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Weapons of Mass Destruction (EUC Report)

My Lords, as a member of the sub-committee, I, too, follow the chairman’s reference to the role of Sir Michael Quinlan and our Clerk, Emily Baldock, for producing a readable report from complex evidence. It is important for the EU to have a common position. It is difficult sometimes to know where the EU has competence in the technical sense of the word. It is even more difficult to know where it has competence in the ordinary common or garden use of that word. The point has not been made that the EU has an interesting role. It has two nuclear weapon states—Britain and France—with the other 23 member states not having nuclear weapons capability. That means that drawing up the common position was by far the most substantial piece of work that has been done in the past year. There is no other creative work. I draw attention to the fact that the governments of the European Union have backed the draft Commission paper, so it is a position of the Council. They attach importance to Article 6, for example, which is an obligation on the nuclear weapons states to go down the road of nuclear disarmament. It is not just the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that believes in nuclear disarmament; it is also all the member states of the European Union and all the states that have signed the non-proliferation treaty. I will come back to that in a moment. The second example of an interesting EU common position is an appeal to the Middle East states to establish a nuclear weapon-free zone. That is extremely important. Unless there is a security umbrella across the whole Middle East we will never get beyond the position where Israel has a stake in the status quo and Egypt has a funny sort of stake in the status quo but the status quo is not one of stability. Reflecting on what has been said by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, and the noble Lord, Lord   Giddens, I think that it was a black day when the NPT conference collapsed in failure. I was making the point earlier that it was not a disastrous outcome because in one sense there was no outcome. They did not even agree on an agenda. They let down the citizens of the world. If everyone is to blame for a conference that has collapsed, unfortunately no one is to blame. We really have to think carefully and urgently about the decline in the credibility of multilateralism. We were all brought up on multilateralism; it is logical that one has multilateralism rather than unilateralism. If I disarm before you do—we all know the nature of the argument. However, it has become a perverse sort of catch-22 in practice that no one is able to put anything on the table until everyone puts something on the table, and so no one puts anything on the table. I do not know whether the committee in New York that the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, belongs to, can throw any light on this, but the game theory of multilateralism has somehow become a nightmare. We are being strangled by multilateralism. If I were a non-nuclear weapons state, would I not say what has been said in New York by many such states; namely that there are double standards? They ask whether we seriously want to say that they are prevented from acquiring those weapons, which they may or may not wish to acquire. On the logic that we are presenting to them—we need the weapons in case someone else has them—they all need them because we have them. That is an insane logic. Many parts of the world are signed up to non-proliferation; the whole of south America for example, which was important in the evidence of Dr Blix. Large chunks of the world are signed up to non-proliferation, but I am not sure how stable even that is if it is thought that we and the Americans, the French, the Russians, the Chinese, the Indians, the Pakistanis and the Israelis are not only hanging on to our present position on nuclear weapons but are going to for the next generation. No doubt we shall have that debate in the next two or three years in the Labour Party. I pick up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord   Giddens: it is not true that no one can now visualise the use of nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons have been used, not by some crummy third world oligarch but by the United States as part of what we then called the United Nations in 1945. They have been used by a civilised country. It is not hard to see that if they can be used by a civilised country they can be used by any country—of course they can. The balance of terror, until the collapse of the Berlin wall, has been succeeded by a more fluid situation, one that we are beginning to realise is no less dangerous. I am pro-nuclear power. Global warming and the use of finite oil and gas will lead to 20 to 40 countries having civil nuclear power, so it is essential that there is clarity on the dividing line between the technology necessary to develop civil and military nuclear power. That is difficult, as we are seeing with Iran. Finally, a word on nuclear terrorism. Is it technically impossible? I would be interested to know whether the Minister has a definitive form of words on that. My noble friend will know that the report tends to the conclusion that we ought to concentrate on state actors, not because they are the only actors in principle but because in practice they are the only credible actors in terms of a nuclear threat.