Intermediate Nuclear Forces

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 4:13 pm on 31 October 1983.

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Photo of Mr Denis Healey Mr Denis Healey , Leeds East 4:13, 31 October 1983

No, they have not deployed any so far.

I fear that the West is in danger of making the same mistake as it now admits it made about MIRVs in SALT 1. The Americans thought that they had an edge with the multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles, and refused to negotiate a limit. Now the Russians have them, and that is the main worry of the United States. If we go ahead with cruise, that new weapon will be deployed in increasing numbers by the Soviets. We shall have gained nothing by this whole tragic episode. We shall have enormously increased our insecurity rather than strengthened our security.

There is an overwhelming case for taking the last Andropov offer as the basis for urgent negotiation to reach agreement. The major obstacle to taking that sensible course is the refusal of the British and French Governments to have their nuclear forces counted in the balance—as they were in the SALT 1 agreement—tacitly in one of the protocols to the treaty—and as the French troops are counted in the MBFR negotiations in Vienna, although they are not, strictly speaking, part of the NATO forces.

The Russians cannot be expected to ignore the British and French forces. If they did, there would not be much point in our having those forces. Both the right hon. Member for Cambridgeshire, South-East (Mr. Pym) and Sir John Nott, who were the first two Defence Secretaries in the right hon. Lady's Government, said that the British Polaris force is committed to NATO and targeted according to SACEUR plans. Secretary Weinberger agrees. In this year's posture statement for the fiscal year 1984, he excludes the British Polaris force from the strategic forces but includes it in the theatre nuclear forces as available to NATO.

The Government Front Bench cannot laugh that off. Conservative spokesmen have said that Polaris is part of the NATO forces. They have also said that, in the last resort, we might use it independently. It is difficult to see a scenario in which they would be available for use independently because SACEUR would have used them long before that point was reached, if we fulfil our obligations to the Alliance.

The Prime Minister's position is unsustainable, as Vice-President Bush made clear recently. The Government's attempts to justify their position grow wilder and wilder. I recently heard the right hon. Lady say that Britain had the Polaris force long before there were any intermediate nuclear forces. She also said that the Soviet Union had hundreds of nuclear missiles deployed against western Europe 10 years before the first Polaris boat became operational in 1968. Her position becomes even less sustainable if and when current plans to modernise the British and French forces are carried out. The Trident D5 can hit more than 10 times as many targets as the Polaris force in three times as large an area. In the 1990s, if British and French plans are carried through, between the two countries there will be 2,000 warheads as against the 5,000 each of the United States and the Soviet Union under START.

I appeal at the last moment to the Government to think again about the problem. I ask them at least to halt the process of deployment, as Mr. John Glenn in the United States has proposed. He is no Leftist thug. He is the candidate that many believe to be the most likely to defeat President Reagan in next year's American election, if President Reagan decides to run.

The House faces the choice today either to halt the arms race now or to move into a new cycle of weapons infinitely more dangerous and difficult to control than those already deployed in the world.

Pershing II and MX on the American side and the SS20 and the SS22 on the Russian side reduce the warning time against attack to minutes. They would require Governments to decide in seconds whether to retaliate on the basis of information from computers. Yet we learnt the other day from the South Korean airline disaster how fallible computers are to human or mechanical failure. A decision that has to be taken in seconds on the basis of computer information will give no Government time to consult their allies, still less to consult their enemies, and the present machinery is totally inadequate for consultation either inside the Alliance or between alliances. That was proved not only in the Sea of Okhots but in Grenada last week.

In some ways cruise is an even more dangerous threat to peace than some of the highly accurate, potentially first strike counter-force weapons that I have mentioned. In addition to the 464 ground-launched cruise missiles in Europe, the United States plans to deploy 4,500 cruise missiles from its bombers and 2,000 missiles from its surface ships. It will be impossible to verify the presence of such cruise missiles, particularly seaborne missiles, by satellite photography. Of course, America is planning to use these missiles for conventional purposes as well as for nuclear delivery. The black fantasy of modern nuclear strategy is taken to extremes when one reads, as did today, that the United States is planning to enable the Soviet Union to identify nuclear warhead-carrying cruise missiles by putting unnecessary decorations on them called FRODS. One cannot have much confidence in the ability of the Soviet Union to distinguish a nuclear from a conventional missile when, over the Sea of Okhots, a trained Soviet pilot was able to mistake a civilian jumbo for a military reconnaissance aircraft, as the Americans have admitted since their original claim.

It is vital that, if there is modernisation of nuclear weapons, it should be calculated to make the balance more stable and disarmament more feasible. Cruise and Pershing II make the balance less stable and disarmament more difficult. That is the case for a nuclear freeze, and a freeze has overwhelming support in the United States—75 per cent. support in the referendums which have been held, and passed two to one by the House of Representatives. There is still time for a major NATO effort to shift the emphasis away from reliance on nuclear weapons to deter conventional attack to conventional weapons, even if it costs more. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh!"] It might well not cost more, because I note that the American Congress has been told that these new missiles in Europe will require 20,000 American personnel to service them. Most of us believe that those men would be better deployed in uniform somewhere in the front line with conventional weapons.

There are rarely moments in history when Parliament has an opportunity to change the course of events. I believe that this is such a moment. If the West and Russia continue the arms race as at present planned, there will be an enormous increase in the risk to both sides and the momentum of the technological developments will wrest the power of decision out of the hands of Governments altogether. There is an alternative. We can halt and then reverse the accelerating slide to catastrophe. The House can take the first step tonight by rejecting the Government's motion.