Nuclear Disarmament

Lord Judd Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd]

My Lords, first, I declare an interest as a trustee of Saferworld. Along with others, I am deeply grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, for having made this debate possible. It is always particularly telling when people with such a strong military background speak out in the way that he has spoken out today. I also want to say how moved I was by the speech of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall. Ever since coming into this House, over 20 years ago, I have admired his contribution almost without limit. He speaks with the firm authority of a former Chief of the General Staff but he also speaks with great enlightenment. I shall never forget his speeches before we went into Afghanistan and before the Iraq war, and I wish they had been taken more seriously. The House will miss his wisdom and experience.

Disarmament and arms control are essential elements in an effective defence policy. So-called irregular, and indeed terrorist, activities underline this, and Afghanistan, Mali and Algeria are all recent examples. The easy availability of dangerous and lethal arms makes arms control all the more imperative. Light arms, vehicles, spare parts and, more sinisterly, the biological, chemical and crude nuclear possibilities are all part of this. Nuclear waste from civil industry is highly relevant. The international arms trade must be under constant scrutiny. Sadly, the prevailing culture seems still too often to be that arms exports are an important part of our export drive and should be debarred only when there is some overriding reason for doing so. Surely, the culture should be that, in our highly turbulent and unstable world, arms and ancillary equipment are highly dangerous and lethal exports which should be permitted only to the closest firm allies in whom we have total confidence or for very specific controllable reasons of international security and defence. Confidence about end-use and potential end-use is essential.

Because of the introduction of the nuclear, biological and chemical dimension of all this, I hope that noble Lords will permit me to say a word on the arms trade treaty negotiations. The final conference, after failure to agree in July 2012, will be in less than two months’ time. If that conference again fails to deliver a treaty, the issue will return to the UN General Assembly in its current session, where the assembly as a whole will take over, with the possibility of voting a treaty through. The methodology in negotiations has been to proceed by consensus. However, this must not be allowed to become a treaty at any cost. That would not be a success—quite the reverse. It must be effective and curb irresponsible transfers. In other words, it must uphold the original purpose of the ATT; it has to cover a comprehensive range of arms and ancillary equipment; and it has to include ammunition. Upholding human rights must be a key part of it all. The Government, like their predecessor, have played a dynamic lead role in emphasising all this and in taking the conference forward. It would be tragic if they were to weaken and fall at the last fence. A treaty must of course meet the challenges of Syria.

Specifically on multilateral nuclear disarmament, the need is urgent. There is growing evidence of pressure for still more proliferation. There are the issues of Iran and Israel. The non-proliferation treaty has as a cornerstone the firm commitment of existing nuclear powers to pursue nuclear disarmament themselves. Our nuclear policy must at all times be, and be seen to be, consistent with that. How do we influence constructively if we are perceived to be moving in the opposite direction? To argue that our own nuclear weapons are essential to the defence of the realm can be provocative and positively encourage others to use exactly the same argument. It has been powerfully argued that nothing would better promote nuclear disarmament than for us to announce the intention not to replace the Trident system, to abandon continuous at-sea deterrence, to mothball our submarines and to put them on the negotiating table as a challenge for all to abandon nuclear weapons. I strongly believe that the case and need for, and relevance of, a new Trident have never been established.

There are other practical steps that we can take. We can reduce patrols, thereby lengthening the life expectancy of submarines and pushing off the need for replacement. We can further reduce warheads, demonstrating that numbers can be very small but still effective. We can step up our proactive diplomacy and technical co-operation around the P5 process. It is going slowly at present. The Chinese are blamed, but more could be done to find out from them what they require in order to have confidence in the process. We could take Russian concern and apparent paranoia more seriously. This paranoia harms our own security as well as the prospects for arms control. We have to address more convincingly their concerns. We could open up Britain to inspections that mirror the US-Russian transparency in the new START process. Why do we have to be more secretive than the US and the Russians? Indeed, we could have our own bilateral arrangements with Russia. Central to the current considerations by the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister on all this is which systems will provide more flexibility to move further forward on disarmament and which will not.

It is essential to remember that the UK has said it believes that a nuclear abolition treaty will one day be necessary and is desirable. Surely now is the time to go beyond William Hague’s May 2010 declaratory posture; for example, by adopting a policy of no first use—that is, negative assurances—Trident is then for use only in deterring a nuclear strike. We could then recommend to the P5, alongside China, that they agree a no-first-use treaty. No first use would be an important confidence-building measure for the wider community of non-nuclear armed states. It would enhance the spirit of the NPT and be an important and concrete step along the long road to nuclear disarmament.

We could also build on the UK-Norway warhead dismantlement initiative by commissioning studies on how the UK could in practice move from being a nuclear weapons state to a non-nuclear weapons state. We could then share these studies with others in the P5 and encourage similar studies by them. The transition to being a non-nuclear weapons state would of course require extraordinary legal, political and practical measures. The international community would need high levels of evidence and confidence to be convinced not only that the UK had disarmed but that the change was genuine and absolute and that it would not reconfigure its nuclear arsenal in future.

Long ago, when I was Minister of State for the Foreign Office, I had some responsibilities in the sphere of disarmament. One of the issues that always concerned me—and I do not think that it concerns me any less now than it did then—was that, because of the complexity of the issues, there was a great temptation to get involved in an intellectualised process in which good minds, as it were, played chess with each other. I am a crude politician when it comes down to the point. The issue is: do we believe that a disarmed world would be safer or more dangerous? Do we believe that a nuclear disarmed world would be safer or more dangerous? Clearly, a nuclear disarmed world would be a much safer place in which to live. Our job is to think about how we do it, not to prevaricate and look at all the difficulties.