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Weapons of Mass Destruction (EUC Report)

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, and his colleagues on their report. It is clear, analytical and has the virtue of being commendably short. I also found the evidence to the committee interesting. A large section of the report covers the evidence, and many interesting points were raised, some of which I want to refer to rather than sticking to the main body of the report. The proliferation of nuclear weapons is one of the most serious threats faced by the world today. It is not just a short-term threat but also a long-term one. In my mind, it is right up there with climate change and ecological issues. It is not hyperbole and it is not exaggeration to say that. We all know that the category of weapons of mass destruction is a loose one. Chemical weapons can be awful, but they do not have a very wide scope at the moment. Biological weapons are similar, but nuclear weapons are quite distinct. They are vastly more destructive than the other weapons included in that category. One should also point out that one does not need weapons of mass destruction to cause mass destruction. The events of 9/11 were produced by aeroplanes and it is worth bearing in mind that the worst case scenario did not happen on 9/11. If the planes had hit the towers at a different angle and velocity they could have destroyed them much more quickly and 50,000 people might have lost their lives in that event. One should remember that the third plane was aimed at either the Congress building or the White House, and was only brought down by the courage of the passengers. That event could have been much more cataclysmic than it was. One can also say that nothing is new in the world. In 1947, a high-level secret report was produced for the British Government. It looked at the threats to the country and concluded that there was no way of stopping a suicide bomber flying a plane into the Houses of Parliament. One should remember that suicide bombers pre-date recent times: there were kamikaze suicide bombers in the last war. Even though the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, said that the report is only about the European response to proliferation, I shall say a little about what the notion of proliferation now means. It has shifted quite radically over the past 10 to 20 years. Proliferation used to mean the worry that an increasing range of states would acquire nuclear weapons. The number of states that have acquired nuclear weapons is a lot less than people feared 30 or 40 years ago. But there are now three other categories of proliferation that we must recognise and which cause massive problems when we seek to confront them. The first is the theft of or trade in nuclear weapons and nuclear materials. We know that some finished nuclear weapons, albeit small ones, have been offered for sale on the underground market. Several hundred cases of theft of nuclear material are known. In a substantial proportion of those cases, the culprits were caught, but we do not know what happened to the fissile material in the other cases. The second category is the proliferation of scientific knowledge. It has been said that there are as many scientists working in the world today as have worked in the rest of human history. One of those scientists is Professor Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Martin Rees and a range of other prominent scientists were asked by Wired magazine to give possible scenarios for the next 20 years. Some scientists said that an individual will live to the age of 150 in that period. Professor Rees placed a bet of $1,000 that, either through error or terror, there will be a single incident before 2020 in which 1 million people are killed. As the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, said, this is not science fiction: Professor Rees is one of the most reputable scientists in the country. The third category is the proliferation of knowledge. We live in a global information society. In my view, it is one of the main causes of the advance of democracy across the world. But it is also a world in which nothing, effectively, can be kept secret. That includes knowledge of weaponry. Again, this is not wholly new. In 1997, an undergraduate at Princeton University set out to make a nuclear weapon of a size and capability to be used by terrorists—small, cheap and easy to construct—using public sources of information. He succeeded. He did not make the weapon, but he created an effective plan to produce a weapon in the 10-kiloton range and about the size of a football that could easily be smuggled into a city. This is the age of the Internet, and the possibility of the construction of weaponry is much greater than it was. We are, to some degree, in a crisis with all four categories of ““proliferation””. The non-proliferation regime has reached a certain crisis. Despite advances that have been made with the control of fissile materials in the former Soviet Union, many such materials are still available. We do not know how to control them completely. Certainly, I accept that the EU can play a major role in controlling proliferation in each of these categories. I would support the commitment if it were put to effective multilateralism. Who would want to support ineffective multilateralism? I support the proposal to establish a weapons of mass destruction centre. What are the Minister’s views on that? On 9/11 Guiliani, the mayor of New York, knew immediately what to do to discover whether the attack involved biological elements. He contacted the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta; but who would one contact in this country or more generally across the European Union? The European Union has two problems of co-ordination. It has a problem at the top, and I have to say the fact that the constitution will now seemingly not materialise will hamper the capability of the European Union to do the things that are stated in the noble Lord’s report and in the original European Union document. It also has a problem at the bottom—a problem of disconnection. I wonder whether reports such as this—I do not refer to the noble Lord’s report, but mainly to the original document on which it is based—do not contribute to the problems of disconnection that the European Union has because this kind of document is written for leaders and experts. The people who would be subject to it, especially to the new conjunction which the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, described so aptly, are the citizenry. I would like to distinguish three areas where there could be an interaction between the public, government and the wider European Union, which would be important in this respect. The first, a fundamental problem for us nationally and across the European Union, is the management of risk. The management of risk for government is exceedingly difficult today. We need to consult the citizens about it. I would expect there to be proposals to do that in a report such as this. There is a perversity to risk, which is very difficult to manage. To get people to take a risk seriously you must proclaim the risk—if you like, you must scare them. But if you scare them and nothing happens then people will say they are the politics of fear and that it is scaremongering. If you do not do enough and a calamity occurs they will blame you for it. We must have consultative procedures to seek to deal with these issues. The most difficult of all is what one would call ““low probability, high consequence risk””, of which a nuclear terrorist attack is at the outer edge. It is not very likely; it is difficult to achieve; but you cannot afford to get it wrong even once. Secondly, there is the management of social division. It is a mistake to suppose that the threat of the conjunction of WMD and terrorism is simply linked to   radical Islam. After all, Timothy McVeigh blew up a building in Oklahoma City and killed about 180   people. He was a radical rightist, working on his own. The Aum Shinrikyo sect in Japan had a massive factory for the manufacture of biological and chemical weapons. It was not able to use them as it could have done, but that could have been a big threat. We know that we have to manage the divisions which are produced by the advent of new forms of terrorism and their conjunction with WMD. We must avoid a situation arising in this country similar to that which has occurred in the Netherlands. Surely we know that this must have a pan-European dimension. Thirdly, on a European level, we need the management of information. How many citizens in Europe know the difference between a dirty bomb and other forms of nuclear weaponry or weapons of mass destruction? How many people know what to do if a dirty bomb is detonated in their area? Terrorism will no longer simply have a national dimension, it could easily in the future have a European dimension. There is no reason why terrorists should not strike simultaneously across a range of European countries. It is not just the experts who have to be prepared, the people have to be prepared too.