Examination of Witnesses (Questions 88-99)
LORD ROBERTSON
OF PORT
ELLEN AND
SIR MICHAEL
QUINLAN
26 NOVEMBER 2008
Q88 Chairman: Gentlemen, thank
you for coming today. I apologise for keeping you waiting for
a few minutes, but we had some important business that we had
to sort out before the end of the parliamentary year.
As you know, we are just beginning an inquiry
on proliferation and related issues; we had an evidence session
last week. Clearly, we are particularly focused today on the nuclear
issues and we are very pleased that both of you, with your extensive
experience, are able to appear before us today.
For the record, would you introduce yourselves?
Sir Michael Quinlan: I am Michael
Quinlan. I was once permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence,
which is where I spent most of my public service career. I have
continued since then in various ways to take an interest in nuclear
weapon issues.
Lord Robertson: I am Lord Robertson
of Port Ellen. I was Secretary of State for Defence for this country
and then Secretary-General of NATO. I was co-signatory with some
other grandees—I think that was how we were referred to—of
an article on the subject of proliferation. I am also co-chairman
of the Institute for Public Policy Research's Commission on National
Security, a body that I co-chair with Lord Ashdown. It is publishing
its interim report tomorrow, which has quite a substantial section
on non-proliferation and our ideas on that subject. You might
wish to see a copy tomorrow when it is published. I would have
brought one along with me, but I do not even have one myself.
Q89 Chairman: We will look out
for that tomorrow.
Following on from what you have just said, Lord
Robertson, there is obviously growing interest in issues related
to nuclear disarmament and nuclear arms control. Why do you think
that is?
Lord Robertson: We live in a very
different world from that of previous generations who dealt with
this issue. The existence of non-state actors, transnational terrorism
and terrorist networks has brought more clearly into focus the
potential dangers involved in the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
There is also growing concern that that is in part to do with
the existing non-proliferation regime, and that those commitments
that we have signed up to over the years in the nuclear non-proliferation
treaty in relation to abolishing nuclear weapons as a whole have
been given insufficient weight. That may well have fuelled the
desire and the ambition of other countries to join the nuclear
club. So it has become a very current preoccupation that we should
address.
Q90 Chairman: You referred in
your introductory remarks to the fact that you were one of the
authors of the article in June, which was a British response,
in a sense, to an American initiative by Henry Kissinger, Sam
Nunn and others. Have you been involved since then in any concrete
co-operation with the American authors of that original article,
and is there a kind of international network now developing on
this issue?
Lord Robertson: It is developing
and building, but I cannot say that I have been as energetic as
I could have been in following through on it. I have been preoccupied
with the work of the commission that I am on and the work that
it is doing. However, I think that a lot of its recommendations
will feed through. I know that Margaret Beckett has also been
involved in leading another initiative, and a few people are trying
to put flesh on the bones of that. I think that we have to do
that, because we have to think through a number of the practical
issues that simply cannot be wished away.
Sir Michael will speak for himself, but at the
beginning of next year he is going to publish a book that he has
kindly shown to me in advance. He is the great guru of this issue.
The book not only analyses all the background to the debate but
puts forward a sensible and practical middle way between the total
abolitionists and the absolute retainers. That is the territory
into which those of us such as the American group and the British
group have to fit.
I am sorry that I am the only one here to represent
that rather remarkable group of people, which includes Malcolm
Rifkind, Douglas Hurd and David Owen. I know that Douglas Hurd
would have been here but for his wife's death at the weekend.
I cannot necessarily speak on their behalf, and I think that Malcolm
Rifkind has done a little more than others.
Q91 Chairman: Is there a comparable
group of similar status in other European countries that includes
people with similar experience who are saying the same kind of
thing?
Lord Robertson: I understand that
there is, and that there are others involved in that. In a way,
what picks us out is that we have been Cabinet Ministers—Foreign
and Defence Ministers—in one of the P5 countries and current
nuclear states. That has given us a certain degree of weight.
Clearly, one would hope that the French will be involved in future
as well.
What we said in the article, and what the Shultz-Kissinger
group says as well, is that the lead needs to come from the bigger
nations. The attention has been focused on the American and the
Russian arsenals. It is very important that they are reduced,
because they are quite significantly greater than would be necessitated
by current deterrence theory.
Chairman: Sir Michael, do you want to
add anything?
Sir Michael Quinlan: I do not
think that there is a continental European gang of four in quite
the same sense as the two groups that have been mentioned, but
there is certainly a great deal of activity. The Norwegian Government
are putting a lot of money into the study of the abolition aspiration
on both sides of the Atlantic. I have attended meetings both at
Stanford and on this side of the Atlantic. I am due to go to a
conference in Oslo in which people like Hans Blix and Carl Bildt
will be much involved. There is a pretty widespread impetus in
favour of at least serious study of these things, which I personally
believe is what is most needed now, rather than high speechifying.
Some pretty hard study needs to be done.
I had some small part in prompting the publication,
or the launch, of a study by the International Institute for Strategic
Studies on the abolition question, which came out as a paper in
its "Adelphi" series this past September.
Q92 Mr. Horam: Sir Michael, you
just said that what was necessary now was a rather more down-to-earth
approach rather than high speechifying. I think Lord Robertson
said something about the practical issues needing to be resolved.
Will both of you comment on what are the most important practical
issues to consider in the search for a third way, or whatever
you like to call it?
Sir Michael Quinlan: To clarify,
in the agenda immediately ahead of us or in studying the abolition
question?
Mr. Horam: Yes.
Sir Michael Quinlan: On the abolition
question, there are two large classes of issues. There are technical
issues, such as how to verify, how to define what a non-nuclear
world is, what must not exist, what must not be done, how to enforce
and what to do about the nuclear energy problem. The IISS study
got very much into that. There is also a quite different class
of issues, and in many ways a much more intractable one: how do
we make the Israelis want it, the Pakistanis want it, Russia want
it? What would we have to put in place in the whole world organisation
to replace the role that nuclear weapons, to my mind, have played
these past 60 years, in ensuring that all-out war is simply off
the table? Both those classes of issues need a lot more work.
Q93 Mr. Horam: Those are essentially
political issues?
Sir Michael Quinlan: That last
group is essentially that, yes. It seems to me that those issues
are, in a sense, both more important—because they are about
the will to do this—and more intractable.
Q94 Mr. Horam: More intractable
or more tractable?
Sir Michael Quinlan: More intractable.
Q95 Sir Menzies Campbell: You
described that group of people as remarkable, and I think that
is a legitimate description. What is remarkable is that before,
the debate was joined between unilateralists and what you might
call retentionists. What we now have on both sides of the Atlantic
are people who have always valued the utility of deterrence but
who now as a group are ready to embrace the notion of multilateral
disarmament, which has been more referred to in the abstract than
given any kind of substance. That is the most remarkable feature,
is it not?
Lord Robertson: I just want a
more peaceful world. You have to start off on that basis. Being
in favour of nuclear disarmament is the wrong end to start off
with. If all you do is replace nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrents
with fighting all-out wars again, you have not exactly advanced.
You need to create the conditions in which people do not feel
that they have to have nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass
destruction. I am much more worried about the use of chemical
and biological weapons, which can be manufactured so easily and
deployed so quickly, than I am about the use of nuclear weapons,
but nuclear technology is not just a huge nuclear bomb or a ballistic
missile. A dirty bomb would cause as much chaos.
As Sir Michael says, we really have to look
towards creating conditions in the world in which people do not
feel that they need that degree of deterrence. We can then move
towards having the absolute minimum that is required to maintain
what is useful at the moment, and move beyond that. That requires
things, both political and mechanical, to be put in place to ensure
that that really happens.
Sir Menzies Campbell: If it is any comfort
to you, the Committee is taking evidence on both chemical and
biological weapons.
Q96 Chairman: We heard evidence
two weeks ago, I believe, from Baroness Shirley Williams, who
is on the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation
and Disarmament, which was set up by the Australian Prime Minister,
Kevin Rudd. I understand that both of you are on the advisory
board of that body, but it has only had its first meeting. Do
you think that it is likely to provide a separate focus, or will
it very much follow the same lines, given that it includes people
from the southern hemisphere and Japan as well as people from
Europe and the United States?
Sir Michael Quinlan: It is useful
precisely because it brings in a wider constituency. From what
I know of its composition, it seems to be more balanced than,
say, the Canberra Commission of a dozen years ago, so I have high
hopes for it.
I have not yet seen anything at all of its
operation. In conversation with Gareth Evans I agreed to join
the advisory council, but I have not heard a squeak since then.
Lord Robertson: I thought that
I had not agreed to going on to the commission, but the press
release apparently makes me a member. Such is life after politics.
However, it is good and worthy, and it includes a wider view and
fairly high-powered people, who will look at the issues and practicalities
and go beyond simple declarations. That is where we need to go.
I hope the commission will assist with looking at the practicalities
of how we get from here to where we want to be.
For example, a number of significant states
have not ratified the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, yet we
have jumped the fence and are starting to talk about other things.
Getting India, Pakistan, Egypt, China, Indonesia, North Korea,
Israel, Iran and the United States to ratify the treaty would
be one very big step towards the objective of an overall regime
that might encourage other countries not to go down the nuclear
route.
Q97 Mr. Purchase: I want to move
to another subject, but just on that point, why would anyone any
longer want to sign the treaty? If you develop a bomb outside
of it, the President of the United States will make a special
visit to your country and say, "Well done, chaps. Join the
club." That did somewhat make a mockery of all the excellent
work that has been done on the treaty over the years. That is
just a comment.
Thinking again about the Times article
written by you and your colleagues, Lord Robertson, you argued,
if I have it right, that the more nuclear material there is in
circulation, the greater the risk that it falls into the wrong
hands. With such a flash of the blindingly obvious, who could
argue that that is wrong? The direction of the article is towards
greater stability by reduction. When we were at the UN six weeks
ago we asked about the updating and modernisation of Britain's
nuclear capability and whether that affects the perceptions of
other nations, and we were told bluntly that it does. However,
if we were to move down your track of choice, if I may term it
so, and get to that wonderful, idealistic position where nuclear
weapons were virtually out of the picture, would the world be
more stable than it currently is?
Lord Robertson: In my view, not
if you did it tomorrow without putting in place the proper verification
and transparency regimes that are required. You have made the
point that no penalty seems to be paid by countries that violate
their own subscription to the non-proliferation treaty or do not
behave in accordance with the International Atomic Energy Agency's
rules on inspections. We have to move in lockstep with a series
of other measures required to ensure that the same degree of security
would be guaranteed. I will also say that statements of the blindingly
obvious are not necessarily a bad thing: they are not always so
obvious, and rarely blindingly so.
Q98 Mr. Purchase: Yes, the truth
of the matter is that on both sides of the argument there are
some perfectly sound points to be made, and the question is how
we argue and move forward on that one step at a time.
Lord Robertson: One of the worrying
things that has stuck in my mind since my period at NATO was a
meeting with President Putin, who said quite candidly that after
the end of the Soviet Union a lot of things happened and a lot
of things got lost, and he said that they did not know where they
were. He said that that represents a danger not only to them,
but to the world as a whole. They think that they order their
affairs very well, but when we were signing the Ottawa treaty
on land mines, if I remember correctly, I was asked by a senior
Russian, "Do you want us to do away with all our land mines?"
I said yes, and he said, "We use land mines to protect most
of our nuclear stockpile sites, so do you think that would be
a good idea?" I am not saying that that was a convincing
argument, but they take that seriously. There was that gap between
the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Putin era—a black
hole that unfortunately still represents a danger to us.
Q99 Mr. Purchase: May I press
you a little further on the question of reduction? Do you think
that the UK would gain from further reductions in nuclear stockpiles
by the acknowledged nuclear weapons states? Would other states
say, "Hip, hip, hooray. We should join you," or would
they sit back, smile cynically and say, "Good-oh," or
whatever other utterance came to their minds?
Lord Robertson: In dim and distant
days I was a member of CND—it was very brief, and I lived
beside the nuclear base on the Clyde. When I told President Bush
that that was how I came into politics there was a degree of astonishment
round the table, but I had mentioned people such as Robin Cook,
Joschka Fischer, José Manuel Barroso and Mr. Piqué,
who was then the Spanish Foreign Minister but who had spent five
years in the Spanish Communist party, so President Bush probably
thought, "Well, I was hell-raising at that time, so don't
let's remind ourselves of what we did 30 years ago."
Those participating in the Ban the Bomb marches
I went on had the great belief that giving up our nuclear deterrent
would have a dramatic effect on the world because everyone else
would say, "You are absolutely right and have done the right
thing, so we will do away with our weapons as well." I grew
disenchanted with that messianic sort of approach, but I think
that the strategic defence review that I conducted in 1998 very
considerably reduced our nuclear profile by doing away with free-fall
bombs and nuclear depth charges and reducing the number of missiles
on the submarines. There is still some scope for moving in that
direction, especially if it is part of a graduated multilateral
process that would encourage everybody to build down.
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