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Armed Forces: Nuclear Deterrent

My Lords, I would like to follow the right reverend Prelate in one respect. He referred at the very end to an ethical case being advanced, which will provide an opportunity for the public to decide whether they want to replace the deterrent. The words he used were, I think, public backing. The Liberal Benches say that there is an element of surprise in our being bounced into this. In 2005, for the first time in 30 years, I was not a parliamentary candidate. I therefore had the opportunity to read the Labour manifesto, something I usually tried to avoid doing until after the election, when I had to defend it or continue to try to change it. Significantly, the manifesto said—quite clearly and without question—that we would maintain the deterrent. The implication was that we would take whatever action was necessary to sustain that maintenance. I say this for several reasons. When I first stood for Parliament in 1974 and 1979, I did so as a unilateralist fighting on a multilateralist manifesto. I only answered questions on the subject and did not, at that time, proclaim very much because, by and large, people were not interested. In the elections of 1983 and 1987, when my views coincided with those of the manifesto, I had—in the first of those elections, at least—the experience of getting helpful suggestions from my constituents on their doorsteps. In 1987 we anticipated some of the problems and went through the kind of somersaults and political gymnastics that we have seen from the Liberal Benches today. We committed ourselves to roughly the same defence budget but were going to spend it on conventional weapons. We would perhaps try to appease the defence constituencies by having a defence diversification agency. We would nevertheless be able to argue that we could turn swords into ploughshares; that there would be a world agreement that, somehow, everyone else would follow a British gesture. Nearly all these points fell on deaf ears for the British electorate. I have the scars of visits to Barrow, Devonport and Rosyth, where I was greeted as a friend who was misguided on the main issue; a number of my constituents worked there at the time. It was a somewhat chastening experience when we went through the public opinion poll post-election analysis and discovered how difficult the issue was. The public were quite happy with a nuclear deterrent and felt comfortable with it. Despite the general approval I received espousing a unilateralist manifesto at Labour Party meetings across the country, it was not reciprocated by the rest of the British body politic when I got out into the world in general. When my noble friends Lord Kinnock and Lord Clark, who is not in his place today, and Gerald Kaufman and I started visiting the decision-making centres of the other nuclear powers—Washington, Paris and Moscow—and spoke to the Chinese in London, we were startled by the indifference with which they greeted our willingness to give up our nuclear arsenal. They felt that it would not be a bad thing, but would make not one whit of difference to their nuclear capability or willingness to participate in disarmament negotiations one way or the other. It could be argued that 1987-88 marked the emergence of new Labour on foreign and security policy. We began to see how we could put together the kind of policies mentioned today by the noble Lord, Lord Drayson, and others: the balance between a defence policy which people accepted and would be prepared to vote for, and one which continued to provide the United Kingdom with an opportunity, as a member of the permanent five, to meet a variety of challenges and help with a number of initiatives in dealing with rogue states and the like. Some argue that the US providing certain elements of our nuclear deterrent somehow prejudices its independence. It would be difficult for any member of NATO to have any independence in any of its defence commitments or capabilities if it sought to do so only with nationally produced military equipment. The Americans provide important parts of our deterrent, but the manner in which we deploy and threaten to use it—if that is the correct expression—is in no way prejudiced by our relationship with the Americans. Indeed, I remember talking to the Soviets in Moscow about this, and they said, ““Well, we know that you are far closer than the French to the Americans. We know that you walk roughly in step with the Americans, but we can never be sure that you would choose to use your weapons in concert with them or that they would have the power of veto over what you wished to do with these weapons””. This is the heart of the British deterrent strategy—the doctrine of uncertainty, which says that it is up to our potential threateners to work out what we would or would not do with our weapons. Equally important is the fact that we have a weapons system which is damn near undetectable. The noble Lord, Lord Howell, made the point that it might be difficult in certain circumstances with only three boats, if all of them were in base at the one time, to know whether or not we had a capability. As someone who has always been supportive of the three-boat concept—and the noble Lord spoke about advances in technology—I think the ease of maintenance is that much greater now that we probably would be able to have such a system without creating the problem that he suggested. The point I am really getting at here is that of the virtual invulnerability of the British nuclear deterrent; the fact that it cannot be detected; the fact that it can be anywhere in the world and can fire at anywhere in the world. If we are to talk about a weapons system which is flexible—we are not going to the old sub-strategic arguments, and the Minister eschewed the concept of sub-strategic weapons today, quite correctly in my view—what we have to recognise is that we need to be able to deploy the new boats with only a limited number of warheads, perhaps only one, and that we would need to have a sufficiency of decoys. This is where the debate has to be conducted in public, so that people get an idea of what nuclear strategy is about. I am not asking this evening for a clear and explicit commitment that we will have at least 11 decoys on at least one of the rockets, but this is something which ought to come out in the debate. I know there is a natural reticence in the MoD for talking in public in an adult way to people it does not always regard as adults, but we have to be given the benefit of the doubt. I notice the Minister is looking at me quizzically. If I can play the old soldier in a civilian sense here, I have been listening to excuses from the MoD for many, many years and it tells you usually less than you want and certainly a good deal less than it needs to let you know. That is not to say that this process is not an exciting one. Politically, we have an opportunity. In the 1970s when people who might be speaking today were members of Cabinet, decisions were, as far as one can understand, at least hinted at in Cabinet. Preparatory work was done before 1980, before the Conservatives committed themselves to the Trident programme in the fullest sense. We did start very early on. That is significant and should be put on the record to clear up some of the nonsense spoken by the Liberals as far as the Blair-Brown thing is concerned. It was in fact the Chancellor who gave a commitment post the election, in advance of the Prime Minister making the point. I see the Minister is nodding and I am grateful for his concession on that point. What I want to say in closing is this: we have an opportunity here to secure a minimal deterrence which is nevertheless credible and would enable us as a country to continue to play a sensible part in trying to deal with the rogue states, as members of the permanent five and others have. It will enable us at the same time to work with our long-standing ally the United States, but equally importantly it will give us the opportunity within the European Union to work with France on those areas of non-proliferation or rogue-state limitation in which the European Union has been doing a lot of good work. We know that there is the economic strength of the federal republic, but when that is joined with the United Kingdom and France in dealing with nuclear rogue states, there is a possibility for fresh European thinking. I believe that we can argue a bit—and only a bit—about timescales and about how long we can extend the life. The Radio 4 interview yesterday morning was very interesting but what the Minister said was equally interesting. He pointed out that the US systems are somewhat different from our own and that life extension may not be exactly the same. We need a great deal more information and it would be helpful if the MoD could be sufficiently forthcoming to the Defence Select Committee in the Commons to allow, if not that committee, at least the rest of us to make a judgment when we see it. The Government have made a good start. The White Paper and the speeches today have shown a breadth of vision, a degree of commitment and a willingness to listen and to debate. This is the start of a lengthy process and I am very grateful to the Minister for the constructive way in which he has introduced the debate.