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Weapons of Mass Destruction (EUC Report)

My Lords, I begin by declaring an interest. I am a member of the Nuclear Threat Initiative Board in the United States, sometimes known as the Nunn Lugar initiative, which I am sure will be familiar to many people taking part in the debate. It is very good to see that a number of noble Lords taking part in the debate were not themselves members of the committee. That is always excellent and shows   the interest in the report that the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, has so eloquently initiated. We live in a time of great danger, and the potential threat—which, thank God, did not emerge in the past week—is so much greater even than the one that did that it is quite difficult to get one’s mind around it. Had there been any element of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons in that terrorist attack, we would be counting the number of those killed and injured in figures 100 or 1,000 times greater than the tragic list we know about and have considered this very day. The report is well informed and thoughtful, and I accept very readily its emphasis on multilateralism. In that context, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, for the way in which he outlined the European strategy and the comments of the committee upon it. However, I will make one criticism. The report does not show a sufficient sense of urgency in a situation which, quite frankly, is dire. The late Prime Minister Harold Wilson once said that a week was a long time in politics. Four months have passed since the publication of this document, and in those four months a series of dramatic things have happened, none of them incidents that make one feel any safer than one did at the time the report was published. I shall mention them quickly. The first was the almost total stalemate that emerged from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review in April, a few days after the report was published. The report refers to that review and calls upon it to consider some of the conclusions of noble Lords in the committee. In practice, what happened, as we now know, was that the review broke down in almost total disagreement and no fundamental decisions of any kind were made. Indeed, the final report did little more than sum up the number of meetings, the people who attended and the dates and times at which they took place. That is extraordinary in the light of the situation that the planet faces. The second event that occurred after that was a growing awareness that the system of conventions and treaties on which the whole peace of the world has turned since the 1960s—they have been remarkably successful—is beginning to break down. The United States refused to ratify the nuclear test ban treaty and decided to have nothing more to do with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran and North Korea decided to go ahead with developments in enriching nuclear fuels, despite the fact that both countries have been repeatedly requested by the IAEA and others to accept full inspection. Most countries were unwilling to sign the additional protocol that the IAEA asked them to sign to make its inspection far more effective. The withdrawal of the United States from the biological and toxin weapons treaty was a real blow to any attempt to establish effective control of inspection over that area of potential weapons of mass destruction. That is a sad list, and to that finally we must add the almost total rejection at the nuclear proliferation review of the extraordinarily far-reaching and wise proposals made on weapons of mass destruction by the high-level United Nations committee. The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, who was such a distinguished member of that panel, will want to refer to that. What is increasingly emerging from that list is that no one feels bound by the decisions, conventions and treaties that they have ratified. At the end of last year, I visited the Indian nuclear agency and asked it its view towards the non-proliferation treaty, of which India is of course not a member. The agency was absolutely clear. It said that the states with nuclear weapons did not obey and had not carried out the commitments that they made for mutual reductions of intercontinental weapons—ballistic missiles and the like. It saw no reason why it should feel itself bound when those other states did not. Members of this House will know well that there has been a real stalemate in terms of the multilateral disarmament agreed under the SALT II treaty and other treaties. We live in a pretty desperate situation where the fragile framework of civilised behaviour is beginning clearly to fray at the edges and where even our own nearest ally is part of that fray. Where do we stand? Certainly some of the things put forward in the report are extremely useful. In that context, I refer specifically to an interesting idea—that of linking the trade agreements to some commitment about weapons of   mass destruction. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, said so clearly, that is no good at all unless there are effective mechanisms for verification and enforcement. If not, they are simply more words cast into the cauldron of chaos in which we live. I plead with the Government to consider seriously pressing the EU to demand verification and inspection as parts of any future trade agreements that it may make. The idea is good, but it will fall apart if there is no effective implementation. Of course, Iran is also of crucial importance to non-proliferation, and all of us in this House want the diplomatic efforts made in respect of Iran to be pressed forward even more vigorously by the three Foreign Secretaries of Germany, France and the United Kingdom. If that means some discussion with the Iranians about how they could retain nuclear civil power without becoming involved in using enriched uranium for nuclear weapons, so be it. In that context—I am coming to the last part of what   I have to say—the co-operative threat reduction proposed by the body of which I am a member, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, contains two extremely interesting ideas. I hope that Her Majesty’s Government will look at them closely. They will know about one—the close bilateral co-operation between the United States and Russia, which has involved among other things the achievement of much greater security for nuclear storage in Russia. Heaven knows that anyone who knows Russia well will know how desperately that was needed. It also produced the blend-down of enriched uranium for use in nuclear power stations, so that a great deal of enriched uranium has been taken out of the Russian system and transferred into sorts of uranium that cannot be used for nuclear weapons. In that context, we must remember the elimination of nuclear weapons from Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus. But, of course, there is a whole new area and one in which I would trust that the European Union might become involved. That is how far we can press forward the replacement of enriched uranium with low-enriched uranium, which is a relatively safe fuel. In that context, initiatives will be taken to propose that in Africa HEU should be replaced by LEU for research reactors, which would enable Africa to become a non-nuclear weapons continent. An extension of that—a switch under the IAEA’s control from HEU to LEU—to some of our neighbours in the EU, who undoubtedly have reactor and research potential, would make the world a good deal safer. I also want to press Her Majesty’s Government to think very seriously, in the context of the EU, about an effort to de-alert existing nuclear weapons. Most nuclear weapons in Russia are still on hair-trigger alert, which means literally a matter of seconds before they can be launched in the light of what appears to their experts and their military to be a threat of some kind. Frankly, in the present situation it is ludicrous to have that kind of hair-trigger alert system because one cannot use nuclear missiles against a terrorist threat. So I urge the Minister and the Government to consider pressing very hard for the removal of nuclear weapons in the Russian, American and European contexts, and to press for them not to be on immediate alert but on a slightly less high-level, hair-trigger system, which at least will give some sense of safety when talking about state-controlled nuclear weapons. I repeat that that is irrelevant to terrorism, which is another story altogether. I shall conclude by reading a paragraph from a book recently published, called Nuclear Terrorism. This is by a colleague of mine at Harvard, who was an assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration and today is a leading figure—director of the Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs. I apologise for this somewhat chilling quote from Professor Graham Allison:"““on the current course, nuclear terrorism is inevitable . . .  If the United States and other governments keep doing what they are doing today, a nuclear terrorist attack on America is more likely than not in the decade ahead””." I commend this to noble Lords. It is not from a wild, unknowledgeable source but from one of the outstanding experts in the area of nuclear terrorism and it is something we should all take very much to heart.