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Chandigarh: The return of an impulsive Donald Trump to the US presidency has triggered quiet unease in London in recent months, over the resilience of Britain’s nuclear deterrent, as the Trident II D5 submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), responsible for delivering its warheads are not British-owned, but simply leased from Washington.

“With an unpredictable and increasingly erratic US President in the White House, Whitehall is growing nervous about Britain’s dependence on America for its nuclear arsenal,” the UK’s popular Sunday Observer reported earlier this week.

In her March 11 column, Rachel Sylvester highlighted how Trump had publicly humiliated UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently, over his refusal to full-heartedly back military action in Iran. Besides, the Greenland debacle, she said had cast fresh doubt over whether a shared alliance of values still prevailed between London and Washington – a situation that could directly jeopardise the over half-century-old SLBM deal.

At the heart of this anxiety lies a little-discussed, strikingly ironic and perversely awkward truth: Britain does not own the missiles responsible for delivering its indigenously developed nuclear warheads. And, for 52 years, the UK’s most powerful instruments of national security have effectively been leased from the US in an arrangement rooted in the celebrated Anglo-American “special relationship” dating back to the Second World War. But it is also an alliance that lays bare a borrowed capability, which successive British prime ministers have nevertheless hailed as the “independent bedrock” of the nation’s strategic stability and global power projection.

Britain designs and builds its nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) and manufactures warheads at the Atomic Weapons Establishment, but relies on Lockheed Martin–built Trident II D5 SLBMs to project its strategic deterrent worldwide. These missiles are stored, maintained and serviced at the US Naval Submarine Base at Kings Bay in Georgia, from which they are drawn whenever Royal Navy (RN) SSBNs require them for operational patrols.

This SLBM leasing arrangement is unique among the world’s nine nuclear weapon states, making Britain the only........

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