Defence Capabilities: EUC Report

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Wednesday 24th October 2012 Grand Committee

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

My Lords, I found this report extremely interesting, and I congratulate my noble friend and his committee on it. Given that defence expenditure in the UK, as the report graphically shows, is 2.56% of GDP, this report should concern us all as parliamentarians. The fact that that percentage actually grew between 2010 and 2011, when expenditure on pretty much everything else went down due to the austerity Budget, is an enormous incentive for us to look to our friends and neighbours for areas where we can share capabilities and save an awful lot of money.

However, I was surprised to find almost no mention of the nuclear capability and no discussion of it. There are some tangential references at the beginning explaining how threats have changed from the old Cold War scenario to threats involving food security, water issues and terrorism. Noble Lords have spoken of a two-tier Europe, and almost nothing is more two-tier than the two countries that belong to the P5—the UK and France—and the rest. So I do not think that it is just about the money, although phasing out the Trident system would save something like £83 billion, according to the Trident Commission which is co-chaired by Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the noble Lord, Lord Browne, and Sir Menzies Campbell; and the French would surely make similar savings. So that is economically interesting. However, I am puzzled as to why the report does not discuss whether two of the biggest European spenders on nuclear issues—France and the UK—would have a very different commitment to the EDA if, for example, they did not have that level of spend on things nuclear. It is the psychology of having two nuclear states and then the rest.

I accept that a lot of expertise is gathered around the table and that noble Lords may well put me right on this issue and say that it is not a question. However, I believe the public will continue to question it and the debate about whether we should continue with our so-called independent nuclear deterrent is already alive here politically.

In France, the force de frappe is perhaps less discussed at the moment, although Michel Rocard, the former Prime Minister, suggested that France should abandon its independent deterrent, saying that the money spent on maintaining it serves absolutely no purpose. The traditional French view was probably more fairly put recently by Josselin de Rohan, chair of the Senate foreign affairs, defence and armed forces committee, when he laid out all the reasons why France would continue to maintain a nuclear capability: essentially the nuclearisation of the Middle East and the nuclear capability in Pakistan, India and China, so I accept that scrapping the French force de frappe is not an immediate prospect. However, we need to consider where this fits in to a commitment to a different sort of European defence force. While we are thinking about things nuclear, there is the question of whether an independent deterrent can be independent when it depends not on the European Galileo system but on the American satellite system.

Finally, there is another gap in this otherwise constructive and useful report. It is European deployment of tactical nuclear weapons. In several European countries, this deployment is seen as very undesirable. As long ago as 2004, the Science and Technology Commission of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly advised NATO to come up,

“with a proposal on a phased and verifiable withdrawal of tactical nuclear weapons from Europe”,

as they,

“do not substantially add to the security of Europe”.

States hosting such weapons need to keep their fleets of fighter bombers up to date, which is another cost that is unlikely to be borne in the present times of austerity and which the public may not see as justifiable. Indeed in a Dutch March 2011 survey, 14 NATO states supported the withdrawal of tactical nuclear weapons, 10 would accept withdrawal and only three opposed it. These issues about the future of the nuclear weapons in Europe are perhaps ones that the EU committee intends to address in a separate paper, complementary to this one. I certainly hope so.