A British submarine armed with Trident ballistic missiles. Three retired senior military officers condemned plans to renew the country's independent nuclear deterrent, saying the Trident system was "completely useless" against modern threats. (AFP/MOD/File)From Yahoo News/AFP:
LONDON (AFP) – Three retired senior military officers on Friday condemned plans to renew the country's independent nuclear deterrent, saying the Trident system was "completely useless" against modern threats.
"Nuclear weapons have shown themselves to be completely useless as a deterrent to the threats and scale of violence we currently, or are likely to, face -- particularly international terrorism," they wrote in The Times.
The idea of an independent deterrent was redundant, they said, as it was "unthinkable" that Britain would launch its nuclear weapons without the backing and support of the United States.
MPs voted in March 2007 to renew the Trident submarine nuclear missile system, at a cost of about 20 billion pounds, arguing it was an integral part of national defence.
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My Comment: The money quote is the following .... "even a retention of a minimum nuclear deterrent" is regarded as too costly and will not serve any useful function.
Sigh ..... to think that Britannia once ruled the world, and now they are too broke to even having a minimum deterrent.
Empires rise and fall .... Britain has definitely fallen.