Ballistic Missiles

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 9:18 pm on 30 October 2001.

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Photo of Lord Wallace of Saltaire Lord Wallace of Saltaire Liberal Democrat 9:18, 30 October 2001

My Lords, the Unstarred Question asks Her Majesty's Government whether they have carried out an assessment of the threat from ballistic missiles and how best to counter it. The Question is not whether we think that the Americans are going ahead anyway and, if so, what we should do, or a number of other questions which have been introduced into the debate. I agree with half of the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, and disagree quite strongly with the other half.

The ABM treaty is a relic of the Cold War. So is NATO. We do not want to get rid of NATO. There are those who think that there are relics of the Cold War that can still turn out to be useful. I find that argument extremely weak. Much that was achieved in arms control in the course of the 1960s and 1970s remains valid, including the exclusion of weapons from space. Part of the ideological rise in the United States is an argument that they want to bust all those arms control treaties, including the introduction of weapons into space. That seems very dangerous and the British Government should be standing up against it.

The Question asks Her Majesty's Government whether they have made an assessment of the threat. There is a potential threat. I hope that the Government are assessing it and conducting some research. However, I hope that the Government also recognise that it is one of a large number of potential threats that we face rather than the dominant threat. There are other forms of weapons delivery. NATO has suffered missile attacks. Many noble Lords will remember that on one occasion the Libyans fired a missile at Lampedusa. It was not a ballistic missile. It was a short-range missile.

If our forces were in theatre on the ground, inter-continental ballistic missiles would not be needed to have a go at them; Cruise missiles would do just as well. I trust that the Government are considering the range of threats that we face, a range both of means of delivery--including non-conventional means of delivery such as we have just seen in the case of the towers of the World Trade Centre--and of forms of weapon.

The range of responses to new potential threats is wide, and the military response is only one. During the past 30 to 40 years, we have done well by negotiating away some potential threats, such as use of weapons in space. We have also had the chemical and biological weapons conventions, the anti-ballistic missile treaty itself and the various arms control treaties, which have reduced the number of ballistic missiles in the US and Soviet inventories. Those are all diplomatic and legal means of containing potential new threats. We must continue diplomatic approaches, including those to encourage regimes to change--either by sanctions or by forms of engagement.

I am doubtful about the concept of rogue states. This summer I was reading a book about the Rumsfeld programme for military reform in the United States that says bluntly that the concept of rogue states was invented by Colin Powell in 1990-91, when US chief of general staff, as a means to justify continuing spending a substantial amount on the American military. One needed a new threat. I would love to have chapter and verse on that; it sounds horribly plausible.

The label "rogue state" was then stuck on several states that could be said to be threats to the continental United States--none of which so far have missiles capable of hitting the continental United States. North Korea, on a good day, can manage to reach Japan, but certainly not yet all the way across the Pacific. We saw that the Iraqis could manage a pretty bad shot at Israel, but not much beyond that, as far as we are aware. Iraq and Korea fit the category of states that live outside international society, in a sense, and are intent on opposing the concepts of that society. In my opinion, Iran no longer fits that category; Libya is in some ways moving out of it. So the label of rogue states is an easy one. It covers a range of peculiar countries, not all of which are similar.

During the past few years, we have suffered from the over-dependence of American foreign policy on military responses to threats and problems, as opposed to the alternative of broader, multilateral diplomatic or economic engagement.

Massive investment in an anti-ballistic missile system is not justified by the current state of development of ballistic missiles by potentially hostile states--certainly not in the time scale suggested by the Republican Right and think tanks in Washington. There is no prospect that within the next five years any hostile state will be able to hit the continental United States, or, for that matter, that any hostile state will be able directly to hit Britain. Research and assessment are justified, not massive investment.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Judd, and others, that a strong military lobby in the United States, allied with a Pentagon that is obsessed with hardware and technical fixes, is locked into missile defence as the next great new project. On Monday, I listened to General Wesley Clark talking about the obsession of the United States Air Force with hardware, as opposed to occupying the ground or using conflict resolution. That American general spoke with tremendous passion against his own armed forces. I share all those views.

One talks about whether the Americans intend to go ahead with the project, but it is not in their interests to do so. It is an ideological commitment of a particular group within the United States and of a number of companies, but I doubt whether there will be an American system. The United States is heading into recession and the Democrats may well have control of both Houses of Congress after the next mid-term elections. At that point, the whole commitment to Star Wars may begin to change.

Her Majesty's Government should be conducting an assessment--I hope that the Minister will tell us that--but major departures by the United States or its allies are not currently justified; nor is major expenditure. I invite the Government to consider whether they want to report to Parliament in written form on how they see the potential threats.