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Armed Forces: Nuclear Deterrent

My Lords, I join those who have welcomed the White Paper. The speech of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, who is always interesting, left me somewhat confused. I am not wholly clear on the Liberal party's policy on nuclear weapons. Primarily, the noble Lord seemed to be saying that, on almost every occasion on which a decision is made about having or enhancing our nuclear capability, it is made on the wrong grounds. I am not clear whether it follows that the decisions are wrong. Others will speak from the Liberal Benches, so perhaps by the end of the debate we shall have a clearer idea of their position. I have always been an unashamed supporter of nuclear weapons. Anyone who has looked at what they can or could do will see the point of them. Recently, I came across one of the most interesting collateral notes to history when reading the diaries of Sir Alan Lascelles, who had been the private secretary to King George VI. Many months before the end of the war, Sir Edward Appleton, later a British Nobel laureate, went to brief the King on the progress of the atomic bomb. He said that the bomb was not likely to be ready in time to be used against the Germans but probably would be ready to use against the Japanese. He was asked whether that would have a great effect. His reply was, as quoted by Sir Alan Lascelles, that, "““a couple of those on Japan and the war would be over within days: no doubt about that””." It has always been apparent what a devastating and total weapon a nuclear weapon is. Its capability to keep the peace, once used and demonstrated in that way, was proved over the 50 years of the Cold War. That was a period when, very rightly, the West decided to contain rather than confront Soviet communism. Of course, that policy of containment was originally laid down by George Kennan in his famous long telegram of March 1946, which was sent to the American State Department. It set the tone for policy on the Soviet Union thereafter. We have an independent, state-of-the-art nuclear weapons system. I totally accept what the Minister said—it ties in with research that I have done—that it is genuinely and totally independent. That means that we can use it, no one can stop us using it, and no one can make us use it. If we were to give it up, it is quite certain that we would never get it back. The costs would be too great and the decision would be too big. We do not really know what the threats to peace are likely to be; we cannot begin to tell what will unravel over the period in which this decision-making framework is set out in the White Paper; therefore, it would be most unwise to assume that the need for such weapons could vanish. Like the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, I am very interested in the Prime Minister's speech at Plymouth on 12 January. I shall quote one part of it, where he speaks of Islamic fundamentalism, "““what we were and are confronted with is of a far more fundamental character than we supposed ... We face something more akin to revolutionary communism in its early and most militant phase. It is global … It has states or at least parts of the governing apparatus of states that give it succour””." That is just one example of the dimension of the unforeseen threats around the world. Incidentally, there is a lesson to be learnt from the Cold War period on dealing with international terrorism because probably the key word should again be ““containment”” rather than ““confrontation””. The crucial thing about a nuclear weapon is that it has to go off when and where it is wanted and not otherwise. I am fairly doubtful about whether the newcomers to nuclear-weapons capability have weapons that remotely compare in quality, reliability and certainty, let along in invulnerability, with those of countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Russia and, probably, China. At the time of maximum tension between India and Pakistan, it was rumoured that had the politicians of either country invited their generals to use the weapons, they would have declined to do so. The question we have to ask is; what are we going to do about these submarines? As I understand it, the contention in the White Paper and in what the Minister said is not that the submarines are technologically obsolete—they are still state of the art, invulnerable, unfindable and fully effective—but that they are likely to become physically worn out. Therefore, I wonder whether we need to spend a great deal of money on a new design of submarine. I know that there are questions about it, and many Members of this House heard the ““Today”” programme yesterday. The question is whether we can modify, repair or replace certain components in the Vanguard submarines. That is one way forward, and I hope that in due course we can hear more about that, although the Minister said that that had been discounted. One of the problems that has always caused overrun on major military expenditure projects is that the spec has constantly been changed and updated. Indeed, one of the reasons why Poseidon and Trident stuck pretty closely to their original budgets was that we were buying off-the-shelf things from the Americans. We knew exactly where we were. I hope that the Government are, among other things, considering building two, three, four—or whatever number may be correct—new Vanguard submarines, which we know how to build and that could by definition be used for a further 25 or 30 years. That could have a significant impact on the cost. I suppose the cost factor concerns us most. The cost of our nuclear deterrent is approximately 4 per cent of our defence budget, which is about 2.5 per cent of our GDP. My worry is always—this is not a great criticism of the Government—that Governments are very inclined to undertake military commitments and then find that the cost of those commitments is greater than the resources they have available, either the equipment they have ready to use or the opportunity cost of the equipment they will need. Last week, we discussed the problem that is possibly looming of the cost of the two new aircraft carriers. We have two or three alternatives on military expenditure: we spend more of our GDP—that has its own problems, but it is a possibility—alternatively, we undertake less in the way of military commitments; or we invite others to share in the cost of military endeavours that we undertake, which are for the benefit of the world as a whole. The latter possibility is one which I would like to see explored much further. In that regard it is particularly notable that, when we spent some £2.5 billion on the first Gulf War, we got back £2 billion from others for whom it was an advantage that we undertook the war. So far, on Iraq, we have spent some £4 billion and we are not likely to get any of it back. I ask the Government to think of the renewal of this weapons system in the context of some of those issues.