Starmer goes nuclear: UK back in the air game

The RAF may soon regain the ability to launch tactical nuclear weapons, but this embrace of smaller devices is fraught with risk and potentially escalatory

The nuclear family

Last week was a busy one if defence and security are among your interests so, well, I had a busy week. One of the announcements which—forgive the pun—landed with the commentariat but perhaps did not fully detonate immediately was Tuesday’s press release from Downing Street. Published the same day as, but not entirely a part of, the new National Security Strategy, it revealed that the Royal Air Force is to buy “at least” 12 Lockheed Martin F-35A Lightning strike fighters, similar to the F-35Bs already operated but “dual capable”, that is, able to carry tactical nuclear weapons as well as conventional munitions. They will be available to NATO as part of the alliance’s Nuclear Sharing Arrangements, joining Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and Turkey in being able to deliver B61-12 tactical nuclear bombs, of which NATO has a stockpile of around 100 (they are US-owned and overseen, and cannot be used without American authorisation).

I wrote about this for The Spectator, but, due to reasons of space, there were issues I glossed over or had to omit. The first point is that this can seem either more or less than it is, depending on your perspective. In some ways, it is a very significant development: the RAF gave up its nuclear mission in 1998, which meant that the UK has since then been the only one of the nine countries with nuclear weapons to rely on a single method of delivery, in this case the Trident II ballistic missiles carried by the Royal Navy’s four Vanguard-class submarines. These are expected to begin being replaced by the Dreadnought-class vessels in the early 2030s, by which time the lead boat, HMS Vanguard, will have been in service for 40 years, having been built with a original intended service life of 25 years.

The evolution of the UK’s nuclear deterrent

It is worth pausing for a moment here. I say that the UK has “relied” on one delivery system for its nuclear weapons but that should not be taken as meaning this was an accidental occurrence or an instance of force majeure. This was all planned. In April 1995, the then-Minister for the Armed Forces, Nicholas Soames, disclosed in answer to a Written Parliamentary Question that Trident, then still relatively new, could be used for “the sub-strategic as well as the strategic nuclear role”. As a result, the WE.177 freefall tactical nuclear bomb then carried by the RAF’s SEPECAT Jaguar and Panavia Tornado aircraft would be retired from service by the end of 1998 on the grounds that it no longer served a capability which could not be provided any other way. By April 1998, it was reported that 86 per cent of the stockpile of WE.177s had been dismantled, and the Strategic Defence Review published in July 1998 confirmed that all of the weapons had been withdrawn from service, having first entered the RAF’s inventory in 1966.

It is true that the decision to retire the UK’s airborne nuclear capability was taken in the golden years after the end of the Cold War. But this was solely a matter of tactical nuclear weapons; the RAF had ceased to be involved in the potential delivery of strategic nuclear weapons in July 1969, when that role had been taken over in its entirety by the Royal Navy. Previously Britain’s defence policy had included the famous V bombers—the Vickers Valiant, the iconic delta-wing Avro Vulcan and the Handley-Page Victor—which were designed to deliver nuclear bombs at long distances and from high altitudes, though this was recast first to be carried out from an even greater height and then as low-level strike as the RAF tried to adapt to the growing threat from Soviet fighter aircraft and surface-to-air missiles.

The operation of the UK’s deterrent force of strategic-level nuclear weapons was taken over by the Royal Navy’s four Resolution-class nuclear-powered submarines armed with US-made Polaris missiles. These boats carried out continuous at sea deterrence (CASD), by which one vessel capable of firing nuclear missiles was on patrol at all times, and were replaced in this task by the Vanguard-class submarines still in service. Operation Relentless, as it is dubbed, has maintained that capability every minute of every hour of every day for (so far) 56 years. In military and practical terms, it is a potent threat and method of dissuasion (since 1961, France’s military nuclear units have been grouped together as la Force de dissuasion nucléaire).

The RAF and the Royal Navy retained tactical nuclear weapons in the form of the WE.177 for decades, but by the early 1990s, while certainly there was an attractive cost reduction in slimming to a single delivery system, the military view was that the then-new Trident system was perfectly capable of modification to deliver smaller, low-yield warheads which could be used tactically as well as the traditional strategic role of effectively wiping out—or rather, being known to be able to wipe out—large population centres.

The great strength of a submarine-based system is that it is flexible, since it can be deployed anywhere in the world’s oceans, and by the same token is virtually undetectable. The routes of the boats carrying out CASD missions are closely guarded, to the extent that the crew do not know where they have been when they return, and the Vanguards submarines remain underwater for the whole duration of the patrol: a three-month voyage used to be considered demanding, but, for various reasons, the average length of deployments has been stretching relentlessly to four or even five months. In March this year, one of the submarines returned to HMNB Clyde at Faslane, the home base for all the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarines, having been away for 204 days—nearly seven months.

I should be honest about my (somewhat complicated) views on Trident and the concept of the United Kingdom having an independent nuclear deterrent. The first article I ever wrote for CapX, , in August 2021 bore the headline “Why I no longer believe in the nuclear deterrent”. I pointed out that it was not a matter of morality or ethics, and that if the UK faced a situation “in which massive nuclear retaliation was the only viable response”, I did not regard it as unacceptable to use what are, I freelyn admit, weapons of mass destruction. War is a bloody business, and if we were ever to find ourselves that deep into a full-throated nuclear conflict, the loss of life, whatever the outcome, would be so great as to be almost unimaginable. (Seriously, read Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario, published last year. Just read it. Brilliant, gripping, meticulous and terrifying.)

I had, and have, two major reservations about the nuclear deterrent. The first, although secondary, is cost: maintaining continuous at sea deterrence with four state-of-the-art nuclear-powered submarines is massively expensive. Buying Trident to replace Polaris in the 1980s and constructing the Vanguard-class submarines to succeed the Resolutions cost £12.52 billion, which is the equivalent now to about £21 billion, and the total figure for operating and maintaining the Vanguards is estimated at something like £3 billion a year, which until very recently represented six per cent of the Ministry of Defence’s overall budget.

These are largely fixed and irreducible costs (although the procurement process for the Dreadnought-class submarines has undoubtedly been more expensive that orginally estimates because of delay and indecision by politicians). Building and maintaining a nuclear submarine costs pretty much what it costs and cannot be done on the cheap, and if CASD is an essential part of your requirement, then you need four submarines and no fewer to guarantee, as best you can, that one will always be on patrol. An option of replacing the four Vanguards with three successor boats in the later stages of the last Labour government was considered but set aside by the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition which followed it because it could not give the necessary level of reassurance that one boat would would always be available.

Does the deterrent deter?

For that reason, I thought and think that the deterrent, which was devised for the very specific and, in relative terms, predictable set of strategic circumstances of the Cold War, consumes a significant amount of the armed forces’ money, and inevitably skews our military posture. But that feeds in to the more fundamental reason I admitted to myself that I was a sceptic on the deterrent: I don’t think it works.

Let me refine that slightly. Of course we can never know the importance and extent of every reason for this, but it is fair to point out that, despite the long Cold War sometimes getting very hot indeed, and occasionally erupting into full-scale conventional conflict, the last nuclear weapon to be used in a real combat scenario was Fat Man, the Mark III atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. I say “last” but should really say “latter”, as it followed by three days the use of Little Boy, the L-11 bomb, on Hiroshima on 6 August. Those were the first two nuclear weapons used, and no-one has ever crossed that threshold again.

You can make a respectable and in some ways persuasive argument that the eventual rough equilibrium in nuclear capability between the West and the East during Cold War was a factor militating against their use: because each side had acquired such mind-numbing destructive power, they has acquired a form of weaponry too devastating ever to be used in reality. Call it balance of power, mutually assured destruction or whatever you choose, but that is certainly a strong thesis in defence of nuclear weapons.

On the other hand, we now know, as archival material has become available in the West as well as the East, how many “nearest run things you ever saw”, to use Wellington’s phrase, there really were: the solar flare in May 1967 which interfered with several radar sites operated by North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) and was initially interpreted as Soviet efforts to jam early-warning radar, leading to US commanders ordering nuclear-armed strike aircraft to be prepared to take off; a series of computer failures at NORAD, Strategic Air Command and the Pentagon in November 1979, as a result of which National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was informed that 250 Soviet ballistic missiles had been launched and President Jimmy Carter had between three and seven minutes to decide how to retaliate; Exercise Able Archer 83, a regular NATO training process simulating a worsening of East/West relations in the build-up to which sunlight hitting high-altitude clouds was mistaken by Soviet satellite warning systems as the launch of a US intercontinental ballistic missile and only overriden by the split-second decision of a radar officer.

If these were mistakes or misunderstandings to which a nuclear response was a feasible reaction, we also know that there were plans made to initiate a nuclear conflict as a method of gaining military and political advantage rather than a last, desperate roll of the dice in reaction to existing circumstances. In November 1950, in the first months of the Korean War (I wrote about the 75th anniversary of the conflict beginning in The Hill this week), President Harry Truman authorised the transfer of nine capsules, the component containing the fissile core, for Mark 4 nuclear bombs to a detachment of the US Air Force’s 9th Bombardment Wing, Heavy, to Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, where it had nine Boeing B-29 Superfortresses carrying unarmed nuclear bombs and designated as an atomic task force. The People’s Republic of China had entered the war in support of North Korea a few weeks earlier, and Truman, at the request of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, signed an order which was never transmitted to authorise the use of the bombs against Chinese bases in Manchuria and North Korean facilities if their armies advanced into South Korea or attacked targets in South Korea. Although a positive decision was never reached, using nuclear weapons was discussed on several other occasions during the Korean War.

This was not an experience confined to the West. At the beginning of the Sino-Soviet border dispute from March to September 1969, there was an indecisive clash at Zhenbao Island (or Damansky Island) on the River Ussuri (or Wusuli) which is now believed to have been caused by deliberate Chinese provocation. Although it was not a clear Chinese victory, the Kremlin was shocked by the sudden reverse of its forces, and Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader as General Secretary of the Communist Party, ordered plans to be made for a massive nuclear strike on China. It was only when Washington was informally made aware of this that the newly elected President, Richard Nixon, and his National Security Advisor, Dr Henry Kissinger, made clear through the Foreign Service that a Soviet strike against China would be met with massive nuclear response by the United States against Soviet cities.

As recently as 2017-18, President Trump in is first term of office squared up with dangerously provocative vigour against the North Korean President and Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Un. As North Korea hit out at increasingly severe economic sanctions, Trump fell back on the strange apocalyptic yet teenaged braggadocio which is his rhetorical comfort zone:

North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening, beyond a normal statement. They will be met with fire, fury and frankly power, the likes of which the world has never seen before.

Of course, restraint and moderation are hardly common virtues in Pyongyang either. Visting the United Nations in New York, North Korea’s foreign minister, Ri Yong Ho, said:

Last weekend, Trump claimed that our leadership wouldn’t be around much longer, and hence, at last, he declared war on our country. Given the fact that this comes from someone that is currently holding the seat of the United States presidency, this is clearly a declaration of war. Since the United States declared war on our country, we will have every right to make counter measures, including the right to shoot down United States strategic bombers even when they are not yet inside the airspace border of our country. The question of who won’t be around much longer will be answered then.

This was not carefully calibrated, ritualistic diplomatic intercourse. Rather it was two impulsive and vain leaders, both with few constraints on their language or action, trading insults while having access to weapons of mass destruction. At the beginning of 2018, Trump, unable not to have the last word, took to social media:

North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!

(In fact the President of the United States does not have a nuclear “button”. He is accompanied when travelling by a military aide who carried the Presidential Emergency Shield, a briefcase known popularly as “the nuclear football”. This contains the Black Book, which is a pre-prepared list of retaliatory options if the United States is subject to attack; a list of classified sites and their locations; a briefing paper on the use of the Emergency Broadcast System, which would allow the President to communicate with the American people in a crisis; and a card bearing authentication codes to allow nuclear weapons to be launched. Although he would consult closely with the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the President, unless he is incapacitated or dead, is the only person who can authorise the use of nuclear weapons.)

I dwell on this because it demonstrates (at least) two relevant points. The first is that, however effect the nuclear deterrent has been, the possession of such large arsenals of colossally destructive weapons increases the chances of some kind of accident, mishap or misunderstanding, and such a misfortune, where nuclear weapons are involved, could have cataclysmic, millions-of-deaths-scale consequences. That is an unavoidable by-product of a nuclear arms race.

The second point is that we know with absolute certainty that the existence of nuclear weapons did not stop political and military leaders considering, in a rational way by their own lights, deliberately crossing the nuclear threshold in search of politico-military advantage. In other words, deterrence was not provided by a feeling that these weapons were so terrible that their use in anything but the last resort was unthinkable. It was both thinkable and thought.

The UK’s independent nuclear deterrent

I am not—what a retro 1980s thrill to say the word—a unilateralist: I do not think we should just decommission the Vanguard submarines and cancel the Dreadnought-class and dismantle the Trident missiles. The reason for my profound scepticism about the ongoing use of the deterrent is that, however hard I think, however wildly I let my imagination roam, I cannot conceive of a set of circumstances in which we would ever use our nuclear missiles, nor can I imagine a target against which we would direct them.

It is true that I wrote my confessio in CapX in 2021, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and at that point the most serious nuclear threat, I believed, was probably from a rogue non-state actor like al-Qa’eda. That kind of asymmetric warfare would, of course, make a nonsense of the foundations of deterrence. As I wondered:

Let’s suppose Islamic fundamentalist terrorists built or obtained a small nuclear device, and detonated it in London. The devastation would be awesome. Hundreds of thousands would likely die. And upon whom would we rain biblical terror and fire from the heavens in retaliation? Afghanistan? Iran?

We have seen how military retaliation against a nation state for the actions of a group which may be sheltering there plays out: we spent 20 years in Afghanistan, left in chaos and humiliation with the Taliban, whom we had ousted at the very beginning of the conflict, back in power and a modest roll call of achievements at best.

Even supposing we suffered a nuclear attack from a more traditional adversary, Russia or Iran or North Korea, and suffered devastating loss of life and the crippling of the very sinews of our state. We would still have the capacity to retaliate, a Vanguard-class submarine somewhere below the surface of the ocean, armed with eight Trident II D5 intercontinental ballistic missiles which can strike a target more than 7,500 miles away; each missile carrying up to eight Mk 4/A Holbrook warheads, each of those with a maximum yield of around 100 kilotons. Remember that Fat Man, the bomb which destroyed Nagasaki, was 21 kilotons. One Vanguard submarine could have the destructive power of more than 300 Nagasakis.

Would a British Prime Minister visit that kind of destructive power on the three million inhabitants of Pyongyang? Would it be conceivable deliberately to wipe from the face of the earth Tehran and its population of nine million? It is a commonplace of modern conflict that we are the enemy of the régime, not of the people. But in a nuclear strike, it is the régime which will suffer least and the people most. I simply cannot imagine that instruction being given by a rational political leader. Because what good would it do?

The terrible truth is that deterrence is a complex and delicate mind game. If you are having to consider the issue of retaliation, then by definition deterrence has already failed; and killing five or ten million Iranians would not miraculously raise from the dead the millions of British citizens who had just lost their lives and would continue to do so. As I said in CapX:

We’re engaged in a game of bluff with other people who might use them but would not be deterred by retaliation. If you’re crazy enough to start a nuclear war, you’re crazy enough to risk losing it.

So I am not at all convinced that the deterrent works, but we have it. We do not choose from where we start. My scepticism about the nuclear deterrent is the equivalent of agnosticism rather than atheism, and just as I cannot say for sure that it does not work as others argue it does, to an even greater degree I cannot predict—no-one can predict—what would happen if we gave it up.

Only one country fully in control of a sovereign nuclear weapons capability has ever simply given it up. South Africa had acquired a stockpile of just six nuclear warheads during the 1980s, its doctrine designed as a tool of political influence rather than a weapons system intended to be used in anger: if the country was attacked, it planned to detonate a test device to prove its capability existed and then threaten to use others unless the United States came to its assistance. President F.W. de Klerk revealed in 1993 that once he became State President in 1989, he had the whole programme dismantled, including the six existing warheads and another under construction. In 1991, South Africa signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and in 1994 the International Atomic Energy Authority conducted an inspection and confirmed that South Africa’s weapons had been scrapped.

The idea of the UK giving up its nuclear weapons would therefore be effectively without precedent, and would be the single biggest disruption to our international stance and policies since the Second World War. I don’t for a moment imagine it’s going to happen and it wouldn’t be something I would choose to pursue.

Going nuclear tactically

Just because I accept the status quo of the Trident and its eventual replacement as a strategic nuclear deterrent doesn’t mean I think we should collect all the nuclear capability we can. In fact, as I said at the beginning, even the logical conclusion of buying the new F-35As does not give us a new capability let alone new munitions. The effect would be to strengthen NATO’s existing ability to deliver United States-manufactured and owned tactical nuclear bombs.

There may be defensible political and diplomatic reasons for taking this step. The Strategic Defence Review echoed the Prime Minister’s often-repeated ambition to “lead in NATO”, and he may well have calculated that putting Britain’s money where its mouth is, by taking some responsibility for tactical nuclear strike, represents a necessary part of that. Sir Bernard Gray, the swashbuckling former Chief of Defence Materiel, put this bluntly in The Observer at the weekend when he argued that the government was effectively currying favour with President Trump.

If money were no object, we could view the £2bn price tag for doing this as a Thank You to Uncle Sam. The UK is, in effect, picking up part of the cost of a mission that would otherwise fall to the US. In a world that wants to please President Trump, it’s easy to see how it plays well to buy aircraft primarily built in Texas… This choice feels like that of an image conscious homeowner, who keeps a flash car on the drive to keep up with the neighbours and draw attention away from the peeling paint and damp on the bathroom walls.

Not everyone would be so trenchant, perhaps. But it identifies the kind of political arena in which this procurement decision can partly be seen.

There is a separate issue which concerns me, and which seems, unless I have been looking in the wrong places, to have been aired far less than it should. Without much discussion or debate, NATO member states seem to have accepted, or reaffirmed, the value of tactical nuclear weapons as part of a spectrum of military capability: in other words, if it came to the worst and NATO was fighting an all-out land war in Europe, tactical nuclear weapons would be among the instruments from which our political and military leaders could choose. That is something I find deeply alarming.

We seem to have been shepherded to this place by that ultimate wolf in wolf’s clothing, Vladimir Putin. From the very beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin has used the spectre of nuclear weapons to attempt to bully, coerce and dissuade countries in a number of ways, warning darkly that this or that action would lead to him being “forced” to escalate the conflict (on which his bluff has been called many times). Last September, he warned the West that he was modifying Russia’s nuclear doctrine, that he would consider a nuclear response if Russia was struck my conventional missiles, and that “aggression against Russia by any non-nuclear state, but with the participation or support of a nuclear state, be considered as their joint attack on the Russian Federation”.

All of these things happened. In November 2024, the United States lifted restrictions on Ukraine’s use of MGM-140 ATACMS tactical ballistic missiles and the United Kingdom did likewise for the Storm Shadow cruise missiles we supply. Both systems were used by Ukrainian forces to strike deep into Russian territory, and no nuclear response was forthcoming. Yet both clearly also represented the “support of a nuclear state”.

Putin reiterated his nuclear threats last month, but he has diminished his credibility on that front (though of course we should all be grateful that he has not followed through). Yet I struggle to see how the lesson to be drawn from these episodes is that NATO must strengthen its tactical nuclear capability. If the argument is that they are needed for deterrence, then it seems that Putin has been deterred by the alliance’s existing capabilities, as he had retreated from red line after red line. Deterrence should generally be maintained at a minimum level—it either works or it doesn’t—so on that basis there is no need for NATO to build up its forces in this regard.

Another argument is that NATO has a gap in its range of responses. Writing in The Critic in March, Dr David Blagden and Professor Patrick Porter argued that “Europe’s defence will need tactical nuclear weapons in order to deter Russia from attacking NATO territory”. They set out what struck me as a rather nostalgic, pre-1990 proposition for tactical nuclear weapons.

Using them can not only hold the adversary’s conventional forces at risk, thus offsetting conventional inferiority. They can also create an escalatory ladder that threatens adversaries with a process that could spiral out of control, while still allowing time for reassessment and talks, as well as nullifying any relative advantage an adversary may see in using its own tactical nukes against an adversary that can’t respond in kind. Of course, “tactical” is a misnomer—there is no use of nuclear weapons that isn’t a profound strategic choice—but as a shorthand, the term conveys a difference in anticipated employment.

Blagden and Porter are quite open about the antecedents of their suggested plan.

During the Cold War, NATO’s reliance on tactical nuclear weapons to deter a feared invasion by massed Soviet ground forces followed from just such a similar assessment that NATO’s own conventional forces were too weak to reliably defeat such an assault and that correcting such weakness would be prohibitively costly.

We should all acknowledge that anything said in this context is speculative. As I frequently remind people, nuclear weapons have not been used in a conflict since 9 August 1945, and they have been used only twice in history. So we don’t know, we can’t know, how the use of nuclear weapons of any size or power would unfold nor how people would react because there is no real-world data from which to extrapolate.

I have two principle reservations. The first is that I’m not sure against what targets these weapons would realistically be used. Blagden and Porter are not specific, but it has traditionally been supposed that tactical nuclear weapons would be used to eliminate large concentrations of military personnel, infrastructure like bridges and tunnels or groups of warships in close formation. They are of a much lower yield than weapons like Trident, ranging from fractions of kiloton to as much as 50 kilotons; but bear in mind that Fat Man, the nuclear bomb which devastated Nagasaki, only had a yield of 21 kilotons and killed 35,000 to 40,000 people outright, with perhaps as many fatalities again resulting from the long-term effects of the nuclear detonation. These are not weapons to be used casually.

This is where I am sceptical. Tactical nuclear weapons are for use on the battlefield, either to punch huge holes in an enemy’s lines or to stop an overwhelming conventional force from advancing, but they would not be dropped in a vacuum. If we are contemplating using them against an advancing Russian army, for example, we would be dropping them on, say, Poland, Ukraine or Hungary. The civilian population would be subject to the massive blast, the scorching heat, the destruction of buildings the contamination of a wide area and the pollution of rivers and lakes by radiation. These would be long-term effects and would cause casualties on a scale it is difficult to imagine, and the political and military leaders who authorised this kind of warfare would do so in the certain knowledge of these civilian casualties. I am simply not convinced a Western leader would take that decision.

The other issue is the idea that tactical nuclear weapons would give NATO more flexibility, this “escalatory ladder”, in the words of Blagden and Porter, that “threatens adversaries” while “still allowing time for reassessment and talks”. I don’t see this as the inevitable logical outcome of threatening or using tactical nuclear weapons. It seems to depend on the idea that the significant threshold keeping events manageable is between tactical and strategic nuclear weapons.

It seems much likelier to me that the meaningful threshold is between conventional and nuclear weapons. And that threshold is more likely to be breached if we introduce more such weapons, however low-yield, actively contemplate their use and factor them into our plans almost as a matter of course. By placing tactical nuclear weapons more prominently in our doctrine, we are, intentionally or not, normalise their use, almost encouraging it. After all, the message is: these are much less destructive than strategic nuclear weapons. Use these and we will obviate the need for those more powerful weapons.

None of us can now for certain, as I said. We are all working in the arena of supposition and guesswork. But reinforcing NATO’s tactical nuclear capability is expensive, complex, controversial, potentially divisive and, I think potentially escalatory. Vladimir Putin’s behaviour has shown over the past three years than he has threatened then held back from the use of nuclear weapons, and it makes no sense to me almost to force him to double down. The general trend of Western policy over the last 50 years has been towards arms limitation and the reduction of stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. The government—and it is by no means alone here—seems to feel it necessary to reverse that trend, and that should worry us all.