The UK government says all Royal Navy submarines will be based at Faslane by 2017 - supporting 8,000 jobs - and there are are no plans to move the nuclear deterrent. Defence Secretary Philip Hammond has said any alternative solution would come at huge cost and take decades.
Problems with Devonport:
Devonport Dockyard in Plymouth - the biggest private-sector employer in Devon and Cornwall - is the main nuclear repair and refuelling facility for the Royal Navy.
It is also home to the Trafalgar-class submarines, which will be moved to Faslane by 2017.
The port’s size - the largest naval base in Western Europe covers more than 650 acres and has 15 dry docks, 25 tidal berths and five basins - and familiarity with submarines has led some to believe Devonport might be the best option for an alternative location for Trident.
However, the Royal United Services Institute’s Malcolm Chalmers says even though - time and expense allowing - Devonport might work as an alternative to Faslane, it couldn’t recreate Coulport.
Coulport possesses a huge floating dock where warheads are placed inside the missiles, 3km from the small village of Garelochhead on one side and the small village of Ardentinny on the other, Westminster’s Scottish Affairs Committee heard in 2012. Any new warhead storage facility would need similar distances from population centres for loading and offloading warheads from missiles.
Problems with Milford haven:
In 2012 Wales’s Labour First Minister Carwyn Jones said the UK’s nuclear-armed submarines and jobs associated with it would be “more than welcome” in Wales if they left Scotland. The remark that was met with an angry response from Plaid Cymru politicians and activists who cited safety risks.
When the original shortlist was drawn up for basing Trident’s predecessor Polaris in the 1960s, Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire was one of the candidates.
The Welsh site is an attractive option because it is a natural deep-water port. But In the 1960s Esso had just established an oil refinery in the town and the MoD decided the two were incompatible on safety grounds, according to William Walker, one of the authors of Uncharted Waters: The UK Nuclear Weapons and the Scottish Question.
“The dangers of handling and storing high explosives near major oil facilities ruled it out. Imagine a big submarine colliding with a tanker. It’s common sense - even if there is a low probability, the consequences could be horrific,” he says.
Nowadays the town’s economic and industrial output makes that line of thinking even more tricky. The haven is home to two liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities and handles 30% of the UK’s gas supply. It also hosts two oil refineries and will soon have a new power station.
Dr Nick Ritchie, a lecturer in international security at the University of York, says it’s inconceivable that the MoD would allow LNG plants and oil refineries to stay open if Trident was relocated to Milford Haven.
And he says closing the refineries and petrochemical plants would have “a pretty significant economic impact”.
Problems with Barrow in Furness, France and the USA are also considered. All involve major disruption and expense.
And the article concludes with an analysis of the possibility of it staying in Scotland:
The Scottish government says it is committed to removing Trident if it becomes independent and maintains it would not negotiate with the UK in exchange for concessions on other issues such as national debt and currency union (the UK government has ruled out the latter anyway).
But Ron Smith says there would be considerable pressure within an independent Scotland to do a deal and create a type of Sevastopol military enclave as Ukraine did, before Russia took over the Crimea.
The UK would be under pressure to do a deal too because even if it was feasible to replace the Clyde naval bases - “and it’s not clear that it is” - it would be incredibly expensive and time consuming, he says.
But Ritchie thinks the scenario is unlikely. “The SNP has staked its political credibility on getting rid of Trident - it’s unlikely to concede. The MoD would also find it very uncomfortable to have the UK’s nuclear deterrent in another country, even if it was a sovereign UK territory,” he says.
Earlier this year, First Minister Alex Salmond, leader of the SNP, ruled out the prospect of a “Cyprus-style” leaseback scheme. Chalmers says this is a distraction. “A sovereign base area would be UK territory, but a foreign base is different. The SNP has already conceded four years of basing to 2020, so there is no point of principle in extending this for some more years,” he says.