MOSCOW (Sputnik) — On Monday, UK parliamentarians in the House of Commons voted in favor of renewing the United Kingdom’s nuclear deterrent system with four new Vanguard-class nuclear submarines.
“It was a foregone conclusion even that the new prime minister wanted to push this through at a time of maximum disarray in the Labour party opposition. I was struck that the debate was not really about the merits of nuclear weapons for British security, but about Britain’s status in the world. So replacing Trident was really about bolstering a declining status and had nothing to do with Britain’s real security needs,” Johnson said.
Johnson also noted that very few members of the UK parliament were aware of the UN multilateral talks on nuclear disarmament that London boycotted this February in Geneva. She stressed that these talks could produce a nuclear ban treaty long before even the first of the new so-called successor submarines in the Trident program would be built.
“So this is a very short-sighted decision taken for quite shameful tactical partly political reasons on an issue of absolutely fundamental importance for future security not only of Britain, but of the world,” Johnson said.
The Trident system is deployed at the UK Royal Navy’s Faslane submarine base in Scotland. The UK Conservative Party has been campaigning to renew the nuclear deterrent despite rising maintenance costs.
The total estimated cost of renewing Trident is 167 billion pounds ($244 billion) over the 32-year lifespan of the system, between 2028 and 2060, according to the International Monetary Fund.
