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Armed Forces: Nuclear Deterrent

My Lords, before the great debate on Trident started, we were reminded by the bishops of the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches of what a terrible weapon it is. It is important to keep recalling that. It is said that, when the first test of a nuclear weapon took place at Alamogordo, the lead scientist at the time, Robert Oppenheimer, said under his breath these words from the Hindu Upanishads: "““I am come, Kali, destroyer of worlds, brighter than a thousand suns””." I mention that because, in the initial period of nuclear warfare, the main argument advanced to President Truman and others, and which has been quoted in this debate, was that a weapon of such immense destructive power would bring the war to an end very quickly. Indeed, after Nagasaki and Hiroshima that is what happened. It was regarded as a weapon beyond all the weapons that human beings had known about until then. In a second period, to which my noble friend Lord Rodgers and the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, referred, the Cold War, the nuclear weapon was essentially justified by the fact that it deterred the use of other nuclear weapons. All of us remember the title of that policy: mutually assured destruction. The moral argument for nuclear weapons was simply that they would never have to be deployed, because if they were, the response would be totally destructive. There is a sense in which, in both these periods, there was a rational argument to be made. One of the things that troubles me slightly about this debate is that the assumption made from the very beginning that deterrence was a rational response to a rational attack may no longer hold good. The noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, talked about maniacal power. We have to recognise that at least some element of terrorism may not be deterred in any way by the prospect of destruction. It might strangely even be attracted by it, so powerful are some of the nihilistic and, indeed, death-loving elements that we now confront. It is a shame that in this debate we have so little addressed the nature of terrorism as distinct from the old-fashioned nuclear attack that is now probably highly unlikely. If we address the issue of terrorism, for a moment at least, one of the claims on our budget has to be the absolute control over existing nuclear materials and restricting and, indeed, stopping access to those materials by utterly irresponsible groups. Yet we as a country contribute extremely little towards such efforts to control the spread of nuclear materials. As a country we have not particularly favoured suggestions such as the fissile material cut-off, the nuclear fuel bank or the reduction in warning times of existing nuclear weapons, all of which would be a very important part of making the world a safer place. This debate has shown two great holes in the Government’s White Paper, the first of which was effectively illustrated by my noble friend Lord Owen and the noble Lord, Lord Moonie. These raise huge questions about whether the country can afford to maintain a massive renewal of the nuclear deterrent and at the same time maintain its existing conventional forces in anything resembling proper operational capacity.