Two modern dinosaurs flirted with catastrophe last month – nuclear submarines each armed with 16 ballistic missiles
THE child in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes told it like he saw it, leaving the surrounding adults to address the consequences.
Since we adults know that recognising an uncomfortable reality obliges us to do something about it, we often prefer to avert our eyes. Our current empirical need to pledge and spend incalculable trillions to transform our economies and save our planet denies us, however, the luxury of such selective myopia.
Dinosaurs were the dominant species on our planet for over 160 million years. When the environment radically changed 65 million years ago, they perished because they had become over-specialised.
Two modern dinosaurs flirted with catastrophe, if not extinction, in early February. Responsibility for the over-specialisation of HMS Vanguard and Le Triomphant lies not with natural selection, but with deliberate and massive human investment.
These two mastodons are not sleek submarines as we might imagine them. They are about half as long again as a rugby pitch, weigh 15,000 tonnes, and carry over 100 crew members each. Nuclear-powered, both have as main armament 16 ballistic missiles with a yield of some 220 kilotons, or 11 times the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb.
France and the UK each possess four of these ballistic missile-launching submarines, one of which is always on patrol. They are “Doomsday” weapons, designed to slip undetectably through the oceans. According to the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) logic of nuclear warfare, they would fire their missiles long after Paris and London had been reduced to rubble. Being “undetectable”, they cannot be eliminated and thus act as a deterrent to potential assailants.
They cost around €2 billion each to build and equip, and millions more each year to operate. Silence is their primary defence and billions have been spent coating their hulls with anechoic materials, and making their reactors, turbines and pumps as noiseless as possible.
Missile submarines rarely use active sonar as it is relatively easy to locate the origin of its sound pulses. They rely on passive sonar, or inordinately expensive underwater microphones, to listen out for others’ sounds.
HMS Vanguard and Le Triomphant are, dinosaur-like, so successfully over-specialised in silent slinking that neither heard the other – until they collided in the Bay of Biscay. Damaged, they both limped home to their respective bases for expensive repairs.
The incident would almost be funny, in a Martin McDonagh form of black humour, were the potential consequences not so lethal. Consequences which might arguably fall within acceptable norms if these boats and their thermonuclear missiles served some military purpose.
It has, however, been many years since nuclear weapons served any military purpose. A convincing argument can be made that their effective lifespan was a mere four years.
The USA detonated the world’s first atomic bomb in 1945, and held a planetary nuclear monopoly until the USSR’s first nuclear test in 1949. A global arms race ensued, reaching its deadly climax in 1986 by which time over 70,000 nuclear warheads had been built.
It was a race involving arms whose only military purpose was to deter the other side from using theirs. Some of the world’s best scientific, military and political brains spent decades failing to develop usable strategies for nuclear weapons. As early as 1954, Winston Churchill warned: “If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.”
Ignore, for a moment, ethical questions about the only true weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capable of eliminating life as we know it, for, despite all the propaganda hype, chemical and biological weapons never really made the WMD grade. Nuclear weapons have been militarily useless since at least the 1950s.
Their current budgetary impact is to drain resources from vital security and other requirements. They have become status symbols rather than weapons. The main nuclear powers are rather like a redundant business executive who spends what little income he has on polishing the Ferrari outside his house.
Two years ago such renowned peaceniks as former US secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former secretary of defence William Perry and the former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee Sam Nunn published an article in the Wall Street Journal calling for the end of nuclear weapons.
Mikhail Gorbachev agreed: “It is becoming clearer that nuclear weapons are no longer a means of achieving security.”
UK foreign secretary in June 2007, Margaret Beckett, added that “a vision, a scenario, for a world free of nuclear weapons” was required.
As a candidate Barack Obama pledged to “make the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons worldwide a central element of US nuclear policy”. As president he told the US Congress last week that “living our values doesn’t make us weaker. It makes us safer, and it makes us stronger” while undertaking to “reform our defence budget so that we’re not paying for Cold War-era weapons systems we don’t use”.
A global political agreement already exists in the form of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), first proposed by Ireland’s then minister for foreign affairs Frank Aiken in 1958. The NPT entered into force with US ratification in 1970. Article VI commits nuclear weapon states to “pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament”.
There are still over 20,000 useless, dangerous and arguably immoral nuclear warheads on our planet. They leave us, in the words of Sinéad O’Connor, “exposed, with a severe case of the emperor’s new clothes”.
It’s time to get rid of them before they get rid of us.