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Recent events have shown that we are far from renouncing war. It still deeply shocks me, as we pore over the events that led up to the Iraq invasion, that even as we sought a second UN resolution, the Prime Minister’s aim was not to prevent war but to justify it. At the core of their manifesto, Russell and Einstein make the clear statement that,
I think that the world, in between times, has recognised that. Many distinguished international lawyers today take the view that the use of the Trident system—not the having of it—would breach customary international law, because it would infringe the intransgressable requirement that a distinction be drawn between combatants and non-combatants.
What does that difficult word “intransgressable” mean in familiar language? The principle of distinction between combatants and civilians is central to certain international crimes. Intentionally
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“In view of the unique characteristics of nuclear weapons ... the use of such weapons in fact seems scarcely reconcilable with respect for”,
Trident nuclear warheads are 100 to 120 kilotonnes each. A low-yield Trident would reduce a whole town to rubble. Each warhead has at least eight times the explosive power of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, and each submarine carries four to eight warheads. Let us think about that for a moment. As the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, said, conventional weapons are increasingly smart. They are certainly capable of greater discrimination than nuclear weapons. A nuclear warhead, by its very nature, creates devastation that cannot be contained. The long-term effects of radiation—cancers, birth defects and burns—have perhaps been forgotten in this debate.
Recently obtained legal opinions by Peacerights and Greenpeace also take the view that the replacement of Trident would be a material breach of our obligations under Article VI of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Why does international law matter? It matters because we know that it is the best attempt to preserve the human race and to show our allegiance to humanity. Joseph Rotblat, the great British scientist who won the Nobel peace prize and who sadly died last year, reminded us that throughout the centuries we prepared for war, so what we got was war, not peace. What we now have to do is to prepare for peace, and we can do that only if we extend our present loyalties to our families, to our friends, to our cities, to our nation and to the whole of mankind.
The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, asked how we can forbid countries such as Iran and North Korea from developing nuclear capacity as we enhance our own arsenal. How can we talk to any other nation about reducing its nuclear capacity if we speak with forked tongues about our own defence needs? The only way to make multilateral disarmament real is by someone taking a lead, and I, like the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, would like to see Britain do just that.
Military experts have been arguing convincingly that we do not need to rush to renew Trident now, and that there should be a more measured and deliberative process of public debate. The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, maintained that there had been wide consultation on the White Paper, but I am afraid that
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Twenty-five billion pounds is a huge amount of public money, which many feel would be better spent on better operational capacity for the Army in the field and better accommodation for Army personnel at home. There have been repeated accounts about the underequipment of our Army as it is stretched to the limits on two war fronts. The Government argue that new threats may come from rogue states using terrorists as proxy operatives, perhaps even supplying terrorists with fissile material. I want to ask what we intend to do: are we going to nuke the rogue states that behave in that way rather than use traditional military and diplomatic methods? Are we going to kill and radiate the people who have the misfortune to live under oppressive regimes?
The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester and others are right to remind us about the moral and ethical issues that are being skated over in the debate. I personally hope that Britain will show leadership in the world and redeem the moral authority we have lost over the Iraq war. The White Paper is supposed to launch a public debate and I hope that the public will be encouraged to take part in such a debate. I would like to hear from the Minister how that will be encouraged and what steps will be taken to bring in the public and allow them to be heard. As Rotblat said when he received his peace prize,
That is what we should remember in having this public discussion.
6.51 pm
Baroness Tonge: My Lords, with one or two exceptions—the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, and my noble friends Lady Williams and Lady Miller being those exceptions for me—I have been appalled at the tone of this debate. A stranger suddenly coming in here might have wondered what we were talking about. At the best of times it sounded like a serious debate on updating a transport system. We are discussing the most terrible weapons of mass destruction ever devised. They are there now. They could destroy the world many times over and they could be used. Whoever starts it, no one can win a nuclear war, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, has reminded us from the Russell-Einstein manifesto.
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We are discussing Armageddon. I remind us all of what that means by referring to a report made in the 1980s by the Medical Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons. I hesitated on that name because I was a member of that campaign and we used to call ourselves “Docs against the bomb”. As we have been reminded, the bomb at Hiroshima was a terrible event in human history and I make no apology now for a passionate doctor to follow a passionate lawyer on the subject, because we need to remind ourselves what happened at Hiroshima, committed by a very small bomb by today’s standards. It killed 68,000 people immediately and badly injured 76,000. Countless thousands of people went missing and were never accounted for.
I quote from an eyewitness cited in the report to which I referred:
“No one knew what had happened. Skin was hanging from faces and hands of the survivors. People lay on pavements vomiting and waiting for death. They were too weak to move and no one was there to help. A priest came in from the outskirts and found a group of soldiers with wholly burned faces and eye sockets hollow with the fluid from melting eyes running down cheeks”.
They had been unfortunate enough to see the blast. The eyewitness continued:
“Three out of 45 hospitals remained in Hiroshima, most of the doctors dead or too badly wounded to help others. In the Red Cross hospital 1.6 km from the explosion, ceilings had fallen, plaster, dust, vomit were everywhere, thousands of dead and dying patients lying inside and on the driveway”.
In many ways those people about whom I have been talking were the lucky ones. They died in a few days, but in the weeks, months and years that followed thousands more died from the effects of bone marrow suppression, cancer, bowel erosions and diarrhoea, and later generations suffered and still suffer from genetic disorders. That is what we are talking about. We are not talking about toy weapons. All that was from a 13 kilotonne bomb, a small bomb by today’s standards. We now use megatonne bombs, 760 times more damaging than that dropped on Hiroshima if we do the sums. A bomb dropped on Westminster would mean no London as far out as Croydon, Enfield and Kingston: no people, no emergency workers, no hospitals, even no Government. We must not forget the scale of those weapons.
Many noble Lords have questioned whether the possession of nuclear weapons acts as a deterrent. I will be brief about that, but if we say that our possession of a nuclear bomb is a deterrent to nuclear war we cannot then say that other countries should not have that deterrent. It is totally illogical. Iran has been mentioned: how can we tell Iran that it must not have a nuclear weapon when its neighbouring country Israel has one, on the admission of its Prime Minister a few weeks ago? I sometimes think rather flippantly that if it was truly a deterrent the international community should make sure that everyone has one little bomb and then we could all deter one another. What a nonsense concept it is; and what of this non-proliferation treaty mentioned by many noble Lords? We agreed then that every signatory should have nuclear energy if they wished. We are complaining about Iran at the moment. We agreed that those without the bomb should not try to obtain
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In keeping and updating Trident, surely we are acting illegally against the non-proliferation treaty. I would like the Minister in his summing up to clarify that point for me. It is a sincere request for clarification and information. As other noble Lords have said, if terrorists strike with nuclear weapons, where do we strike back? Do we drop nuclear bombs on the civilian populations of north Pakistan, where it is alleged that there are terrorists hiding, or Manchester, where we know that there were terrorists hiding after 7 July? Where do we drop those bombs? They are not relevant to a terrorist attack.
I have no idea what the cost is going to be. I am told that it is £25 billion to update the weapons rising to £76 billion if we take the maintenance into account—enormous costs. As the noble Lord, Lord Owen, who is not in his place, asked in his fascinating and brilliant speech, what about our ordinary defence forces? Is it obscene that we possess nuclear weapons but there are soldiers in Iraq who did not have sufficient body armour for the job they were supposed to do? Is it obscene that we have nuclear weapons in this country and our Armed Forces, wives, children and families are accommodated in the most appalling homes and flats? Is it not appalling that we have nuclear weapons in this country yet, when there is a natural disaster, a cry goes out for helicopters and not only do we not have enough helicopters, which are the only seriously useful thing that the Armed Forces possess—that is a flippant remark, but they are seriously useful—but we do not have any heavy lift equipment to get them out to where they are needed, whether it is Mozambique, Kashmir or wherever is the disaster? It is verging on the obscene that we have nuclear weapons, yet we cannot do the things that we want to do. Money spent on the developing world, and on our own education and health services, would be a far better investment.
In his opening remarks, the Minister said, as does the White Paper, that the number of warheads in the Trident system will be reduced. It will be fully independent, not dependent on the United States, which is good news, and it will form only 1 per cent of world nuclear capability. Nevertheless, let us not doubt that by updating this system, we are pushing the world into a new arms race. Worse than that, my country will lose any moral authority it may have left since the Government’s disastrous foreign policy adventures in the Middle East.
7 pm
Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Drayson for the comprehensive way in which he introduced the debate. I am pleased that the Government have committed themselves to this full public debate on updating our nuclear deterrent, which will be followed of course by the vote in another place. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester said and my noble friend Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
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For many of us, the terms of this debate and the context in which it is taking place have changed enormously over the past 30 years. The whole question of whether this country should have a nuclear deterrent was one of the overarching points of political controversy in my youth. It was a topic that was never very far from the top of the Labour Party’s agenda and that—as the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, described—divided the Labour Party from top to bottom as a huge question of public morality, with no little party infighting. As we heard again today, not least from the right reverend Prelate and from the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, my noble and learned friend Lord Archer of Sandwell and the noble Baroness who just spoke, these issues remain huge questions of public morality, and so they should. It is right that they do. A battery of other issues has also been raised today: timing, costs, the impact of the expenditure on other forms of military expenditure, and the leverage that we have by maintaining—or, indeed, by abandoning—our nuclear capability. All of those are very important issues.
The Government’s position cannot be a great surprise to anyone, not even, if I may say so, to the Liberal Democrats. Our 2005 election manifesto said unequivocally that the Government were committed to retaining an independent nuclear deterrent. My noble friend Lady Kennedy said that she did not think that that meant it would be renewed. I remind her that our own national policy forum in 2004 specifically rejected a proposal not to replace Trident. I think that that put a very particular context around it.
The Government’s commitment, however, goes a great deal further than that. Like any Government, ours have a first duty to maintain the security of our own country. But unlike many other Governments, we are also committed to contributing to and working for global disarmament. Since 1997, the Government’s approach has been consistent in reducing our own nuclear arsenal, in working towards a minimum deterrent, in maintaining that deterrent, and, moreover, in maintaining our position as a nuclear power actively working for more comprehensive international approaches on the reduction and eventual elimination of nuclear arsenals both here and abroad.
I remind the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, and my noble and learned friend Lord Archer of Sandwell, that the Government have an excellent record on this issue: on the withdrawal of the free-fall bomb, on the reduction of our operationally available warheads by almost half, by all the work that we have undertaken on transparency with regard to fissile holdings, and on our work on verification. I know that my noble and learned friend is well aware of that because he often raises questions on it in this House.
Lord Archer of Sandwell: My Lords, I apologise for interrupting my noble friend. I recognise our wonderful record and, in consequence, the respect that we have built up internationally. I was suggesting that it would be a great pity to throw that away at this stage.
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Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: My Lords, I do not believe that we will throw that away—a point that I shall come on to—but I thank the noble and learned Lord for re-emphasising those points, because they all testify to the Government’s commitment to reduce and control our nuclear capability and to press for multilateral negotiations towards mutual, balanced, verifiable reductions in nuclear weapons. All those points are important in the stance that the Government take. I am bound to say that ours is a record of which I am very proud.
As we have also heard today, many of the old certainties have gone, and they have been replaced by new threats: international terrorism, suicide bombing and rogue states that support terrorism openly or covertly. It is, of course, a terrorism that boasts a total disregard for the value of human life. I was pleased to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, acknowledge the links, actual or potential, between rogue states which are on the way to acquiring nuclear capability and terrorist groups which are committed to using any weapons to kill as many innocent people as possible.
Many questions have been raised today on the timing of this decision. I thought that my noble friend Lord Drayson dealt with the point in his opening speech, but I should like to press my noble friend Lord Triesman on it. When I was Minister for Defence Procurement I was appalled at how long the procurement process takes and how enormously difficult it is to reduce the huge delays which are built into the processes. Our predecessors in government experienced very similar difficulties. In defence procurement we have managed to get some control over costs, but our control over delays is still very much wanting. It seems at least arguable that the Ministry of Defence and the defence industries have to do more to reduce the time that the procurement process takes. We have been told that the Vanguard submarines will start to reach the end of their lives in 2017 and that they can be extended by five years, to 2022. The Government’s argument is that it took 14 years to procure Trident, so it will take at least as long to update it, particularly given the more vigorous safety and regulatory standards and the more complex and sophisticated technologies which pertain today.
Given my own experience, I readily accept the validity of the argument as it stands, but I question the underlying assumption that procurement has to take so long and that nothing can be done to speed up our processes. There are underlying questions about our reliance on particular sectors or companies in our defence industrial base. In recent years, the tendency towards mergers of those companies has meant that a great deal of the competitive edge has been taken out of the procurement process.
I therefore ask my noble friend the Minister: what will that procurement process be? We all know that it will be built in the United Kingdom, but how will the contractor be selected, and how will any contractors be bound to timetabling and cost undertakings? As we all know, companies are very good at making all sorts of promises when they are undergoing the
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This is bound to be a project that will be highly sensitive in terms of security and secrecy. I therefore ask what real political and administrative oversight Ministers will be able to exercise now and in the future. How can we be sure that the decisions on specifications taken now or in the next few years will not be hopelessly out of date by 2022? Of course, this will also be very costly. To take the Minister’s figure of £15 billion to £20 billion, it is an enormous government procurement project, and the MoD procurement processes have a tendency sometimes to underestimate costs rather than the reverse. How will the costs be monitored and controlled? What oversight will Parliament have?
We have all read the assurances that the costs will not be at the expense of conventional capabilities of our Armed Forces. For my part, knowing how defence expenditure has to be managed in different capital projects, I have the depressing feeling that the noble Lord, Lord Owen, may be right. The noble Lord, Lord Hamilton of Epsom, took up very much the same themes. The fact is that while complaints continue on Forces pay, Forces accommodation and some of the most basic equipment—let alone really big procurement projects—assurances on this point are vital. I would not only like to hear these assurances from my right honourable friends the Prime Minister and the Chancellor but I would like them to be specific about expenditure on this project being quite clearly an addition to defence expenditure elsewhere.
We all know that the fundamental issue for many people is not the cost, not the impact of expenditure on other defence projects, not the timing, or even, sometimes, not the jobs that may come from such a renewal—it is the morality of updating a weapon of mass destruction, a weapon which some people would never use no matter in what circumstances. I expect that the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, and my noble friend Lady Kennedy are just such individuals. I respect that argument. I even admire those who hold that view in the principled way that they do. I am glad that they make the arguments they do to remind us about the horror of nuclear war. However, I take a different view. I believe that the nuclear deterrent keeps us safer with it than we would be without it. As the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, said, it is the certain knowledge of any potential aggressor that a nuclear attack upon us would be suicidal to the attacker. To me, that is the most persuasive deterrent of all.
It seems to me fanciful to suggest, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, did, that if we divested ourselves of our nuclear weapons, we would have greater authority to persuade others to do the same; or, indeed, that it is hypocritical not to divest
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