PicoBlog

One aspect of Britain’s policy of nuclear deterrence has long fascinated me: the Letter of Last Resort. Since the late 1960s, Britain has maintained a fleet of four submarines, each equipped with several ballistic missiles with thermonuclear warheads. Of the four submarines, at least one is always deployed – for half a century, Britain has maintained its Continuous At Sea Deterrence.  

It functions, effectively, as a dead man’s switch: were Britain devastated by a nuclear first-strike, and its government decapitated, it could still launch a retaliatory strike. Which is where the Letter of Last Resort comes in. Upon assuming office, one of the first duties of the new Prime Minister is to write four copies of the same letter, all of which are sealed in an envelope and stored within a safe on each of the four submarines. If the deployed submarine commander is satisfied that a nuclear strike has destroyed their government, and much of civilian society – this is determined by a largely secret series of checks, but includes whether or not BBC 4 Radio is broadcasting – he or she will open the safe and then the letter. That letter may, or may not, authorise a retaliatory strike. Or it may leave the decision in the hands of the commander. Or it may order something else entirely, like requesting that the submarine offer itself to an ally’s command.  

We don’t know what they say, and after a Prime Minister leaves office, the envelopes – unopened – are removed, destroyed, and replaced with the latest. The following short story imagines a new Prime Minister trying to write one.

The Prime Minister had listened attentively, but was also careful to be seen to be listening attentively. The briefing was heavy, his duty grave, and on his first day in the job he did not want to accidentally suggest to his military advisors, with an involuntary wince or tactless grin, that he was either inadequately solemn or suspiciously anxious about his new authority. And so, as he was briefed about nuclear threats, contingencies and chain-of-command protocols, he paid attention to their words but also to his observable response to those words.

And in the seconds after they’d left his office, he thought he’d done well. That he’d succeeded in both intellectually grasping what was said, but also in appearing to possess a Churchillian poise while grasping it. There was no reason, he thought, that either of the advisors would have left his room thinking that their Prime Minister had not, as a basic matter of temperament, assumed a noble equilibrium between flippancy and awe when told he would have to write a letter dictating the use of annihilating weapons.  

But now, in the solitude afforded him to write the letter, he felt both his composure and intellectual confidence wobble. This was all very strange. First, to have this letter opened and its instructions enacted, would mean that he was dead, that his next in command was dead, that London was likely irradiated ash. But it would also likely mean – and he placed his pen down upon his desk now – that his family was dead too and, for that matter, most people he’d ever known.

Or would they be? Would there have been some warning? Might his family have found safe passage – to a bunker in Scotland, or a farm in New Zealand? Would a nuclear attack that decapitates his government necessarily be one that also renders millions dead and most of the country uninhabitable?

He thought again about his dead family, and then he thought about how his letter should perhaps be written without thinking about them. That a loftier view should be assumed, detached from feelings of vengeance, one which held in its gaze the families of millions which he could order destroyed by what he wrote now.

But the thought of his immolated family – or, worse, his family killed more slowly through burns or radiation sickness – proved very sticky, and to extricate himself from this unpleasant reverie he stood and walked to the window which overlooked his courtyard. And still he thought: I should like to avenge them.

The Prime Minister had stopped smoking regularly many years ago, and now kept himself to just one or two on New Year’s Eve. Sometimes special occasions called for a cigar, as when he became Prime Minister, but he was proud of upholding his rules of temperance. But now he opened his desk drawer, took out his emergency pack and lit one.

After a few drags, the Prime Minister found some relief from thoughts of his dead family and the urgency of vengeance. And he thought: this letter is absurd, right? Yes, it could trigger the use of profoundly destructive weapons. It could unleash nightmares and alter history. But – and the Prime Minister took a deep drag now, in concert with his thought – the value of this letter I’m about to write is entirely performative.

What’s important is that it exists, he thought, and that our enemies know that it exists. Less important is what’s contained within it, provided its contents remain secret and thus can generate perpetual ambiguity. Because the point of the letter is deterrence. The point is that there’s a dead man’s switch, and that this great kingdom’s capacity to retaliate with all the fury of God will not be harmed even if you kill me. Because, out there and always, will patrol the submarines of our King and they possess the power to launch black and righteous rain.

But the absurdity, the Prime Minister thought – and he was not happy with this notion – was that if deterrence was the great point of the letter, then if it ever needed to be opened then it had already failed. The threat of retaliation was tactically important, but what was retaliation’s value if the worst had already happened?

And so the Prime Minister now wondered: Should I authorise the destruction of whatever’s left of humanity? Most of the dead will be civilians. Can it be right to seek indiscriminate revenge with nuclear weapons? Or is it pathetic to turn the other cheek when we’re all dead? Might the precedent of retaliation be important in the centuries beyond – or would there no longer exist a civilisation to be chastened by the precedent?

The Prime Minister had initially thought that writing the letter would not take long, but he had now rung his secretary to delay his next meeting. He had moved on from thinking about his dead family, and was now stuck on recursively contemplating the worth/worthlessness of this letter. The fact of the letter mattered, but for its contents to be read meant that the letter had failed.

And so what did it matter what he wrote? He could scribble a cock and balls. And so long as Britain’s nuclear enemies never knew, it didn’t matter. Ambiguity was maintained. You have bad weapons, we have bad weapons, let’s not do anything stupid. It is enough for them to know that we can strike back, even in death.

But now another absurdity appeared to him. When certain predecessors wrote these letters, there was only one possible culprit for a nuclear attack on London. In fact, the co-ordinates for Moscow were programmed into the launch system. But today? There were nine states with nukes, many thousands of weapons, and the possibility of non-state actors acquiring them.

Well, this was an impossible situation, the Prime Minister thought: how can I authorise such power now for a future event of which I don’t know the circumstances or target? More pointedly, would the submarine commander know precisely where to launch the nukes? How might that commander know who was responsible? It’s possible that they do. It’s also possible that they don’t. The opening of the letter pre-supposes a profound breakdown of communication – given that, how might the commander know where to send the missiles? (Thirteen metres long; two metres in diameter; accurate to within metres.)

The Prime Minister lit a second cigarette, and called his secretary again to delay his next meeting by another half an hour. He wondered if he wasn’t indulgently spending his time here, but he was captive to the weird duality of the letter – between its absurdity and gravity – and he’d be damned if he didn’t spend a little more time trying to reconcile it.

Okay, he thought. The importance of this letter exists independently of me. It’s a bluff of sorts, and its power exists regardless of the contents of my letter… And this thought allowed the Prime Minister to briefly feel less besieged by the responsibility of having to write it.

And so the Prime Minister lit his third cigarette, and then began to write his letter.

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