Jump to content

Indyref2 -alternative


Recommended Posts

7 minutes ago, Tibbermoresaint said:

I would be very surprised if this happened.

I wouldn't - the infrastructure isn't something that can be replicated in a hurry, and they can't just tie 'em up pier side at Brighton. You could negotiate just about any terms you wanted to let them keep Faslane for 5 years.

Edited by renton
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just now, renton said:

I wouldn't - the infrastructure isn't something that can be replicated in a hurry, and they can't just tie 'em up pier side at Brighton. You could negotiate just about any terms you wanted to let them keep Faslane for 5 years.

The UK's Strategic Nuclear Deterrent being based outwith the UK is a complete non-starter.

Besides, why would we want it? We'd have no control over it and it would simply make us a target. No thanks.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, Tibbermoresaint said:

The UK's Strategic Nuclear Deterrent being based outwith the UK is a complete non-starter.

Besides, why would we want it? We'd have no control over it and it would simply make us a target. No thanks.

You loan them the land (at an eye watering rate) I guess that get's you round the third country stipulations in the non proliferation treaty. it's not about having control of the system, and in any event as a second strike weapon it's not like the UK has any active control really, it's there to be there, not to be used. If it ever get's used it's because the UK Government is gone anyway! For me it's about using the leverage it affords us to get a very good deal in terms of other assets and liabilities from the rUK at the point of independence. The UK needs Trident, but they'll lose it in an instant if we tell them to sling their hook on day one.

I also see the point that it leaves us a target in the short to medium term. You obviously want it out as quickly as possible but I don't see why we can't be neighbourly and also screw the UK to the tune of billions a year in basing rights and a reduced share of liabilities at the point of independence. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 minutes ago, renton said:

You loan them the land (at an eye watering rate) I guess that get's you round the third country stipulations in the non proliferation treaty. it's not about having control of the system, and in any event as a second strike weapon it's not like the UK has any active control really, it's there to be there, not to be used. If it ever get's used it's because the UK Government is gone anyway! For me it's about using the leverage it affords us to get a very good deal in terms of other assets and liabilities from the rUK at the point of independence. The UK needs Trident, but they'll lose it in an instant if we tell them to sling their hook on day one.

I also see the point that it leaves us a target in the short to medium term. You obviously want it out as quickly as possible but I don't see why we can't be neighbourly and also screw the UK to the tune of billions a year in basing rights and a reduced share of liabilities at the point of independence. 

You're fundamentally missing the point. The UK won't base its subs in Faslane post-independence. They'll be based in Kings Bay, Georgia in the short-term and then moved to a new base in the rUK. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

No, the guys will just stop trading with us and lending us money and resources which the UK doesn't have much of itself, otherwise it wouldn't need to have be trading in the first place.
Which guys ? No one is going to stop trading with America because it has debt [emoji23]
Link to comment
Share on other sites

21 minutes ago, AUFC90 said:

Which guys ? No one is going to stop trading with America because it has debt emoji23.png

The US is rich in resources, they can get away with defaulting on debt. Only a complete fool would think the UK would get away with it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

36 minutes ago, Tibbermoresaint said:

You're fundamentally missing the point. The UK won't base its subs in Faslane post-independence. They'll be based in Kings Bay, Georgia in the short-term and then moved to a new base in the rUK. 

That might well be an option for them, but it's hardly a good one. The logistics of maintaining a significant Royal Navy presence in the US, with delineated supply chains, separate areas, issues around national security (even allowing for the large amounts of common technology and doctrine) as well as the enhanced difficulty of maintaining a standing patrol when you add several thousand miles to your route probably aren't great (And your probably still paying for that privilege anyway)

The third option is that the SSBNs join the SSNs down in England but are disarmed and laid up until the infrastructure for the missiles and warhead storage can be replicated in England, creating a deterrent gap.

I don't necessarily think Faslane is an easy option for them - the chief issue being the diplomacy around storage of weapons that have US technology in a third country. There is the Faslane-as-part-of-rUK option that might help with that, Scotland being in NATO would further reduce difficulties there. From the point of view of the rUK I still think that's the best option if you could make the politics work. The supply chain runs as it has always done, there is no gap in capability. 

US basing short circuits any diplomacy between the rUK and Scotland into a bilateral arrangement with the US but I still think logistically it's a nightmare and probably further reduces any notional independence the deterrent system might have and probably costs more to maintain than paying the Scots for the use of Faslane (or the equivalent in negotiations for indy)

A deterrent gap is probably the end of deterrence full stop so would be unacceptable. 

I don't think any decision was made prior to the first Indy Ref, and you might well be right that the US option is the preferred one by the MoD - I haven't seen any literature on that subject. 

For me the principle point is moral: Are we so desperate to get rid of them on day one, or are we prepared to use Faslane as leverage to get our way elsewhere. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 minutes ago, D.A.F.C said:

Scotland has no debt and can walk away from uk debt?
Bollocks

Scotland has no legal obligation to take any debt from the UK on independence. This is a well established precedent. That it would take some share of UK debt is seen as a moral obligation - a sign of fiscal responsibility that would help stabilise Scotland's position with the markets. How much of that debt it would take would be open to negotiation.

On the other point you were making about Scot Gov spending priorities on Universities and prescriptions. Scotland until recently could not borrow and could create no deficit. The budget is always thus balanced against the money it is given to spend by the UK government.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Currently we are spending more than we are bringing in. I'm not saying free education and prescriptions are bad but someone has to pay for it.
There is no way banks would allow scotland to walk away from debt responsibility. Each household in Scotland is due money through mortgages and loans as in england and Wales. We created the debt in the same way. Government borrowing for civil infrastructure etc maybe we can argue that.
It's a massively complicated issue and not something that we can just walk away from. Going independent would take a decade to sort out.
Scottish people cant face it now after brexit.
Its game over.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

14 minutes ago, renton said:

 

A deterrent gap is probably the end of deterrence full stop so would be unacceptable. 

 

If you can grasp this then you can grasp why Faslane isn't an option. The issue isn't money, supply chain or anything else. It's credibility. The rUK know they can run a 24/7/365 deterrent from Georgia. They don't know that they can from Scotland. They don't know what future Scoto-rUK relations will be like and they certainly aren't going to allow their deterrent to be used as a bargaining chip. It wouldn't take much to blockade Faslane or to prevent supplies or crews reaching the boats. That's far too much of a risk. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, D.A.F.C said:

Currently we are spending more than we are bringing in. I'm not saying free education and prescriptions are bad but someone has to pay for it.
There is no way banks would allow scotland to walk away from debt responsibility. Each household in Scotland is due money through mortgages and loans as in england and Wales. We created the debt in the same way. Government borrowing for civil infrastructure etc maybe we can argue that.
It's a massively complicated issue and not something that we can just walk away from. Going independent would take a decade to sort out.
Scottish people cant face it now after brexit.
Its game over.

Read my post again. On the one hand the banks couldn't stop us walking away without debt, as successor state (a title the rUK would desperately want) it inherits the responsibilities and liabilities of the former state. On the other hand there is recognition that we should take debt in order to demonstrate our financial and fiscal responsibility so that the ratings agencies amongst others treat us kindly. 

The level of debt we take is negotiable.

This is an entirely separate issue from current Scottish government spending which must be balanced by law, until very recently ScotGov had no borrowing powers, no means to run it's own deficit. It only spends the money it is given by the UK. Any debt run up is done so by UK government spending, and nothing to do with ScotGov spending money on free prescriptions.

Not even sure how you get from your first line to the statement in the penultimate line.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 minutes ago, D.A.F.C said:

Currently we are spending more than we are bringing in. I'm not saying free education and prescriptions are bad but someone has to pay for it.
There is no way banks would allow scotland to walk away from debt responsibility. Each household in Scotland is due money through mortgages and loans as in england and Wales. We created the debt in the same way. Government borrowing for civil infrastructure etc maybe we can argue that.
It's a massively complicated issue and not something that we can just walk away from. Going independent would take a decade to sort out.
Scottish people cant face it now after brexit.
Its game over.

After Indy there must be a lot coming to Scotland from our percentage of military hardware  to overseas investments and property portfolio.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, Tibbermoresaint said:

If you can grasp this then you can grasp why Faslane isn't an option. The issue isn't money, supply chain or anything else. It's credibility. The rUK know they can run a 24/7/365 deterrent from Georgia. They don't know that they can from Scotland. They don't know what future Scoto-rUK relations will be like and they certainly aren't going to allow their deterrent to be used as a bargaining chip. It wouldn't take much to blockade Faslane or to prevent supplies or crews reaching the boats. That's far too much of a risk. 

This is the crux of the matter. I'm not sure they could. I'm not sure the US would necessarily let them, or at least wouldn't put the kinds of conditions on it that made it unfeasible over any length of time. Lockheed Martin might be happy selling Trident hardware to us, but there is no doubt that the US would ultimately prefer to be the only nuclear equipped western state. 

The arguments about blockading Faslane apply equally, if not more so to Georgia, surrounded as it would be by US naval and air power. A UK SSBN couldn't even get to it's patrol zone without running the guantlet of the largest ASW equipped power on the planet. Let along the US army able to break down the doors if they so wanted. 

Georgia might look attractive in so much as the US and UK traditionally align on foreign policy, and also because it makes missile storage easier. It doesn't make warhead storage any easier, and that's the bit - alongside the submarine that still has UK propriety technology. It doesn't do much for credibility when your whole deterrent is based on the US not simply locking your sailors up to stop you going about your business. 

Supply chains similarly impact credibility, because as you rightly point out, it's about being able to run a 365 deterrent, right? Much harder to do, when committing a considerable part of your navy supply chain to maintaining a service on a foreign base 4000 miles away. 4000 miles further away from potential targets as well.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 minutes ago, renton said:

This is the crux of the matter. I'm not sure they could. I'm not sure the US would necessarily let them, or at least wouldn't put the kinds of conditions on it that made it unfeasible over any length of time. Lockheed Martin might be happy selling Trident hardware to us, but there is no doubt that the US would ultimately prefer to be the only nuclear equipped western state. 

The arguments about blockading Faslane apply equally, if not more so to Georgia, surrounded as it would be by US naval and air power. A UK SSBN couldn't even get to it's patrol zone without running the guantlet of the largest ASW equipped power on the planet. Let along the US army able to break down the doors if they so wanted. 

Georgia might look attractive in so much as the US and UK traditionally align on foreign policy, and also because it makes missile storage easier. It doesn't make warhead storage any easier, and that's the bit - alongside the submarine that still has UK propriety technology. It doesn't do much for credibility when your whole deterrent is based on the US not simply locking your sailors up to stop you going about your business. 

Supply chains similarly impact credibility, because as you rightly point out, it's about being able to run a 365 deterrent, right? Much harder to do, when committing a considerable part of your navy supply chain to maintaining a service on a foreign base 4000 miles away. 4000 miles further away from potential targets as well.

 

The US and UK have been allies for 200 years. Their relationship is known and predictable. UK and Scotland? A complete unknown, which is where the risk lies.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

19 minutes ago, Tibbermoresaint said:

The US and UK have been allies for 200 years. Their relationship is known and predictable. UK and Scotland? A complete unknown, which is where the risk lies.

205 years ago the US and UK were at war. We've only really been 'allies' in any real sense since the early 1900s when some of the final grievances of that last conflict were reconciled to allow the British to concentrate on their naval arms race with the Kaiser's Germany. The US Rainbow war plans had a specific scenario for invading Canada as part of a war against Britain well into the 1930s. The US brought the UK to it's knees in the late 50s over Suez, and froze the UK out of it's nuclear technology (which was jointly developed) until the McMahon act of 1958. 

When it comes to nuclear war planning, the reason for the UK deterrent is exactly the reasons for the US disapproval of it. The more nations who have nukes, the less control any one nation has on the timing and scenario of such an engagement. The US didn't want the UK and France having independent deterrents on the basis that they might force the US into a conflagration not of it's choosing. The UK and France wanted those deterrents precisely to stop the US having a choice to let us burn if push came to shove. The UK of course committed it's deterrent entirely to the devices of SACEUR to avoid further discomfort with it's US allies while retaining a notional independent second strike capability.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that alliances, even as ones revered as the UK revers it's relationship with the US are still built on tangible political motives than sentimental ones. The US would probably see UK basing of their deterrent on US soil as a way of gently nudging the UK out of that strategic game. Basing in Georgia is as fraught with difficulties and risks as Faslane in an independent Scotland, albeit for different reasons. A further domestic policy issue would be that it's a harder sell to the general public if the deterrent is not only working with US weapons but working out of the US. This would further make it harder to secure money to keep it going long term.

Maybe the relationship with Scotland would be a complete unknown. It's unlikely we wouldn't be Western aligned at least to start with. It's a risk to be managed. Ultimately repatriation of the deterrent down south would be the only way to maintain it long term. However, I'd simply opine that Faslane would be a good place to leave them in the short term if Scotland and the US could be persuaded to let them stay there (as I said, given the central space Trident occupies in UK political thinking we could leverage it to f**k) and in some ways less risky than leaving them entirely at the mercy of the US.

Edited by renton
Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 minutes ago, renton said:

205 years ago the US and UK were at war. We've only really been 'allies' in any real sense since the early 1900s when some of the final grievances of that last conflict were reconciled to allow the British to concentrate on their naval arms race with the Kaiser's Germany. The US Rainbow war plans had a specific scenario for invading Canada as part of a war against Britain well into the 1930s. The US brought the UK to it's knees in the late 50s over Suez, and froze the UK out of it's nuclear technology (which was jointly developed) until the McMahon act of 1958. 

When it comes to nuclear war planning, the reason for the UK deterrent is exactly the reasons for the US disapproval of it. The more nations who have nukes, the less control any one nation has on the timing and scenario of such an engagement. The US didn't want the UK and France having independent deterrents on the basis that they might force the US into a conflagration not of it's choosing. The UK and France wanted those deterrents precisely to stop the US having a choice to let us burn if push came to shove. The UK of course committed it's deterrent entirely to the devices of SACEUR to avoid further discomfort with it's US allies while retaining a notional independent second strike capability.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that alliances, even as ones revered as the UK revers it's relationship with the US are still built on tangible political motives than sentimental ones. The US would probably see UK basing of their deterrent on US soil as a way of gently nudging the UK out of that strategic game. Basing in Georgia is as fraught with difficulties and risks as Faslane in an independent Scotland, albeit for different reasons. A further domestic policy issue would be that it's a harder sell to the general public if the deterrent is not only working with US weapons but working out of the US. This would further make it harder to secure money to keep it going long term.

Maybe the relationship with Scotland would be a complete unknown. It's unlikely we wouldn't be Western aligned at least to start with. It's a risk to be managed. Ultimately repatriation of the deterrent down south would be the only way to maintain it long term. However, I'd simply opine that Faslane would be a good place to leave them in the short term if Scotland and the US could be persuaded to let them stay there (as I said, given the central space Trident occupies in UK political thinking we could leverage it to f**k) and in some ways less risky than leaving them entirely at the mercy of the US.

If the US genuinely didn't want the UK to have a deterrent it could simply refuse to sell us the missiles. But of course they want us to have a deterrent not simply to spread the cost but to maintain the fiction of NATO being a genuine alliance.

They would welcome the deterrent being based in Georgia. They would welcome the rent and the opportunities for integration and training.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...