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Trident

I was a grateful recipient of my hon. Friend’s brilliant essay on nuclear deterrence, which partially persuaded me. For the reasons that I have given, I have decided to support the proposal. I am not inclined to take the risk of allowing the unilateral nuclear disarmament of this country to send us naked into the conference chamber, as Nye Bevan once put it. The trouble is that those considerations apply just as strongly to Iran as they do to the United Kingdom. Why should we expect a proud Iranian nation to go naked into the conference chamber? It is a difficult question. My answer is that we have the world that we have. We would like a world with no nuclear weapons in it, but there is not the smallest hope of achieving that without gradually reducing the nuclear weapons of those states that have them, while doing our utmost to ensure that no new countries acquire them. Will we succeed? I am sad to say that I doubt it, because I am profoundly pessimistic about the future of the world. Climate change has the capacity to make the planet uninhabitable for humans, and now that nuclear technology has been invented, it will never go away. There are nuclear weapons around, and sooner or later one or more of them will get into the hands of people who we would rather did not have them. We now have the ability to destroy the world, and I regret to say that it is natural human behaviour that when we have the ability to do something, sooner or later we try it out. I believe that that will happen before climate change has had time to do its work.