Nuclear submarines and their lethal cargo

The Letter of Last Resort was an intense debate between a top civil servant and an incoming Prime Minister over the letter each new PM has to write to the commander of a submarine who had ultimate responsibility for sending off weaponry which would obliterate hundreds of thousands of “enemies” civilians or not.

The verbal jousting covered all the moral and strategic arguments which are the stuff of the Trident renewal debate. But the most arresting part was the acceptance that if the commander were to open such a letter and read its contents, it would mean that the UK government, and much the UK itself, had probably been obliterated by a nuclear attack.

In other words we wouldn’t be using nuclear missiles to save our skins, but as a calculated act of posthumous revenge. And that, say proponents of spending tens of billions on Trident renewal is what deterrence is all about. It keeps the peace, they contend.

You have to say it doesn’t feel that way. Our threat just now doesn’t come from other nuclear powers but from myriad terrorist groups whose very commitment to suicide bombings makes them immune to threats of incineration.

Which is why I hope Defence Secretary Michael Fallon had his fingers crossed behind his back as he attended the media event at Faslane last week and announced that fears about nuclear convoys travelling on public roads was nothing more than scaremongering.

I often use the MoD road between the A82 and the Rosneath Peninsula and have been behind a nuclear convoy which got stuck because of some kind of mechanical failure.

When I finally got out the car to inquire when the tailback might get moving again, I was told there was nobody there who could fix the fault, and they had sent for the cavalry.

Anyone with malign intent monitoring that journey would have had more than ample time to mount an attack, and, judging by the letters pages of Scottish newspapers my experience was in no way unique.

Mr Fallon, although born in Perth and educated at St Andrews, sits for the Kent constituency of Sevenoaks, which, when I last looked, had neither nuclear bases nor was on the route of nuclear convoys, which may make him rather more sanguine than some of us.

But one other aspect of that deliberately high-profile visit disturbed me. The commander of the Vanguard class sub involved was happy to show the innocuous looking safe with the nuclear button inside. And the officer whose finger would be on the red button even offered a replica for the snappers to get up close and personal.

Was he disturbed about the carnage which would ensue? He tried not to dwell on that. Orders were orders and he would mainly be following those of his “political lords and masters”.

I seem to recall that particular defence failing to impress in the aftermath of World War II.

Last year I was having a conversation with a retired officer who held the same role, and who is now, as it happens, a vocal opponent of Trident renewal. Yet he too told me he would have pressed that button if ordered.

Is this a tribute to the necessary discipline of our armed forces, or evidence that our training methods screen out too much imagination and personal morality?