Britain's Weapon of Mass Destruction Executive Summary Nuclear weapons are not a myth or an abstraction. There are real warheads on a British Trident submarine on patrol and there are detailed plans specifying the latitude and longitude of points on the globe against which these weapons are ready to be used. The Navy keeps three Trident submarines armed, with 14 missiles and 48 nuclear warheads on each. The Labour Governments retention of Trident is inconsistent with the way in which thinking on nuclear weapons has moved - with many former advocates of the bomb arguing that there is an urgent need to abolish these weapons.
Some observers say the risk of nuclear war is greater now than it was several years ago.
Today more countries have the bomb. Russian nuclear forces are kept on a hair-trigger alert because they are vulnerable to an attack from US Trident missiles. In the 1950s and 1960s Britain had plans to attack a large number of cities in the Soviet Union using V bombers or Polaris missiles. These plans were later adjusted so an attack would concentrate on targets around Moscow. Today the scale of Britains nuclear capability and the way it is deployed suggest that it remains oriented principally against Russia.