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A number of measures have been introduced since the 1960s designed to prevent further proliferation, the most important one being the nuclear non-proliferation treaty of 1968. In many ways the treaty has been very successful. In the 1960s many forecast that by the turn of this century about 40 nations would possess nuclear weapons. This has not happened. Today, as we have heard, both the United States of America and the Russians still have vast nuclear armouries. As other noble Lords have said, many would judge these arsenals to be too large. They are unnecessarily large and could be reduced with little or no risk. But what should we in this country be doing now? The British Government have acted wisely in deciding that, with so much uncertainty and potential danger, now is not the time to abandon entirely a capability which we have had for more than 50 years. I believe that Trident is affordable and needs to remain so even today. However, I agree very strongly with the views of the noble Lord, Lord Owen, on Trident’s replacement. Although I do not think the time is right to abandon nuclear weapons, we should seriously examine the number of submarines that we have and whether we always need to have one boat at sea. I also wonder whether we need to have 16 missile tubes in each boat.
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Remaining a nuclear weapon state for the present enables us to carry more weight and leverage in discussions about non-proliferation. Giving up nuclear weapons today would be something of a gesture which I doubt would influence many who continue to move towards becoming nuclear weapons states. I am afraid that I am extremely sceptical that the money saved by abandoning our nuclear weapons would be immediately ploughed back into the defence budget. Trident is coming to the end of its life and we certainly need to be prepared for that. Nuclear weapons are a good bargaining chip which we do not want to cash in at the moment. The day has not come yet and I think that the Government are on the right course.
2.30 pm
Lord Ramsbotham: My Lords, I, too, begin by congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, on introducing the debate in such masterly fashion. This debate is, as other noble Lords have said, very timely, and I was particularly glad and interested to hear her mention the cyber-dimension, which is all too often ignored, because if command and control is missing then the danger is magnified greatly.
I must declare two past interests. First, I was once on the council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies which, last September, produced the admirable document Abolishing Nuclear Weapons, calling for a broad and deep international debate based on serious analysis of what it would take to achieve the immensely important and equally difficult goal of nuclear disarmament. That debate must include all states, whether nuclear or non-nuclear. Secondly, for a time I worked for a company that had the extraordinary multinational role of providing British ex-servicemen to guard Russians protecting Americans who were breaking up intercontinental ballistic missiles in Kazakhstan in the 1990s.
The call for the debate was also reflected in a letter that my noble and gallant friend Lord Bramall and I wrote to the Times. I have colluded with my noble and gallant friend, who unfortunately cannot be here today to apply the passion and intellectual vigour that he has so often deployed on the issue on the Floor of this House. As other noble Lords have mentioned, this debate is timely because of the quinquennial review of the non-proliferation treaty that takes place next year. I was particularly glad, therefore, to see the government paper Lifting the Nuclear Shadow, which was published last month, and to hear the admirable speech by the Prime Minister, to which the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, referred. Both of those are covered in the admirable briefing provided by the Library, for which, I am sure, all Members of the House are, once again, hugely grateful.
As other noble Lords have done, I start my comments on the Government’s plans to counter possible nuclear proliferation with a brief look at how the world has come to the situation in which it finds itself, and thus the platform on which plans must be based. In view, particularly, of the human casualties resulting from the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was inevitable that the moral dimension of what nuclear
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It always seemed something of a paradox that the comparative stability in the world depended more on uncertainty than certainty. Neither side knew precisely what the other might do, although it always seemed likely that the side that appeared to be losing would be more tempted to use nuclear weapons first. To some extent, the moral dimension was mothballed by those nations who deemed it in their national self-interest to maintain a seat at the top table thanks to possessing nuclear weapons, as well as the intellectual conviction that the impact of such holdings would have more influence over a potential aggressor than more affordable conventional weapons would.
However, in the years since the end of the Cold War, when we have seen and been involved in an exponential growth in asymmetrical warfare—or, as General Sir Rupert Smith has so accurately described it, “War amongst the people”—the practicality and utility of nuclear weapons have also edged out the moral dimension from the top of our concerns. Of course, the political dimension has not gone away—far from it, because possessing nuclear weapons puts us on the opposite side to those who do not. Possession, therefore, carries certain rights and responsibilities in the debate for which the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, and many others are now calling.
The recent government statements to which I referred very clearly announce a commitment to an eventual nuclear-free world. No one pretends that the road to that goal will be covered quickly or easily, nor do I pretend for one moment that, by unilaterally giving up our weapons, we will encourage other weapons possessors to do the same. The sheer number of weapons possessed by America and Russia makes that a practical impossibility and justifies the separate START process, which involves them alone. Yet the two statements made by the Prime Minister on 17 March give me hope that he is determined that we do not merely follow others in paying lip service to the opportunity presented by the review for measures to prevent proliferation. First, the Prime Minister said:
“We cannot expect to successfully exercise moral and political leadership in preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons if we ourselves do not demonstrate leadership on the question of the disarmament of our own weapons”.
“As soon as it becomes useful for our arsenal to be included in a broader negotiation, Britain stands ready to participate and act on our current holding of 12 tubes per submarine and fewer than 160 warheads”.
However, those commitments require, and should only follow, deep analysis and serious debate about national defence self-interest. I entirely agree with the suggestion from the noble Lord, Lord Owen, about the study that should be started now; the more you look at the practicality and utility of using weapons with the capability of the Trident system, the more useless they appear to be as deterrents of the types of violence against which we are currently, and for the foreseeable future appear likely to be, faced. One can, of course, never be certain about that, as recent reports of nuclear refurbishment by President Medvedev confirm.
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There is also always the great danger either of a disastrous nuclear accident, or of technical know-how—as well as weapons and nuclear material—getting into the wrong hands. In that connection there will always be fears, for example, of Pakistan’s weapon falling into fundamentalist Islamist hands. Yet nuclear weapons of the size and capability of Trident are unusable because of their effects against both the guilty and the innocent, which could be catastrophic in both the short and long term for us as well as for any target.
However, before we even think of using them, we have to remember that we do not own the D-11 missiles on which the warheads are mounted, and it would be incredible to think of our using them without consulting America, of whose overall capability our Trident fleet forms a very small part. On the national defence self-interest, we also have to ask ourselves whether we can continue to afford so much of our defence budget being devoted to what is essentially a political weapon when, day after day, we are reminded of the inadequacy of our conventional forces, who are currently being called upon to carry out commitments for which they require increasingly expensive and technically advanced equipment, including precision guided munitions.
If we are to exercise moral and political leadership in line with the Government’s announced intentions, then what plans should we make? Of course, the six steps announced by the Foreign Secretary are critical. They include as their first five: stopping further proliferation, action on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty, as well as encouraging US-Russian negotiations and working with the IAEA to help those nations who wish to develop civil nuclear energy systems. However, great attention must also be paid to what David Miliband described as,
- “the exploration of the technical, political, military and institutional challenges that need to be resolved if states such as ourselves, that possess nuclear weapons, are to reduce and ultimately eliminate their arsenals securely”.
In relation to the national defence self-interest, I have called before in this House for consideration of whether nuclear should be removed from the defence budget, because of the political nature of its possession. If we are to be properly equipped to meet the requirements of our conventional forces, their size and shape should not be determined by budgetary competition with the nuclear force. A seat at the top table, except at the NPT table, is not now linked to the possession of nuclear weapons, but more to economic power.
Recently, therefore, the Government showed considerable courage and leadership on the issue of cluster munitions. Any pretension to moral leadership in the proliferation debate is likely to be undermined if we press ahead with the expensive replacement of our current capability. Indeed, in view of the parlous state of our conventional forces, I would go so far as to say that it is irresponsible to spend vast sums on new and irrelevant weapons, purely to satisfy domestic political amour-propre. If the Government exercised similar courage over the possession of nuclear weapons, declaring that they will carry on with what they have for as long
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2.41 pm
Lord Dykes: My Lords, I warmly thank the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, for some very wise words, which I am sure other noble Lords also support. I thank him particularly for highlighting once again the fallacious irrationality of the submarine-based deterrent arguments and their continuation in the future. In fact, in referring to that, he reminded me of a recent incident that was hilarious and amusing in one sense but disturbing and sinister in another. We await the results of the inquiry, but unfortunately and inevitably some of the answers will be covered by the Official Secrets Act in this country and, I imagine, by similar provisions in France.
It was either early in February, or maybe before Christmas, when it was reported in the press—maybe from a leak, or else it was announced by the French and British ministries of defence—that a collision took place recently in the Bay of Biscay between HMS “Vanguard” and “Le Triomphant”, the equivalent French nuclear submarine. As others have mentioned, each had 16 missile warheads on board, of something like 15,000 tonnes each, with over 100 crew members each. They are very similar vessels, coated in a strange kind of black material—the name of which I cannot remember, it is so complicated—which means that they are undetectable and totally silent. They avoid active sonar and use only passive sonar so that they cannot be detected. They are supposed to be able to immediately ascertain everything that is going on around them.
These vessels, which cost £2 billion each and thousands of millions of pounds to repair and maintain under the normal programmes, let alone if there are accidents, both had to limp back to suitable ports in the UK and France. I think that our vessel was towed, and perhaps the French one made it under its own steam. They collided; and they are not supposed to collide. The destructive nuclear power of these vessels, if there had been a worse accident, would have been truly appalling, not only for the crews involved but for everyone else because of the radiation and fall-out results.
That hugely expensive so-called deterrent system has been our mainstay for a long time, since nuclear bombers were replaced. The idea of its continuing on this irrational basis, which is so expensive for countries of our size of a population of 60 million, with hugely stretched resources because of the worldwide financial and economic crisis, is to my mind utterly absurd. That is the case even if the surrounding arguments for the maintenance of nuclear capability of one machinery or another are continued, as they will inevitably be for some time, particularly by the five principal nuclear powers that started off before other countries, such as India, Pakistan and Israel, joined in.
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The considerable reduction of the nuclear arsenals has been referred to by my noble friend Lady Williams—I pay tribute to her for her outstanding speech—and by the noble Lord, Lord Owen, in his compelling and riveting speech. He suggested future prescriptions for continuing the process of reduction. Yes, the Russians and the Americans have shown impressive leadership in recent times, despite the awful nature of the Cold War. That surely must continue, I hope, on an accelerated basis.
In fact, more and more people now think that you do not have to be a unilateralist any more, but you can be a multilateralist and get on with it, and you can make sure that the countries under the new treaty frameworks that are going to be created from next year onwards covering all the fields—I thank my noble friend Lady Williams for mentioning the specific mechanics, modalities and machinery for doing those various bits and pieces—of the total nuclear disarmament, nuclear reduction and non-proliferation exercise. It is hugely complex task, which is now more and more urgent and is often put aside in people’s thinking because of other pressing economic and financial problems. However, it is one of the most important examples of the dangers facing us.
The nuclear weapons and warheads reduction by France and Britain, starting at a much more modest and higher level, has been reasonable. France has done less than Britain in numerical terms, but that is understandable because France became an independent nuclear power in its own right later on. I happen to live in France as well, and often when one discusses these matters in Paris the old cynicism comes out. There were many different arguments about what happened, but the French like to think that they were prevented by the Americans from having atomic secrets because they had a large Communist party that was inherently unstable, and there were lots of people who rather liked the Soviet Union, Stalin and so on in the post-war period in France. Therefore, they could give the secrets to the British, and the British had the sharing of nuclear secrets eventually, even though they did not at the beginning. The French muse on that in an amused way that all the nuclear secrets given to Britain by the Americans were given away by rather posh undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge, some of whom ended up living in the Soviet Union.
All this madness now has to be looked back on with an idea of changing the world, creating a new situation and saving a huge amount of money. Even if some part of that saving goes back into defence spending, that is a separate argument. It is very important for countries that now wish to contribute to the modern form of warfare, which is the peace process, trying to maintain peace and create peace where war exists. That is the new kind of warfare, which we find more acceptable, though tragically inevitable. We would prefer not to have any wars at all, but that is the real world in which we live. It is that kind of thing, rather than imperial struggles and the nuclear arms race which went up to a total of 70,000 warheads and now is down to 20,000 plus because of the disarmament process, which we now look back on.
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It would have been impossible a few years before that people such as Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, Senator Sam Nunn and others would have said what they said recently, about the need for us to see a new world and to respond, in a solemn international compact, which the advanced countries should now accept more and more, with this fresh treaty-building on which we are about to embark. It has been said that we have sorely and savagely let down other countries that expected us to do this business much more rapidly and much more creatively.
I do not think that anywhere near 20,000-plus warheads are necessary in this unstable world. The way in which you stop the spread of nuclear fissile material and dirty bombs, and all the sinister terrorist threats that may be conjoined with those, is to put an end to those weapons as soon as possible, even if, as the noble Lord, Lord Owen, said, it could take 10 years, which is not a long time in these processes, and it may be longer. Whatever the time taken, the whole world and the United Nations must be supported in these matters. We do not seem to be able to get modernisation and reform of the Security Council or an acceleration of the process of nuclear disarmament to create a proper non-proliferation nexus for the global society, where we are more and more interdependent.
Apparently the Israelis have 200 nuclear bombs. What is the use of those nuclear weapons? As a friend of Israel, I agree entirely that Israel has to be militarily unbeatable otherwise it would be too vulnerable in the Middle East to attacks from surrounding countries which might believe that they could win in warfare. Israel, once armed with that superior unbeatability in conventional terms and with the latest aircraft which any air force in the world can possess, does not need nuclear weapons. What if they were unleashed in some tragic circumstance against Arab countries which surround Israel and the pollution and the nuclear fallout came back on to Israel because of the way the wind was blowing or something equally absurd? It would be absolutely crazy for them and they know it. They were acquired in a strange, illicit fashion.
In more recent years we have seen the spread into Pakistan and India. Perhaps my noble friend Lady Falkner will refer to Pakistan, which she knows so well. This is a time for huge change and a time to get away from nuclear weapons. I thank my noble friend Lady Williams who has not only been helping the Government officially on disarmament matters but she has the unusual distinction of teaching with great commendation in both Harvard and Yale. I remember an old story of a graduate from Yale—a young man, not a distinguished lady—who said, “I graduated from Yale which stands for youth, ability, leadership and energy”. Although my noble friend and the rest of us in this Chamber are of a more mature age in physical terms, in no way does that remove from her the youthful approach which she has to new ideas on this matter. Long may she prevail, like all of us, in this battle to achieve common sense and the end of madness. I believe that nuclear weapons were effective only between 1945 and 1949, and not in a very nice way, in view of what happened in Japan. The sooner we get rid of that madness—mutually assured destruction is MAD and is madness —the better for all of us.
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2.52 pm
Lord Hannay of Chiswick: My Lords, it is no exaggeration to say that at no point since the non-proliferation treaty came into force, some 40 years ago, has the risk of a substantial degree of further nuclear proliferation been greater than it is today. That risk is not limited to the two countries whose nuclear programmes provide the greatest cause for concern, North Korea and Iran. If either of those countries were to become a fully fledged nuclear weapons state or were to acquire the capability to do that in short order, few believe that the matter would rest there. Each of those countries is in a region full of tension with other neighbouring states which would not lightly sit idly by in such circumstances. I believe we are faced with the risk of a major breakout from, if not a complete breakdown of, a rules-based regime, which has made a major contribution to international peace and security. Therefore, we should not lull ourselves into a false sense of security with talk of a soft landing, even if attempts to prevent those two countries acquiring such a capability were to fail.
That sombre prospect is a reason to welcome the timeliness of the debate and to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, on initiating it. In recent years, she has worked tirelessly as a member of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, as the Government’s adviser on non-proliferation and now as a member of the Australian and Japanese Governments’ Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament. She has also worked tirelessly to strengthen the regime which others are working so assiduously to undermine.
What needs to be done? Put simply, I suggest that we need to ensure that the 2010 nuclear non-proliferation review conference does not turn into the sort of fiasco which the last quinquennial review turned into in 2005, unable even to adopt its own agenda let alone achieve anything positive. To do that we need to ensure not only some positive results next year but also to set a clear direction of travel for both nuclear weapons states and non-nuclear weapons states for the years ahead, a direction of travel which demonstrates that they all mean to make a reality of their commitments under the treaty, on the one hand, to move towards nuclear disarmament and, on the other hand, to strengthen the safeguards against any blurring of the line between civil and weapons programmes.
Of course, those broad objectives will require deeds and not just warm words. First, efforts need to be resumed to bring into force the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. In that context, the new US Administration’s willingness to return to the charge with Congress is extremely welcome. Others too, like China and India, will need to match those efforts. Secondly, we surely need to find a way to initiate rapid negotiations on a fissile material cut-off treaty. If the procedural deadlock created by the consensus rules of the conference on disarmament in Geneva remain an insuperable obstacle to initiating those negotiations, I ask the Minister whether the Government have given any thought, and whether they are prepared to consult their fellow recognised nuclear weapons states, all of whom have said that they favour such a treaty, to the possibility of proceeding on a narrower basis. After all, such an
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