UK's Nuclear Deterrent

Neil Gray Excerpts

Monday 18th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Neil Gray (Airdrie and Shotts) (SNP)]

Tonight I will vote against the renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons system and will join my SNP colleagues—the vast majority of Scottish MPs—in doing so. My opposition is based on three clear principles: the ridiculously high cost, its outdated ineffectiveness, and the morality of renewing a nuclear weapons system that we want to see the back of.

The new Trident system will cost in the region of £200 billion over the project’s lifetime. At a time when we are telling disabled people that we cannot afford to continue paying their £30 a week employment support payments, when we are telling the WASPI women that we cannot afford proper transitional payments on their pensions and when this Government accept that food banks, on which 1.1 million people rely, are just part of the social security system, we have to question extraordinarily large items of spending, so we must certainly question the affordability of Trident. In the wake of the damning Chilcot report into the Iraq war, in which we read about how ill equipped our soldiers were for that theatre, perhaps some of the £205 billion would be better spent on our under-equipped but actually used conventional forces, on restoring recently cut areas of defence or even perhaps on some jets to go on the aircraft carrier that we just built without having any planes to use on it.

We have to consider the effectiveness and practicality of the system. Even the new Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr Hammond), recently said that holding nuclear weapons makes a state a target. Nuclear weapons are ineffective and useless as a deterrent against the modern threats we face. We cannot threaten cyber-criminals or the terror groups that we fight with a nuclear bomb. Climate change is not tempered by nuclear weapons. None of those era-defining threats to our way of life and to our safety and security are protected by the mutual assured destruction of nuclear weapons. Some of the support for Trident reminds me of the arms race that led to the first world war. Each power was trying to outgun the others in order to avoid war when all they were really doing was making war inevitable. It is claimed that Trident is the ultimate deterrent, but if it is a deterrent at all, it is a deterrent against the wars and threats of the past.

Finally, on morality, each of the nuclear missiles carried by the submarines has about eight times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which caused absolute destruction. Imagine the destruction caused by just one of those warheads and then remember that each submarine carries forty. We must remember that nuclear weapons cannot be targeted; they are all about complete obliteration. They obliterate innocent men, women and children, which should be abhorred. While such weapons remain in our possession, there is a risk of them being used, which we cannot comprehend or countenance.

Trident is a cold war weapons system. It is outdated, immoral and extortionately expensive. Taking humanity, defence and our economy into account, we simply cannot afford to renew Trident tonight.