OVER 4,000 people filled Glasgow’s Freedom Square (aka George Square) on Saturday for the national Bairns Not Bombs rally, calling for the scrapping of Trident. Why are the three main London parties so gung-ho about spending £100 billion on a new fleet of nuclear submarines armed with city-busting Trident missiles? The answer lies not in Downing Street but in the White House and the Pentagon. As always, the UK is playing poodle to America.

The plain truth is the US military-industrial complex has embarked on a new submarine race with China and, to a lesser extent, Russia. Britain, as America’s long-time technological partner in nuclear submarine technology, is being dragged in to provide political cover and pay some of the costs. Welcome to the front row of a new Cold War.

Most folk think the US navy has dozens of Trident submarines at sea. Not so. Back in 1960s, when undersea nuclear deterrence began, the US could deploy 41 subs. But since the fall of the Iron Curtain and the latest economic crisis, the US Navy’s Trident ballistic missile fleet has shrunk to just 14 subs. These are very near the end of their operational lives. Such is the massive cost of designing and building replacements, America’s missile fleet is likely to shrink to 10. That’s not a lot compared to the UK’s four Trident subs. Now you know why the Pentagon needs Britannia on board.

Of course, every Trident sub is capable of firing 14 missiles, each equipped with multiple warheads. You could take out a lot of China with that firepower. But that’s not the point, politically. Nuclear subs are there to demonstrate imperial reach. America’s nuclear willy has to be bigger than anyone else’s, or it fails it in its task of projecting power.

But now the Chinese industrial powerhouse looks bent on out-building the US Navy. The People’s Liberation Army Navy is changing from being designed to guard the coast into an ocean armada. Key is construction of the new Jin-class ballistic nuclear submarines. Each will carry 12 JL-2 ballistic missiles with a range of 8000km. These missiles will let China target large portions of the United States for the first time. In January, the Chinese media claimed four Jin-class boats were operational. The US reckons as many as a dozen could be planned.

Submarines are only part of this new arms race. The rival capitalist powers (now including China and Russia) are modernising every strategic and tactical nuclear weapons system they have. Under Obama, the US national security establishment plans to upgrade all three legs of the nuclear triad of land-based missiles, submarine-launched missiles, and long-range bombers. The US nuclear modernisation program is forecast to cost some $355 billion over 10 years and $1 trillion over 30 years.

What drives this new nuclear arms race? Partly it is the new global instability, the product of a multipolar world of rival capitalist blocs very reminiscent of the Great Power era before the First World War. And partly it derives from America’s fear of losing its political hegemony – a status that lets it keep the almighty dollar as the world’s reserve currency, meaning US capitalism can print its way out of any economic crisis.

There’s also the issue that the success of American industry is based around a colossal high-tech defence sector. This monster needs constant feeding with new projects or its technological capacity will erode. That in particular has been driving the timetable for the new nuclear sub fleet. A decade ago, the RAND Corporation, the shadowy think tank behind a lot of US nuclear strategy, began lobbying hard for a new ballistic submarine fleet precisely to maintain America’s design capability and technological edge. This was well before Chinese naval expansion was drafted in as an excuse.

Enter the UK. Britain’s decision to replace Trident was made by the Labour government in December 2006, at the same time as America’s move in that direction. Then last year, the Tory-LibDem coalition quietly renewed Britain’s longstanding nuclear weapons co-operation treaty with the US, the so-called Mutual Defence Agreement, which dates back to 1958. The heart of this edition of the treaty is a deal to co-operate on designing warheads and reactors for the new generation of Trident subs.

The US could go it alone in submarine development, though it helps if the British taxpayer covers some of the ludicrous costs. The ultimate reason America maintains the Mutual Defence Agreement with Britain is political – to make sure the UK, as a junior partner, can never use its nukes independently of the White House. Every Lockheed Trident D5 missile at sea today is rented from the Pentagon. Royal Navy submarines must visit the US base in Kings Bay, Georgia for the maintenance and replacement of these missiles – so much for referendum scare stories about the strategic importance of Faslane.

Britain’s part in Trident 2 is now well under way. The UK Ministry of Defence used the Christmas parliamentary recess, with media attention elsewhere, to slip out news of its latest increase in spending on the project’s “assessment phase” – a euphemism to disguise the fact parliament has not technically approved the new subs. The MoD has sanctioned another £261 million of funding, £206m of which will be spent on new facilities at the BAE Systems shipyard at Barrow-in-Furness.

Britain is under heavy pressure from America to increase defence spending, as the new global arms race accelerates. George Osborne has played a blinder convincing folk the UK economy has recovered. But the truth is Britain is an industrial basket-case, with productivity falling and most “growth” generated by financial speculation, so the UK can’t afford its current military establishment, far less Trident 2. The MoD faces a 10 per cent real cut over the next five years. That should make scrapping Trident 2 a no-brainer. Alas, my guess is that even a minority Labour government will feel obliged to tow the Pentagon line. We’ve been here before: the Labour government of 1945 went ahead with a secret programme to create the original British nuclear arsenal, despite chronic economic austerity.

We will be told, of course, that Trident 2 is insurance in an unstable world. After all, didn’t a mutual balance of terror keep the peace in the long decades of the original Cold War? Actually, we came close to nuclear Armageddon a number of times – and that was with two players trying to second-guess each other. In a world with competing nuclear powers, someone is bound to push the button in a nuclear version of 1914. Which is why “bairns before bombs” makes profound sense.