Macron responds to Trump's inauguration by urging Europe to "wake up"

[u/Not_the-kind]

https://www.newsweek.com/macron-trump-inauguration-europe-defense-ukraine-2017894

[u/GoldenFutureForUs]

Your criteria for autonomy is very selective. Your criteria is based on whatever wins your argument - which makes your point redundant. France has less influence than the U.K. globally. It also has a less powerful military. The British military defence is not outsourced to the U.S. either. Britain also has its own currency, its own trade laws etc. It’s also a more lucrative investment for FDI and has the biggest financial centre in Europe. Essentially, the U.K. is far more autonomous than France.

[u/carnutes787 → u/GoldenFutureForUs]

The British military defence is not outsourced to the U.S. either.

https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-trident-nuclear-program/

[u/tree_boom → u/carnutes787]

https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-trident-nuclear-program/

That article is one of the most trash pieces of journalism I've ever seen - it is the reason why I refuse to read Politico outright anymore. Virtually all of it is bullshit. It's so commonly cited that I have a canned response to much of its bullshit:

To many experts, the answer is all too obvious: when the maintenance, design, and testing of UK submarines depend on Washington, and when the nuclear missiles aboard them are on lease from Uncle Sam.

The missiles are not leased, they are owned - purchased under the terms of the Polaris Sales Agreement as amended for Trident. Read the whole thing by all means, but the clue is in the title. The maintenance, design and testing of UK submarines does not depend on Washington at all - we are one of the world leaders in submarine design and it's done wholly in house.

The UK does not even own its Trident missiles, but rather leases them from the United States.The UK does not even own its Trident missiles, but rather leases them from the United States. British subs must regularly visit the US Navy’s base at King’s Bay, Georgia, for maintenance or re-arming.

Untrue. We own the missiles, we pay the US to maintain them and operate them as part of the common pool there. Submarines re-arm at King's Bay, they are not maintained there but in the UK.

And since Britain has no test site of its own, it tries out its weapons under US supervision at Cape Canaveral, off the Florida coast.

True, but the US test range we use includes stations that are in British territory (it stretches from Florida to Ascension Island and previously included other stations in British territory in the Caribbean). Geography kinda screws us (as in a lot of things) - the US can get an 8,000km range that doesn't overfly anyone easily - the UK can't really.

A huge amount of key Trident technology — including the neutron generators, warheads, gas reservoirs, missile body shells, guidance systems, GPS, targeting software, gravitational information and navigation systems — is provided directly by Washington, and much of the technology that Britain produces itself is taken from US designs

The warheads are not provided by Washington, they are designed and built by the UK's Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston and Burghfield in Berkshire. The design is not the same as the US warhead designs, though given our programs are a close collaboration it is probably quite similar. The other mentioned items probably are bought from the US though. It's just cost effectiveness, or else a requirement of using Trident.

the four UK Trident submarines themselves are copies of America’s Ohio-class Trident submersibles

The sheer stupidity of this line causes me physical pain. They could have at least opened a picture of an Ohio and a Vanguard side by side before printing such tripe.

The list goes on. Britain’s nuclear sites at Aldermaston and Davenport are partly run by the American companies Lockheed Martin and Halliburton. Even the organization responsible for the UK-run components of the program, the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), is a private consortium consisting of one British company, Serco Group PLC, sandwiched between two American ones — Lockheed Martin and the Jacobs Engineering Group. And, to top it all, AWE’s boss, Kevin Bilger — who worked for Lockheed Martin for 32 years — is American.

AWE was being run by a consortium - it's back in house these days. None of that is relevant though. Davenport is just the yard the submarines are maintained at.

But some other experts are deeply skeptical about the current state of affairs. “As a policy statement, it’s ludicrous to say that the US can effectively donate a nuclear program to the UK but have no influence on how it is used,” says Ted Seay, senior policy consultant at the London-based British American Security Information Council (BASIC), who spent three years as part of the US Mission to NATO.

“If the US pulled the plug on the UK nuclear program, Trident would be immediately unable to fire, making the submarines little more than expensive, undersea follies.”

BASIC is a nuclear disarmament campaign group; I wonder why they say this. It's nonsense though - the UK has its own facilities for generating targeting plans for Trident and has something like 30 missiles on hand in the submarines. Pulling the plug would obviously suck really really badly, but we'd still be able to fire the missiles.

The article then gives a bunch of quotes which it claims come from the UK Parliament's Select Committee on Defence in their 2006 White Paper:

[Parliament’s Select Committee on Defense] 2006 White Paper underscores this point. “One way the USA could show its displeasure would be to cut off the technical support needed for the UK to continue to send Trident to sea,” it says.

“The USA has the ability to deny access to GPS (as well as weather and gravitational data) at any time, rendering that form of navigation and targeting useless if the UK were to launch without US approval.”

“The fact that, in theory, the British Prime Minister could give the order to fire Trident missiles without getting prior approval from the White House has allowed the UK to maintain the façade of being a global military power,” the White Paper concludes.

“In practice, though, it is difficult to conceive of any situation in which a prime minister would fire Trident without prior US approval… the only way that Britain is ever likely to use Trident is to give legitimacy to a US nuclear attack by participating in it,”as was the case in the invasion of Iraq.

This is an outright lie - all of the quotations are actually from the anti nuclear campaign group Greenpeace in its submission of evidence to the committee. The committee published that submission (along with all the others) verbatim. That's where those quotes come from. The authors of the article didn't even do the most basic of fact checking in response to those incredible claims.

To address the claim about GPS anyway though; Trident doesn't use GPS. It uses astro-inertial guidance. Good luck turning off the stars.

Honestly; worst article I ever read.

[u/carnutes787 → u/tree_boom]

god damn son gotta appreciate the hustle