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Nuclear Disarmament

My Lords, I have to confess that I come to this scene with so many more cumulative recollections of the years when we were confronting the Cold War and all that went with it, and I find myself impressed beyond my own capability by the compact and skilled way in which the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, presented his summary of the present situation. I glance back for a moment, as did the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, to an earlier stage in my career when, as I moved from the Treasury to the Foreign Office, I found myself absorbing all the case that could be made for the preservation and enhancement of our nuclear weapons, and the fact that my son had become the national press officer for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. That led to a certain amount of stress within the family, but I am happy to say that we have now, more or less, reconciled it. What immediately strikes one when recalling that period now is the huge distance that we have been able to cover and the fact, as the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, pointed out, that a formidable gathering of American men of authority, including four secretaries of state and two senators, has come together to lead their campaign on a worldwide basis for the achievement of a world that will in the end be free of nuclear weapons of any kind. It is all the more encouraging that comparable movements have been started and are making headway virtually all round the world. Like the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, I regret the absence from today’s debate of the noble Baroness, Lady Shirley Williams. She, in her partnership with Gareth Evans in the Australian Parliament, has also made a very substantial contribution to what we need. One other feature that influences me from the Cold War era is the extent to which success in these matters will require, and has always required, tenacity and determination on a very long and often frustrated basis. Happily, we no longer live, as we did in those days, in a world where everything is dominated by the confrontation between the two superpowers. For example, it was remarkable—miraculous—when my noble friend Lady Thatcher and I had our first meeting at Chequers with Mikhail Gorbachev as he first arrived on the world stage, and he immediately said that arms control was his principal preoccupation. He pointed out the scale of the agenda at that time, with the simple proposition that the weapons available to the superpowers exceeded by billions the total power of the weaponry used in World War 1. There one began to see the will which has taken us now so far along the road, with an impressive array of treaties already in force, the enhancement and reinforcement of which are of primary importance in the years ahead. Our American friends, led by my former colleague George Shultz, have also underlined a very simple analysis. He has written a very helpful essay in a book, to which I wrote a foreword, edited by a former colleague in the other place, Robert Harvey. The book is entitled The World Crisis: The Way Forward after Iraq. The central dilemma as set out by George Shultz is that the prospect of building more nuclear power plants implies the wider distribution of potential bomb material. In those circumstances, it is our duty now to undertake—to quote from George Shultz’s analysis— ""the task of protecting the golden moment"." We have reached the point where it is not unrealistic to expect the possibility of progress along the lines indicated by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay. My central point is that if we are to achieve the completion of that agenda, then the will and determination to tackle the different tasks in each of the different quarters that the noble Lord identified will require as much tenacity as was needed to make the first steps in achieving headway on arms control between the major powers. We have rightly identified the value of the agreement between the two leaders of the superpowers and counted our blessings on the agenda that has to be tackled in the next two or three years. I hope and believe that we shall now be able, in this country with our limited influence, to play our part in a much larger concert of leadership on the road to sanity in achieving defence against the horrors of a world overwhelmed and cluttered by nuclear weapons, although tucked away. We may well be on the track that will take us possibly to the elimination of all nuclear weapons and certainly to the large-scale reduction of them. That, as the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, pointed out, is a direction to which we can all commit ourselves. I hope this Government, and the one who will shortly succeed them, will have no doubt in pressing ahead with that agenda.