David Edgerton: "Boris Johnson might break up the UK. That’s a good thing."

I found this piece incredible insightful, actually, and I agree with @Greg that this is one of the first optimistic pieces I've seen regarding post-Brexit realities. One paragraph (although minor to the essay's thesis) that stuck out to me was:

Freed from the grip of the decayed British nation and British state, England could finally be done with its delusions of grandeur. Fanciful beliefs about British importance in the world would crumble. England would be only around the eighth-largest economy in the world. And it would probably have to give up its nuclear weapons — the United Kingdom’s nuclear submarine base is in Scotland.

What would happen to the UK's nuclear arsenal if the union dissolved? I had never considered this before. My gut instinct is that it would be weird for an independent Scotland to have a nuclear arsenal, but it's also not clear that they would, or should, repatriate them to England in that event. Because they aren't England's either, they are the UK's. The closest parallel would be what happened to the USSR's nuclear arsenal after its 1991 collapse - satellite states returned the weapons to Russia, which either dismantled them for civilian reactors or else kept them. So maybe they would be sent back to England and remain under the control of Westminster.