---

Trident

Many right hon. and hon. Members tonight have acknowledged that the cold war is over, but the White Paper on the future of Trident is still rooted in cold war thinking. It makes no real analysis of the future role of the US-led and nuclear-armed NATO alliance of which we are a part, nor of the new Europe in which we live. It is a mass of assertions with no attempt to examine how best to approach security in a world where climate change and competition for resources and markets will be paramount. Instead, we are given three scenarios for threats that the White Paper tells us can be countered only by Britain maintaining its nuclear weapons system until 2050. We are told that a major nuclear power, presumably Russia, may re-emerge to threaten us. Now Russia may be an imperfect democracy, but why should the Russians, who have everything to gain from a more united Europe, specifically aim their nuclear weapons at Britain? Whatever the potential conflicts over oil, does anyone really believe that nuclear weapons could be used to settle any such future conflicts? The White Paper goes on to pose a second threat: new states acquiring nuclear weapons and threatening our vital interests. Iran is the country most often cited. Embroiled as that country is in middle eastern politics, with a nuclear-armed Israel on one side and a nuclear-armed Pakistan on the other, it is impossible to understand why Iran would want to target its nuclear weapon, if it acquired them, specifically at the United Kingdom. I am the last person to support Iran in its endeavours, but it is inescapable that if we argue that we need nuclear weapons to protect us against future threats, so can Iran. As the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed El Baradei, recently warned, a decision now to renew Trident sends exactly the wrong message to those countries that we would wish to deter from the acquisition of nuclear weapons. The third threat posed in the White Paper is that countries might sponsor nuclear terrorism from their soil. This, frankly, is the most preposterous assertion of nuclear deterrence. Do we really believe that the dirty bomb in the suitcase is going to have a survivable country-of-origin label on it? We all know that suicidal terrorists cannot be deterred by nuclear weapons and they know that it would be impossible immediately to identify a sponsoring state so as to justify nuclear retaliation. Let us however suspend disbelief for a moment and accept that all these threats can be deterred only by nuclear weapons. Why then should Britain be uniquely targeted by Iran, North Korea or any other state? The White Paper asserts continually the deterrent value of British nuclear weapons without advancing a single plausible threat scenario. But it is not even that simple. As the Prime Minister wrote to George Bush last December, in the letter to which my hon. Friend the Member for Hemsworth (Jon Trickett) referred, the new British nuclear weapons coming into service in 20 years’ time would be assigned to NATO, as now. With the end of the cold war and an expanded Europe, do we really think that we would get agreement from all our allies to use British weapons of mass destruction? Or that the US would not intervene if Britain wanted to act independently but that did not suit the US? It is just not credible.