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Trident

I am just very pleased that she changed her mind. I do not want to go into all the arguments about the particular week in which she did so; I am sure she can explain that to us herself. There are, of course, important questions about costs, timings, the necessary skills base and the lifespan of some of the equipment involved. I shall turn to those shortly, and perhaps the Secretary of State for Defence will comment on them when he winds up the debate. However, we will support the Government’s motion, although the phrase"““take the steps necessary to maintain… the existing system””" barely does justice to what is being decided: the building of an entire new class of ballistic missile submarines, along with the updating of our Trident missile force, together representing the single most important and expensive procurement of the coming decades. In effect—unless there is, as the Foreign Secretary said, some fundamental and utterly unexpected change in world affairs—this means deciding to replace our nuclear deterrent for another generation, and our vote tonight will be the decision on whether to do so. The motion also refers to taking"““further steps towards meeting the United Kingdom’s disarmament responsibilities under… the Non-Proliferation Treaty””." Let me make it clear that those disarmament steps have the strong support of the Opposition. Britain is already unique among the recognised nuclear weapons states, in that we have reduced our nuclear deterrent capability to a single system, Trident. We have reduced the size of our nuclear arsenal by 70 per cent. since the cold war, and the Government rightly propose to make a further reduction in our stock of warheads from 200 to 160. We have only a single Trident submarine on deterrent patrol at any one time, with its missiles de-targeted.