Trident

Debate between Alec Shelbrooke and Julian Knight

Tuesday 24th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, because his intervention makes my point: there was no deterrent to stop Russia going into Ukraine because President Putin rightly recognised that President Obama would not intervene in international affairs. There were no checks and balances—no counterweight to what has become a new superpower. Putin just walked in, and was allowed to do so.

[Julian Knight (Solihull) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend recognise that Ukraine was persuaded to give up its nuclear weapons, and as a result Putin has been able to ride roughshod over international agreements?

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Exactly. I am grateful to my hon. Friend.

This debate is not about war-mongering. It is not about a desire to launch nuclear weapons; it is the direct opposite. It is about the fact that a nuclear deterrent has prevented major world conflicts, but today we see that there are conflicts taking place. We talk about Daesh getting its hands on nuclear weapons, or about North Korea, which would be able to launch an attack on South Korea. Let us not forget that there was never a peace treaty between North Korea and South Korea. Technically they are still at war, but they have been able to face each other off with conventional weapons for several decades. If that game changed with nuclear weapons, there would have to be western intervention concerning South Korea to make sure that it could counteract that threat from North Korea; otherwise, hundreds of thousands of innocent people would be murdered by a regime with no other intention than wiping out its neighbour. That is what a deterrent prevents. That is why this debate is so important.

Nobody in this Chamber, nobody in NATO, nobody in the western world and probably not even President Putin would want to use nuclear weapons. That is not what this debate is about. It is about making sure that when something exists, those enemies who would use it do not have the opportunity to do so because they know it would be pointless. North Korea will not launch a nuclear weapon at South Korea if it knows that 10 seconds later it would disappear off the face of the map as well. However unpalatable that truth may be, that is the truth that has kept the peace.

If we consider the first world war, and then the second world war, which was fought with conventional weapons but had a much higher death toll and in which far more civilians were killed than in the first world war, we see that as technology advances and wars increase, more and more of the civilian population die. It was noticeable that when my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister stood at the Dispatch Box earlier this week, he made it absolutely clear that military action that may be considered in Syria would be part of a wider programme with targeted intervention to try to prevent civilian deaths. Western leaders today spend most of their time trying to work out how we can intervene to reduce civilian deaths, and there is nothing better for that than having the Government who may be pushing their people into war know that they themselves would be wiped out. That is hugely important.

There has been a lot of talk about whether Trident is the right thing to spend money on. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence said, it amounts to 0.2% of GDP. What would a war, even one fought with conventional weapons to which we may not be able to respond, do to the GDP of Europe, of the western world?