Nuclear Weapons

Lord West of Spithead Excerpts

Tuesday 20th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

My Lords, I first declare that I have been closely involved with the UK deterrent for some decades. Indeed, for four years I was directly responsible to the Prime Minister for the safety and operational effectiveness of the UK deterrent. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, for raising this topic, because it is important.

First, I make clear my view that this UN nuclear ban treaty was a mistake and will if anything make us less safe because it will take our eyes off the areas where we should be concentrating to try to control and to restrict nuclear weapon ownership, types of devices and numbers. As has been mentioned already, it is virtue-signalling on a grand scale—something that seems to have caught on in this snowflake and social media age. While it makes the people virtue-signalling feel rather good, generally I am afraid it achieves nothing.

Shortly after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the strategist Bernard Brodie stated:

“Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them”.


I agree with that. We spend extraordinary resources on weapons that we hope will never be used, but one of the ironies of nuclear deterrence is that its effectiveness depends upon actual willingness to use nuclear weapons. I do not intend to go into that deep justification, but I will make it absolutely clear that if any nation thinks that in the final analysis of the destruction of, for example, our capital cities, we would not use nuclear weapons, they are deluding themselves. One should make that clear.

Although I disapprove of the UN treaty, I am strongly of the view that the leaders and nuclear strategists of the nuclear powers need to start focusing on what is without a doubt the greatest existential threat facing all our nations and indeed the globe. They have taken their eyes off the ball. Even if the US nuclear posture review has pushed deterrence up the agenda—although, as my noble friend stated, there are some very worrying proposals within it—I believe that there is a real risk of an inadvertent nuclear exchange. There are multiple ways of misreading or misjudging the other side’s behaviour, or miscalculating during a crisis, especially in “hybrid” scenarios of the type beloved by President Putin. Such a possibility of a nuclear exchange with Russia, starting by accident, no matter how remote it might be at present, would have such a catastrophic result that we should work hard now to ensure that it can never happen.

Part of my concern is because of Putin’s so-called “escalate to de-escalate” strategy, which is bonkers. In that, he would use a nuclear weapon at a sub-strategic level, based on his calculation that NATO could not credibly respond with strategic-level nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are not war-fighting weapons—I find the whole prospect of that horrifying. That is a very dangerous assumption and the prospects of controlling escalation and terminating a conflict according to any pre-planned scenario which he or NATO might think they have are disturbingly small. All sides would have great difficulty in limiting, managing or ending a conflict on their preferred terms.

All our leaders in the nuclear weapons states must understand the value of dialogue and signalling for conflict avoidance and management. Diplomacy and investment in coherent signalling are cheap compared to the costs of conflict. Russia and NATO should make sustained efforts to communicate their positions to each other and be able to use well-established communication channels to manage any emerging crisis. It is no good trying to cut those links; we need more and better links.

I had hoped that Presidents Trump and Putin, the great “deal makers”, might reach some accord. There was, I thought, a golden opportunity to lessen tension by establishing lines of communication and to avoid misunderstandings. Indeed, reinvigorating the web of agreements and understandings between their two nations and NATO about nuclear weapons could help defuse potential escalation in time of crisis. Additionally, the START negotiations could move forward again, because, despite the achievements of SALT I and II and START I and II, we are still in a world where Russia and the US each have about 7,000 nuclear warheads in their arsenals. The Russians also have 4,000 short-range nuclear weapons, and the US fields about 200 in Europe. These are particularly destabilising, not least in their vulnerability to terrorist attack and capture, since many of the Russian weapons are held in remote storage areas. A major reduction in warhead holdings and systems would make the world safer.

We in the UK can be proud of having taken a lead in reducing our warheads to about 200 and only one system—the bare minimum to establish a credible deterrent. If the two Presidents could reach some agreement on ways of reducing tension, it would enhance global security. It would be a great coup, for example, if the US and Russian strategic nuclear forces went from a condition of instant notice to fire, which I find quite extraordinary in the world that we are in at the moment, down to a reduced readiness to fire, as we have done in the UK. The issue of alert state and readiness to fire is particularly important in the case of land-based ICBMs and bombers, as they are vulnerable to first strike. This means there is only a limited time to react to a suspected attack before they are destroyed—in the US and Russian case, it is about 15 minutes. In times of severely strained relations between the US and what was then the Soviet Union in the past, on a number of occasions missile launches were almost made on incorrect information—that is a chilling thought. Such calming measures, combined with success in a new START III, would be a substantial achievement by these two “Marmite” leaders. We would inhabit a safer world and feel bound to acknowledge, at least in this one area of endeavour, that perhaps they have some statesmanship.

Reduction in number of warheads, removal of whole types of systems and better links and understanding of the need for more dialogue will all make us safer and put no country’s interest at risk. The risks, should things accidently go wrong and we do not make some progress, are too dreadful to contemplate. Bearing in mind the worrying proposals in the US nuclear posture review, has our Prime Minister discussed in any depth with the US President ways forward on this nuclear issue?