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Global Security (Russia)

I note the hon. Gentleman's views. His point is one for the Minister, who will no doubt wish to respond when he replies to the debate. My second suggestion to the Government relates to the resources that the Foreign Office devotes to supporting non-governmental organisations and others in Russia that are bravely battling for improved human rights and standards of governance. I have been looking at the Foreign Office's latest human rights annual report, and the Foreign Office appears to be spreading its available help pretty thinly. The report says:"““FCO project funds provided over £700,000 for 18 projects working with NGOs to promote human rights, good governance and reform in Russia during the 2006/07 financial year. Over £440,000 was allocated for a further 16 projects starting in 2007/08.””" I put it to the Minister that a little more than £1 million spread over two years is a pretty marginal amount of support. Given the key importance of Russia and the human rights battle there, I hope that the Government will see whether they can find additional resources to devote to the issue. I come now to my last suggestion. Although there is much that we can do bilaterally, we will have to act internationally if we are to stop and then reverse Russia's downward human rights trend. I therefore strongly urge the Foreign Office to continue to do all that it can in the available international forums to exert additional pressure on the Russian Government to improve their human rights performance. I am referring to what the Government can do at the UN, through the EU-Russia human rights dialogue, in the negotiations on the EU-Russia agreement and through the not inconsiderable contacts that take place between Russia and NATO. All those forums give the Foreign Office an important opportunity to press its human rights agenda. I turn now to the two biggest bones of contention between what I would broadly call the west and Russia. First, there is the enlargement of NATO to include Ukraine and Georgia. I support making progress on their NATO membership. Both have a clear western orientation and have made significant improvements in democratic and human rights terms. There is more to do in both countries, and more would need to be achieved before they gained NATO membership, but they have made significant advances. They have shown that they are committed to NATO as a defence organisation and have made useful contributions to NATO deployments in operational theatres. For all those reasons, their applications should be supported. Some say that Georgia should be excluded because of the frozen conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but I do not buy that argument. I know that the EU is not the same as NATO, but it has taken Cyprus in despite the frozen conflict there—that particular freeze might be beginning to thaw, but that is the history. I should add that the one absolutely certain way to ensure that the frozen conflicts in Georgia remain frozen would be to tell the Russians that they were the justification for keeping Georgia outside NATO—that would mean a permanent freeze. I am disappointed that the Government appeared from what one read in the press to be sitting on the fence on this issue in Bucharest, but I hope that the Prime Minister can clarify the situation further if he reports back to the House. I would have hoped, however, that the Government were more supportive of these applications. I turn now to the other bone of contention—ballistic missile defence. In wider security terms, this is far more significant than our difference of view with Russia over the applications by Ukraine and Georgia for NATO membership. I have received several briefings on ballistic missile defence from both sides of the Atlantic, although they are, admittedly, all non-classified, as is appropriate for me as a Back Bencher. Although I have an open mind and I am ready to be persuaded, I have so far seen no overall security benefit to western European from the ballistic missile defence deployment proposed by the United States. On any objective assessment, the security benefit to Europe appears pretty marginal. We are talking about a site in eastern Europe with just 10 anti-ballistic missile interceptors. The technology is far from proven and is incredibly demanding—the process has been likened to hitting a bullet with a bullet. Nothing that I have read suggests that anything like 100 per cent. success can be achieved. One could argue that that does not really matter and that any degree of anti-ballistic missile defence is surely worth having, given the possible threat down the road from the Iranians, but we must look at both sides of the equation and at the downside, which appears considerable. The Russian reaction has been exceptionally hostile so far. The proposed deployment has brought out the Russian regime's age-old and, it must be said, historically entirely understandable paranoia about encirclement and particularly about threats from the west. Regrettably, President Putin has already suspended the agreement on conventional forces in Europe, which is a serious step. Much more serious, however, is his threat unilaterally to abrogate the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty, which was concluded in 1987. That treaty is far and away the most significant nuclear weapons arms control agreement to have been entered into, and it has operated satisfactorily since it was first agreed. It led to the removal and dismantling of huge numbers of ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of between 500 and 5,500 km. Perhaps most importantly, it ended a most dangerous and terrifying situation in Europe, whereby the decision takers with the nuclear trigger at their sides had only a few minutes to decide whether nuclear retaliation was justified. That was an extraordinarily dangerous position for us to have got into, and was significantly alleviated, in terms of warning times, by the INF treaty. All of us in western Europe must ask whether we want to risk creating the situation from which we managed to escape as a result of the 1987 INF treaty. Do we want Russian ballistic missiles to move west and US and NATO cruise missiles to move east? Do we want to recreate a situation in which literally less than 10 minutes' warning is available for people living in Europe, including its capitals? In January I was fortunate to hear someone who has made a remarkably important contribution to arms control issues for many years, former Senator Sam Nunn, in Washington with the NATO Parliamentary Assembly's defence committee. In a speech to us on 28 January entitled ““The Mountain Top: A World Free of Nuclear Weapons”” former Senator Nunn, who is now co-chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, rightly drew attention to the fact that even today, supposedly after the end of the cold war,"““The nuclear giants, the United States and Russia, continue to deploy thousands of nuclear weapons on ballistic missiles that can hit their targets in less than 30 minutes—a short warning time, prompt launch capability that carries with it an increasingly unacceptable risk of an accidental, mistaken or unauthorised launch.””" He went on to say:"““The United States and Russia should move to change the cold war posture of their deployed nuclear weapons to greatly increase warning time in both countries and ease our fingers away from the nuclear trigger.””" What we must consider is whether, instead of increasing the already terrifyingly short warning time of 30 minutes, which former Senator Nunn is campaigning to change to at least two hours, we want to go in the other direction and get the warning time for western Europe down to 10 minutes or less, with an impossibly short time scale for decision taking to determine whether an alarm is genuine or not. That is what is at stake with ballistic missile defence deployment if it does indeed lead to the unilateral renunciation of the INF treaty. In my view there has been wholly insufficient disclosure in detail by the Government of the implications for western Europe of the proposed BMD deployment. I strongly urge the Government that they need to repair that and to set out fully what the implications would be for western Europe if the deployment were to lead to the unilateral renunciation of the INF treaty. That is a fundamentally critical security issue for the whole of western Europe and the UK in particular.