I am not using this blog much because I use the course site messageboard so heavily. But...

The facts on the UK's 'Trident' nuclear missle submarines, since this came up in the lecture and seems to have created a lot of jaw-dropped amazement when it was mentioned as an aside, are that each boat can carry 16 missiles, with a minimum of three and a maxium of 10 independently targeted warheads. Each of the warheads is big enough to destroy a large city or, perhaps, a region - though many may be targetted at military bases as well.

The missles have in effect unlimited range, though they may depend on US communications and targeting satellites and therefore could not be used against the USA (who supplied the technology) and, possibly, can't be fired without US permission in the form of a 'dual key' control (this is a secret - Trident is in theory an 'independent' force under the non-proliferation treaty and so it could in theory be used against the USA, but nobody beleives that could ever happen).

The maximum number of cities which could in theory be destroyed by the Trident force is 640 and (unlike the putative N. Korean force) these missiles can hit everywhere on the planet. Experts estimate the UK in practice maintains 'only' 200 warheads which are ready to fire at any one time. Obviously in the run up to some sort of war, production could be increased towards capacity.

(My feeling is that dictators like having a few nuclear bombs and really big old fashioned missiles (the ones with tail fins and everything) because they look really great as the central attraction in the annual jack-boot military parade. Saddam used to have dozens of these riddiculous Jules Vernes rockets (Soviet Army Surplus Scuds) on display - look where they got him.)

I can only find statistics for the largest 300 cities in the world. The 300th largest is Detroit, with just under 1 million. The total population of these 300 cities is about 600 million people (but this includes many cities in the US and its NATO allies and SEATO allies, including the UK. The next 300 cities might have smaller populations than this.

It is reasonable to conclude that the UK Trident force alone could destroy every single town or settlement in a medium-sized country like Iran, for example, if it were used in this way. Even if Korea or Iran were able to manufacture hundreds of nuclear bombs, they would not have a weapons system (like Trident) to launch them in any great numbers. It is no good having a nuclear hand grenade. What counts are the missiles and the satellites to guide them. Only the Americans (and to a lesser extent now the Chinese and Indians - the Russians are falling way behind) have these. The Koreans would have to use crude rockets with internal guidance (like the clumsy Scuds used by Saddam in Gulf War One) these would land just anywhere and the effect would be more like a very bad nuclear accident than an effective military strike. Such a thing might kill a few million and be an attrocity of massive proportions, but it wouldn't knock the country out of the war. The whole thing about nuclear weapons is that the people you fire them at are really going to be very, very angry so you have to be very sure you are going to knock them out completely before hitting the button.

Getting back to the UK's Trident boats... I would guestimate the maximum number of people who could theorectically be killed instantly by the British nuclear force used to maxium effect would be about 1000,000,000 people - old, young, people in hospitals, refugees - all without discrimination - or about a quarter of the entire world population.

Of course many more would die later (including many in the UK itself) of radiation sickeness, disease, economic collapse, climate change (nuclear winter) stavation, preadation and infrastructure collapse. But Britain's nuclear bombs (which do exist) are not 'weapons of mass destruction'. Those are the facts, pretty much.