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Nuclear Proliferation

My Lords, the Question on the Order Paper in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby, could not be more timely or, indeed, more essential to debate. The international disciplines the world put in place more than three decades ago, as the noble Baroness said, are under acute stress and show increasing signs of fragility. Last year two major global conferences, the NPT review conference in May and the UN summit in September, concluded without a single word being agreed, let alone any measures to strengthen the international regime. Two countries—North Korea and Iran—have, in one case, broken out of the regime and in the other failed to satisfy the IAEA that their long-standing clandestine uranium enrichment programme was not designed as a step towards doing so. Three countries—India, Israel and Pakistan—have never belonged to the treaty and show no signs of moving towards it. The five recognised nuclear powers have little to show, and nothing at all recently, on their nuclear disarmament. This is a sorry story on a matter which, as long ago as 1992, was clearly identified by the UN Security Council as a threat to international peace and security. First, I say a few words about the two most urgent cases, North Korea and Iran. We should have no illusions. If the international community cannot find an effective response to these two cases, there is no readily available fall-back position, no plan B and no second row of trenches. If countries that want to—even countries with a proven track record of assisting terrorism and challenging the UN charter, and which have signed and ratified the NPT—can acquire nuclear weapons with impunity, then we, the international community, have failed. But finding that effective response cannot just be a matter of coercion, of wielding enough sticks to bring about compliance; we must also be ready to discuss with these countries their security concerns that motivate them and, in so far as they are legitimate, we have to address them. That ““we”” means ““all”” those principally concerned, including the United States, which is why I too welcome warmly last week’s statement by the US Secretary of State of willingness to join such a dialogue with Iran as the US is already doing with North Korea. We have to put forward in any such dialogue a convincing alternative to the path on which those countries have set out, one which offers real advantages and which guarantees legitimate access to civil nuclear power. But simply addressing those two problem cases is not enough; nor will it be successful if all we do is to find ad hoc solutions to them and if we fail to strengthen the multilateral non-proliferation system as a whole. In March of this year Mohamed El Baradei, the Director General of the IAEA, in a powerful speech in Karlsruhe, set out a comprehensive analysis of what needs to be done. Just last week, as the noble Baroness mentioned, Hans Blix published the report of his distinguished commission on the same policy areas. I would welcome the Minister’s response to those two sets of ideas. What are we doing to make the additional protocol for IAEA safeguards the gold standard? What, above all, are we doing to provide internationally guaranteed assurances of the supply of enrichment and reprocessing services to any country in good standing with the IAEA so that it can pursue a civil nuclear programme without any need or temptation to acquire the whole fuel cycle? If anything like the current level of oil prices continues over a significant period, a large number of civil nuclear plants will be constructed worldwide in the years to come. Each of those will require enriched uranium and the reprocessing of spent fuel. If we do not do more now to address this political weakness in the regime, to provide a solid basis for a voluntary moratorium on new enrichment and reprocessing installations, we will surely rue the day—naturally, when it is too late. I warmly welcome the support the Prime Minister gave in his Georgetown speech on 26 May to such an approach. What are we going to do to make a reality of it? What is the critical path towards decisions on it? Later this year the Government have promised that there will be a national debate on the future of Britain’s own nuclear deterrent. I certainly do not want to anticipate that debate today, but I would be grateful for an assurance from the Minister that, in framing their position on this issue, the Government will take full account of their commitments under the non-proliferation treaty—and reiterated at subsequent reviews of that treaty—to move towards nuclear disarmament. I know our past record in this matter is better than some others, but it really is important to avoid conducting this national debate with a blithe disregard to its possible impact on other countries which do not possess nuclear weapons but which may be contemplating the case for doing so. Too many of the statements by existing nuclear powers in recent times have ignored that dimension; and too few of their actions have reflected any awareness of the commitments they assumed when the NPT was negotiated. Today’s short debate provides an opportunity to air concerns about a matter of fundamental importance to international peace and security. Can we expect that any action will be taken on these issues when the G8 heads of state and government meet in St Petersburg in July? Of course that grouping cannot take binding legal decisions, but it can give a powerful sense of direction and momentum to a debate which, so far, seems to be drifting rather aimlessly towards a dangerous fall. Energy security is one of the main themes of that summit but we will not achieve any kind of security, of energy supply or of anything else, if we do not respond effectively to the challenge of nuclear proliferation.