Orders of the Day — Air Estimates, 1957–58

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 9 May 1957.

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Photo of Mr Tony Benn Mr Tony Benn , Bristol South East 12:00, 9 May 1957

The hon. Member was shaking his head, and naturally I wondered whether he was disagreeing with me.

In the debate on the Bermuda talks, the Prime Minister told the House with pride that he had got the missiles, and he indicated that they would be made available to us and we should be able to make our own warheads. But if the missiles are made available to us under the Mutual Defence Assistance Agreement, although we may be allowed to have them, just as we are allowed to have the rifles and all the rest that we get under American aid, or whatever it is, we shall be bound by treaty not even to fire the missiles without the permission of the United States Government.

The Agreement states: Neither contracting Government, without the prior consent of the other, will devote assistance furnished to it by the other contracting Government to purposes other than those for which it was furnished. Although there would be nothing to stop our using the missiles, because American troops would not be controlling them, under the provisions of this Agreement, signed and honoured by this country, it would be in law impossible anyway for us to use the misslies except under conditions in which the Americans would let us have the warheads.

It is important that we should know exactly what the arrangements are. The Prime Minister has said that he had a better deal than did Lord Attlee. I frankly doubt that. Lord Attlee obtained an agreement by which Americans came to this country with their bombers and they would not use them without our consent. Now we find that the Americans are supplying arms to our troops and we cannot use them without their consent. The position can be compared with that of a man who is nervous of burglars and calls in a neighbour. Under the the Attlee agreement the neighbour has the gun but promises not to use it unless his friend gets really worried, but under this Agreement the neighbour not only has a gun of his own but controls the other man's gun as well and says, "You cannot shoot the burglar unless I think he is dangerous." [AN HON. MEMBER: "A poor analogy."] The nuclear deterrents cannot be used without the permission of the United States, whereas, under the old agreement the American deterrent could not be used without the permission of the United Kingdom.

We come next to the practical problem of global war. The Minister of Defence has said that it is impossible to defend people and we must confine ourselves to defending the bases of the nuclear deterrents. Is it that we cannot defend the big towns or that the Government says that the big towns are less important than the North Coast missile bases? Obviously, the Minister does not think that the towns are less important than the nuclear bases.

No Minister would deny air defence to London because he thinks it is not important. The answer is that we cannot defend London, and if we cannot defend London, how can we defend the nuclear bases? These are questions which people who read these documents are bound to ask, and we have had no answer to these questions. We are told very gaily that there will be an atomic missile and that if the Russians fire something at us or send bombers over, we shall use atomic missiles to repel them. I do not know whether that is safe, but it is worthy of question.

Finally how much time is available once our control and reporting system picks up a missile on the screen? All these missiles are supersonic and they travel at many times the speed of the fastest aircraft. If our wonderful control, and I have no doubt that it is wonderful, picks up the missile, is there any time at all in which to reach a decision about what we should do? The White Paper on Defence says quite clearly in paragraph 17 that: …a would-be aggressor should not be allowed to think he could readily knock out the bomber bases in Britatin before their aircraft could take off from them. Either we should have to stop the aggressor from getting his aircraft off the bomber bases, and I think that even the Minister of Defence would say that that would be optimistic, or we should have to scramble our own bombers with H-bombs aboard them. Therefore the position we are in is that there is a complete abandonment of political control of the hydrogen bomb.

Obviously, the Cabinet will not have time to reach a decision after the control and reporting system has picked up the rocket. They will not be able to decide whether we ought then to unleash war on Moscow. The Secretary of State is not in a position to decide. Parliament is not in a position to decide and, of course, I am not suggesting that Parliament should be called into special session to reach a decision of this kind. I am only alerting the House to the policy which is presented to us by the Government, the implications of which ought really to be thought through.

I have only mentioned some of the difficulties of the present policy. In these circumstances what sort of reshaping should there be in the Royal Air Force? This point has been dealt with searchingly in the debate and I do not want, and I do not feel qualified on the information made available, to deal with it at any great length, except to say that I sympathise with the Minister in the struggle he is making to persuade people that they will still be flying in the Royal Air Force. Whether there is the same opportunity for adventure in the Royal Air Force in peacetime that there was in wartime, I do not pretend to know. I do know that the excitement of flying was in my mind from my earliest days as a schoolboy in the war until the time I was demobilised from the Air Force, and I would be the last to denigrate or write off the interest and passion of young British people in flying.

We must not make the mistake of thinking that the Air Force can only be of interest if it is flying the old aircraft. I detected in the speech of the hon. Gentleman the Member for Watford (Mr. Farey-Jones) the idea that somehow we were all intended by God to fly by aircraft, and that if anything came along afterwards it would be a betrayal of 1,700 years of heritage. Well, aircraft have not been flying throughout the whole period of the House of Commons, and I hope that the hon. Gentleman will not take too pessimistic a view of the possibilities of scientific advance.