ministers are insisting that spending on Trident cannot be separated out from spending on conventional weapons.
There have also been disagreements in the past over the choice of nuclear reactor to power the new submarines. The manufacturer, Rolls Royce, proposed a wholly new design, but some officials argued it would be better to stick with a reactor similar to the existing one.
The problems have been seized on by critics who have been campaigning to scrap Trident as a waste of money. “Instead of postponing decisions on Trident, the government should bite the bullet and cancel it completely,” said the SNP Westminster leader and defence spokesman, Angus Robertson MP.
“In the current economic climate it is just perverse to blow billions on this useless weapons system while considering cuts to conventional forces and frontline services.”
The Conservative Liberal coalition government has refused to include Trident in its strategic review of defence spending. It insists that it is committed to the nuclear weapons replacement programme, though it is conducting a review of its “value for money” to ensure that it is as cost effective as possible.
Before the general election in May the Liberal Democrats opposed a “like for like” replacement of Trident. But now it looks like they may have been forced to swallow their opposition.
According to Mr Robertson, Mr Fox and the Chancellor, George Osborne, were “at loggerheads” over who should pay for Trident. This made their decision to exclude it from the strategic defence review “completely unsustainable”, he argued.
The previous Westminster government, backed by a majority of the UK parliament, took the decision in principle to replace Trident submarines three years ago. But before this translates into reality, two other major investment decisions have to be made, known in MoD jargon as “initial gate” and “main gate”.
It is the initial gate decision which has now been delayed until the end of the year. It involves approving hundreds of millions of pounds of pubic money on the designs for the submarines.
In a parliamentary answer last week, Mr Fox said that the spending would be considered by the MoD’s Investment Approvals Board in the autumn. “We are currently planning for initial gate decision towards the end of 2010”, he added.
John Ainslie, the coordinator of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, claimed that the repeated delays to the initial gate decision suggested that some Whitehall insiders doubted whether new nuclear weapons were good value for money.
“Trident is a nuclear weapon system that was designed during the Cold War to flatten the city of Moscow,” he said. “Yet we are now facing cuts in schools and hospitals to pay for a new generation of weapons of mass destruction.”
Mr Ainslie argued that Mr Fox had “no excuse” for keeping Trident out of the strategic defence review. “Perhaps he wants to exclude it because he knows that so many people think this is the first thing that should be cut.”
The MoD stressed its commitment to replacing Trident. “The government is conducting a value for money review of the future deterrent,” a ministry spokeswoman told the Sunday Herald.
“The initial gate decision process will begin once the review has completed as it will obviously need to take account of the review’s findings.”
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