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Mr. Savidge: I intervened on the hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith) precisely because of that particular view on the Republican side of the Senate. Although I was concerned when the hon. Gentleman mentioned the Soviet Union, I now realise that he simply made a slip of the tongue and was not wishing to be identified with that particular Republican view.
Mr. Anderson: I shall conclude my speech speedily.
The world is very different now from what it was in 1989, and the pressures in the defence sphere are wholly changed. We have now to consider matters such as flexibility, inter-operability, new alliances and new forms of threat. In every way, we shall have to be creative in adjusting to those changes.
The right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife dealt with the concept of intervention for humanitarian purposes. I am glad that the United Kingdom is seeking to build a consensus in the United Nations on the conditions in which such interventions might occur.
However, I think that there will never be such a consensus. National interests--particularly those of China in Tibet, and those of Russia in Chechnya and the other Caucasus republics--will ensure that there is no consensus on the matter in the United Nations. Nevertheless, the search is worth while.Sir Winston Churchill frequently made the point that the Chinese character denoting crisis was actually composed of two characters, one designating danger and the other opportunity. Dangers there are aplenty, and they will arise in different forms--such as weapons of mass destruction, new forms of terrorism, ease of access to chemical and biological weapons, and the types of weapons that have been used in the Tokyo underground. Putting aside the threat of ballistic missiles, it is easy for a terrorist to operate in a city street or for a ship to approach the United States coast and penetrate its proposed defence shield. It would be far cheaper to try to civilise North Korea than to develop weaponry that may be wholly destabilising and serves only a domestic political purpose.
Those are some of the dangers. However, opportunities, too, are available--to adjust to a new role, not to be stuck in the past, and creatively to try with our allies to create a safer world.
4.33 pm
Sir John Stanley (Tonbridge and Malling): It seems to be my allotted station in the House to follow in the wake of my Foreign Affairs Committee colleague, the hon. Member for Swansea, East (Mr. Anderson), and I am delighted to do so once again. I wish to raise four issues and shall endeavour to make the shortest speech so far in the debate. I want briefly to deal with nuclear proliferation, particularly in relation to Russia; the American national missile defence programme; biological weapons; and the land mines convention.
Like the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell), I was very encouraged, and indeed somewhat surprised, by the events that have occurred in recent weeks in Moscow. Those of us who went to Moscow in the months after the ending of the Kosovo war and spoke to a wide range of political opinion in Russia were left in no doubt whatever about the vitriolic sense of injustice among a complete cross-section of political opinion in Moscow about NATO's involvement in the Kosovo war. Although I regard that sense of injustice as being wholly misplaced, one could not in any way deny the strength of feeling against NATO at that time. The feeling seemed to be very prejudicial to the likelihood of the Duma's ratification of START 2 or the comprehensive test ban treaty.
It is excellent that, in the past few weeks, those two crucial arms control treaties have been ratified by the Duma. That action puts in even more disappointing relief the failure of the United States Senate, so far, to ratify the CTBT. However, ratification by the Russians of those two very important arms control treaties still leaves some very major nuclear proliferation issues in relation to Russia.
The first issue that I want to address is that created by the quite staggering scale of the stockpile of nuclear fissile material still inside Russia. With other Foreign Affairs Committee members, I was fortunate quite recently to be briefed on the matter by the senior official responsible in the United States Department of Energy. Although I
cannot recall whether the figures, in metric tonnes, that we were given on the size of the stockpile were classified, simply to illustrate the scale of the remaining problem I shall deal with the matter in terms of cost. The public figure for the estimated cost of converting the Russian plutonium stockpile into mixed oxide fuel is estimated to be $1.5 billion. On top of that is the whole issue of the destruction of Russia's highly enriched uranium.Not unreasonably, the US Government feel that, as the whole of western security is involved in trying to remove that stockpile, or at least certainly in reducing it very substantially indeed, Europe should be making some contribution towards the cost. I think that that is a very reasonable proposition, as the issue relates directly to our own security. I should be grateful if the Minister, in his reply, could give us any view that he can on whether the British Government, with our European NATO partners and European Union member partners, are willing to contemplate making a contribution to the cost of the conversion of plutonium into mixed oxide fuel, which entails de-weaponising it. Are the British Government prepared to make such a contribution and to seek one from our European partners?
The second aspect of proliferation from Russia to which I should like to refer is the still acute danger of nuclear material being smuggled out of Russia. Although that material is probably not in fissile form, it could perhaps be so converted. On that, I noticed a very disturbing and considerably detailed report in The Sunday Telegraph on 23 April on the interception of 10 lead-lined containers being moved from Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan. The containers were intercepted after being detected as radioactive. The incident certainly raises the issue of the danger of nuclear material being smuggled out.
The US Administration have been very exercised about the issue and have given practical help in making available to several customs authorities in those areas portable devices for detecting radioactivity. I should be grateful if the Minister would tell us what action the British Government are taking to try to assist the Americans and our other NATO allies in helping the Russian Government with the very serious problem of the illegal leaching out of potential nuclear materials, some of which, it is reported, may be on their way to terrorist groups, such as that of bin Laden.
I want to deal with the United States national missile defence programme, which has been referred to, rightly, by almost every speaker in the debate so far. It is a dominant defence policy issue in the United States and deserves to be given a higher profile here as it is a major defence and arms control issue.
There has been some attempt inside the US Administration and elsewhere to represent this as a relatively minor modification to the existing ABM treaty. The phase 1 plan of the NMD could be construed as a relatively minor modification. It is a transfer of the American entitlement of 100 ABM interceptors, as allowed under the treaty, from the national capital to Alaska. However, phase 1 is a prelude to phase 2, on which we received a valuable briefing in Washington. Phase 2 involves, in numerical and geographical deployment terms, much more widespread deployment of ABM interceptors. As I have said, phase 1 of NMD could be presented as a modification of the existing treaty, but
there is no doubt that phase 2 effectively means a tearing up of the existing treaty and having no treaty at all, or putting in place a fundamentally different one.
Sir Geoffrey Johnson Smith (Wealden): Does that include the United States sharing the use of Fylingdales with us? Would that mean tearing up the ABM treaty? I would have thought not.
Sir John Stanley: Phase 1 involves a material modification of the existing treaty which, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Wealden (Sir G. Johnson Smith) knows, allows the deployment of 100 interceptors around the two national capitals. The major modification is represented by the Americans being allowed to transfer their allocation to Alaska. As I understand it, phase 2 would be quite different. It would involve a much greater number of interceptors being deployed much more widely in the continental United States. I will come to the Fylingdales dimension in a moment.
In his opening speech, the Secretary of State set out the Government's position on NMD. I listened carefully to him and he exposed a fundamental contradiction in the Government's position. That has been revealed clearly in the different way that questions have been answered by Foreign Office Ministers and Defence Ministers. For example, the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the hon. Member for Leicester, East (Mr. Vaz), answered a question on 11 April on the Government's position on NMD and said:
- We have made it clear to both sides that we wish to see the anti-ballistic missile treaty preserved.--[Official Report, 11 April 2000; Vol. 348, c. 185.]
Remarkably, my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (Mr. Key) was given a different view in an answer from the Secretary of State for Defence on 21 March. My hon. Friend asked
- what recent discussions his Department has had with the United States regarding a European-wide ballistic missile defence system.
- We will continue to consult closely with the US and take account of the work they are doing, to help us take an informed decision on whether to acquire such a capability ourselves in the future.--[Official Report, 21 March 2000; Vol. 346, c. 491W.]
On Fylingdales, there is a direct and inescapable British involvement in the NMD issue because, for NMD to proceed, including phase one, there will need to be a major software upgrade at Fylingdales. I thought that the Secretary of State was being disingenuous this afternoon
when he said, blandly, from the Dispatch Box that we had received no approach from the United States about Fylingdales. The use of Fylingdales has been announced in any number of US Government press releases, and MOD and Foreign Office officials in Washington have been discussing with the US Administration the Fylingdales dimension. It would be surprising if they had not, given that it is in the public domain in the United States, as it is here. For the Secretary of State to say that we have received no approach and that, therefore, it is not an issue for us is not fair to the House.Open and active dialogue is taking place now and the Government will have to decide whether they are prepared to tell the Americans that they cannot do the software upgrade, or that they will turn a blind eye while they get on with it, or that they can go ahead because it will be useful for us and will enable us to keep open the option of Europeanwide ballistic missile deployment. Those will be the policy issues and the Government cannot shirk them.
On biological weapons, I agree with what was said by the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife. As we move ahead in the 21st century, of the three forms of weapons of mass destruction--nuclear, chemical and biological--it is biological weapons that give me the greatest concern and fear for the future. As we all know, biological weapons are relatively easy to manufacture and are extremely difficult to detect. They have relative ease of delivery and their capacity to kill on a vast scale is appalling. On that issue, I believe that the Government have been right to be more explicit and detailed than any previous Government. It is a serious issue and although, understandably, successive previous Governments, both Conservative and Labour, have been worried about causing public anxiety, it is incumbent upon the Government, given the degree of risk, to say something officially about the dangers.
I need go no further than what the Foreign Secretary said in the context of Iraq in the paper that he placed in the Library on 4 February 1998. That unclassified paper said:
- One hundred kilogrammes of anthrax released from the top of a tall building in a densely populated area could kill up to three million people.
I was amazed when the Secretary of State said that home defence is no longer an issue. Perhaps he was thinking of the second world war Home Guard, but to suggest that the need for home defence has disappeared is, frankly, extraordinary. I hope that he will clarify what he meant.
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