Nuclear Deterrent

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Thursday 17th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Dr Lewis]

The answer to that is catered for by the point I made earlier: it is not the weapons we have to fear but the nature of the regimes that have them. I have no desire to lecture other democracies on whether or not they should have nuclear weapons, as that is a question for them and it is about whether they feel they can afford to do that. It does not bother me if democracies have nuclear weapons, but I do reserve the right to lecture dictatorships, and preferably to try to thwart, baulk and deter them from having such weapons, because they are the threat, not the weapons themselves.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

rose—

[Dr Lewis]

I will give way, but it will be for the last time as otherwise I will be in danger of taking too much time. [Interruption.] I thank my hon. Friend for his courtesy in resuming his seat.

I wish briefly to make four political points. The first political argument is that when people are asked whether it is safer for this country to continue to possess nuclear weapons as long as other countries have them, a large majority of the population consistently take the view that we should do so and that it would be unwise and dangerous to renounce them unilaterally. We can ask different poll questions that seem to point to a different answer, but when that question is asked, the answer is surprisingly consistent.

The second political argument is that in the 1980s, under cold war conditions, two general elections demonstrated the toxic effect of one-sided disarmament proposals on a party’s prospects of gaining power. The third argument is that it was and remains widely believed—this refers to the intervention made by my hon. Friend the Member for Crawley (Henry Smith) a few moments ago—that the nuclear stalemate of the cold war enabled all-out conflict between the majors powers to be avoided for 50 years, despite their mutual hostility and in contrast to what happened in those many regional theatres where communists and their enemies could and did fight without fear of nuclear escalation. The final political argument is that the ending of the east-west confrontation has not altered the balance of public opinion on this question. First, that is because a danger could easily re-emerge of a reversion to a confrontation of that sort. Secondly, it is because even today there are unpleasant regimes, such as Iran’s, on the point of acquiring nuclear weapons and some, such as North Korea’s, that have already done so.

The role of our strategic nuclear force remains what it has always been: to deter any power armed with mass destruction weapons from using them against us, in the belief, true or false, that nobody would retaliate on our behalf. The use of our deterrent consists of its preventive effect on the behaviour of our enemies. The actual launching of a Trident missile would mark the failure of deterrence and would presuppose that a devastating attack had already been inflicted on our country.

Because strategic nuclear deterrence is largely irrelevant to the current counter-insurgency campaigns with which the British Army has been involved, some senior Army officers have been suggesting that we must choose between fighting “the war” of the present and insuring against the more conventional prospect of state-versus-state conflict in the future. I say that that choice is unacceptable, and that the underlying message that the era of high-intensity, state-on-state warfare is gone for good is a dangerous fallacy. Every sane individual hopes that such warfare will never return, but to rely on that in the face of past experience would be extremely foolhardy. The lesson of warfare in the 20th century, repeated time and again, was that when conflicts broke out they usually took their victims by surprise. Obvious examples are: the failure to anticipate the first world war; the follies of the “10-year rule” from 1919 to 1932; and the entirely unanticipated attacks on Israel in 1973, the Falklands in 1982, Kuwait in 1990 and the United States in 2001. Conversely, and on a brighter note, the speed with which the Soviet empire unravelled from 1989 left even its sternest critics largely nonplussed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Nick Harvey]

I did not say that they would be willing to see Moscow flattened—most certainly they would not. I am saying that there are other ways of inflicting damage on Russia that it would consider unacceptable.

I mentioned that there will be a vast opportunity cost to be paid if we decide to commit these funds, which, let us refresh our memories, in today’s money will be approximately £25 billion to £30 billion on the capital investment in a further generation of submarines. On top of that, we have to factor in the running costs of a nuclear deterrent on this scale for 30 or more years of through-life costs—more than £3 billion a year in today’s money. Beginning to total that out and factoring in decommissioning at the end, we are talking about an expenditure of more than £100 billion. We need to look closely at whether that is justified in the context of the size of our defence budget, and what we are able to make available for other forms of defence and security in an increasingly dangerous and changing world.

[Mr Jenkin]

My hon. Friend has started to talk about 20, 30, 40 years ahead. Would he like to describe the strategic context in which we might be operating a nuclear deterrent in 20, 30, 40 years’ time, or indeed find ourselves operating without one? What is it going to be like then?

[Sir Nick Harvey]

The truth of the matter is that none of us knows. If we retain a nuclear deterrent of any description and any scale, it is an insurance policy against the unknown. I am saying that the current nuclear deterrent is scaled specifically to overcome the threat that we believed the Soviet Union posed in 1980. As we look to an unknown future over the course of this century, we have to decide what proportion of our defence spend and effort should go into this one part of our defence livery, and the opportunity cost of doing that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I commend the hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes), who has just made a powerful contribution to the debate, and my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) for securing it. I congratulate the Minister on delivering a model speech, which in a short time went through all the key arguments that justify the Government’s spending the money.

We need to lay more emphasis not just on how we might imagine the weapons system could be deployed but on the fact that it is in use every single day, shaping the global security environment that we enjoy today. It is no coincidence that the advent of nuclear weapons on the international scene has led to the longest period of peace among the superpowers and major powers of the world that we have ever seen.

War between super-states is now unthinkable because of nuclear weapons. That is rather a good thing and certainly an argument for our maintaining our inherited role of acting as a major democratic, friendly, benign, positive influence in global affairs, with our international role enhanced by nuclear weapons.

The issue is the sort of country that we are and that we want to continue to be. We are a country with global reach, global influence, global interests and the ability to enhance global security—not just for the world as a whole, but for the security of our own people.

Were we, irresponsibly, simply to dispose of our nuclear capability, we would be upsetting a balance that we may not even understand. We are down to fewer than 200 nuclear warheads. China, which has been mentioned, is increasing its number of warheads pretty dramatically with two new intercontinental ballistic missile systems and a new submarine-based intercontinental ballistic missile system. Russia, with its thousands and thousands of warheads—far more than it could possibly want—is building new nuclear weapons systems and new nuclear submarines for the delivery of those systems. We are not living in a world that is disarming, despite the incredibly generous gestures that our country has made. The next move downwards is not for us, but for others. If others will not make those moves, we must continue to guarantee our security and that of our allies.

I end on one fundamental point. Much is being made of the cost of Trident. I respect the view of those who over the years have been proved wrong but nevertheless carry on with their campaign to disarm our nuclear weapons. However, nothing is less honest than the idea that there is some cheaper system that will maintain the deterrent effect of our nuclear weapons or that somehow our current weapons system is vastly overspecified because of the Moscow criterion, to which completely obscure and mad reference has been made. That has nothing to do with the capability that we deploy today. It is totally irrelevant and a means of spreading disinformation about the credibility of our system so that the Liberal Democrats can get rid of our nuclear weapons system.

The Liberal Democrats know that there is no cheaper system. Just how cheap is it? It represents 0.1% of GDP over the lifetime of the system. I challenge anybody to produce any defence expenditure that can produce so much global influence.