Trident Alternatives Review

Simon Reevell Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Simon Reevell (Dewsbury) (Con)]

I first stopped and thought seriously about nuclear weapons and the issues associated with them 30 years ago after I spent some time in the forest near a little town called Menden in West Germany. I was there with 50 Missile Regiment, which had battlefield nuclear weapons—we do not have those any more. The purpose of that regiment, come war time, was to fire its Lance missile into Soviet tank configurations, possibly in a battlefield context as a first-strike weapon. The regiment had three missiles, but it only ever trained to use one because its signature would have been picked up and the regiment would have been wiped out by Soviet battlefield nuclear weapons before it had even got close to loading the second missile. Its members did not bother practising to drive away either, as they had worked out that they could not get away fast enough to get out of the impact area of the weapon that would be fired against them. I have no doubt that the regiment would have been prepared to fire its weapon, and it was a sobering experience.

A few years later in the Army I was tasked with lecturing and explaining the consequences of using intercontinental nuclear weapons, and I had to learn the difference between the consequences of using ground-burst weapons—those have been replicated on television and people might have seen the force that moves out along the ground—and air-burst weapons. Ground-burst weapons are appalling, but the consequence of air-burst nuclear weapons is truly horrific by comparison. I learned two lessons from those experiences. First, that such weapons are the worst example of man’s ability to cause death and destruction, and secondly that this country must never be exposed to those who believe they could use such weapons against us with impunity.

I realise that over the years others have taken a different stance, and have done so in a principled way—I am thinking of previous Labour party leaders who had an open and sincere belief that they expressed during the 1980s. They were wrong: the SS-20s did not disappear from the Ural mountains because well-meaning people danced around Greenham Common air base but because cruise missiles were put into Greenham Common air base.

I understand, too, that for some the idea of putting country before party is difficult. I understand that when coalition offers an opportunity for power, their approach might well be that party policies are paramount and not what is best for the United Kingdom. It is unfortunate when that happens, not least because it leads to a large amount of expenditure of time and money on reports such as the one we have been considering over the past couple of days. Commissioning a report in the false hope that it would undermine the argument for a submarine-based nuclear deterrent was always going to fail. Russia is not modernising its submarine fleet for no good reason and China is not expanding its submarine programme on a whim.

The report is published and confirms that the only viable option is the submarine-based system, but what comes next, sadly, is the most appalling piece of “party before country” politics that I can recollect. The analysis of my coalition partners seems to be, “Our report has confirmed that the submarine system is the only option. It is the only option because it provides an effective continuous deterrent, so we will therefore go with the submarine system, but seek to make it non-continuous and therefore less effective and seek to portray that as progress.” If the Chief Secretary is a unilateralist, he should have the moral courage to come out and say so. If he is not, he should realise that this idea ranks somewhere between third rate and poor. The “four boat, continuously at sea” policy is the only practical way to maintain the effective deterrent that has protected these islands for a long time. It is about time we got on with its modernisation.

Political maturity and national interest should dictate that coalition partners now accept that the part of the agreement that delays matters to 2016 has been rendered obsolete by this report and that a positive decision can and should be brought forward.