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Nuclear Disarmament

My Lords, in trying to sum up for these Benches on this subject, I acutely feel the lack of my noble friend Lady Williams—I feel that even more than the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, felt it in his initial remarks—because the complexity of the process is mind-boggling. The people who state that they are working as bodies towards non-proliferation and removing nuclear weapons work as a huge spider’s web pulling in roughly the same direction some of the time. Why have we got to this situation? It is because we have realised that nuclear weapons pose a great threat to our existence and we want to get rid of them. We have managed to get ourselves into a situation where we have lots of them on a hair-trigger response. The noble Lord, Lord Robertson, reminded me of the world in which I grew up. The idea that we could all die tomorrow was there throughout my childhood and my early adult life. It could always happen. It was a constant of the popular literature and culture of the time. We now have gloom and disaster about climate change, we even invented things about meteorites, but in my childhood, we did not have to invent anything. Two squabbling politicians provided a drama where the world ended. We have moved on considerably. That type of pressure may have produced Tom Lehrer being beautifully black in "We Will All Go Together When We Go", but getting rid of it is something we must work towards. What can Great Britain do? I forget who said that our place within the nuclear pantheon is as a small player, although we still possess enough nuclear weapons effectively to obliterate life as we know it on this planet. We are probably the smallest of the established five powers, but we are still there. As has been said by virtually all speakers, we can lead by example in showing that we want to reduce our capacity because we do not want to use it. This means that we have to try to encourage others to become involved in that process in a fairly aggressive way. By that, I mean not simply shrugging our shoulders but having a stake in the process of removing this threat. Every second noble Lord who spoke mentioned the complication of the link with civil nuclear power. If the theoretical knowledge that is the basic prerequisite for acquiring nuclear weapons is there, how do we marry these two threats—effectively one threat and one benefit to society? We have to make sure that when we are talking about this and making pronouncements, we know what everybody is saying: we must enhance the verification process. Great Britain has the capacity to make considerable investments in the laboratories, institutions and groups that need expertise. As we cannot get rid of the knowledge of nuclear weapons and power, we need a commitment from the Government, whoever sits on the Treasury Bench, to make sure that we invest in those institutions in terms of personnel, training and awareness to make sure that they function in the short, medium and long-term future and that we have enough people who are reliably trained to make sure that when we say we are doing something, we are doing it, and others can rely on that. The idea of nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction was based on the fact that we do not know what the other person is doing—in other words, fear—so let us have another missile. I was very relieved when everyone seemed to pull back from the recent idea of missile defence and the idea of being able to deter somebody from striking back against you. Russia felt that, justifiably, as it no longer has an overwhelming mass of land-based forces. If we can get the knowledge to get away from positions where that fear can come out, we can make a real contribution. Britain has sufficient resources to do that. We also have sufficient status to take a lead in this. When she sums up, will the Minister give us some idea of our status on the training and support of those institutions?