Ukraine: Tactical Nuclear Weapons

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 1st December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, President Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine has upended our own country’s national security strategy, along with those of many other countries, particularly fellow European states. As our strategy is currently being reviewed and reset, this debate in the name of my noble and right reverend friend Lord Harries of Pentregarth could not be more timely or more welcome. I will focus my own remarks on the nuclear aspects of the Ukraine conflict, both military and civil.

It is a bitter irony that in the first days of 2022, the five legally recognised nuclear weapon states—China, France, Russia, the UK and the US—rather belatedly reaffirmed their support for the Reagan-Gorbachev statement that

“a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought”.

A few weeks later, President Putin was threatening the possible use of nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear weapon state—indeed, one whose territorial integrity and sovereignty Russia had explicitly pledged to respect as part of the agreement by Ukraine to give up its Soviet-era nuclear weapons, known as the Budapest memorandum. Then, in August, Russia blocked the agreed conclusions of the UN’s nuclear non-proliferation review conference. Perfidy does not come in much purer form than that.

We will know for certain only after this war has ended whether President Putin was merely sabre rattling or whether his remarks presaged something far worse. Let us hope that the unambiguous passage in the recent G20 communiqué:

“The use or threat of use of nuclear weapons is inadmissible”


will have given him some thought. It was, of course, signed by the Chinese too.

Either way, President Putin will have put back on the table several key aspects of nuclear policy. First is whether a doctrine of “constructive ambiguity” on the use of nuclear weapons, as all members of the P5, including ourselves, currently maintain, is the best approach. There is nothing much constructive in Russia’s interpretation of that doctrine and not much benefit from the ambiguity. It might be preferable to move to a “sole purpose” doctrine, meaning that nuclear weapons’ only purpose is to deter their use by other nuclear weapon states.

Secondly, engagement with the whole issue of global strategic stability between nuclear weapon states will surely need to be resumed at some stage, drawing in the Chinese, whose nuclear arsenal is increasing by leaps and bounds; nor should we overlook the desirability of ensuring that the New START Treaty between the US and Russia on strategic nuclear weapons does not lapse and is, if possible, replaced by more constraining limits. There is also a need to look again at the question of intermediate nuclear weapons in Europe. While ensuring that Russia does not use nuclear weapons in or around Ukraine—it would be good to hear whether the UK, like the US, has conveyed any messages about the consequences of stepping across that line—this much wider agenda is coming towards us and we need to be ready for it.

There is another nuclear dimension to the Ukraine conflict: the need to safeguard civil nuclear installations in conflict zones. Both at Chernobyl in the early days after the invasion and at Zaporizhzhia, the site of the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, Russia has taken quite horrendous risks without any heed to the possible consequences. We all owe a debt of gratitude to the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, and his officials for the courage and professionalism they have shown in safeguarding those installations. I hope the Minister agrees with that and, if he does, will convey our collective thanks to the IAEA. Do we think that the international rules and conventions governing vulnerable civil nuclear sites in conflict zones are sufficient, or does experience in Ukraine show that they need, over time, to be strengthened and supplemented? This will not be the last occasion on which civil nuclear power stations find themselves in conflict zones.

I realise that some of the nuclear issues raised by the conflict in Ukraine are extraordinarily sensitive and not easy to handle in open debate, but we surely need to be thinking about and getting ready to engage with them.