1. The purpose of the British nuclear deterrent
remains what it had always been: to minimise the dreadful prospect
of the United Kingdom being attacked by mass-destruction weapons.
It is not a panacea and it is not designed to deter every type
of threat. Nevertheless, the threat which it is designed to counter
is so overwhelming that no other form of military capability could
possibly prevent it. The possession of the deterrent may be unpleasant,
but it is an unpleasant necessity the purpose of which lies not
in its actual use but in its nature as the ultimate "stalemate
weapon". As the next generation of the nuclear deterrent
will, if approved now, be deployed from about 2020 until about
2050, it would be reckless in the extreme to assume that no threat
could arise to the United Kingdom, so far in the future, from
a nuclear-armed adversary who would need to be deterred.CHANGING
TIMES AND
CHANGING THREATS
2. Many of the people who oppose Britain's retention
and replacement of nuclear weapons in the 21st century also advocated
unilateral nuclear disarmament, despite the level of the Soviet
threat, during the Cold War. There are, however, significant numbers
who believe that what was necessary then no longer applies now.
This brings us to the central problem of predictability.
3. From time to time wars break out in circumstances
which were anticipated; but, more often than not, they arise totally
unexpectedly. The Yom Kippur War in 1973 took even hypersensitive
Israel by surprise. The Falklands War, nine years later, took
Britain by surprise. The invasion of Kuwait in 1990 took everyone
by surprise. And the attacks of 11 September 2001 took the world's
only superpower by surprise. There was nothing new in any of this—as
a detour into the archives strikingly illustrates: from August
1919 until November 1933 British foreign and defence policy was
hamstrung by a prediction that the country would not be engaged
in a war with another major Power for at least a decade. This
had a dangerously adverse effect on necessary rearmament when
the international scene darkened. Arguing against the continuation
of this so-called "10 Year Rule" in January 1931 when
Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, Sir Maurice Hankey,
observed:
"As a nation we have been prone in the past
to assume that the international outlook is in accordance with
our desires rather than with the facts of the situation . . .
We are also apt to forget how suddenly war breaks out. In 1870,
a fortnight before the event, we were not in the least expecting
the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. The same was true in
1914. A fortnight after the murder of the Austrian Archduke, a
debate took place in the House of Commons on foreign affairs.
The European situation was hardly referred to at all. More attention
was given to the preparations for the next Peace Conference! .
. . There was no statement made on the subject of the European
crisis in Parliament until July 27 . . . We really had, at the
outside, not more than 10 days' warning . . . How foolish a Government
would have looked that had reaffirmed an assumption of 10 years
of peace during the early part of 1914!" (CAB21/2093: 19/10/201,
The Basis of Service Estimates, 9 January 1931.)
4. The lesson of history is that the onset of
armed conflicts is inherently unpredictable. This is why it makes
sense to keep in being an army, a navy and an air force during
long periods of peace. The same applies a fortiori to the
nuclear deterrent. Investment in armed forces in apparently peaceful
times is analogous to the payment of premiums on insurance policies.
No one knows when the accident or disaster may happen against
which one is insuring: if one did, one could probably avoid it
and save oneself the cost of the premiums! It is rare indeed,
in terms of international politics, that one can rule out the
recurrence of a major military threat from any quarter just because
it has receded from a particular potential enemy.
5. With the benefit of hindsight, the Second
World War is often regarded as a disaster predetermined by mistakes
made at the end of the First World War. Yet, in the decade of
the 1920s, there was so little sign of an obvious enemy that each
of Britain's three Armed Services prepared its hypothetical contingency
plans against an entirely different potential enemy. In those
days, the choice of possible enemy would seriously affect the
nature of the defence policy designed to meet the threat. Fortunately,
the British strategic nuclear deterrent is less dependent than
conventional armed forces upon the correct identification of the
enemy in advance. Any country which emerges as a potential aggressor
with mass-destruction weapons, in the next three or four decades,
will be vulnerable to retaliation from Trident or its successor.
And this is the sort of time-scale which we have to consider.
6. Each generation of the strategic nuclear deterrent
functions for a period of 30 years or more. The actual replacement
of the Trident system, if it occurs, will not even begin for at
least another 15 years. No-one can possibly foretell what dangers
will face us between the years 2020 and 2050, just as the threats
facing us today would have seemed bizarre to politicians and military
planners at the height of the Cold War in the 1980s. During periods
of peace, democratic states naturally tend to scale down their
conventional fighting services, but they try to do so in a way
which is reversible should the international scene darken. This
option does not apply to the nuclear deterrent, which has always
been set at the minimum level regarded as essential for credibility.
Just as it makes sense to keep minimum conventional forces in
being as an insurance policy against unpredictable future conventional
threats, the same applies all the more strongly to a minimum strategic
nuclear deterrent. There can be no more assurance that a nuclear
or major chemical or biological threat will not arise in the next
half-century than that major land, sea or air threats will not
have to be faced. If it is right to insure against the latter,
it is essential to insure against the former.A NECESSITY
BUT NOT
A PANACEA
7. Apart from those who have always opposed British
nuclear weapons, irrespective of the level of threat, some politicians,
some churchmen and commentators, and even some military figures
who used to support it, have now changed their minds. This is
primarily because the Cold War is over, America appears to be
the dominant world power, and the principal threats today emanate
from rogue regimes and stateless terrorist groups. Let us consider
each of these in turn.
8. First, the ending of the Cold War removes
the danger of nuclear confrontation with Russia for as long as
that country continues to tread, however hesitantly, the democratic
road. Indeed, it is striking to note that many prophets of nuclear
doom during the 1970s and 1980s have been all but silenced by
the change in East-West relations, even though enough nuclear
weapons remain in US and Russian hands to destroy the world's
main population centres with many warheads to spare. This illustrates
the fact that it is not the weapons themselves which we have to
fear but the nature of the governments that possess them. As soon
as Russia turned away from totalitarianism, the main concern about
her nuclear arsenal shifted from those devices under the control
of the Kremlin to those which might leach out from Russian stockpiles
and fall into the hands of other regimes which remained more hostile.
9. One concept which advocates of nuclear disarmament
have traditionally ignored is the propensity for dictatorships
to go to war with dictatorships, and for democracies and dictatorships
to clash, whilst few—if any—examples exist of democracies
attacking each other. This suggests that it is quite right to
have fewer qualms about the possession of deadly weapons by democracies,
though regarding their possession by dictatorships as wholly unacceptable.
There is no comparison between the two, and it is a constant failing
of the disarmament lobby to try to project values of reasonableness,
tolerance, goodwill, and peaceful intent onto states under the
control of despots, fanatics and dictators.
10. The ending of the Cold War rightly caused
a reduction in international tension; but the impossibility of
predicting the emergence of future conventional and nuclear threats
means that the permanent dismantling of our nuclear deterrent
cannot possibly be anything other than a reckless gamble.
11. Secondly, the current period of America's
solo superpower status in no way diminishes the case for an independent
British deterrent. Nuclear weapons, by their very nature, have
devastating potential even in very small numbers. Quite apart
from the prospect of unpredictable major threats in the longer
term, the current enmity towards Britain by near-nuclear regimes
like Iran suggests that unilateralism would be fraught with danger.
It used to be pointed out that the British Polaris fleet had done
nothing to deter Argentina from invading the Falkland Islands.
Certainly, there was never a prospect of democratic Britain threatening
to use its ultimate weapon except in response to a mortal threat
against the cities of the United Kingdom. What would have been
the case, though, if the Argentine junta had possessed even a
few atomic weapons or other mass-destruction devices? Without
a nuclear force of her own, would Britain have dared to respond
conventionally to the occupation of the Islands by a nuclear-armed
military junta?
12. Time and again the United Kingdom and the
United States have stood side by side in international conflicts.
If this pattern continues, the prospect could arise of a nuclear-armed
enemy regarding it as safer to threaten or attack the smaller
of the two Allies. The danger would then arise of a possible miscalculation
by an aggressor thinking that the US would not respond in kind
to an attack with mass-destruction weapons on British cities.
If this were a miscalculation, the attacker would discover it
only when it was too late, instead of having been deterred at
the outset by the knowledge that Britain could respond in kind
on her own behalf.
13. These considerations clearly bear on the
third issue—that of rogue regimes. Several of them are already
nuclear powers or on the verge of becoming so. The notion that
they will abandon such a course indefinitely in response to unilateral
British nuclear disarmament is totally unrealistic. Those who
subscribe to it continually make the error of projecting civilised
values onto extremist governments who hold them totally in contempt.
14. Turning, fourthly, to the current emergence
of non-state terrorist groups, it is absolutely correct that strategic
nuclear weapons are of no relevance whatsoever. Neither are aircraft
carriers, main battle tanks, guided-missile destroyers or any
other heavyweight military equipment. The presence of a serious
terrorist threat is clearly an argument in favour of expanded
counter-insurgency forces and security and intelligence services.
It is no argument at all for the abolition of those military capabilities
which are designed to meet other types of threat which this country
has faced in the past and may well face again in the future.NUCLEAR
PROLIFERATION
15. Does proliferation make Britain's continued
possession of nuclear weapons unethical? There might be a case
for arguing this if it could be shown that there were a causal
link between our continued possession of a strategic nuclear deterrent
and the decision of one or more named countries to acquire nuclear
weapons. During the Cold War era, the proliferation argument was
often used by one-sided nuclear disarmers in their campaign against
Polaris, Trident and the deployment of cruise missiles. Yet, whenever
asked to name a specific nuclear or near-nuclear country which
would be likely to abandon its nuclear ambitions if we unilaterally
renounced ours, the CND and its fellow-travellers were notably
unforthcoming. Countries make the decision whether or not to seek
to acquire mass-destruction weapons according to hard-headed calculations
of their own strategic interests. A quixotic renunciation by democratic
Britain is not very likely to encourage any undemocratic state
to follow suit. On the contrary, it is more likely to encourage
any such state which views Britain as a potential enemy to redouble
its efforts to join the WMD club, given that we would no longer
have the means to threaten retaliation against nuclear, biological
or chemical aggression.
16. What does the Non-Proliferation Treaty actually
commit the United Kingdom to do? Article VI of the NPT is often
referred to, but seldom quoted in full. This is what it states:
"Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes
to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating
to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to
nuclear disarmament, and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament
under strict and effective international control."
17. There are thus three obligations, only the
first of which is time-limited. This is to end "the nuclear
arms race" at "an early date". Given that the United
Kingdom—and, for that matter, France and China—have
never engaged in a nuclear arms race, their policy of each having
a minimum strategic nuclear deterrent does not fall foul of this
provision. None of these countries has ever sought to match the
nuclear stockpiles of Russia or the United States. Each has been
content to possess a much smaller nuclear capability, provided
that it is adequate to threaten an unacceptable level of retaliation
if attacked. The same would apply to any replacement system for
Trident.
18. It is true that Article VI aspires to both
"nuclear disarmament" and "a Treaty on general
and complete disarmament" as well—but this is nothing
more than an aspiration for the indefinite future. What it amounts
to is nothing less than a world completely disarmed of all weapons
of every description "under strict and effective international
control". This utopia would require several things to happen:
the creation of a World Government; the establishment of foolproof
methods of preventing clandestine rearmament; and, above all,
a revolution in the minds of men so that warfare became redundant.
As my Parliamentary colleague, Michael Ancram, observed when Shadow
Defence Secretary:
"Nothing in the Article requires worldwide
nuclear disarmament to be achieved prior to worldwide conventional
disarmament. This is just as well: to abolish all nuclear weapons
in a world left bristling with all sorts of other deadly armaments
would be to make the world safe again for the disastrous conflagrations
which killed millions between 1914 and 1918 and between 1939 and
1945."CONCLUSION
19. No-one can foretell what threats this country
will have to face between 2020 and 2050. Some may be threats at
a level, or from a non-state actor, against which a strategic
nuclear deterrent would be irrelevant. Others may consist of mass-destruction
weapons in the hands of hostile and potentially aggressive regimes.
Against the latter, no amount of conventional military power can
hope to be effective. The United Kingdom has never sought to match
such regimes warhead-for-warhead. Our policy of minimum strategic
deterrence is both potent enough and flexible enough to make any
potential enemy with assets to lose think long and hard before
daring to use mass-destruction weapons against us.
20. The reason for this was elegantly explained
by one of Britain's leading defence scientists before the first
atomic weapon had even been tested. In a top secret report for
the Chiefs of Staff in June 1945, Professor Sir Henry Tizard wrote
that the only answer which he and his colleagues could see to
the atomic bomb was to be equipped and able to use it in retaliation:
"A knowledge that we were prepared, in the
last resort, to do this might well deter an aggressive nation.
Duelling was a recognised method of settling quarrels between
men of high social standing so long as the duellists stood 20
paces apart and fired at each other with pistols of a primitive
type. If the rule had been that they should stand a yard apart
with pistols at each other's hearts, we doubt whether it would
long have remained a recognised method of settling affairs of
honour." (CAB 80/94: COS(45)402(0), Future Development in
Weapons and Methods of War, 16 June 1945.)27 February 2006
