by General Sir Hugh Beach

Congress House, Saturday 2^nd September 2006

A nuclear war of any kind would be a humanitarian disaster almost beyond imagining. If it involved Russia or America it could lead to the use of thousands of weapons. If it involved Britain or France; China or India; Pakistan or Israel then it might be a hundred. Any such use would be a mega-catastrophe, totally dwarfing the effects of earthquakes, floods, genocides and epidemic disease. The only way to be sure that this can never happen is to secure the complete and permanent abolition of these weapons. This is what the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970 seeks to achieve (in Article VI) and what the states parties promised ‘unequivocally’ to work for (in Step 9 of the thirteen agreed) at the NPT Review Conference in 2000. If the nuclear weapons parties to the treaty are not living up to their obligations then they are frustrating the process of nuclear build-down and leaving the world in grave peril. The British Government claims to have an ‘extremely good record on this score’. Since the end of the Cold War we are the only Nuclear Weapon State to have reduced to a single system and to have undergone a reduction of 70% in the explosive power of our nuclear weapons. So they say there is no argument that requires us to press ahead on our own with further reductions at this stage to zero, which is what the decision not to replace Trident would involve.

The International Court of Justice delivered an Advisory Opinion on 8^th July 1996 to the effect that: ‘the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict’. But the Court went on to say that it ‘cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defence, in which the very survival of a state would be at stake’. HMG was quick to point out, and has just repeated, that: ‘We would only ever consider the use of nuclear weapons in the extreme circumstance of self defence’. So a legal case against possession as such does not quite stand up.

The case against testing is watertight since we have ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The British Government has made it clear that if it decides to design and build a new warhead it will do so without the ultimate proof test of a nuclear explosion. Indeed some, at least, of the current investment at Aldermaston is precisely to make this possible. So that’s OK. Which brings us to the question of threat or use.

Since the end of the Cold War the British Government has maintained that it ‘does not see Trident as a system for fighting wars, but as having a fundamentally political role in deterring aggression’. Its representation to the International Court of Justice said plainly that: ‘the United Kingdom has always accepted that the use of nuclear weapons is subject to the general principles of the jus in bello’. This means adhering to the principles of discrimination and proportionality which are, of course, the relevant criteria in Christian Just War theory. The crucial question is this. Can any real war plan, involving the political use of nuclear weapons, be constructed with full regard to the principles of proportion and discrimination? We are talking here, remember, about a British go-it-alone action where ‘supreme national interests are at stake’. This is explicitly allowed for under our agreement with the US, and is used by most commentators, including Michael Quinlan in a recent article in the Tablet, as the real justification for a British independent force. ‘Our capability is an insurance against the possibility of our (or Europe) being caught up in a deep military confrontation with powerful adversaries in circumstances where the United States is not – or not perceived by the adversaries to be – equally committed’.

David Fisher, in a forthcoming book being published by CCADD, sets out the implications as follows:

I find this less than fully convincing. First because Chevaline was designed precisely to meet the ‘Moscow Criterion’. If we had to contemplate a go-it-alone use of Trident how confident can we be that the target list would not include Tehran, Pyongyang or wherever? Secondly it seems to me that most ‘military and related assets’ can be perfectly well looked after by advanced conventional weapons with precision guidance. The advantages of tackling them in this way are obvious. If nuclear weapons are brought into play it must be for a different purpose, i.e. (in Michael Quinlan’s words) to transmit to any potential attacker a political message: ‘You have wholly underestimated my determination to defend my interests: for your own survival you must now stop’. I have no quarrel with this. But how sure can we be that this logic would not lead to an attack on populations?

There is one other constraint about which I have no doubts. It concerns the question of what the deterrent can be used to deter. Like the other recognised nuclear weapon states, the UK has given a so-called Negative Security Assurance regarding the possible use of its nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states. This was given in 1995, at the time of the indefinite extension of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and repeated in UN Security Council Resolution 984. It said in terms that ‘The United Kingdom will not use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states party to the Treaty’. This assurance does not apply to a state which has illegally acquired nuclear weapons or is seeking to acquire them, and has thus violated the NPT. But the Assurance clearly does apply to a non-nuclear weapon state which possesses other weapons of mass destruction, i.e. biological and/or chemical weapons, even if those weapons were acquired in violation of commitments under the Biological and/or Chemical Weapons Conventions, and even if those weapons were used to attack the UK or UK forces. This contingency must certainly have been taken into account when the 1995 formulation was drawn up, because by that time the UK had been through the experience of the first Gulf War when the threat that the Iraqi chemical and biological weapons might be used against British forces was taken very seriously.

Regrettably, from time to time UK Ministers have sought to imply that Britain’s response to an attack with chemical or biological weapons might be nuclear. For example in 2002 the then Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon said in a television interview: ‘if there is a threat to our deployed forces, if they come under attack by weapons of mass destruction and by that specifically chemical, biological weapons, then we would reserve the option , in an appropriate case, … to use nuclear weapons’. That seems clear enough. Yet the UK has not modified the terms of its Negative Security Assurance. On 21 June 2006 Dr. Howells, a Foreign Office minister, said in a written parliamentary answer: ‘We … remain fully committed to the negative … security assurances we gave to non-nuclear weapons state parties to the NPT in 1995.’ This means that one of the arguments which might otherwise be adduced for maintaining and renewing the UK nuclear deterrent has no validity.

So we come back to the basic question: can we be assured that the war plan for Trident, and for any successor, will be based only and wholly on an explicit counter-combatant targeting policy, holding at risk military and related assets, and keeping non-combatant casualties to a proportionate minimum. If we can be sure that this will be true for the next 40 years, then there seems to be no conclusive argument on legal or ethical grounds against replacing Trident if we want to. My objection to it is that Trident has been of no actual use to us up to now, nor is ever likely to be. There are much more useful things, like infantry battalions, being squeezed out the defence programme for lack of the billion odd pounds a year that Trident is costing us.