| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The future of the United Kingdom's nuclear arsenal is in the hands of 4.1 million Scottish voters who go to the polls Sept. 18 to decide whether to end the country's 307-year union with England and become an independent country.
If the ballot proposal is approved, the ruling pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP) has pledged to evict the UK fleet of four nuclear-armed submarines from the naval base at Faslane on Scotland's west coast by 2020. Having no comparable submarine base, the UK government would then face expensive choices about how to maintain its exclusively sea-based nuclear force.
"It would be an enormous exercise to reproduce the facilities elsewhere," the UK Ministry of Defence said in an October 2013 analysis of Scottish independence. "It would cost billions of pounds and take many years."
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