Foreign Affairs and Defence

Part of Debate on the Address – in the House of Commons at 4:06 pm on 10 December 2008.

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Photo of Malcolm Rifkind Malcolm Rifkind Conservative, Kensington and Chelsea 4:06, 10 December 2008

I think both that the United States has been premature in giving such emphasis to a ballistic missile programme long before there is any real threat of the kind suggested and that the Russians have grossly overreacted to some unarmed missile defence systems that might be placed in the Czech Republic and Poland. Therefore, I think both countries have to look at this afresh and try to move forward in a more sensible way.

To return to my theme, if the Americans and Russians were able to make such major progress, that would itself send a massive signal to the NPT negotiations and help to ensure a continuation of that treaty. In addition, it would very greatly strengthen future President Obama in dealing with the Iranian threat. If he is able to demonstrate to the world not only that the United States is making massive reductions in its nuclear arsenal, but that he is prepared to negotiate—as he has said he is—with the Iranians on a resolution to the problems they face, either the Iranians will respond positively or if they fail to do so President Obama would be able to expect, and would receive, much greater international support for any tough measures that might then be needed against the Iranians. Therefore, no loss would be involved in the American position; instead it could be enormously enhanced.

The second half of this debate is about not only a reduction in nuclear arsenals, which would ultimately have to include the United Kingdom, China, France and other nuclear powers, but whether it is possible actually to contemplate their elimination. That is, of course, a very difficult issue, because there is a crucial difference between a country reducing the number of nuclear weapons it has to 150, 100 or even 50 and removing them completely. If a country has even five or 10 nuclear weapons and its opponent has the same, the relative position between the two countries remains the same. Compared with a country that does not have nuclear weapons, a country with five or 10 weapons is enormously powerful in a way that the other is not; in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Bringing the amount of weapons down to a very small number will not be easy, but going to zero will be infinitely more challenging. That does not mean that it cannot be done, because we have been enormously successful in, effectively, abolishing chemical weapons, and that is a very encouraging precedent. To be able to contemplate achieving a reduction to zero, there must be a huge improvement in the verification and transparency regimes, not only for the weapon states themselves, but for civil nuclear programmes. That is because the fissile material in such programmes is also relevant to the potential production of enriched uranium or plutonium for nuclear weapons. We would also need to be confident that the verification and control systems would prevent the fissile material from getting to terrorist organisations, because those would be the people who could wreak enormous damage on the wider world.

That is the basis on which we would have to address this issue, but there is a second aspect to it. One of the arguments that many, including myself, have used over the years, and which needs to be addressed if we are ever to contemplate the elimination of nuclear weapons, is that our eliminating them—assuming that we can do that—might, in practice, make conventional war more likely. Might it not be argued that nuclear weapons have helped to prevent conventional wars from breaking out? That was a powerful argument during the cold war; indeed, in one of his last speeches as Prime Minister, Winston Churchill said that

"it may well be that we shall by a process of sublime irony have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation."—[ Hansard, 1 March 1955; Vol. 537, c. 1899.]

Those are very powerful words.

Even in recent years, there is at least an argument to be made that India and Pakistan are now much less likely to renew the conventional wars that they have had several times in the past 30 or 40 years, because both are now nuclear powers and they know that a conventional conflict might lead to a nuclear exchange. So this is not a foolish argument and we cannot simply dismiss it lightly. However, although the argument is valid, it is becoming progressively less so; indeed, it is becoming outweighed by other factors.

The crucial argument that was relevant during the cold war was that if a conventional war ever broke out between the Soviet Union and the NATO powers, it would, in effect, be a third world war. It would not just be a local conflict; it would be a global conflict of dimensions comparable with both the first and second world war. There is no prospect of a global conflict of that kind in the foreseeable future. The great powers have not the remotest intention of going to war with each other, and there is no fundamental issue that might even lead towards that in the foreseeable future. The wars that we are trying to avoid are essentially local conflicts in various parts of the world. That is still a serious matter, but one cannot use the argument that we must therefore have nuclear weapons in those countries, because the logic would then apply to 180 countries around the world, and that would result in an unsustainable situation.

In any event, even if the India and Pakistan situation in respect of the outbreak of conventional conflict has, in some way, been assisted by the fact that they are now both nuclear weapon states, that must be set against the downside that flows from what has been happening in recent years. The proliferation of nuclear weapons states has increased alarmingly, is increasing and, if we are not careful, will continue increasing so that it will encompass many more states around the world. We are talking not only about nuclear weapons states, but about the fissile material that is available, because when that fissile material is available and people such as A. Q. Khan in Pakistan are prepared to sell information to rogue states, the risks of that information getting into the hands of terrorist organisations become far more serious.