Name: The home of Britain’s Trident nuclear weapons is at risk — and climate change is to blame
Uploaded: 2021-11-19T17:56:29.000Z
Duration: 12 min 45 s
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It's a military naval base in Scotland, and it's best known for

being home to the United Kingdom's four nuclear-armed submarines located here.

One submarine is always on patrol to provide a constant at-sea deterrent.

A recent report found that this area in red, which covers much of the base,

is at risk of flooding due to rising sea levels and storm surges.

If true, it would make flooding the biggest threat to the U.K.'s national security.

Behind me is the home of four Vanguard-class submarines.

They're armed with thermonuclear warheads, and together, 

they form the United Kingdom's nuclear deterrent.

The U.K. Ministry of Defence says their purpose is to discourage 

the most significant dangers to British national security.

But the deterrent may be under threat, not from an enemy nation

or a terrorist group, but from climate change.

No environmental disaster touches more people than flooding

and climate change projections indicate it's only going to get worse.   

Between 2000 and 2018, at least 255 million people were directly affected

by a large flooding event. The proportion of the global 

population affected by flooding increased by about 20 percent between 2000 and 2015.

That's 58 to 86 million more people experiencing the devastation of

Southeast Asia, home to many low-lying urban areas,

has the highest concentration of population exposed to floods by far.

Outside of Asia, the U.K. is one of the most vulnerable regions, 

with six million people at risk of floods.

The U.K.'s Environment Agency recently stated that even if the country hits its net-zero targets by 2050,

summer temperatures will get up to 7.4˚C hotter, rainfall in winter will increase by 59%, 

and sea-level events that used to happen once every century

The key issue that we all cumulatively face is climate change.

And in that sense, it poses the kinds of problems that past politics and past

military strategies seem unable to resolve.

Paul Dorfman is a senior research fellow at

University College London's energy institute and founder of the Nuclear Consulting Group.

He's written a report on the climate's impact on the U.K.'s nuclear military.

All of the models or predictions, all of the analysis, all of the data

It's good that people are taking notice, but it's bad that this new data, is showing us that we

According to the report, coastal flooding

frequency is estimated to increase by a factor of between 10 and more than

make up more than eleven and a half thousand miles of coastline.

One small but important stretch of that coastline is located 25 miles

northwest of the city of Glasgow. Her Majesty's Naval Base Clyde, located

at Faslane, is the headquarters of the Royal Navy in Scotland,

as well as the home port for the U.K.'s nuclear deterrent fleet.

The base was first used during the second world war, but it was only when the U.S.

and the U.K. signed a missile systems agreement in the 1960s, during the height of the Cold War,

developed since then, and what is its relevance in today's world?

Professor Andrew Futter is Director of Research for Politics and International

Relations at the University of Leicester.

By the end of the 1950s, and particularly the 1960s, there was a move, certainly in

the U.K. to rely much more on submarines as the main way of deploying nuclear weapons.

Simply because submarines were seen as the most secure and safe way to house them.

If you have a nuclear-powered, very quiet, nuclear-powered submarine

on patrol hidden in the depths of the ocean somewhere,

it is very hard for an adversary to target it to strike it to knock it out.

Therefore, there is always the risk if somebody attacks you that you can retaliate.

I think Faslane and Scotland became a site of choice initially because

it would be used by the United States and their submarine force as a base in Europe.

But it has a number of very useful natural advantages.

There are a number of different ways to get out to the ocean very quickly, which makes

it very hard for an adversary that wants to track or find those submarines to do so.   

But some believe, the force's biggest adversary today is climate change.

This is an aerial map of a sea inlet called Gare Loch and HMNB Clyde.

The blue area is the current waterbody, but by 2050,

this additional area in red would also be below the water level.

This would mean that a number of fixed jetties, submarine infrastructures,

an oil depot and several other buildings would be below water.

Faslane is not the only Royal Navy base under threat.

Across Gare Loch is the Royal Naval Armaments Depot Coulport,

where they process and store nuclear warheads.

Some of the base's support facilities would be exposed to flooding by 2050.   

Sellafield on the Cumbrian coast is Europe's largest nuclear site and holds 

the world's biggest stockpile of untreated nuclear waste.

Next-generation nuclear-powered Dreadnaught

submarines are being built at a shipyard in Barrow-in-Furness.

The naval base Devonport Royal Dockyard is the Navy's sole nuclear repair and refueling facility.

And the Rosyth Dockyard on the east coast of Scotland is primarily used to

dismantle and decommission nuclear submarines.

The near term risk is not simply sea level rise

but a thing called storm surge, which is when certain atmospheric conditions happen.

It makes the sea level itself rise, and then rush on to the land.

that these places are surprisingly vulnerable, and will be of no help at all.

According to the Global Extreme Sea-Level Analysis, the magnitude and frequency of

extreme sea levels which cause storm surges and catastrophic flooding has accelerated worldwide.

A storm surge is an abnormal rise in water generated by, you guessed it, a storm.

And when a storm surge coincides with typical high tides,

it can result in huge storm tides reaching up to 20 feet or more.

But is this the case for Faslane, one of the most highly protected areas in the country?

I went to Brunel University to meet Dr. Phil Collins, an expert in geology & geotechnical

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The home of Britain’s Trident nuclear weapons is at risk — and climate change is to blame

vulnerable

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