The Three Myths that Drive the UK’s Nuclear Juggernaut

Within ten days of becoming prime minister, Andy Burnham had hitched his wagon to the idea that an ‘independent nuclear deterrent’ can guarantee not only the UK’s national security but also its reindustrialisation. Ian Davis argues that this is delusional on all counts and heightens the probability of environmental as well as nuclear apocalypse.

Speaking in Barrow-in-Furness on 30 July, PM Andy Burnham announced that the UK’s nuclear submarine programme would ‘help support’ an additional 18,000 workers within four years. But the Burnham Government ‘s decision to place the renewal of the UK’s Trident nuclear programme at the heart of its vision of reindustrialisation is not the change that Britain needs. It is being sold to the British people based on three myths: the myth of independence; the myth of nuclear deterrence; and the myth of reindustrialisation.

The myth of independence

While the submarines will carry the Union Jack (a recurring concern of Labour leaders since Ernest Bevin), the system continues and deepens our reliance on the United States at a time when we ought to be decoupling from Washington. It shouldn’t really be necessary to ask why the UK should be distancing itself from the United States. Over the past 12 months, actions by the Trump administration have strained the UK’s traditional security posture through claims to Greenland, unilateral military escalations in the Middle East, disruptions to intelligence and basing agreements, and direct political and economic pressure.

The UK’s Trident nuclear programme is operationally independent but technically dependent on the United States. While the British government possesses full and unconstrained authority to launch its nuclear weapons without foreign permission, the underlying hardware, lifecycle support and maintenance infrastructure are deeply intertwined with the US military-industrial complex.

The UK does not own its Trident II D5 missiles; it leases and participates in a shared pool with the US Navy. In addition, British submarines must periodically travel to the Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay in Georgia, USA, for heavy missile maintenance and replacement. And while the warheads are British-made, the UK relies on the US for specific components, including the missile fire control systems (built by General Dynamics), navigation subsystems (built by Lockheed Martin) and warhead aeroshells.

The myth of nuclear deterrence

The decision to continue the investment in Trident also continues to tie UK security to the genocidal use of weapons of mass destruction. Nuclear deterrence is a belief system and power structure with an inherently limited life. The situation is so unstable that it can fall apart at any time with catastrophic consequences.

Commentators, military strategists and international relations experts are increasingly warning that the traditional framework of nuclear deterrence is failing, or at least rapidly eroding. They argue that the foundational ‘rules’ of the Cold War no longer hold true in the face of modern geopolitics and technological evolution.

Weapons, such as hypersonic missiles, that travel at multiple times the speed of sound compress decision-making windows from 30 minutes down to just a few minutes, while the risk of artificial intelligence misinterpreting early warning data, or a cyberattack disabling command-and-control systems, drastically increases the probability of an accidental nuclear launch. Because human beings are fundamentally fallible, relying on a system where a single technical or psychological mistake means global catastrophe means the system is guaranteed to fail eventually. It is simply a question of when.

With nuclear deterrence, however, there is no room for error or failure of any kind. The fate of the country and the planet and its people is on the line. Numerous declassified nuclear war games—numbering in the dozens over several decades—have demonstrated that if deterrence fails any use of nuclear weapons inevitably spirals into an uncontrollable global catastrophe. The 1983 Proud Prophet simulation, for example, concluded that a ‘limited’ nuclear war is impossible to control, inevitably escalating into total nuclear annihilation. The simulation resulted in half-a-billion immediate deaths from the nuclear exchanges, at least another half-billion people were projected to die shortly after from radiation sickness and widespread starvation, and large parts of the Northern Hemisphere were rendered completely uninhabitable for decades. Major cities including London, Paris, Washington, D.C. and Moscow, along with entire nations like Germany and Poland, were destroyed.

The myth of reindustrialisation

The argument that the prioritisation of the defence and nuclear sectors in the UK’s long-term economic strategy is the most viable foundation for national reindustrialisation is also largely a myth. Proponents argue that investing in the military nuclear enterprise directly bolsters the civilian nuclear sector, drives dual-use technological breakthroughs and ensures the UK retains critical industrial capabilities, heavy engineering facilities and secure supply chains. In his speech Andy Burhham particularly highlighted the additional high-skilled jobs and apprenticeships that would be created through investment in large-scale defence and nuclear sites in regions outside of London—such as Barrow-in-Furness, Derby, and various shipyards.

While it is true that these hubs sustain high-skilled, unionised, and well-paid manufacturing jobs that are difficult to replicate elsewhere, numerous economic studies show that spending the £8.4bn earmarked for the new phase of contracts for the ‘nuclear enterprise’ in virtually any other civil sector would create many more jobs. Barrow-in-Furness, for example, possesses the UK’s only heavy-assembly infrastructure for complex marine architecture. These marine engineers could be reallocated to high-volume green maritime and coastal defence projects. The heavy fabrication halls could be retooled to build massive, next-generation deep-water floating offshore wind platforms and tidal energy turbine matrices, converting defence savings into national energy security.

Alternatively, if some of the funds were diverted to conventional military capabilities, frigates and uncrewed surface vessels could also be built under an expanded defensive naval strategy. Global ‘blue-water’ power projection—such as policing the South China Sea or maintaining a permanent presence in the Persian Gulf—would be abandoned in favour of transition into a highly lethal, high-density ‘green/black-water’ denial force with a strict geographical mandate: the UK’s Exclusive Economic Zone, the North Sea, the Norwegian Sea and the critical Greenland-Iceland-UK (GIUK) Gap.

Directing billions of pounds into complex nuclear programmes, such as the Dreadnought-class submarines, diverts limited public funds and private capital away from what should be the UK’s No. 1 security focus: climate change and the green transition. The ‘nuclear enterprise’ draws heavily on a finite pool of highly specialized engineers, project managers and technicians. This concentration creates a domestic ‘brain drain’, making it harder and more expensive for green industries to recruit the talent needed for a rapid transition. Defence manufacturing and nuclear projects are often highly centralized, capital-intensive and subject to strict export controls. This creates economic ‘islands’ rather than the broad-based, export-led industrial growth that a global green market offers.

Moreover, major military and nuclear procurement cycles routinely span decades and face systemic delays and huge cost overruns. In contrast, green energy projects like offshore wind and solar farms can be deployed rapidly, offering quicker industrial returns and faster decarbonisation.

Conclusion

The UK deploys nuclear weapons to guarantee national security. It does so based on a theoretical war strategy that assumes either infallibility or an eventual global catastrophe. This is insane. And it is equally irrational to seek to build an industrial policy on the back of the nuclear submarine programme that lies at the heart of this flawed strategy.

Following Andy Burnham’s ‘bloodless coup’ there was an opportunity to consider a profound, structural realignment of the UK’s national security and industrial architecture. Instead, we get tired tropes about the employment benefits of military spending. In terms of security thinking, at least, it is a case of “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss”. Lamentably, we are about to get fooled again over arguably the most consequential issue of national governance.

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Dr Ian Davis is the founder of NATO Watch, a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation that works to promote public awareness and foster debate on the role of NATO in public life. He is also the Executive Editor of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Yearbook and an Associate Senior Fellow within Conflict and Peace at SIPRI.

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The views and opinions expressed in posts on the Rethinking Security blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the network and its broader membership.

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Image Credit: Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street, via Flickr. Prime Minister Andy Burnham visits BAE Systems Barrow, 30 July 2026.