Making an astute decision: renewing the British deterrent

I read about the Populous survey of gender and voter attitudes to Britain's nuclear deterrent renewal in the December 13th editon of The Times newspaper.

The PM's statement seems to suggest it's a done deal, and offers the bone to parliament of arguing over buying three or four deterrent submarines to carry the future weapons.

However, from the point of view of deterrence theory and the industrial and obvious financial implications there must be a better way of tackling the challenge.

After all, for the UK the submarine deterrent is the closest national prestige engineering challenge to the space programme of the USA. The implications for the industrial supply chain of abandoning it woule be deleterious to our engineering skills base as a whole.

Returning to the key issues of purpose and capability a few observations:

Why not have nuclear armed cruise missiles which can be fired from any submarine. Although slower and shorter in range than missiles, most of the world's cities are close to water.

Industrial implication: The same class of submarine could be built in greater numbers - some carrying nuclear weapons and some not. This would keep prospective adversaries guessing (surely a good thing in deterrence thinking), and would enable a longer production run of submarines which could do other useful things most of the time.

A longer production run offers industrial certainty and permits investment to build skills and reduce product costs; Completing the virtuous circle for the military whole life costs fall as economies of scale increase.

Lastly, cold war thinking at its frostiness favoured a strategic 'triad' of different delivery systems for nuclear weapons, which would cause a potential rival to think carefully knowing it would be impossible to prevent nuclear retaliation. A British nuclear cruise missile could be carried by aircrcaft - perhaps a Nimrod MRA2, giving strategic flexibility should international relations take a turn for the worse at some unforseen point in time:

I suppose the difficulty for the Labour party is to drop Trident (a source of angst in the 1980s) in favour of Cruise (which was a source of angst in the 1980s).