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Armed Forces: Nuclear Deterrent

My Lords, last year there was a tremendous consensus among the political parties, the Government and scientists that the greatest threat to the security of our country was climate change. I want to look at some of the arguments about the renewal of an independent nuclear deterrent in the context of climate change. I am an unashamed unilateralist. I do not want to go into the ethics of the argument this afternoon, as that debate has not changed over the past 30 years, although the context has. Climate change will bring unknown consequences. Scientists are unable to model exactly where we are going with climate change, and social scientists cannot model what the consequences will be. Among the possible effects that they have outlined are mass migration, resource shortages, especially of food and water, and an atmosphere of great instability and vulnerability. In such an atmosphere, it could be argued, it would be important to have an independent nuclear deterrent to deter people from encroaching on our resources. But, can we really envisage a situation where we would launch an attack on people, for example refugees, threatening to overwhelm us? I agree with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester that there has not been a debate about the morals of when we would use such a weapon in this context. Nor is it likely that a country which wanted to acquire our land and water resources would launch a nuclear attack on us, as by doing so it would pollute the very resources it sought to acquire. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, has outlined the various scenarios. He is evidently far more qualified to do so than I am, but very serious questions need to be asked about how relevant nuclear deterrence is in this context. A number of noble Lords have pointed to the need for resources to go into conventional military weapons and other areas of demand such as schools and hospitals. As long ago as 1995, the opinion of quite a body of leading economists was brought together in a book called Economists and the Environment. Their opinion, even then, was that it made far more sense to spend less on weapons and more on the environment. There are some striking parallels between the calculations of the overall cost of buying the missiles, replacing the submarines and maintaining the system for 30 years—estimated by some as £76 billion—and the cost of making some real inroads into reducing our carbon emissions by a level approaching the Government’s target. So far as anyone can calculate, that figure is £60 billion to £80 billion. So when discussing where resources should go, it is important that climate change is part of the equation. The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, made the point about jobs. Jobs can be found equally well in the cutting-edge, scientific developments of carbon-reduction technologies and, not least in this country, in adaptation—as we know, climate change is already under way. We have to adapt much more rapidly and take cognisance of the issue more than we have hereto. The Government are budgeting, I believe, less than £1 billion a year to tackle directly all the climate change issues, but, as the Stern report showed, we need to spend far more than that and far quicker. The speed with which we tackle these effects will be crucial; we cannot afford to spend at the end of the period. Much has been made of what we will leave to our children as an inheritance if we do not have the security of a nuclear weapons system. However, I believe that world security will be about adequate energy, water and food in the 21st century, and about each country having controlled its needs and consumption so that it feels secure enough. That will take a sea change in the amount of investment in research and development, agriculture, water conservation and so on. We will probably have to redesign the very way we live. We need that sort of investment for a secure future. We should have already decided to make such investment now. Instead, the Government seem to feel that they must make a thoroughly premature decision on a weapons system whose relevance in the 21st century many analysts, including many speakers this afternoon, have questioned. Last week it was revealed that the Doomsday clock, which was created in 1947 by a group of atomic scientists to calculate the risk of nuclear catastrophe, had moved closer to midnight by several minutes. In my lifetime it has always been between about 10 minutes to midnight and only two minutes to midnight. Midnight is wipe-out time. This year the scientists moved the time forward because of climate change risks being faced without progress on the non-proliferation treaty. If it has moved in that way, climate change has to be taken into consideration in this debate.