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Trident Replacement:
Assessing UK Security Needs and Nuclear Policy
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Secretary of State for Defence evidence on the question of Trident replacement,
Defence Committee, November 18, 2005
GENERAL Evidence SESSION with the secretary of state for Defence,
UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE, To be published as HC 556-i,
House of COMMONS, MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE DEFENCE COMMITTEE.
This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported
to the House. Any public use of, or reference to, the contents should
make clear that neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity
to correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record
of these proceedings.
Oral Evidence Taken before the Defence Committee on Tuesday 1 November
2005.
Witnesses: Rt Hon John Reid, MP, Secretary of State for Defence,
Mr Desmond Bowen CMG, Policy Director, and Mr Ian Andrews,
Second Permanent Under-Secretary, Lieutenant General Sir Rob Fry
KCB CBE, Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff (Commitments), Ministry
of Defence, gave evidence.
Q1 Chairman: I would like to welcome everyone to the Committee.
This is our first briefing with you, Secretary of State, and it is a general
evidence taking session in which I hope we will be able to cover a lot
of ground. This means, if I can address particularly the members of the
Committee, short, snappy questions and, if I could address particularly
the witnesses, short, snappy answers would be much appreciated. Perhaps
I may begin, Secretary of State, by saying that by all accounts this is
the job you wanted. This is an area in which you have had a lot of previous
experience. Can you tell us what your major aims have been to cover during
your period as Secretary of State for Defence, which we very much hope
will be a long one?
John Reid: Thank you very much. May I just place on record my condolences
to the families of all those servicemen and women who have lost their
life or been injured in service to their country since you were first
established and I became Secretary of State and, also, to remind us of
the threats and dangers which they face which have been exhibited in the
last 48 hours by an action to deprive this country of the poison of masses
of drugs. I am delighted that the Navy has succeeded in that. It is the
latest illustration of just how the servicemen and women in our Armed
Forces serve this country. That is precisely one of the reasons I wanted
this job. I cannot think of any group of people for whom public service
is more serious, more dangerous and more comprehensive than the men and
women who serve our country. To have a contract that says I will serve
my country even until death is a very exceptional and rare thing and I
am honoured to be able to play some part with them in defence. That is
why I wanted to come back and why today I am working with my colleagues:
the Deputy Chief of Defence Staff, General Sir Robert Fry who covers operations,
Desmond Bowen who is my Policy Director and, on my right, Ian Andrews
is my Second PUS who covers finance and other issues. The Ministry of
Defence exists to produce fighting power. It does many other things, but
essentially the main product of the Ministry of Defence ought to be fighting
power. My job is to make sure that that is relevant to today's threats,
it is capable of meeting those threats and it is sufficient in terms of
all of the elements of fighting power to so do. The first element, as
you will know, Chairman, is the intellectual element, which is doctrine,
training and so on. The second element of fighting power is the physical,
that is equipment, tanks, ships, planes, and the third element is morale
and it is probably the most important element, which means a bonding together,
a feeling of trust in each other and in the leadership, a sense of history
and family as well as a sense of country and a sense of belonging together
as a fighting unit. It is my job to make sure that all of those elements,
the intellectual, the physical and the morale element, are sufficient
for today's tasks.
Chairman: Thank you. There are a lot of issues we are going to have to
cover this morning and the first one that we would like to go into is
the nuclear deterrent.
Q2 Robert Key: Secretary of State, you say in your Department's
report published last week, paragraph 171, that in a recent poll undertaken
by Ipsos 81 per cent of people said that the UK needs strong Armed Forces.
That is no surprise. When it comes to the nuclear deterrent and the fact
that you are going to have to make decisions with the Government during
the lifetime of this Parliament and given the answer yesterday in the
House of Lords from Lord Drayson about nuclear weapons in which he laid
out what I can only describe as a very large number of nuclear weapons
still around in the world, do you think it is going to be very difficult
to persuade the British people that we need to renew our nuclear deterrent?
John Reid: Let us be absolutely clear on what the present position of
the Government is and then I will turn to a replacement because the question
you are asking me is very relevant but it concerns events 15 years away
and up to 50 years away. I think what the public is most interested in
is what the present position is and the present position has been laid
out quite clearly by the Government, ie we will retain Britain's minimum
nuclear deterrent. That is a pledge that we made in the last manifesto
nearly six months ago and one that we will keep. You may ask how long
that manifesto pledge lasts. Technically it is for the life of a Parliament,
but I think all reasonable people would assume it to apply for the life
of the Trident system. That is where we are. We intend, at the same time
as minimising our deterrent, which we have done, and keeping our obligations
under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, to maintain the nuclear deterrent.
The question to which we must now turn is about what we might do in 15
years' time in terms of addressing the situation when the present warheads
or missile system or nuclear submarines from which they are launched come
to the end of their useful life. That is precisely the discussion on which
we are now embarking. There are a great many questions to be asked about
the nature of the threats we might face then, about the assumptions on
which we work at present and being willing to take part in multilateral
negotiations at the right time. We have always maintained that as long
as some other nuclear state which is a potential threat has nuclear weapons
we will retain ours. That is the assumption from which we start but it
has to be tested in discussions with others and it will be. Even if we
decide that we want to keep the nuclear deterrent, we then have to ask
whether we want to keep it in the same form, submarine launched, sea launched,
air launched or land-based nuclear weapons, and then we have to ask ourselves
about the cost, and we will work through those points. For the foreseeable
future we will be maintaining the nuclear deterrent. We are now entering
a discussion about whether that foreseeable future will extend beyond
the 15 to the 50-year point.
Q3 Robert Key: The Prime Minister has said that decisions are
likely to have to be taken in the life of this Parliament, although we
are looking a long time into the future. I understand why you have to
be very discreet about the information that can be made public. Do you
agree that if we are to have a proper debate, and it must be an informed
debate, it will be necessary to come clean with people and to give a certain
amount of information about the basis for the discussion that you have
said already that you wish to have? How far can we go?
John Reid: I have tried to do that not only in Defence Questions and
defence debate in the House and I am sure that will continue but, also,
last night with my colleagues in the Parliamentary Labour Party, today
in front of this Committee and I am sure this is something that will continue
to be discussed and debated. In a sense the decision is really quite simple
and that is whether we stand by the assumptions that we have used so far,
which are that we should minimise the nature of our deterrent, that we
should be prepared at a given stage, if the Russians and the Americans
get down to a certain level of nuclear capacity, to hand our nuclear weapon
in, but that throughout this process of complying with the NPT and along
with those assumptions also to have the other assumption, which is as
long as another potential enemy has nuclear weapons we will retain ours.
That is the decision in principle. That has to be taken in practical terms
against what we think will be the threats in 15, 25, 30 years' time and
then we have to decide, if we want to go ahead and if we can afford it,
what the nature of our deterrent would be. I would merely make one point.
I have heard it said that because there are new threats from terrorism
that in itself makes the nuclear deterrent redundant because, of course,
it is said you cannot use the nuclear weapon against terrorists. It is
equally true that you cannot use Special Forces to deter a nuclear attack.
That does not mean to say that Special Forces are redundant. The truth
of the matter is we face a range of threats at this moment running from
individual acts of terrorism to nuclear threats. We need a range of responses
that include Special Forces, individual acts of dynamic heroism if you
like, right through to nuclear deterrent. Not all of those responses are
responses to every threat but the range of them is necessary in order
to meet the range of threats. That is the assumption we have at the moment
and it is that assumption that we will test against our analysis of what
might be future threats.
Q4 Robert Key: Secretary of State, I wonder if you would agree
with me that maybe for the last decade there have been discussions about
battlefield nuclear weapons, a little nuclear weapon that would somehow
do much less damage, but that that actually is a trap and that if you
have a very small nuclear weapon it would be just as dangerous and much
less effective than a big one. Is it not a good idea to start educating
us, the general public, 81 per cent of whom want to see a strong defence?
How are you going to do that? How do you see this process evolving over
the next two or three years, up to the time when you are going to have
to take a decision during the lifetime of this Parliament?
John Reid: You are right to say that there has been a discussion about
the types and nature of nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrent. You are
also right to imply that among our major colleagues in the Security Council
they retain multiple systems of nuclear deterrence. The French have got
two, the Russian have got three and the Americans have got a range of
nuclear deterrents as well. We have reduced ours to the absolute minimum.
Under this Government we have reduced our fire power by 70 per cent, we
have reduced the number of warheads to less than 200, we have reduced
the number of warheads per boat to no more than 48, we have reduced the
number of boats at sea and we have reduced the state of readiness and
targeting and so on. We are the only country in the world which has actually
got rid of a complete system of nuclear deterrents because up until this
Government came in we had two systems, one of them was the WE177 airborne
free-fall bomb and the other one was the submarine launched Trident D5.
We got rid of the former. We have reduced ours to a minimum. Unfortunately
over recent years, despite the fact that we have contained the number
of new states that have developed nuclear weapons and therefore we have
got less than, say, John F Kennedy would have expected 30 or 40 years
ago when he predicted that by the turn of the century we might have 40
states, as we have been reducing other states have been acquiring. We
know that India has nuclear weapons, Pakistan has nuclear weapons, North
Korea and so on. Probably more worrying is the fact that some countries
have been trying to develop nuclear weapons by deceiving the world and
not complying with their own obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty,
for instance Iran. Therefore, you are right to point to the need for an
informed discussion on this because if we are looking at trends over the
past ten or 20 years and looking forward 20 years, I think it would be
naive to believe inevitably that there will be no further proliferation,
however hard we are committed to that.
Q5 Mr Borrow: It seems to me that this is a crucial decision which
is for the medium to long term. If it has not to be made during this Parliament
and by this Labour Government, it may well be a decision which comes in
under a different government altogether and therefore any public debate
needs to lead to a public consensus and ideally a cross-party consensus
on what happens after Trident. Do you agree that that can only happen
if there is the maximum amount of information in the public domain to
allow the public to reach a public consensus which politicians can then
use in making any decision?
John Reid: It is not absolutely essential the decision is taken during
this Parliament but it would be highly desirable in my view. It is not
absolutely essential that you have a cross-party consensus but in my view
that would be desirable. It is also desirable with any such important
issues that there is the maximum information and consensus across the
public as well as across Parliament. The history of these matters is,
despite the raging controversies that have been going on for 25, 30 or
40 years, that there has been a fairly consistent two-thirds majority
who believe in the simple proposition that as long as a potential enemy
has a nuclear weapon we should retain one. That is not to say that is
necessarily right or that it will not change, but that has been the traditional
position in terms of what we can take out of the scientific evidence from
opinion polls. Let me just comment on the timescale. If you leave aside
any replacement in 15 or 20 years' time, whether that replacement is an
update or a renewed type of system with new submarines or whatever or
whether it is a completely new system, we still have to maintain the safety
and reliability of our present deterrent. That means that the various
elements of the deterrent have to be maintained, that is the warhead,
the missile system and the boats in simple terms. That involves a degree
of expenditure which any government that succeeds this one would have
to pay anyway otherwise we would be losing the key obligation of Government,
which is to keep safe, reliable and secure our means of security. There
will be an ongoing need for governments to maintain our present deterrent
until the end of its useful life while we have the discussion and decision
about how and when we replace the present system.
Source: Defence Committee website, http://www.parliament.uk/parliamentary_committees/defence_committee.cfm
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