General Election - December 12th, 2019

[1.618034]

All circumstances not just some. The idea that we would be using Trident without the consent of the US or our allies is a non starter. It is also why Trident is an irrelevance. If we are using Trident as part of a wider nuclear conflict then we are fucked. If there is a wider nuclear conflict and we didn’t have Trident we are also fucked.

No matter what we are fucked. So what’s the point of Trident?

To look hard, obvs.

It's similar to having a Rottweiler in a council house.

 

[mat]

Deputy PM in waiting playing the sexism card because ITV won't let her double team Corbyn with her future leader.

 

[meltonblue]

Deputy PM in waiting playing the sexism card because ITV won't let her double team Corbyn with her future leader.

Yes, open discussions about a remain alliance really suggests a repeat of a coalition with the tories doesn’t it...;)

 

[Mike D]

Lib Dems going to court now over tv debates ffs.

Politics is finished in this country and we might as well just have court cases to decide.

The women is clearly deluded she even needed Andrew Neil to give her a reality check the other day in that her party doesn't have a cat in hells chance of winning the elections and she is never going to be PM. She has issues they call it little man issues but she's a woman.

 

[blueinsa]

Corbyn and Johnson has better be careful of she will set her new minder Antionette Sandbach on them.

 

[The Light Was Yellow Sir]

Bizarre how the lefties have to defend the Labour position in the face of it being idiotic.

The 186 countries would be rather less likely to attack us, OBVIOUSLY.

You don’t have to be a lefty to be against nuclear weapons, you arse. I’m far from a pacifist but I do believe that the renewal of trident is the most egregious act of self-harm to our conventional defence. This is a colossal investment in a weapons system that will become increasingly vulnerable and for whose security we will have to throw good money, after bad – in fact tens of billions more than already estimated – to try to keep it safe in the decades to come.

Britain’s independent possession of nuclear weapons has been turned into a political touch-stone for commitment to national defence. But this is an illusion. The truth is that this is a political weapon, effectively aimed against the Labour Party (as you amply demonstrate with every post) whose justification rests on the defence economics, the politics, and the strategic situation of over three decades ago. But it is of less relevant to the defence of the UK today and certainly surplus to the needs of NATO.

We were told, in 2015, that the capital costs for the replacement of the four Vanguard submarines would now be £31bn, with a contingency fund of £10bn. We’ve also been told that the running costs of the Successor programme will be 6% of the defence budget.

At this level this one programme will consume around a quarter to a third of the defence procurement budget for the whole of the next decade. Programme cost are of the order of £180 billion, and the costs are likely to rise much further.

Emerging technologies, including distributed sensors and unmanned aircraft detecting surface wake, will render the seas increasingly transparent in the foreseeable future. Marine biologists are already able to track shoals of fish in real time from several hundred miles away.

Ballistic missile submarines depend utterly upon their stealth by utilising the sheer size of the oceans. If we are today able to detect the gravitational waves first created by the big bang, how can we be so confident that a capable adversary would not be able to track our submarines 20 years from now?
The system vulnerabilities are not restricted to its increasingly detectable signatures. Trident might also be risk from cyber attack. There is every incentive for adversaries to invest in offensive cyber capabilities in order to neutralise them.

If in future we are uncertain that Successor is not being tracked we cannot be certain that it will not be eliminated in the early stages of a crisis.

This issue of vulnerability is key. There is a clear direction of travel in defence against big platforms in favour of distributed capability. Are we really going to bet the shop that the foreseeable risk to these massive steel tubes does not include the period before 2060?

We could be considering alternatives, such as deploying modernised free-fall bombs on the new F35 jets. Such a system would be a significant contribution to NATO’s nuclear posture, tailored to the type of threats NATO could face in the worst conceivable scenarios, at a fraction of the cost.

Rather like the weapon system, this is about politics rather than the substance of security. If we were applying any rational application of available resources to meet threats to the UK we wouldn’t be going down this route. We wish to seem resolute on defence, but the deep irony is that we are doing fearful damage to our conventional defence and acquiring an expensive liability in the process.

 

[Chippy_boy]

You don’t have to be a lefty to be against nuclear weapons, you arse. I’m far from a pacifist but I do believe that the renewal of trident is the most egregious act of self-harm to our conventional defence. This is a colossal investment in a weapons system that will become increasingly vulnerable and for whose security we will have to throw good money, after bad – in fact tens of billions more than already estimated – to try to keep it safe in the decades to come.

Britain’s independent possession of nuclear weapons has been turned into a political touch-stone for commitment to national defence. But this is an illusion. The truth is that this is a political weapon, effectively aimed against the Labour Party (as you amply demonstrate with every post) whose justification rests on the defence economics, the politics, and the strategic situation of over three decades ago. But it is of less relevant to the defence of the UK today and certainly surplus to the needs of NATO.

We were told, in 2015, that the capital costs for the replacement of the four Vanguard submarines would now be £31bn, with a contingency fund of £10bn. We’ve also been told that the running costs of the Successor programme will be 6% of the defence budget.

At this level this one programme will consume around a quarter to a third of the defence procurement budget for the whole of the next decade. Programme cost are of the order of £180 billion, and the costs are likely to rise much further.

Emerging technologies, including distributed sensors and unmanned aircraft detecting surface wake, will render the seas increasingly transparent in the foreseeable future. Marine biologists are already able to track shoals of fish in real time from several hundred miles away.

Ballistic missile submarines depend utterly upon their stealth by utilising the sheer size of the oceans. If we are today able to detect the gravitational waves first created by the big bang, how can we be so confident that a capable adversary would not be able to track our submarines 20 years from now?
The system vulnerabilities are not restricted to its increasingly detectable signatures. Trident might also be risk from cyber attack. There is every incentive for adversaries to invest in offensive cyber capabilities in order to neutralise them.

If in future we are uncertain that Successor is not being tracked we cannot be certain that it will not be eliminated in the early stages of a crisis.

This issue of vulnerability is key. There is a clear direction of travel in defence against big platforms in favour of distributed capability. Are we really going to bet the shop that the foreseeable risk to these massive steel tubes does not include the period before 2060?

We could be considering alternatives, such as deploying modernised free-fall bombs on the new F35 jets. Such a system would be a significant contribution to NATO’s nuclear posture, tailored to the type of threats NATO could face in the worst conceivable scenarios, at a fraction of the cost.

Rather like the weapon system, this is about politics rather than the substance of security. If we were applying any rational application of available resources to meet threats to the UK we wouldn’t be going down this route. We wish to seem resolute on defence, but the deep irony is that we are doing fearful damage to our conventional defence and acquiring an expensive liability in the process.

What an excruciatingly long post. You lost me at "arse".

 

[Coatigan]

Courts to decide on the law? That's a novel approach.

I said a while ago thats where football is headed with VAR.

 

[Ban-jani]

She’s absolutely right to ask for equal airtime.

This isn’t 1997, we’re in a political crisis and polling experts are saying the smaller parties can break records.

 

[Coatigan]

That is how they were classed in the referendum, if you do not agree then take it up with the Government.

I don't. But i'll leave it to my MP to take up with them.