Nuclear Brexit
Those who voted for a “Brexit,” with the avowed goal of “making Britain great again,” may have set in motion a course of events that will result in Britain’s unilateral nuclear disarmament.
For those who favor disarmament, this would be good. For those who hoped Britain’s departure from the European Union would restore its glory on the world stage, it presumably would not.
Much of the public commentary on the prospective fallout of Brexit has focused on the anticipated damage to global markets, the probable shrinkage of British gross domestic product in the years following withdrawal from the EU, and a possible domino effect within Europe as other populations, incited by the British example, mobilize against the Brussels bureaucrats.
Insofar as pundits have speculated about the international security implications of Brexit, they have pointed out that British diplomats will be so focused on renegotiating trade agreements with the rest of the world that they will devote fewer resources to the turmoil in the Middle East and simmering tension with Russia, and that Britain will therefore be a less reliable ally for the United States. (This partly explains why Russian President Vladimir Putin greeted Brexit with a grin.) They assume, though, that Britain will remain strongly committed to NATO.
One problem with this assumption is that the UK may no longer exist as a country within a few years. It looks likely that, if Brexit proceeds, Scotland will withdraw from the United Kingdom, and there is a possibility that Northern Ireland will follow suit. In 2014, in a referendum on secession from the United Kingdom, 55 percent of Scots voted to stay and 45 percent voted to leave. But the subsequent referendum on leaving the EU has pushed many Scots to reconsider their position on Scottish independence. In the Brexit referendum, every single district in Scotland voted to remain in the EU, and a decisive majority of Scots—62 percent—voted to stay. It now looks as if the only way they can remain in the EU is to secede from the United Kingdom and apply for EU membership as a separate nation. A poll taken after the Brexit vote found that 59 percent of Scots say they would now vote for independence from Great Britain. Nicola Sturgeon, the shrewd and charismatic leader of the Scottish National Party, has stated her interest in moving toward a second referendum on Scottish independence.
For 30 years, the Scottish National Party said that an independent Scotland would stay out of NATO. It narrowly reversed that position in 2012, but it remains adamantly opposed to the stationing of any nuclear weapons in Scotland. That could be a problem since all of Britain’s nuclear weapons are stationed in Scotland. Until 1998, the United Kingdom maintained a mix of submarine-launched ballistic missiles and tactical nuclear weapons, with some of the mix based in England. In 1998, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government retired the tactical nuclear weapons, leaving only the Vanguard submarines. Those submarines are headquartered at Her Majesty’s Naval Base Clyde at Faslane in Scotland, with warheads stored eight miles away at Coulport. There is no obvious alternative site for them in England.
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