Disarmament Diplomacy
Issue No. 28, July 1998
How Strategic Was The Review?
By Michael Clarke
The Strategic Defence Review was finally published on 8 July, and
contained few surprises. It constitutes a sensible rationalisation
of the UK's force structure to reduce the problems of overstretch,
reorientate the forces more coherently towards expeditionary
operations, and address some of the long-standing problems of
Service morale. The Review treats the Ministry of Defence more than
ever before as a major company and seeks to gain greater
efficiencies through de-stocking, out-sourcing and more commercial
asset-management. It is certainly a 'review' in the management
sense that it has looked hard at all areas of MoD operation,
including equipment procurement, and tried to find ways of
streamlining the organisation. And it claims to be 'strategic' in
the sense that it began from a foreign policy baseline which
establishes what the UK wants to achieve with its security policy
and relates its force goals explicitly to that. Most observers have
given the SDR high marks for its intellectual breadth and
consistency and welcomed the fact that it has provided us with a
template that can evolve in response to new events and new ideas.
The MoD is rather pleased with itself and expects to offer a robust
defence of the process during the Parliamentary debate on the issue
in the first two days of the new session in October.
Nevertheless, if the SDR claims to be an exercise in strategic
thinking, then it is more notable for what it does not spell out
than for what it does. It lists some of the major assumptions
behind the policy but does not tell us on what basis they were
adopted - such as that the Atlantic Alliance remains fundamental to
our security, as does the nuclear deterrent; or that the
Eurofighter project is not up for negotiation. And it adopts other
assumptions which are not made explicit at all, still less the
thinking behind them; such as the view that the UK should
aim to play a prominent role in the world, or that UK interests
will be best served by having the power to intervene - 'we must be
prepared to go to the crisis, rather than have the crisis come to
us.' Such assumptions are not necessarily wrong, but it is far from
clear that they have been thought through rigorously.
The SDR has quite a lot to say about the UK's nuclear posture
and some interesting announcements to make, but here - more than in
other areas - it remains locked into some long-held assumptions
that a more strategically-minded review might have questioned. The
SDR announced a ceiling on warhead numbers of 48 per Trident
submarine, a cap of 200 in the total number of UK warheads, and
published figures for the first time of the total size of its
weapons programme nuclear materials stocks. It also announced some
measures of reduced readiness for the nuclear deterrent force,
whereby Trident submarines would henceforth be on several
days notice to fire rather than on immediate alert. All of this is
to be welcomed, and goes further than other allied nuclear powers
have gone, but it does not address some of the more basic questions
regarding the UK's nuclear posture.
The SDR mentions the role of Trident as a sub-strategic,
as well as a strategic, nuclear deterrent. This role is mentioned
but never elaborated. In July 1997 a senior MoD official told the
House of Commons Defence Committee that thinking about the
relationship between sub-strategic and strategic deterrence in this
connection was still progressing. In July 1998 the same official
told the same committee that sub-strategic deterrence should be
seen as a way of bolstering the strategic deterrent. It was not
evident that thinking had gone very far and all MoD pronouncements,
both official and private, studiously avoided offering any specific
scenarios for sub-strategic nuclear use.
In fact, a sub-strategic role for Trident is extremely
difficult to justify, even within the corpus of deterrent thinking.
It undermines the claim that the UK deterrent is down to the bare
minimum; it assumes that where it might be employed against a small
aggressor State the distinction between strategic and sub-strategic
will be appreciated; it also ignores the fact that if a nuclear
device were used (say) against British forces operating abroad -
which is the nearest the MoD ever comes to offering a scenario for
sub-strategic use - then the most effective response on our part
would be to display great nuclear restraint and use the
moral outrage of the world as legitimacy to employ our overwhelming
advantages in economic power and conventional forces. In other
words, any nuclear aggression against British forces, who would in
any case be part of a broader coalition, would open the way for
Western countries to play to all their military and moral strengths
rather than engage in a highly dangerous battle using weapons of
mass destruction (WMD). Not least, the possession of sub-strategic
weapons implies that they are there to deter the use of other
weapons of mass destruction - particularly chemical and biological
- against our forces abroad. But in doing so, sub-strategic weapons
themselves help promote complex games of micro-deterrence in
regional crises, the complexities of which make the deterrence of
the Cold war appear very simple indeed.
Nowhere in the SDR is there any explicit consideration of
whether it is in the long-term security interests of the UK to
continue to be a nuclear power; still less whether its own posture
- responsible and increasingly transparent as it is - makes the use
of WMD elsewhere in the world less, or more, likely. The nuclear
deterrent is regarded by this government as an insurance policy,
the premiums on which have already been substantially paid; the
sub-strategic option is regarded merely as a useful military
adjunct to it which extends the range of options for military
planners and therefore contributes to the UK's deterrent in
general. The SDR does not question whether the long-term political
costs of remaining a nuclear power may make this insurance policy,
in reality, very costly indeed. And it certainly does not
acknowledge the argument that a sub-strategic option may actually
work against the interests of a general, minimum deterrent,
as well as encouraging the proliferation of other forms of WMD in
the world. These sorts of questions must await a more fundamental
look at the role the UK is best placed - and most wants - to play
in the world, and a more holistic approach to thinking about the
nuclear future of mankind.
Maintaining nuclear deterrence as an 'insurance policy' -
however well it is operated - is too narrow a conception of the WMD
problem in an era that is just on the point of sliding into
extensive WMD development in many parts of the world.
Michael Clarke is Director of the Centre for Defence
Studies (CDS), King's College, London.
© 1998 The Acronym Institute.
Return to top of page
Return to List of Contents
Return to Acronym Main Page
|
