UK-US Co-operation on Using Atomic Energy for Mutual Defence

Lord Stevens of Birmingham Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Stevens of Birmingham (CB)]

I am very pleased to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, not least because she has spurred all kinds of reactions in my mind to the “Address to the Australian Parliament” which we have just heard. It is a stretch to say that the decision to renew the strategic deterrent lacks democratic legitimacy in this country, when it was explicitly voted on by the House of Commons in 2016; when the people of this country had a choice, in 2019, whether to elect the leader of one of our principal political parties who had an obvious preference against nuclear weapons; and when, in the 2024 election, her party, under good democratic principles, put before the electorate the prospect of unilaterally abandoning our nuclear weapons and I am afraid the country did not elect a Green Government. The idea that these decisions lack democratic legitimacy is itself an illegitimate argument.

It was also surprising to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, cite the US Congressional Research Service report on the AUKUS pillar 1 deal as an alternative to what is being proposed. I happen to have that report here and was just flicking through it as she was speaking. The alternative proposition that the CRS put on the table is not the absence of nuclear-powered submarines for Australia or, indeed, the downgrading of its defence expenditure so as to reinvest in other worthy projects; it is in fact to contemplate greater dependency on US basing of US-controlled Virginia-class SSNs in Australia, foregoing any sovereign oversight that the elected Australian Government of the day might have. We are here to discuss what is in Britain’s interest, not Australia’s, but I think most of us are convinced by the argument that there is a strategic need for Australia for these types of submarine services and, by pooling our technologies and resources, we will all get a better deal.

My starting point is that I accept that if we are going to have the asymmetric capability that the submarine service represents, we need to continue with our forward order book. The idea that, at some point in the late 2030s, a better, modern class of submarine will replace the A-class attack submarines that we have right now seems to me a statement of the obvious. I accept that there are legitimate debates about the affordability and management of our nuclear programme; these are not new. On 14 October, the Chancellor of the Exchequer wrote to the Prime Minister about this matter and said, “The nuclear submarine programme seems to me a very doubtful proposition. The cost is prodigious. How many of these are we likely to be able to afford? How soon can we get them? When they arrive, will they already be obsolescent?” That was on 14 October 1957 and the then Chancellor of Exchequer, Peter Thorneycroft, writing to Harold Macmillan, who fortunately ignored that ministration and the rest, as they say, is history.

So, yes, I think this makes strategic sense. However, for AUKUS pillar 1 to work, and to respond to some of political doubts that will be sowed in the minds of people in Australia, and possibly elsewhere, it is very important that the transitional elements of AUKUS, the so-called optimal pathways between now and the construction of these new submarines, also work well.

We can all use this as an opportunity to note our concerns about the pressures on the Royal Navy Submarine Service at the moment. Open-source reporting has said that some of the times at sea have almost doubled over the past three years, with a combination of difficulties of availability of submarines and retention of submariners, and we are not alone in this. The US is also experiencing difficulties in its new submarine production. Since 2022, the rate of build for the new Virginia-class subs on order has been between 1.2 and 1.4 a year, compared with the two boats a year that had been expected.

The reason this matters is because creating, as it were, the facts on the ground for AUKUS from 2027 requires rotational deployments of one of our SSNs and four of the US SSNs, so availability in the submarine services of the two countries in the here and now is very important for getting this programme under way, as of course is restarting the fuller production pipeline for Virginia-class submarines, so that they are available for the US to sell to the Australians, beginning with the three that are in play. This all needs proper scrutiny, no doubt through the strategic defence review, but it is not something that is simply a late 2030s conversation; it is something that needs careful attention, as I am sure Ministers are well aware, in the here and now.

My final point—and I declare my interest as chair of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency—is on the role that UK science and innovation in nuclear naval propulsion potentially has in the maritime civilian sector as well. There is growing interest on the part of merchant shipping and the port sector around the role that new nuclear technologies can potentially play—small modular reactors, non-enriched fuel, non-pressurised reactors for use at sea, perhaps using next-generation molten salt technology, and so forth. In the last 12 months we have seen Lloyd’s Register, Maersk and ABS all producing scoping reports for how small nuclear reactors could be used in merchant shipping, in containerisation. The reason why this matters is because, worldwide, shipping constitutes 3% of greenhouse gas emissions, about the same as aviation, but to date has received less attention in terms of what the green fuels transition will look like for shipping.

I think that it was in 1956 that we were the first country to get a civilian nuclear reactor up and going, and by the mid-1960s there were more nuclear reactors at work in civilian installations in the UK than all the rest of the world combined. As the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, said, the programme that has been set out around skills development, nuclear engineering and the broader clusters that go around this set of technologies, which are implicit in AUKUS and the agreements before us today, also have profound benefits—spillover benefits, potentially—in other applications, including at sea.

This is an area that will be entirely worthy of investment. The noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, said that money was the elephant in the room. Perhaps to the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, when this question is being debated with the Treasury, there is an example that he might call to mind. Apparently, when Lord Mountbatten was having this argument with a different Chancellor of the Exchequer at that point, he produced a 20-inch model of a nuclear submarine, which opened up with a little compartment. During the entirety of the Cabinet committee the Chancellor fiddled around, looking at it, and in the end said, “Okay, how much do you need?”