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Armed Forces: Nuclear Deterrent

My Lords, with one or two exceptions—the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, and my noble friends Lady Williams and Lady Miller being those exceptions for me—I have been appalled at the tone of this debate. A stranger suddenly coming in here might have wondered what we were talking about. At the best of times it sounded like a serious debate on updating a transport system. We are discussing the most terrible weapons of mass destruction ever devised. They are there now. They could destroy the world many times over and they could be used. Whoever starts it, no one can win a nuclear war, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, has reminded us from the Russell-Einstein manifesto. We are discussing Armageddon. I remind us all of what that means by referring to a report made in the 1980s by the Medical Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons. I hesitated on that name because I was a member of that campaign and we used to call ourselves ““Docs against the bomb””. As we have been reminded, the bomb at Hiroshima was a terrible event in human history and I make no apology now for a passionate doctor to follow a passionate lawyer on the subject, because we need to remind ourselves what happened at Hiroshima, committed by a very small bomb by today’s standards. It killed 68,000 people immediately and badly injured 76,000. Countless thousands of people went missing and were never accounted for. I quote from an eyewitness cited in the report to which I referred: "““No one knew what had happened. Skin was hanging from faces and hands of the survivors. People lay on pavements vomiting and waiting for death. They were too weak to move and no one was there to help. A priest came in from the outskirts and found a group of soldiers with wholly burned faces and eye sockets hollow with the fluid from melting eyes running down cheeks””." They had been unfortunate enough to see the blast. The eyewitness continued: "““Three out of 45 hospitals remained in Hiroshima, most of the doctors dead or too badly wounded to help others. In the Red Cross hospital 1.6 km from the explosion, ceilings had fallen, plaster, dust, vomit were everywhere, thousands of dead and dying patients lying inside and on the driveway””." In many ways those people about whom I have been talking were the lucky ones. They died in a few days, but in the weeks, months and years that followed thousands more died from the effects of bone marrow suppression, cancer, bowel erosions and diarrhoea, and later generations suffered and still suffer from genetic disorders. That is what we are talking about. We are not talking about toy weapons. All that was from a 13 kilotonne bomb, a small bomb by today’s standards. We now use megatonne bombs, 760 times more damaging than that dropped on Hiroshima if we do the sums. A bomb dropped on Westminster would mean no London as far out as Croydon, Enfield and Kingston: no people, no emergency workers, no hospitals, even no Government. We must not forget the scale of those weapons. Many noble Lords have questioned whether the possession of nuclear weapons acts as a deterrent. I will be brief about that, but we cannot agree if we say that our possession of a nuclear bomb is a deterrent to nuclear war that other countries should not have that deterrent. It is totally illogical. Iran has been mentioned: how can we tell Iran that it must not have a nuclear weapon when its neighbouring country Israel has one, on the admission of its Prime Minister a few weeks ago? I sometimes think rather flippantly that if it was truly a deterrent the international community should make sure that everyone has one little bomb and then we could all deter one another. What a nonsense concept it is; and what of this non-proliferation treaty mentioned by many noble Lords? We agreed then that every signatory should have nuclear energy if they wished. We are complaining about Iran at the moment. We agreed that those without the bomb should not try to obtain one, and that those five countries with the bomb would negotiate the elimination of all nuclear weapons in time. In keeping and updating Trident, surely we are acting illegally against the non-proliferation treaty. I would like the Minister in his summing up to clarify that point for me. It is a sincere request for clarification and information. As other noble Lords have said, if terrorists strike with nuclear weapons, where do we strike back? Do we drop nuclear bombs on the civilian populations of north Pakistan, where it is alleged that there are terrorists hiding, or Manchester, where we know that there were terrorists hiding after 7 July? Where do we drop those bombs? They are not irrelevant to a terrorist attack. I have no idea what the cost is going to be. I am told that it is between £25 billion to update the weapons rising to £76 billion if we take the maintenance into account—enormous costs. As the noble Lord, Lord Owen, who is not in his place, asked in his fascinating and brilliant speech, what about our ordinary defence forces? Is it obscene that we possess nuclear weapons but there are soldiers in Iraq who did not have sufficient body armour for the job they were supposed to do? Is it obscene that we have nuclear weapons in this country and our Armed Forces, wives, children and families are accommodated in the most appalling homes and flats? Is it not appalling that we have nuclear weapons in this country yet, when there is a natural disaster, a cry goes out for helicopters and not only do we not have enough helicopters, which are the only seriously useful thing that the Armed Forces possess—that is a flippant remark, but they are seriously useful—but we do not have any heavy lift equipment to get them out to where they are needed, whether it is Mozambique, Kashmir or wherever is the disaster? It is verging on the obscene that we have nuclear weapons, yet we cannot do the things that we want to do. Money spent on the developing world, and on our own education and health services, would be a far better investment. In his opening remarks, the Minister said, as does the White Paper, that the number of warheads in the Trident system will be reduced. It will be fully independent, not dependent on the United States, which is good news, and it will form only 1 per cent of world nuclear capability. Nevertheless, let us not doubt that by updating this system, we are pushing the world into a new arms race. Worse than that, my country will lose any moral authority it may have left since the Government’s disastrous foreign policy adventures in the Middle East.