Britain confirms plan to build 12 new nuclear attack subs

The Defence Investment Plan commits the UK to building up to twelve next-generation SSN-AUKUS attack submarines, the same boats Australia will build, with steel to be cut on the first at Barrow next year.

The plan committed the United Kingdom to building “up to 12 next-generation SSN-AUKUS” boats, nuclear-powered but conventionally armed, describing them as the same submarines Australia will also build and saying steel would be cut on the first of them next year.

The class, known in Britain as the SSN-A, will replace the Royal Navy’s seven Astute-class boats from the late 2030s and form the backbone of the country’s hunter-killer submarine force for decades to come.

The submarine sits at the heart of AUKUS, the security partnership between the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia under which the three nations are helping Australia acquire a nuclear-powered submarine fleet of its own, and the SSN-AUKUS design is based on the British successor to the Astute that has been adapted to take in American and Australian technology. Australia plans to build up to five of the same boats at Osborne in South Australia, having also arranged to buy three American Virginia-class submarines to bridge the gap until its own yard is running, which makes the design one of the most significant industrial undertakings the three countries have attempted together.

The British boats will be built by BAE Systems at Barrow-in-Furness, with the nuclear reactors made by Rolls-Royce at its Raynesway site in Derby, the same yards that build the Dreadnought ballistic-missile submarines and that are being expanded to cope with the workload, and the government is aiming in time to complete a new submarine roughly every eighteen months.

At its peak the programme is expected to sustain tens of thousands of jobs across the United Kingdom, and it forms one strand of a wider international approach in the plan that also takes in the £8.6 billion Global Combat Air Programme with Italy and Japan. Alongside the submarines, the plan said the United Kingdom would invest in weapons and sensors for underwater drones as what it called the signature project under the second pillar of AUKUS, the strand of the partnership concerned with advanced technologies such as autonomy, artificial intelligence and undersea systems rather than with the submarines themselves.