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Nuclear Global Threat

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Kemp.]

9 pm

Llew Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab): The Government's opposition to weapons of mass destruction was given as the reason for going to war with Iraq. Those weapons did not exist in Iraq, but they exist in Israel, and not only does Israel have weapons of mass destruction; it has the ultimate weapon of mass destruction—nuclear weapons. Indeed, it has 200 nuclear warheads. However, there is no talk, and quite rightly so, of any kind of war with Israel, partly, one would have thought, because of its weapons of mass destruction, partly because it daily invades its neighbour, Palestine, and partly because it daily treats UN resolutions with contempt. Obviously, our Government are selective in their opposition to weapons of mass destruction: they are okay as far as Israel is concerned, but they are certainly not okay as far as Iraq is concerned.

The threat of weapons of mass destruction, and in particular of atomic and nuclear weapons, has been with us since 1945, and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the tragedy that went with that and the tragedy that followed it, with the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians and, probably, a similar number of injuries. On some of the anniversaries of those bombings a message has come from the Japanese people: "Step back and learn from us." Sadly, we have failed to act on that message, which the Japanese people wanted to be not only heard but acted on.

Sadly, too, the Government are refusing to support some of the peacemakers, the people who have had the good sense and the courage to warn of nuclear proliferation and its threat to this planet. In particular I think of Mordechai Vanunu, who for the past 18 years has been rotting away in an Israeli jail. His crime, if crime is the right word, and it certainly is not, was telling the truth about Israel's nuclear capability when all around him were lying.

We are also selective in our opposition to weapons of mass destruction, and in particular nuclear weapons, when we consider our own position. I am not saying that the Secretary of State of Defence has learned to love nuclear weapons, but he has accepted the need to use them in certain circumstances. I remember him saying a while back:

"The United Kingdom would, in the right conditions, in extreme circumstances of self-defence, be prepared to use nuclear weapons."—[Official Report, 10 April 2002; Vol. 383, c. 30W.]

For me, there are no conditions and no circumstances that would justify the use of nuclear weapons. Pressing that button would, for a number of reasons, be the ultimate act of madness.

Nuclear weapons are madness because they are a total waste of money. Trident alone has cost the United Kingdom in the region of £15 billion, and the annual cost of operating those weapons is in the region of £280 million. It is madness to use that money on such a weapon when it could be spent for far more socially useful purposes, such as providing some of the services that for many years people took for granted. If we stopped spending money on nuclear warheads, we

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could, for example, use it to return to the old socialist principle of free higher education or, indeed, provide more decent pensions for our senior citizens—the list of uses is endless.

Our nuclear industry involves another financial cost. On 2 July 2002, the Department of Trade and Industry announced that the clean-up liability for the civil nuclear industry was about £48 billion, and rising. The Ministry of Defence has not revealed the equivalent figure for the military today, but hopefully the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Mr. Rammell), will provide the House with such information when he replies to our debate.

There is one cost that I would welcome, but which the Government have failed to meet—proper compensation for the atomic veterans and their families for the suffering caused by events many years ago. It is estimated that the United States spent $3 trillion between 1940 and 1995 on a possible nuclear war. Annually, it spends $27 billion on preparations for such a war. Those figures do not include the costs of environmental clean-ups.

Another act of madness is the waste of skills, talents and creativity in the design and production of nuclear weapons. Imagine what could be achieved if we transferred those skills from military to civilian use. How much more dignified life could be for many more people. The greatest act of madness is the fact that nuclear weapons would kill not only our so-called enemy but our supporters. Ironically, they would kill the people who designed and produced them. Not only would they kill the enemy, our own people and the people who designed and produced those weapons of war but they would kill civilisation as we know it. They would literally cost us the earth.

That is not just my opinion, but the opinion of many eminent statespeople. Many years ago, the former US President Jimmy Carter argued:

"In an all-out nuclear war, more destructive power than in all of World War II would be unleashed every second during the long afternoon it would take for all the missiles and bombs to fall.


A World War II every second—more people killed in the first few hours than all the wars of history put together. The survivors, if any, would live in despair amid the poisoned ruins of a civilisation that had committed suicide."

Khrushchev expressed similar sentiments, when he said that after a nuclear war

"the survivors would envy the dead".

President Carter made his statement more than 20 years ago, and our capacity to destroy our beautiful planet has increased dramatically in the intervening period. No individual or Government has the moral right to agree to the use of nuclear weapons. We have no moral right to take away from our children the opportunity to experience the many beautiful things on our planet. We have no right to take away from them the opportunity to avoid the mistakes of our generation or to achieve something good with their lives. But that is what we would be doing if we ever agreed, as the Secretary of State for Defence has agreed, to use nuclear weapons in certain circumstances.

The use of nuclear weapons would be not just an act of madness, but an act of hypocrisy. We cannot tell other states that they should not produce nuclear

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weapons or that they should abandon the nuclear weapons that they have if we continue to go down the nuclear road. It has been estimated that 128,000 nuclear warheads have been built worldwide since 1945, 70,000 of them in the United States. Our continued nuclear role is not only an act of madness and hypocrisy, but in my opinion and in the opinion of many lawyers it is illegal. We are signatories to the non-proliferation treaty, yet we daily breach the laws enshrined in that treaty.

While we continue to have nuclear weapons of mass destruction, we are clearly in breach of article VI of the treaty, which calls for each party to the treaty to enter into negotiations at an early date in good faith to achieve nuclear disarmament. That is not happening. Article I forbids any country that has signed up to the NPT, including countries that possess nuclear weapons, to collaborate directly or indirectly with any other country on nuclear weapons. It is obvious that Trident breaks this article. We breach article VI because, as the Secretary of State for Defence admitted,

"Negotiations to implement Article VI have not yet commenced and are not scheduled."—[Official Report, 26 February 2004; Vol. 418, c. 498W.]

Because Trident represents a significant increase in our capability, it is in breach of article VI as a serious act of proliferation. Even if the number of warheads is kept similar to the number deployed on Polaris, the qualitative difference in targeting capacity and accuracy of the missile system makes it a much more potent weapon. On 16 June 2002 an Atomic Weapons Establishment spokesperson at Aldermaston told The Observer that

"it had to maintain the capability to design a successor"

to Trident. Once again, that breaks articles of the non-proliferation treaty.

The UK is in breach of article I of the NPT, which states:

"Each nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly".

The Trident nuclear WMD system was bought from the USA and its warheads were tested in the USA, which provides targeting technology and command and control support. By any judgment that is indirect support. I would argue that it is direct support.

What is particularly disgraceful about the continued military co-operation between the United States and the UK, which neither Tory nor, apparently, new Labour Administrations can grasp, is that these countries are two of the three depository states for the NPT. In effect, the treaty is held in trust by them. How do they show their respect? By breaking the very first article of the treaty.

The bilateral US/UK mutual defence agreement on atomic energy matters dating from 1958, which facilitates this co-operation, comes up for renewal later this year. It should be cancelled as an international gesture of good faith. Until decision makers and law makers in the nuclear armed powers recognise that the US and the UK in particular have obligations as part of the NPT bargain, no amount of lecturing other states how to behave in the face of nuclear proliferation temptations will have any credibility. If we continue to ignore the NPT or to break its articles, the greater will be the global threat of nuclear weapons.

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The policy of successive Governments, Tory and Labour, is that we simultaneously support both our non-proliferation treaty commitments to nuclear disarmament and our need to retain nuclear weapons of mass destruction to protect our national security. Some might perceive a significant internal inconsistency in those policy positions—indeed, some might consider them to be in direct contradiction. That is in stark contrast with a decision that was taken at a Labour party conference in the early 1990s that we, as a future Labour Government, would, among other things, scrap Trident.

In 1985, the UN Secretary-General, opening a review conference on the non-proliferation treaty stated:

"The most safe, sure and swift way to deal with the threat of nuclear arms is to do away with them in every regard. This should be our vision of the future. No more testing. No more production. No more sales or transfers. Reduction and destruction of all nuclear weapons and the means to make them should be humanity's common cause."

Sadly, almost 20 years later they are more of a threat than they were when those words were first spoken.

In my opinion, nuclear weapons will continue to be a threat to global security if we continue to ignore our obligations under the non-proliferation treaty. My hopes, and those of many other people committed not only to the anti-nuclear cause, but to world peace, are embodied in the NPT. If this Government and the Government of the United States continue to treat that treaty with contempt, the hopes of world peace and of avoiding nuclear catastrophe will be sorely diminished.

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