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Trident

Whatever the merits of the debate, the Royal Navy, Aldermaston and British companies have, with our American allies, maintained a continuous at-sea deterrent for many decades, which is an astonishing achievement of which they should be proud. In this Parliament, the Defence Committee has conducted three inquiries on the future of the UK’s strategic nuclear deterrent. We have intended—successfully, I think—to encourage and inform a comprehensive debate on the future of the deterrent. I pay particular tribute to the members of the Select Committee for the constructive way in which they have carried out these controversial inquiries. The White Paper is an important document. This is the first time that we have had such openness and such a debate at this stage. I welcome that, and I think that the courage of the Government in coming to the House in such a way should be commended. I have been waiting for this debate to make my conclusions. I do not want to disparage those who take a different view—I have found the decision extremely difficult. First, I would like to go through the arguments against the Government’s proposal. This is an awful lot of money to spend on something of doubtful usefulness. At a time when we are funding our armed forces at a peacetime level, this seems an odd priority. We believe that we are the closest allies of the United State of America, and what do we add by buying this deterrent? We add a bit of uncertainty in the minds of the potential aggressor, but that is an awfully expensive bit of uncertainty. And how can we say to North Korea and Iran, ““We can, but you can’t””? It is not that our going for unilateral nuclear disarmament would have any persuasive power with them—clearly it would not—but making such statements does reduce our moral authority. The Government have made little attempt to explain how deterrence works. The purpose of having nuclear weapons will have failed if we ever have to use them, yet the only point of having them is that someone might think that we might use them. It is on the basis of such arguments that we are spending £20 billion. When could we use them? Perhaps the only scenario is that the United Kingdom will not know who has exploded a nuclear weapon, and then what would we do? Could we use them in retaliation? I believe that retaliation, as such, is illegal. We can use them to hit back in self-defence, but by the time that we are involved in a nuclear exchange, all thoughts of stopping anyone else from doing anything again will be long dead, along with most of us. Perhaps those rules are suspended in war, but that is far from clear. Legally, perhaps we could only use the weapons if we were firing them in first use, and that is a rather scary prospect. The Foreign Secretary said that the deterrent was an ““insurance policy”” against an uncertain threat, but talk of an insurance policy is simply wrong. If someone destroys a house, the purpose of an insurance policy is to pay to rebuild the house; it is not to destroy the house of the person who destroyed it. Let us find a better analogy. The best one that I can think of is a booby trap. The Secretary of State assures us that if someone walks into our ““house””, there is a likelihood that that devastating booby trap, wandering round the oceans of the world, will go off. That is not like any insurance policy of which I have ever heard. In what circumstances could the horribly high rate of collateral damage caused by a nuclear weapon be justified? It is hard to deter those who have a religious conviction that death is better than life, or who are irrational, so the weapons are aimed at a tiny proportion of the threats against us—those from rationally led states. That is not a conclusive argument, but the equipment is very expensive for deterring that sort of threat. I am not convinced that we can delay the decision; I think that we have to make it today.