It’s time for the peace and climate movements to get Britain’s nuclear proliferation back in the crosshairs, writes Samuel Rafanell-Williams.
Despite the disarmament policies of independence-supporting parties in Scotland, the immense risks posed by nuclear weapons are not at the forefront of the public mind. Scottish CND members running outreach for the “Reclaim Our Clyde” campaign report that many of the Scottish public are not even aware that the UK’s nuclear weapons lurk permanently in the Clyde estuary. Still fewer know about the appalling disrepair of the Vanguard nuclear submarines, which are causing increasingly more risk incidents at Faslane as a result of record-long assignments in the North Sea.
The twenty-first century has seen various mass social movements: anti-war, anti-austerity, climate, racial justice and the strengthening Palestine solidarity movement. But whilst the movement against nuclear weapons could mobilise hundreds of thousands across class boundaries at its peak in the 1980s, the end of the cold war lifted the fear of nuclear apocalypse from mass consciousness, and the bombs were relegated to a peripheral issue. This is despite nuclear weapons being a spectre haunting every one of the issues generating the mass social movements listed above.
Consider how the UK’s US-dependent nuclear weapons programme has implicated us in the disastrous US military expeditions of this century, from Iraq to Libya, Syria to Yemen and Gaza. An Atlanticist ideology predominates amongst the British political elite, and the Trident nuclear weapons programme is entirely dependent on US assent. These facts have surely played a role in implicating the UK in these misadventures. The Trident II D5 missiles which deliver the UK’s nuclear bombs are owned and maintained by the US and leased to the Royal Navy under the Mutual Defence Agreement. UK Prime Ministers, always conscious that the White House could revoke this rental at any moment, have thus been eager to show their willingness to support US military ventures, no matter how disastrous. This dynamic of nuclear dependence likely compromises UK foreign policy to this day, as we can see from the RAF’s support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza from the Cyprus airbase Akrotiri. Opposition to the UK’s involvement in unjust wars around the world cannot sensibly evade the question of nuclear weapons. They are at the heart of the matter.
Regarding the climate issue, the UK government’s recent promotion of nuclear power as the silver bullet for reaching net zero is incomprehensible unless one understands the deep relationship between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. That is, the exorbitant and decades-long expenditure required to build nuclear power plants has to be understood as part of a wider strategy to support the UK’s nuclear weapons programme. The knowledge, technology and scientific specialism required to build nuclear plants and nuclear weapons are the same; the same scientists trained to work on nuclear power plants can be recruited to build nuclear propulsion reactors for submarines. Certain material by-products of nuclear fission can be used in the manufacture of bombs, for instance as part of the “Sovereign Warhead Programme” recently announced in the government’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR). In this sense, the ‘peaceful’ or ‘civilian’ variety of nuclear power, unfortunately promoted in UN treaties on nuclear weapons, is a theoretical notion. The climate movement should have nuclear weapons in its crosshairs. As long as they exist, nuclear states will invest in nuclear power instead of green energy as the climate collapses, with still no solutions to the problems of permanently hazardous nuclear waste or the highly racialised harms of uranium mining on predominantly indigenous lands.
The UK’s nuclear weapons have endured a generation of austerity economics, despite being the perfect opportunity for debt-panicked UK governments to make immense long-term “savings” by rapidly dismantling them. The Trident renewal programme has been estimated to cost around £200bn over its lifetime. Whilst social spending, especially at the municipal level, continues to be cut to the bone, successive governments have found ever more money for new nuclear submarines and warheads. The projected cost of building the new Dreadnought vessels to replace the decrepit Vanguard class climbs year after year as the project encounters technical and logistical obstacles. Along with the further £15bn recently committed to the Sovereign Warhead Fund promoted in the SDR, it is incredible to witness the fount of resources that the government can mobilise to build unusable weapons of omnicide. Meanwhile, stringent “fiscal rules” apply to social investment and the recent government Spending Review included no measures to help citizens with the cost of living. Resisting austerity as such necessarily means opposing nuclear militarism. That is the logic behind Stop the War’s ongoing “Welfare Not Warfare” campaign, cosponsored by Scottish CND, which calls for the immediate diversion of resources away from nuclear weapons and towards socially-productive investments like healthcare, education, transport and energy infrastructure.
The UK’s possession of nuclear weapons is a poison that runs through society and politics: from Westminster’s foreign policy and its approach towards the climate crisis to the prevailing policy of austerity for citizens and Keynesianism for the military industries. The left should raise the salience of these multiple harms exacerbated by the UK’s possession of nuclear weapons. But we must also challenge that foundational, dominant and utterly misconstrued narrative that is deployed to justify all these harms: that nuclear weapons keep us safe. We must deny the doctrine of “deterrence”.
Even someone who understands the obscene expenditure of nuclear weapons, and the massive opportunity costs for society this entails, might nevertheless accept this cost as necessary if they believe the bombs keep us safe. It is important to frame a robust response to this notion of “deterrence” because it is the single most utilised line of propaganda about nuclear weapons.
The numerous ways to respond to the illogical “deterrence” theory include discussing the long history of nuclear close calls, the calamitous late 20th century wars that the nuclear ‘security’ regime failed to prevent, and the fact that nuclear states have been almost perpetually engaged in conflict since 1945. The most effective argument against “deterrence” logic challenges it on its own terms by pointing out that possession of nuclear weapons actually escalates geopolitical tensions, rather than mitigating them. The history of the Cold War compelled many political elites to accept this fact, and in the 1980s and 90s we witnessed a successful worldwide programme of nuclear disarmament. There are now approximately 13,000 warheads worldwide, from a peak of over 60,000 in the 1980s. Unfortunately, it now falls to civil society to educate our current political class about the insanity of nuclear weapons, before they lead us to catastrophe.
Current world leaders, including the UK Prime Minister, have drunk thirstily from the nuclear Kool-Aid and are now flaunting decades-long nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation norms. In June 2025 the UK government committed £15bn to building more nuclear warheads, possibly aiming to expand nuclear capabilities to include air-to-ground bombs such as those dropped by US fighter jets. Both of these are in flagrant disregard of our obligation to pursue disarmament in good faith under the UN Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which the UK is a depository state.
The government also announced unspecified more billions for building twelve nuclear-propelled submarines as well as continuing the disastrous Dreadnought submarine programme. This is despite their own infrastructure agency, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA), deeming the manufacture of the nuclear reactors intended to propel all these vessels “unachievable”. No high-profile journalist has challenged the government on this point. The serious possibility that the new generation of nuclear submarines may not be deliverable should raise doubts about the current policy of “Continuous At Sea Deterrence” (CASD). The Vanguard submarines are already well past their lifespan and will simply not endure another 10 years (minimum) of 6+ months assignments in the North Sea whilst their increasingly decrepit substitutes sit in the maintenance docks. Meanwhile, submariners are enduring awful conditions during these assignments. There are reports that a Vanguard crew ran out of food during the latest record-long tour in March this year. Conditions at the Faslane naval base are also deteriorating, as documented in reports by The Ferret and the Nuclear Information Service this year, with serious radioactive risk incidents increasing steadily in the 2020s.
Trident is a disaster waiting to happen. US nuclear bombers are being hosted at “RAF”
Lakenheath again. Plans to buy nuclear-armed jets will further entangle the UK in the US arsenal.
The recently published SDR promotes a new nuclear Britain. These measures can all be
understood as the outcome of panic amongst the British security establishment. They know that
the UK’s nuclear power status is an unsustainable farce, but their response is to double down on
nuclearism and thus compound the UK’s national decline and worsen international security.
Scotland, a nuclear-occupied nation, is at the front lines of this unfolding crisis. The Scottish left
has an opportunity, and a duty, to put strong opposition to nuclear weapons at the core of a vision
for a more just, fair and ultimately safer Scotland that is a proud signatory of the UN’s Treaty on the
Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Samuel Rafanell-Williams is Communications Officer for the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.