Rishi Sunak’s first official duty as Prime Minister of the UK is an incredibly grim one

On Oct 25, 2022

New Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has a lot of important things to deal with now that he’s leading the country.

But the first task for the 42-year-old father-of-two is not to deal with the cost-of-living crisis, to do undo the damage of his predecessor Liz Truss.

For Sunak, who is now also the leader of the Conservative Party having been voted in unopposed earlier this week, is actually going to write some very important letters.

Having had his position as Prime Minister ratified by King Charles, he returned to Downing Street to sit at his Prime Ministerial desk and pen letters to the commanding officers of the four British ballistic missile submarines the UK has, with the last resort instructions of what to do should a nuclear strike destroy the government.

Sunak’s first task will be to think about nuclear weapons
(Image: Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Each submarine has two letters – one carrying the instructions on how to open the safe-within-a-safe that the letters one it, while the second is from Rishi Sunak giving permission to use the nukes.

Once a Prime Minister is no longer contactable – and the entire government has been destroyed – the commanders at sea are essentially in charge and will use the nuclear deterrents to target those who blew up the government.

The letters are destroyed and renewed every time a Prime Minister leaves office and is replaced by another one.

The process is known as the Last Resort.

The nuclear deterrent letters are known as Last Resort
(Image: Getty Images)

Former Prime Minister Theresa May was once asked if she was willing to “authorise a nuclear strike that can kill 100,000 innocent men, women and children”.

In a very stoic fashion, she replied “Yes, the whole point of a deterrent is that our enemies need to know that we would be prepared to use it.”

Sunak has never said much about nuclear weapons, but in 2016 he voted to support replacing the four Trident nuclear missile submarines to maintain the UK’s continuous at sea nuclear deterrent.

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