Britain’s high military dependence on the US is “no longer tenable” and the UK has to become increasingly independent of the special relationship with Washington, a former Nato chief has said.
George Robertson, who last week accused British leaders of a “corrosive complacency” towards defence, said on Wednesday that the traditional allies were diverging over values – and that even after Donald Trump leaves the White House, the separation was likely to continue.
Lord Robertson, a former Labour defence minister and Nato secretary general, highlighted Trump’s unprovoked attack on Iran, his decision to levy tariffs on traditional allies and, “most jarringly”, he said, the threat to wrest Greenland from Denmark.
He said the diplomatic tone from the White House had “reached a historic low point” with Trump’s repeated public criticisms of the UK.
We reached out to Mark Rutte for comment, but he was unable to extract his head from Trump’s ass in time for publication.
Great news for Tsar Vlad.
Trump will cause US defense companies to lose business.
That is why they are trying to increase the pentagon budget to 1.5 trillion, to make up for the contracts lost when we find a pretext to pull out of nato.
But the nukes are totally operational without us support 😉
They’re… kinda not though. The UK uses Trident SLBMs in their SSBNs. That’s a US missile.
France, on the other hand, rolled their own. It’d really strategically behoove the Royal Navy to figure out how to equip their next iteration of SSBN with M51s instead.
Yeah but those are old enough to not have a Killswitch.
But there is a maintenance and support supply chain, which is effectively a kill switch in the long term
This is the correct answer. Only one place - in Florida - where UK nukes can be serviced.
They don’t have kill switches and do not use GPS (rather celestial guidance), but if you cannot maintain them you cannot use them.
It’s not like they couldn’t figure it out though. It’s old enough to be relatively easy to reverse engineer compared to anything with heavy coding. If they really wanted to make them their own, they could.
Good point, but I’m sure the brits can certainly figure it out.
That’s… not how SLMB maintenance works.
That’s the joke.
I’d rather save the money and not have nukes or if we must have them, spend money and roll our own (doesn’t even matter if they work or not TBH). But being dependent on France is preferable to being dependent on the US.
With the way this timeline is going, I don’t think anyone getting rid of nukes is a good idea. If you do decide to for some reason, give them to Canada.
Canada doesn’t need nukes – the geographic proximity to the states basically means if nukes are used on the continent, both populations suffer. Just look at the wildfire smoke from Canada that circulates down to new york etc, and imagine that as nuclear fallout.
If Canada wants a deterrent, drones and bio-weapons is likely a better option. It’d be against international conventions perhaps, but Canada’s already declared international rules based order dead – so who cares on that front. You can build up more biotech knowledge by supporting medicare programs / vaccine research (something the states has pulled back on, making them more susceptible to such attacks). You can have a massive, lopsided impact, with a very low cost, easy to deploy/guerrilla setup.
You can’t develop nukes without an overt footprint showing your neighbour what you’re doing, giving them ample opportunity to sabotage/interfere with your actions. You can setup a couple dudes in a shack with a chicken coup and a couple drones fairly easily, by the thousands, all along the border.
Both population don’t suffer equally, and realistically nukes would not be used. They’re just a deterrent and make the invading force reconsider or work harder.
Really I don’t think nukes are a deterrent when the world is full of despotic leaders.
Trump, Netenyahu & Putin don’t give a fuck about a retaliatory strike.
No sane leader will launch a strike, so I don’t really see who nukes are meant to deter, it’s just a money pit that could be spent on just an okut anything to be more useful.
I don’t think that really tracks with what we’ve seen in Ukraine. The world tiptoed around and wasted a year of potential action because Putin threatened to use nukes. It’s still one of the main things stopping escalated allied involvement. I also doubt Russia would have invaded had Ukraine not given up its nukes.
Yeah nukes are only useful in the hands of people crazy enough to use them. The UK & France having nukes did nothing to protect Ukrainians, it’s also done nothing to dissuade Russia from carrying out attacks on British & French soil.
I also doubt Russia would have invaded had Ukraine not given up its nukes.
Maybe, or maybe the risk of nukes falling into the wrong hands is used to justify a more violent preemptive strike on Ukraine. Russia effectively used salami tactics and “rebel” troops to take Crimea without it looking like an invasion until it was too late, I don’t think the invasion of Ukraine necessarily doesn’t happen, it could have just happened in a different way.
Even Thatcher’s nukes failed to deter Argentina’s Junta, so simply having nukes doesn’t really guarantee anything.
The UK has given up over 50 territories since it developed nukes, including handing Hong Kong back to China, so I don’t really think nukes guarantee much.
All we know for sure is they cost us a lot of money.
You’re right that we never really know how things will play out. That said, I don’t think anyone expected foreign nukes to defend Ukraine, especially since allies are unwilling to use conventional weapons or send troops.
The UK’s political leadership is no longer tenable.
