I start by congratulating the right hon. Gentleman the Foreign Secretary on his appointment to his present high office. It is, I think, the only high office he has not previously held. He may be relieved if my congratulations are a little less fulsome than those of the Prime Minister at the Guildhall dinner. I do not know what the right hon. Gentleman thought about them, but I thought that they were being laid ona bit thick. When the television cameras settled on the right hon. Gentleman's face at the height of the Prime Minister's praise and I noticed his Buddha-like mask and I wondered whether, like me, he was thinking that the Prime Minister's hyperbole wasdue to a mixture of electioneering and bad conscience—the fact that the right hon. Gentleman has been twice so roughly handled in a leadership crisis. At any rate, I congratulate him. The right hon. Gentleman is undoubtedly the best Prime Minister—I beg his pardon—the best Foreign Secretary that the Conservatives have.

I come straight away to the issue which the Prime Minister has apparently decided to make the main issue in the election, that of the so-called independent nuclear deterrent. Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Belper (Mr. G. Brown) in a splendid speech earlier in the debate, I welcome this issue being taken to the electorate. We intend to argue this issue on a much higher level than the Prime Minister so far has argued it. It is a very serious issue, which involves the whole question of the best defence policy for the country and how to increase Britain's influence in the world. It involves the question of the reorganisation of N.A.T.O. and the whole nature of the Western Alliance. It is a very serious issue, and people expect it to be argued seriously and not reduced to cheap and oversimplified slogans and trick questions.

An example of the trick questions was given when the Prime Minister said, speaking of my right hon. Friend the Member for Huyton (Mr. H. Wilson), Would he go round the country now as Leader of the Opposition, and possibly later as Prime Minister, questioning the good faith of Britain's greatest ally?".—[Official Report, 12th November, 1963; Vol. 684; c. 50.] I could hardly believe my ears: because what else have the Conservatives been doing? During the whole period that the Prime Minister was Foreign Secretary the argument for maintaining the so-called independent nuclear deterrent was the nuclear blackmail argument. This was that there might be some great British interest in which America would not stand by us. The nuclear blackmail on which the Government relied for so long means that on the one hand we must put absolute trust in the United States to get the weapon and to maintain it and, on the other hand, we use the argument for having it that we cannot trust the Ameri- cans. The nuclear blackmail argument presupposes simultaneously American solidarity and American perfidy, and it seems to me extraordinary that the Prime Minister used that argument.

The Government case for maintaining the independent nuclear deterrent is the Gaullist case without the logic and consistency of General de Gaulle. General de Gaulle knows that if one wants an independent nuclear weapon one must stay in the missile race. One must not abandon it, as Britain did with the cancellation of Blue Streak and the decision to depend on America for the provision of the weapon.

Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Belper, I think that General de Gaulle and France will find that this effort is beyond their means, but in any case both Britain and France in their various versions of the Gaullist argument base themselves on a false strategic assumption.

The truth is that if any country wants to be a nuclear Power it must have a complete nuclear armoury. A small second-strike weapon based on Polaris missiles—which is the very most we can hope to afford, and I do not believe that we can afford them—is wholly inadequate, because—and this must be strongly emphasised—these are relatively inaccurate weapons. They cannot be used for firing at enemy missile bases, for they have insufficient accuracy. If used at all, they must be fired upon cities. If they were fired alone by us even as a second-strike weapon—and the Government lay great stress on the fact that this is an independent deterrent at our disposal—they could hit only Soviet cities and would not reduce Soviet retaliatory power by one jot.

If they were fired alone and did not reduce the Russians' retaliatory power, that would invite suicide. Even if the United States had only their Polaris fleet, which is many times the size of ours, and no Minutemen, no accurate counterforce weapon, they, too, would not be an effective nuclear Power, even with many times the size of our Polaris fleet. That is why the United States do not rely solely upon a Polaris fleet.

The Government must answer this question. I hope that the Foreign Secretary will do so. If this Polaris fleet were used by us alone it would invite suicide for this country. If it were used as par of the complete second-strike capacity of the West, it would make only a minimal and insignificant addition to that second-strike power.

What, then, is the military argument for maintaining a force which could not be used alone and which, if used with the rest of the Western second strike deterrent, would make no significant addition to it?

The Government have abandoned all military arguments for the Polaris weapon and they advance now only what can be called the status symbol argument—that without this nuclear deterrent Britain would be unable to go to the conference table. The Conservatives ask the question, if a Labour Government had been in power at the time of the Moscow negotiations about the Test Ban Treaty, whether we could have been at the conference. This is a trick question. We have never said that we should throw away our weapon. The Conservatives always seem amazed when we make this statement but we have made it a score of times: we should not throw away our weapons. If it is true—which I do not believe—that we were at that conference only because we possessed nuclear weapons then a Labour Government at that time would have had these weapons and would therefore have been at the conference.

I also ask the right hon. Gentleman a further question about the argument that we must have this ticket of entry. Why did it win us no influence during the Cuban crisis, which is the one that really mattered?