LIVING IN THE REAL WORLD

Adam Price makes a fair point when he observes that while the Cold War is long past and that the world has changed, he notes that the mindset and attitudes of the London based parties are still focused on the dynamics of the the old Cold War. The conflict that the UK is currently involved in is a world away from anything that could have been envisaged during the old Cold War days even by the coldest of cold warriors. Putin's Russia and Obama's America sat down recently, with a host of other states to discuss nuclear weapons and other nuclear issues and end up with a significant reduction in nuclear warheads - what do we get from the three London based Parties - silence!

Now the UK government's 2006 White Paper (on Trident) stated that building replacements would cost between £15bn and £20bn and that would (using 2006 prices) include between £11bn and £14bn for the four boats, and between £2bn and £3bn for the refurbishment of the replacement warheads, not to mention an additional £2bn to £3bn for infrastructure and upgrades over the life of the submarines.Oddly enough these figures make no reference to running costs, maintenance, refits of the submarines, or any additional costs in the missile programme from 2030, when the Trident D5 missile will cease to be in service.

It's worth noting that not everyone agrees with these figures, certainly Greenpeace don't, they have estimated that the full cost of replacing and running the Trident system on a like-for-like basis (as New Labour and the Conservatives have promised to do), will be between £80bn and £100bn in total. Which works out at around £2bn pounds per year over the weapon system's expected lifespan of 40 years, in real terms this is estimated to be some 5% of the annual defence budget, which currently rolls in at approximately £38bn per year.

Replacing Trident with a like for like system, makes little military sense and no economic sense at all. To do this when the old style confrontation that was the Cold War ended some twenty years ago makes little sense. We in the West, face wholly different security threats which are a world away from the old Cold War. It's about time the the UK government caught up with the modern world and stopped living in the past and cut its budget and its cloth to match current realities.