Trident - Do we want it or not?

After Gordon Brown’s announcement that he intends to reduce our Trident submarine fleet from four to three vessels, I would like to know what everyone else thinks.The way I see it, we either need Trident or we don’t. If we don’t need it, get rid of all four of them. If we do need it, we keep all four of them. There are no in-betweens. The Trident programme was designed so that the UK would have a credible nuclear deterrent that would be operational 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The extensive research concluded that we would need a minimum of four submarines in order to guarantee an uninterrupted service. The Trident program went ahead and the outdated Polaris fleet was retired.Gordon Brown’s official line is that scrapping a Trident submarine will be the UK’s contribution to nuclear disarmament but we all know the main reason is to save money. But how much money will he save? Will scrapping a quarter of the fleet save a quarter of the annual Trident budget? Only a fool would think so. We’ll still need a Trident maintenance headquarters with experienced staff whether we have one submarine or four submarines. We’ll still need weapons specialists and nuclear warhead technology. Yes, we’ll save a few pounds here and a few pennies there but it won’t be a significant amount unless we retire the entire Trident force.If Gordon seriously wanted to reduce our nuclear arsenal whilst maintaining a credible defence, surely it would be more sensible to reduce the number of nuclear warheads rather than reduce the number of submarines. Each Trident submarine carries 40 nuclear warheads. Wouldn’t it have been better to reduce each submarine’s payload to 30 missiles and keep operating all four submarines? The end tally will be the same... 120 nuclear warheads in operation across four submarines instead of 120 warheads in operation across just three submarines.If a submarine develops a fault or is disabled in conflict we need the remaining three to continue our 24 hour service. As soon as our fleet is reduced to three vessels we will be preparing a new emergency response:"Please hold fire, your war is valuable to us and one of our submarines will answer your call shortly."