Arctic Committee Report

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)]

My Lords, as one of the very few speakers this afternoon not to have served on the committee, I must congratulate it and my noble friend Lord Teverson, its chairman, on producing such an interesting report. I have learnt a great deal more this afternoon by listening to contributions from members of the committee.

I want to make a short intervention on what I think my noble friend Lord Teverson referred to tangentially as an enforceable convention—it does not exist yet. My interest in this subject began when I visited Nova Scotia in 2008 and went to Thinkers’ Lodge, which is run by the Canadian Pugwash Group, the Nobel laureate group that does a lot of work on peace. In 2007, it produced a very interesting report on the Arctic as a nuclear weapons-free zone. This was in response to the push from the indigenous people of the Arctic in 1977, 1983 and 1998 to have the issue considered. It is perhaps a worthy addendum to this report to mention this subject.

It was unfortunate timing that a very wide survey of Arctic Council populations was published in April 2015, by which time the committee had finished taking its evidence and the report was published, but it is worth sharing some of the conclusions from that survey. The question was whether:

“The Arctic should be a nuclear weapons free zone just like Antarctica is, and the United States and Russia should remove their nuclear weapons from the Arctic”.

To give your Lordships a flavour of the responses, in Sweden the population surveyed was 90% in favour of that proposal. In Finland and Iceland it was 88%, and so on. The percentages obviously varied in that 2015 survey but when a similar question was put into 2010, the responses were more or less between 70% and 80%, so considerable support is growing for this idea. Very surprisingly—it certainly surprised me—even in Russia, support for it was 68% and in the USA it was 67%. Since Antarctica has been a nuclear weapons-free zone since 1961, the idea certainly has a strong precedent. For the Russians, as long ago as 1958 Premier Bulganin proposed that the Arctic should be a zone free of atomic and hydrogen weapons. That idea was also explored later by President Gorbachev in 1987.

I wanted to intervene briefly to throw that issue into the mix because it really concerns the Arctic Council, which bothered to have that survey done. The results are so positive that it merits much further serious consideration. As one of the nuclear weapon states, the UK is in a position to progress these discussions as well. There were a couple of mentions of some of the threats from nuclear weapons—not only the obvious issues but that of pollution, which the noble Lord, Lord West, mentioned when he intervened. The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, also mentioned them. This bears further discussion. I think the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, also mentioned Wilton Park. I do not know what that discussion will produce but perhaps this idea might be taken further there.