‘Letters of last resort’

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Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s days are numbered. The United Kingdom will have a new Prime Minister by September. Less than 1% of the population - members of the Tory party - will make a choice between a multi-millionaire banker, Rishi Sunak, and the Johnson-supporting Liz Truss, the current Foreign Secretary. The general public will not have the opportunity of choosing between gangrene or the plague.

Harold Wilson was the last UK Prime Minister to enter office through victory in a General Election (October 1964) and to leave office through defeat in a General Election (June 1970). Is there a better measure of the long-term dysfunctionality of the UK’s democratic system than this? In fact, there is.

One of the first acts of Prime Minister Sunak or Truss will be to write four identical letters. They will write these letters in their own hand and will do so having been ‘indoctrinated’ by the Chief of the Defence Staff, who is tasked with explaining the damage that will be done by the detonation of a nuclear warhead.

These letters will be transported from No 10 Downing Street to the four nuclear-armed submarines in the Royal Navy. The letters will be locked in a safe to be opened in one circumstance only: loss of all contact and communication following a devastating attack on the United Kingdom. A ‘letter of last resort’ leaves instructions to the Captain and Commander of each submarine on how to respond in such a situation. By the time the letters are opened, it can be assumed that the person who wrote them will be dead. The Captain and Commander will have to decide whether or not to follow the instructions of a corpse.

There are a whole number of ‘grey areas’ around this process. The first of these is the fact that arrangements for briefing a new Prime Minister are not a matter of public knowledge. Will the new Prime Minister be given a series of options and asked to pick one, or are they permitted to decide their own? Will the Captain and Commander be asked to fire one or all of the nuclear missiles on the submarine? Will they be instructed to fire none at all? Who or what will be the target of such an attack? What is the legal position of the Captain and Commander? Is it illegal to disobey a dead person? If it is illegal, in what court will they be tried? There is a stench of the perverse around the whole procedure.

What of the risks associated with storing such letters aboard nuclear-armed submarines? What if a serious communications malfunction, the result of a design flaw or cyberwar, manifests? Are the Captain and Commander expected to carry on regardless or are they expected to crack open the safe?

It would be nice to imagine that the majority of those serving on nuclear-armed submarines would take a very cautious approach to any such situation. However, when it comes to the prospect of nuclear war something firmer than hope is required.

What of Mr Johnson’s letters? Will they be deposited in a memorial library, the Ministry of Defence Archives or his personal filing cabinet? No. The letters will be destroyed, as will be the letters of whoever comes next at the appropriate time.

Of all the dimensions of grim stupidity that combine into nuclear doctrine, the ‘letters of last resort’ must rank up there with the grimmest and most stupid of all. The next UK Prime Minister will be faced with spiralling cost of living, a crisis in the health service, the consequences of pandemic, looming recession, hungry children, poverty and much else. The priority on day one will not be feeding the hungry, housing the homeless or caring for the vulnerable: it will be to decide how to contribute to the total extinction of life on planet earth by way of a letter that will only be read when the poor, homeless and vulnerable - along with the rest of us, Prime Minister or not - are already a heap of ashes.