Britain will play a bigger role in a security pact with the US to provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines than it thought 18 months ago, when the country began negotiating the Aukus treaty, according to several people familiar with the deal.
Rishi Sunak, the British prime minister, told his colleagues on Wednesday that the so-called Aukus talks had been a success for the UK, with one minister noting that “the deal was definitely done”.
“The prime minister was buzzing about when he said the minister, smiling and bouncing on the balls of his feet,” added the minister.
Sunak, US president Joe Biden and Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese will unveil the deal in San Diego on Monday.
First announced in 2021, the Aukus pact is intended to help Australia secure nuclear-powered submarines as part of a wider push to counter China’s military might that will also require the three countries to work together in areas such as hypersonic weapons.
The announcement on Monday is expected to include details on the design of the submarine as well as how and where the ship will be built.
Early indications have suggested that Australia will choose a US design based on the current Virginia class or a British design based on the Astute submarines.
However, new attention has shifted to whether the submarine will be based on a variant of Britain’s design for the next generation of submarines, which will replace the Astute class.
Industry sources on Wednesday would only say it would be a “hybrid” platform based on a “pragmatic” design. Military experts say the submarines will rely on US combat systems and weapons.
Negotiators have been at pains to agree a deal that will allow all members of the pact to claim some kind of victory.
A Downing Street aide said it could not “prevent future announcements”.
One of the big questions about the deal is how the US and UK, both of which have limited submarine building capacity, will be able to build a program that will help Australia without reducing their own domestic industrial capacity.
In January, Jack Reed, the Democratic chairman of the Senate armed services committee, and his then-Republican counterpart Jim Inhofe wrote to the Biden administration warning of the need to ensure that the US submarine industrial base does not reach a “breaking point”.
Both senators said they were concerned that plans to help the US and its allies operate in the Indo-Pacific could become a “zero-sum game” for scarce resources.
“There is no reserve submarine capacity to carry out exports or add more customers. The UK and the US are in the heat of sending their own programs,” said Nick Childs, senior fellow for naval and maritime security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
“For everyone involved there will be a lot of demand to recruit and engage on an industrial basis as well as on the operational side,” added Childs.
BAE Systems, which builds all submarines for the Royal Navy at its Barrow-in-Furness site in Cumbria, north-west England, is building the last two Astute-class vessels, out of a total of seven, for Britain.
Ben Wallace, British defense secretary, said in January the UK will increase the number of jobs in Barrow from 10,000 to 17,000 people to fulfill the two Dreadnought programs to carry out the country’s nuclear deterrent and the next generation design after Astutes.
In the US, General Dynamics Electric Boat, which builds the Columbia and Virginia class submarines, employs fewer than 20,000 people. The US group has 17 Virginia-class submarines in its backlog scheduled for delivery until 2032.
Reporting by Jim Pickard, Sylvia Pfeifer, Demetri Sevastopulo, John Paul Rathbone