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Foreign Affairs and Defence

I listened with interest to the remarks of the hon. Member for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn) about nuclear weapons. On the Trident decision, the point on which I think he is mistaken is that the need is for multilateral, not unilateral, nuclear disarmament. I do not believe that the Government's decision is irreversible. I have no doubt that if there were scope for major progress on nuclear disarmament over the coming period, it could be revisited in the context of what was happening around the world. The Gracious Speech itself was very light on the subject of nuclear weapons, but I pay tribute to what was said by my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague), the shadow Foreign Secretary. He paid great attention to the subject, and I very much agreed with the thrust of his remarks. I believe that the whole issue of nuclear weapons will be increasingly important over the next 12 months and the period thereafter, partly because the first foreign policy crisis with which President Obama will have to deal will be the question of nuclear weapons in Iran—and how he deals with that will also be influenced by what is happening on the wider nuclear weapons front—but also because I believe the time has come for major consideration of where the world is going with regard to the overall question of nuclear weapons. Over the last two days, I have attended an international conference in Paris arranged by the new Global Zero organisation. It may be thought that the conclusion that was reached was not a surprising one, but it was surprising in one sense. I shall come to that in a moment. The conference reached the conclusion that there was an urgent need for a massive reduction in the number of nuclear arsenals around the world, and for serious consideration of the question of ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons. Members may ask what was surprising about that, given that over the years many conferences have reached the same conclusion. It was extraordinary, however, in view of the composition of the conference. To put it mildly, none of the usual suspects were there. It was not a collection of professional peace campaigners. Among those present were a former President of the United States, a former American national security adviser, Foreign Ministers and former Defence Ministers of NATO countries and nuclear weapons states, and air marshals, generals and other senior military personnel from countries with nuclear weapons. The conference followed an initiative taken nearly two years ago in articles that appeared in the American press signed by Henry Kissinger, George Shultz and others. In this country, a number of us have made similar proposals. An early-day motion is currently before the House, signed by 277 Members including, I believe, some 57 of my hon. Friends. We have to ask why those of us who have so often been identified with realpolitik are becoming strongly convinced of the need for a fundamental debate on the overall question of nuclear weapons, along with a change of approach to one of greater urgency. Essentially, it is because realpolitik means being influenced by real events and not by idealism or theoretical issues, and the real world has changed substantially since the end of the cold war. As the Foreign Secretary implied and my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks said, much has been achieved. At the end of the cold war, the United States and the Soviet Union between them had between 26,000 and 27,000 operational nuclear weapons. That figure is now down to about 12,000—between 5,000 and 6,000 each. Nuclear weapons have also been successfully eliminated from Kazakhstan, Belarus and Ukraine in the former Soviet Union, and there have been local achievements, such as South Africa giving up its nuclear weapons and Libya being persuaded not to conduct a weapons of mass destruction programme. In the past few years, however, that whole process has stalled dramatically. There is no evidence of any further impetus with regard to the United States and Russia, who between them have 95 per cent. of all the nuclear weapons in the world. That is becoming an increasingly serious matter because the continuation of the non-proliferation treaty, which comes up for debate in 2010, can no longer be taken for granted. Not only have we seen serious new proliferation in recent years, such as in Israel, India and Pakistan, but now there is the possibility of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons as well; the North Korea situation is not yet resolved, and we know that if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, it would only be a matter of time before the Arab states did so as well. There is, therefore, a serious new urgency, and the arguments that were valid during the cold war are no longer valid in the same way. The countries that had nuclear weapons during the cold war were overwhelmingly the great powers involved in that cold war, and they needed nuclear weapons because of the perceived conventional superiority of the Soviet Union and the need to prevent any war—conventional or nuclear—from breaking out. Because they have 95 per cent. of all nuclear weapons, the key to progress lies with the United States and Russia. If they were both able to make massive further reductions in their nuclear arsenals, they would know they could do so without any change in the relative power of the two states and their ability to deter any possible attack on themselves. Even if we believe in deterrence, we do not need 5,000 nuclear weapons to prevent an attack by our enemy; 500 would clearly destroy the world several times over. There is, therefore, no logical argument of defence why the Russians and the Americans cannot now approach a further stage in these negotiations by at the very least reducing their nuclear arsenals to 500 or 400, or even 200 or 300, without any change in fundamental defence strategy.