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A replacement for Britain's Trident nuclear deterrent will become highly contentious at the next general election after the Liberal Democrats confirmed that they will campaign for an alternative and the SNP rejected the presence of "weapons of mass destruction in our waters".
The divisions were highlighted on Sunday when Philip Hammond, the defence secretary, confirmed a £1bn contract to refurbish the Rolls-Royce plant in Derby to build reactors for the next generation of nuclear submarines. The plant will build two reactors – one to power the replacement for the Vanguard submarines, which carry the Trident deterrent, and a second to power the Astute-class attack submarines.
The announcement is consistent with the coalition agreement in which the Tories and the Lib Dems disagreed over a replacement for Britain's nuclear deterrent. The Tories are committed to maintaining the "continuous-at-sea deterrent" (CASD) in which at least one of Britain's four submarines carrying ballistic missiles is able to launch a strike at any time.
The Lib Dems support a nuclear deterrent. But the coalition agreement allowed the Lib Dems to examine alternatives to what they dub the "Moscow" option which allows Britain to launch a nuclear strike at the Russian capital at any time on any day or night of the year.
The coalition partners have agreed to delay the so-called "maingate" decision – the irreversible decision to replace the continuous deterrent – until 2016, a year after the election. Hammond told the Sunday Politics on BBC1: "We're carrying on with the government's policy. We're doing everything that is in the critical path to make sure that when we get to 2016 we can make that decision and all the long lead items will have been ordered."
Sir Menzies Campbell, the former Lib Dem leader, said Hammond's announcement did not change the coalition agreement. "The position of the Liberal Democrats before the last general election was that the cost of a like-for-like replacement of Trident was so great that it was necessary to examine alternatives," he told the BBC.
"That [review] is not affected by this announcement. Even if there was no Trident submarine programme we would still have had to upgrade these facilities [at Derby] in order to ensure that the reactor cores for the Astute-class … were being properly constructed and in a safe environment."
Nick Harvey, the Lib Dem armed forces minister, is in charge of examining alternatives to the continuous nuclear deterrent. One Lib Dem proposal would put a smaller nuclear missile on cruise missiles in the Astute-class submarines.
The difference between the Tories and the Lib Dems means that the coalition partners are likely to go into the next election with different pledges on the nuclear deterrent.
The SNP rejects the nuclear deterrent outright. Angus Robertson, the SNP's defence spokesman, said: "People in Scotland do not want Trident. Church leaders, the Scottish Trades Union Council, the Scottish government and Scotland's parliament are all against weapons of mass destruction being in our waters.
"Despite this the UK government is prepared to spend £1bn of taxpayers' money on a needless programme and then expect the people of Scotland to accept weapons of mass destruction being dumped here. What Scotland needs is a government close to home making decisions based on what the people of Scotland actually wants. Only an independent Scotland can deliver this."
