UK defence in 2025: Integrated air and missile defence
What air defence capabilities does the UK have to protect the UK homeland and what did the recent Strategic Defence Review say?

Croatia has nearly finished the process of joining the EU: if all goes according to plan it will become the EU’s 28th Member State on 1 July 2013.
Croatia: the closing stages of EU accession (152 KB , PDF)
Croatia has nearly finished the process of joining the EU: if all goes according to plan it will become the EU’s 28th Member State on 1 July 2013.
The accession negotiations took just over ten years, encountering problems with a border dispute, corruption, refugee returns and war crimes prosecutions. With Croatia, the European Commission and the Member States were keen to avoid the conditional accession that led to post-accession monitoring of Bulgaria and Romania, and so introduced a detailed new negotiating ‘chapter’ on judiciary and fundamental rights.
The European Parliament approved Croatia’s accession treaty on 1 December 2011. Croatia and all 27 EU Member States will sign it on 9 December. The treaty will then go through each state’s domestic ratification processes: Croatia is likely to hold a referendum at the beginning of 2012, but no other Member State (including the UK) is expected to hold a referendum on Croatia’s accession. The European Commission will continue to monitor Croatia’s progress in certain key areas but the consequences of a negative report are not clear.
The signing of Croatia’s accession treaty comes at a time when Croatia has just voted in a new government. In parliamentary elections on 4 December 2011 a centre-left led coalition defeated the centre-right party that had governed Croatia almost continuously since the country’s 1991 independence. The new government will have to deal with a bleak economic situation and tackle the corruption that is still a major problem for Croatia.
Croatia may well be the last country to join the EU for some years.
Croatia: the closing stages of EU accession (152 KB , PDF)
What air defence capabilities does the UK have to protect the UK homeland and what did the recent Strategic Defence Review say?
This paper briefly examines the UK's nuclear weapons policies, capabilities and programmes. It is one paper in a larger series on the nuclear weapon states.
The leadership of the Republika Srpska, the majority-Serb territory within Bosnia and Herzegovina, is threatening secession. This could endanger the peace agreement that ended the conflict of the early 1990s.