NATO

Lord Addington Excerpts

Tuesday 29th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, first, I apologise for being one of those people who has not read the letter, but never mind.

I find myself in agreement with the main thrust of what was said by the noble Lords who have just spoken. Indeed, in a debate not so long ago in this House, I drew attention to the fact that NATO’s major problem with Russia is that Russia is probably very frightened of NATO. The Russian successor state has found itself in a declining sphere of interest, with its own borders being pushed back and what it regards as its justifiable interest being constricted at all times. We must also remember that Russia is an incredibly important and powerful state to this day. The importance of Russia in the current situation in Syria probably clarifies how we must speak to Russia and try to get it to at least communicate in language that we understand, so that we can reduce conflict throughout the entire world, if not just in Europe and the closer parts of Asia and Africa.

Of course, everybody sane agrees that there should be fewer nuclear weapons. They then disagree violently about what that actually means to the state at the time. If we are worrying about Russia’s position, we should worry about the position of members of NATO and NATO’s allies. If you are a Pole, Czech or Latvian, just how much more secure do you feel having those low-level nuclear weapons around? It may be an illusory security blanket—one that will mean that you simply die of radiation poisoning slightly later on—but it is there. Unless we can bring that into our discussion more fully, we are always going to struggle.

What do we do with the non-nuclear capacity within NATO? It is not difficult to find somebody in uniform who will tell you, “Don’t spend money on nuclear weapons; spend it on other things”. Aircraft carriers and battle tanks are usually the first call, rapidly followed by the latest whizz-bang fighter jet or bomber. But does that increase tension as well? Does it increase tension within the organisations that you are dealing with and with your potential enemies, who are also your potential allies? How we handle that situation—that ongoing relationship—is going to be incredibly difficult. Getting a holistic approach is also going to be very difficult.

There is also the flipside that we if expand our conventional weapons, how do we deal with the peacekeeping and conflict resolution capacity of NATO, which has had its successes and failures but has been a new area of activity? As long as we are worrying about the nuclear stockpile, we also need to consider how to make better use of our defence spending. As my noble friend Lord King pointed out, the eternal question is: what do you spend money on in terms of preparing military force? It has always been a case of blood and gold being spent together. Preparing to spend blood and gold is how you define your defence capacity. That has always been the case, going back to when people first decided to spend a little bit more money going from bronze to iron weapons.

How to make better use of our defence spending is something that we must bear in mind. If we have this hugely expensive nuclear stockpile, which leads to a great deal of justifiable fear even if it just sits in its bunker and decays, there will always be greater stress on our conventional forces if they are in the same budget. It would be quite honest of the Government—or indeed any Government—to separate out those two budgets. That might be a starting point.

If we are going to encourage things such as missile defence—and the Chicago summit tried to make it clear that it is not aimed at Russia, it is aimed at someone else; the subtext is Iran—it will only work against nations that can fire a limited capacity of missiles. The way to deal with this defence system is to swamp it, as has always been the case. You simply launch more missiles; you take out missiles individually and then some will get through. As Tom Lehrer put it,

“Oh, we will all fry together when we fry”.

If you fry once or fry 100 times, you are still fried. The idea of guaranteed mass destruction worked in the past.

The noble Lord is quite right that without some sort of coherent idea about how to approach making a reduction that reassures Russia, we are never going to progress as quickly as we should towards reducing nuclear weapons to the bare minimum or getting rid of them altogether. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will give us an idea about progress. That is what we are talking about here: are we encouraging coherent progress, at least among our allies?