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Conventional Weapons

My Lords, I was acknowledging a failure rate of 25 per cent to 30 per cent for the weapons used in Lebanon as a figure that has been used. Frankly, given the fraught nature of the aftermath of that conflict, it is very hard to get solid figures for the failure rate, but it was clearly unacceptably high and had a terrible consequence for civilian lives. I fully acknowledge that point but, again, I contrast those weapons with the UK M85, which has a self-destruct mechanism. We are committed to improving the reliability of these weapons. The essential point is that, given what the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has observed about the current nature of the conflicts in which we are involved in Afghanistan and Iraq, there is no current use of those weapons. They remain in the arsenal, but are not used. The weapon of dispute is the Apache-fired CRV7, which the Ministry of Defence does not categorise as a cluster weapon—but I suspect that there may be a debate on definition there. I assure your Lordships that Her Majesty's Government have moved this year in response to concern expressed in this Chamber and outside by civil society and all those involved in the Oslo process. We have moved sharply to contract our use of those weapons, to decommission whole categories of those weapons and to take the lead internationally in pressing for a conventional treaty to ensure that the use of cluster weapons, as an indiscriminate tool of warfare against people and one that no longer comports with the overwhelming nature of modern conflict, is reined right back to military purposes that have a military rationale.