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Trident

All we can go on is the evidence of history. The hot war—to use the hon. Gentleman’s phrase—did not happen. One of the factors that brought the cold war to a peaceful end was the strength shown by the western alliance—by NATO—not only in having independent nuclear deterrents in Washington, London and Paris, but also in deploying, as an alliance, theatre nuclear weapons, which was highly controversial at the time, as we all remember. The hon. Gentleman should remember that point when he comes to vote this evening. I was very struck by the speech in the House of Lords on 24 January of Lord O’Neill of Clackmannan, a former colleague in this House who was the Labour party’s defence spokesman in the period when it championed unilateral nuclear disarmament. He said that when Lord Kinnock and other Front-Bench colleagues of the time"““started visiting the decision-making centres of the other nuclear powers—Washington, Paris and Moscow—and spoke to the Chinese in London, we were startled by the indifference with which they greeted our willingness to give up our nuclear arsenal. They felt that it would not be a bad thing, but would make not one whit of difference to their nuclear capability or willingness to participate in disarmament negotiations one way or the other.””—[Official Report, House of Lords, 24 January 2007; Vol. 688, c. 1120.]" He added that those experiences marked the beginning of new Labour in foreign and security policy. For the policy we are currently discussing above all others, it remains the case today that laudable idealism must be leavened with gritty realism. In terms of numbers, there have been large reductions in the American and Russian arsenals, but within the last 10 years we have also seen the Indian and Pakistani nuclear weapons tests, the modernisation of China’s nuclear arsenal, North Korea’s proliferation, the discovery of Iran’s covert nuclear programme and the evolution of Russia’s nuclear doctrine, placing increased emphasis on nuclear weapons to offset its conventional weakness. All that demonstrates that the nature of the long-term threat to the peace of the world from nuclear weapons has changed but has not necessarily diminished. Indeed, according to ““Strategic Trends””, an independent view of the future produced by a body in the Ministry of Defence,"““access to technology that enables the production and distribution of chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons is likely to increase.””" That view certainly seems to be borne out by what we see around the world.