Nuclear Deterrent

Part of Oral Answers to Questions — Defence – in the House of Commons at 2:30 pm on 4 July 2005.

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Photo of John Reid John Reid Secretary of State, Ministry of Defence, The Secretary of State for Defence 2:30, 4 July 2005

If my right hon. Friend will allow me, I would rather study the options and their implications before drawing conclusions from any of those options, whether on the basis of cost or anything else. When we consider the dynamics of change over the last six years, we find, in terms of our nuclear deterrent, that on the one hand we have reduced to a single form of nuclear deterrence—the only nation to do so; we have abolished the WE177 freefall bomb, detargeted our missiles and reduced the number of warheads and the number of boats we have at sea. On the other hand, since then, we have discovered that North Korea, Pakistan, India and, formerly, Libya were in the process of developing programmes, and there may have been aims in Iraq, too. The situation is constantly fluid and it behoves all of us to give the matter serious and prolonged consideration rather than pre-empting or prejudging it, or making arbitrary decisions on something so important.