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Armed Forces: US Missile Defence

My Lords, recent developments in the field of missile defence systems, in particular the unilateral US decision to deploy anti-missile missiles and their back-up equipment to eastern Europe and the extraordinarily shrill Russian response to that decision, have reminded us of the basic fragility of the security environment in which we live in this post-Cold War era. Some statements, particularly those from the Russian side, have sounded eerily like echoes of the Cold War. While I do not believe that we are in fact slipping back towards that era, we surely need to learn lessons from some of the mistakes that have been made and to try to remedy some of the damage that has been done. Because this issue has wider implications for the whole future of mutually agreed multilateral measures of arms control and disarmament, we need, I argue, to look wider than the single matter of missile defence. We need to know a lot more than we have hitherto been told about the role that the British Government are playing in these developments and, for that, we look to the Minister replying to this debate. For all these reasons, I warmly welcome the initiative taken by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, and the Liberal Democrats in bringing this issue before the House. I should say at the outset that I do not believe that either the United States or its allies can simply afford to ignore the potential future threat from weapons of mass destruction armed missile attacks, launched by one or more of the growing number of countries seeking to acquire such a capability. So I do not favour attempting to place a blanket ban on the development or deployment of any form of anti-missile defence. There I take the same view as, I think, the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, and certainly the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford. To do so, in my view, not only would be doomed to failure, but could leave the United States and its allies with no better form of deterrence against such attacks than the appalling prospect of massive retaliation. That form of deterrence may have worked in the special circumstances of the Cold War, with two equally armed nuclear superpowers, each with the capacity to destroy the world, squared off against each other, but would it work in the much more fragmented, fissiparous world in which we live? There must be some reasonable doubt about that. Will it work in the medium to long-term future, whose shape we never seem terribly good at predicting? Nor do I consider the Russian response to US policy to be other than disproportionate and excessively aggressive. The idea that a very small number of anti-missile missiles deployed in Poland will pose a serious threat to Russia’s security is not convincing. The initial approach of the US to the handling of the perceived threat seems to me to have been deeply flawed and to bear all the marks of that unilateralist approach to policy-making that has inflicted such damage on the US’s reputation and its alliance relationships over recent years. Was it really wise not to ensure firm support or at least clear understanding of the reasoning behind the policy in NATO before moving ahead? Was it sensible not to consult Russia at an early stage and at every level before firm decisions were announced, given the fraught negotiations that preceded the setting aside of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002? My answer to both questions is, ““Clearly not””. The need now, surely, is to proceed much more circumspectly and cautiously towards any future decisions, particularly those on the timing and practicalities of any actual deployment of missiles, seeking to meet concerns where they are legitimate and to find ways around problems rather than bulldozing one’s way through them. In all this, the element of timing is surely critical and, in the light of the recent US National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, there may be slightly more of that commodity available than was thought by some a short time ago. After all, a world in which the potential threats from North Korea and Iran have been met by peaceful negotiated responses will be a totally different world from one where the diplomatic approach has definitively failed, and we are not yet at a point where we can say one or the other of those two outcomes is the more likely. It would be good to hear from the Minister whether the Government are urging such a more circumspect and cautious approach on our US allies when it comes to deployment. That brings us to the wider significance of this anti-missile defence issue to arms control and disarmament in general. Developments in this wider field since the turn of the century have almost all been negative. The major shift towards substantive measures of arms control and disarmament that marked the 1980s and 1990s ground to a halt and was then reversed. This was no random event, born simply of neglect or inadvertence. Any reader of Surrender is Not an Option, the recent memoir of the former US ambassador to the UN and Under Secretary for Arms Control, will see there the glee and enthusiasm with which the Bush Administration set about unilaterally dismantling existing agreements such as the ABM Treaty and destroying future ones on biological warfare verification and on a fissile material cut-off treaty, as well as blocking any prospect of bringing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty into force. This in my view misguided policy seems, fortunately, to have pretty well run its course, but it has not yet been reversed, as it surely needs to be. That is what makes 2008 a crucial year for arms control and disarmament, one in which we can either stand aside helplessly as the world slides towards disorder and greater insecurity for all, or one in which we collectively begin to resume the process of multilateral arms control and disarmament and to strengthen the effort against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. We should be under no illusion that those two matters are closely connected. If the 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference is to avoid being the fiasco that its predecessor was in 2005, if the now certain major expansion of civil nuclear energy in the years ahead is not to lead to major proliferation risks from the increasingly widespread existence of countries controlling the full fuel cycle, and if the cases of Iran and North Korea are to be handled satisfactorily, the existing legitimised nuclear weapon states will need to honour their commitment to move towards nuclear disarmament. That is the view of a number of extremely distinguished US statesmen known more for their realism than for any ideological commitment to disarmament and led by two former Secretaries of State, George Shultz and Henry Kissinger. It surely should be the view, too, of our own Government, but on that I wait to hear the noble Baroness when she winds up. This year’s election in the US provides an opportunity and is, indeed, a necessary precondition for such a reversal of recent negative trends, as probably is the emergence of Russia from its cycle of parliamentary and presidential elections. But the debate needs to go wider than that and it would surely be wrong if the British Government—one of the legitimised nuclear weapon states—were to regard themselves simply as a spectator in this process. Is it not high time that the Foreign Secretary or the Prime Minister set out fully and publicly the British Government’s thinking on the whole range of issues covered in this debate? What are we ourselves prepared to contribute to the sorely needed renaissance of multilateral arms control and disarmament? What are we doing to bring about a concerted European view on these matters, particularly a view concerted with our fellow European nuclear power, France? What progress is being made at the International Atomic Energy Agency to take decisions and to implement the Government’s proposals for a uranium enrichment bank or drawing rights? In conclusion, I return briefly to missile defence. It is surely clear that addressing this matter on its own, in complete isolation from these wider considerations, is not likely either to work or to produce good results. We need to address it in a wider framework of resumed international co-operation over arms control issues. By this I am not suggesting any crude trade-offs or some obscure ““grand bargain””. The suggestion is rather that, unless we can bring about a reversal of recent negative trends and a spirit of greater mutual confidence and co-operation, dealing with each individual issue, of which this is one, will be a great deal more difficult and only too likely to lead to a further unravelling of the important international agreements that were put in place some time ago.