Trident Renewal

Debate between Nick Harvey and Joan Ruddock

Tuesday 20th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Sir Nick Harvey]

I remind the hon. Lady that the national security strategy identified such a nuclear attack as a second level threat. I believe that we have potential nuclear adversaries, but I do not believe that we have actual nuclear adversaries at the moment. To be an actual adversary requires a combination of capability and intent. I can see plenty of countries with the capability but none with the intent, and countries that may have an intent to launch a nuclear weapon at us in future are still a considerable way away from having such a capability. If any of that should change, and if any future Government should arrive at a different calculation and believe there was an enemy with both capability and intent, they would need to revisit our posture.

Trident should be retained on a flexible basis that can be ramped up or down according to our reading of the security situation, which is exactly how we approach all our other military capability. The rest of our military capability is not kept on constant patrol on the basis that that is the only point at which it has any deterrent effect; it is kept at different levels of readiness, according to our assessment of the particular threat that it is designed to mitigate.

[Dame Joan Ruddock]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the one scenario in which there could be an instant attack, without the build-up and norms of international discussions or whatever, would be a terrorist nuclear attack, not state sponsored but by something like ISIS? In those circumstances, does he agree that our nuclear weapons system is completely useless and does not deter?

[Sir Nick Harvey]

The right hon. Lady makes a good point. If a threat emerges from nowhere, it will be either at the hands of terrorists or a by rogue state sponsored by terrorists, against which a conventional state-on-state nuclear deterrent of the sort that we have would have absolutely no value or purpose. It is important to remember that we have moral and legal obligations to try to bring about global nuclear disarmament, and with one notable exception I hope that all Members of the House believe that that is a desirable objective.

In 1968 the non-proliferation treaty was in effect a pact between the nuclear states that were going to use their best endeavours to negotiate away their weapons and the rest of the world that agreed not to develop nuclear programmes. In terms of non-proliferation the treaty has been moderately successful, but it has made astonishingly little progress on disarmament. Very few signatories to that treaty can have imagined that by 2015 so little progress would have been made. Things are stirring and changing, and the British Government need to wake up to that. More than 150 nation states have attended international conferences and considered in detail and depth the humanitarian consequences of using nuclear weapons.