WAR BY ACCIDENT

HC Deb 30 June 1965 vol 715 cc779-90

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Fitch.]

11.31 a.m.

Mr. Frank Allaun (Salford, East)

Mr. Speaker, at this moment at least five American Polaris submarines are lying submerged off the Chinese coast. Each is armed with 16 missiles, each, in turn, capable of delivering, 1,500 miles away, a warhead many times as terrible, as powerful, as the one which devastated Hiroshima. If one of those warheads were delivered on Peking or Hanoi, either by design or accident, then it would be difficult to prevent a world war fought with hydrogen bombs on both sides from developing within days or even within hours.

As Aneurin Bevan once said, "There is no label on an H Bomb". If one is dropped on Russia or China, the Russians and the Chinese will not set up a commission to decide where the bomb came from. They would probably wipe out all the possible sources from which it might have been delivered.

The greatest danger today, it seems to me, lies in wars starting by accident. This is the most likely cause of war, because of the instant state of readiness which is maintained, and because of the growing number of nuclear weapons and of nuclear Powers. The Minuteman, for example, can be launched within 30 seconds and, once launched, cannot, unlike a plane, be recalled. One-third of the United States Air Force is at 15 minutes' alert, and some of its bombers are always airborne with the H-bomb aboard. If the fighting in Asia involves the direct confrontation of East and West, as its extension is tending to do, and if the recent relaxation of tension disappears, as I am afraid is already beginning to happen, then the danger of war by accident immensely increases.

Accidents do not by themselves cause war, but decisions based on accidents can. The kind of response made by a Government to the dropping of a bomb on its territory will largely depend on the surrounding circumstances, and the current international situation. If there is already fighting in the area, as in South-East Asia, then there is not much hope of an accident being regarded and responded to as other than deliberate.

Reports by military spokesmen mostly aim at showing that a serious accident cannot happen. I profoundly hope they are right, though there are so many different ways in which accidents can happen that, despite all the precautions, the odds are that sooner or later one will take place.

Even if our precautions are infallible, can we be so certain that the Russians cannot make a mistake, or the French, or the Chinese, or, if they obtain control of nuclear weapons, the Germans? Recently, two fanatics, with 200 lbs. of dynamite on a bicycle, blew up the American Embassy in Saigon. I very much doubt whether Moscow, Peking, Hanoi or any other capital planned or knew anything about this incident; yet it undoubtedly worsened the prospects for peace. Is it not possible that two fanatics in control not of dynamite, but of nuclear bombs, might have an even more terrible result?

Returning to the question of Polaris submarines off the Chinese coast, by next year there will be 82 Polaris submarines in operation throughout the world, each with a crew of 100, with 27 of the vessels constantly at sea. One man could not launch the missiles alone, because they have been so arranged and designed that collaboration between two or three individuals is required, and crews are constantly screened for signs of emotional instability. That check may be 100 per cent. effective, though, here again, I have my doubts. But there are other possibilities. A crazy submarine commander could give to his crew simulated instructions from the supreme headquarters, or a perfectly sane commander could misinterpret a signal, or a signal received might not be authentic.

What is there to prevent the possibility of crazy commanders higher up the line of command? According to the Mershon Report, 43 per cent. of all discharges from the United States forces are for psychiatric reasons, and we can remember James Forrestal, the United States Secretary for the Army, who jumped out of a window shouting that the Red Army had landed when he heard an air raid siren.

There are others holding positions of great power who, while not declared mentally unsound, are itching to use their terrible weapons, and whom not all of us would feel too happy about in a crisis. General Nathan Twining, for instance, has said: If it were not for the politicians, I would settle the war in one afternoon by bombing Soviet Russia. General Orvil Anderson, Commander of the United States Air War College, has said: I would be happy to bomb Russia. Just give me the order to do it. God save us from our friends!

One assurance we are given by the military experts is that there are nuclear locks built into the American Polaris warheads. However, just as the most complicated combination locks of safes have been picked by safe-breakers, so can electronic locks. What is more, according to an article by Chapman Pincher in the Daily Express, for whose reports I have the highest respect—Chapman Pincher's, I mean—British Polaris warheads do not have such locks. He wrote last September: The American Government urged Britain to fit a radio-lock in the British-made Polaris warheads when it agreed to supply the missiles at Nassau nearly two years ago. No such device is included in the Polaris warheads currently being built at the weapons station at Aldermaston in Hertfordshire. Mr. Pincher reported that the British Government refused for several reasons. First, they said that extreme care is exercised in selecting our Polaris crews. Secondly, it would show that Britain's so-called independent nuclear deterrent was not independent. Thirdly, the lock is a complex device which would be expensive and would unnecessarily complicate operational use.

I have had a word with Chapman Pincher today, and he states categorically that he has been told officially that these locks do not exist on British warheads. That is something that needs examination.

This third point regarding delays in operations is serious. According to Dr. J. C. Phelps, writing in the "Atomic Scientist Journal": A weapons system could be surrounded by so many technical safeguards that it could not actually be used as intended in a crisis". At least 12 major accidents have so far occurred involving nuclear weapons. On a number of occasions the early warning radar screens have picked up objects which were thought to be enemy planes and they later turned out to be something quite different. An hon. Member of this House who served with radar during the last war tells me that the difficulty was to distinguish, say, between a flock of birds rising from the water and more serious objects. This difficulty, he says, has not been entirely overcome. Indeed, as radar becomes more sensitive it is likely to pick up the wrong target.

Then there was the case when the rising of the moon confused the radar screens. On such occasions planes are dispatched to the fail-safe points surrounding Russia. They do not pass beyond those points without a positive further order. What troubles me is this. What appeared on our radar screens was a mistake. What, no doubt, appeared on the Soviet radar screens was not a mistake. It was actually our bombers proceeding towards them. Suppose they reacted by moving their planes and suppose these movements were again picked up in the West. These would be real targets and not imaginary ones.

Take the gripping American novel "Fail Safe" and the film made from it. In at least one direction its prophecies have proved accurate. The book describes vital conversations taking place on the "hot" telephone line between Washington and Moscow. At the time when the book was written this "hot" line did not exist. Let us hope that other prophecies in the book do not prove equally accurate.

Consider the situation which arises in this book. Because an electronic device goes wrong, a flight of six U.S. bombers receive the signal to proceed beyond their fail-safe stations and fly to Moscow. At American headquarters it is realised that a terrible mistake has been made. The planes are radioed to return. The message is not received by the planes as the Russian defences have jammed wireless communications between the pilots and the bases. What is the American President to do? He gets on the "hot" line, informs the Russian Prime Minister and and asks him to shoot down the American planes before they reach Moscow with their load of bombs. One of the six, however, gets through the net.

Now comes the dilemma for the Soviet leader. He believes that the President is telling the truth and that a mistake has, indeed, been made. But he, too, has his "tough" generals to deal with. Could he or any leader possibly accept the obliteration of 6 million men, women and children without retaliation and not be swept aside himself, to enable the counter-attack to proceed? Some kind of agreement, however difficult to reach, between Russia and America, that one bomb will not instantaneously release massive reprisal, seems to be worthy of serious consideration.

There are some questions that I would like to ask the Minister. Fighter bombers flown by one man today carry nuclear bombs. What safeguards can be or are applied to single-seater tactical aircraft? They are not supposed to fly near the Russian frontiers with nuclear weapons on board. Is this precaution watertight? What about tactical nuclear artillery available to N.A.T.O. forces in Europe? Is it correct that West Germany is producing at Karlsruhe "clean" plutonium in considerable quantities and that this is of value only for war purposes?

To conclude, several hundred thousand missiles and bombs are waiting to be delivered at a moment's notice. We are likely to live under this shadow for years ahead. It seems to me that the best ways to prevent their being released are to work for such a lessening of tension between East and West that a decision to launch war as a result of an accident would be intolerable to both sides; to prevent any further spread of nuclear weapons to additional Governments; and to reduce the number of weapon delivery vehicles and all other armaments—in other words, to end the arms race.

11.46 p.m.

The Under-Secretary of State for Defence for the Royal Air Force (Mr. Bruce Millan)

My hon. Friend the Member for Salford, East (Mr. Frank Allaun) has raised an extremely important subject, and I hope that some of the things which I shall say to him in reply will reassure him about some of the points which he raised. His last point is the most important of all—that until we have a general disarmament agreement there must obviously be dangers in the present situation, in which certain Powers have these terrible weapons in their hands.

It is not possible for me to answer in detail some of the questions which he asked, because security considerations are involved. I must also make it clear that anything that I say can be said only from the point of view of the British Government and deal with the precautions which we take to make certain that accidental war will not break out.

As my hon. Friend fairly pointed out, the Russians and Americans are also involved. If other countries have nuclear weapons—one thinks of France and China—or if a number of other countries obtain them in the future, the question will arise whether they have taken adequate precautions to prevent the danger of accidental war arising from the actions or reactions of Governments.

This is an extremely complex subject, and my hon. Friend will understand that I can answer only from the point of view of the actions which we take in this country. My hon. Friend dealt almost exclusively with questions of mechanical or human failure, but there are other possible causes of accidental war, for example political miscalculations.

I will start by making one or two general political points, because these are relevant to the points which my hon. Friend raised. First, it is obvious that if there are certain dangers—and I hope that they are limited dangers in the present situation—when a small number of countries have nuclear weapons, these dangers will be immensely greater if there is a considerable proliferation of nuclear weapons. It is one of the Government's major purposes that there should be no further proliferation of nuclear weapons, and one of the main objectives of our foreign policy, through disarmament negotiations and elsewhere, is to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. This is very important in the context of this debate.

Similarly, it is extremely important that both sides should be better informed than they were in the past and than they are at the moment about what is going on. This makes the "hot" line between Moscow and Washington, which was established just two years ago, extremely important. If there is a direct communications link of this sort there are many circumstances of the kind which my hon. Friend postulated in which potentially extremely serious situations could be prevented from developing into war by means of the "hot" line communication.

There are a number of other things which could be done to give each side information about the movements of the other, for example, proposals for the establishment of observation posts in the N.A.T.O. and Warsaw Pact areas at major ports, railway stations, motor highways and air bases. Both the United States a id the Soviet Union have put forward at different times proposals along these lines, but, unfortunately, there has not yet been agreement between Russia and the West on an acceptable observation posts system.

The Western position, broadly speaking, is that this is something which we could decide not in complete isolation from disarmament negotiation generally but as a separate issue, whereas the Russian point of view is that this is something which must be linked with very much wider questions of disarmament. This is something to which, from the British point of view, we attach considerable importance and is the kind of thing which my noble Friend the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs will certainly be pushing forward in any disarmament negotiations.

These are more general political matters, but are very relevant to the kind of things which my hon. Friend raised. To deal with some of the specific points which he put to me, obviously, short of a general disarmament agreement and while we still have nuclear weapons held by the West and the Soviet Union these weapons are bound to be held in a state of literally instant readiness. If we are to have a deterrent and it is to be credible there has to be a considerable state of readiness at any time. It is this state of instant readiness that worries my hon. Friend very much. He feels that if we calculate the state of readiness too precisely there may be circumstances in which the whole thing may be set off because of a miscalculation of the kind which he described.

On that point—and this is absolutely vital—these nuclear weapons in the West are—and presumably the same is true in the Soviet Union—subject to political control. There is no question of handing these over to military commanders and allowing them to use them at their military discretion. Nuclear weapons are under political control.

This is a complicated subject and, obviously, I cannot go into details tonight, but I take, for example, the V-bomber force in the United Kingdom at present. There is a whole complicated system of communications and control which ultimately goes to the Prime Minister himself. In other words, the ultimate decision would be taken by the Prime Minister, and in circumstances in which he is already in direct communication with the White House and with N.A.T.O. Therefore, there is political control, and this is something which is extremely important.

On the question of procedures, we provide that even if a decision were taken to launch the V-bomber force into the air that would not be the end of the matter. My hon. Friend talked about the "fail safe" point. What happens is that if the aeroplanes were to go beyond that point they would have to receive a positive message to proceed. If they did not receive that message or if there was any ambiguity about that message there would be no question of their proceeding. They would turn back.

This, again, is a matter which involves technical and security considerations, but I assure my hon. Friend, having looked into this carefully, that the procedures which are laid down provide that the message must be clear and unambiguous and must be subject to a quite complicated authentication procedure which would identify the intent and origin of the message beyond all doubt. Therefore, we have procedures, which are as watertight as we can make them, which would mean that there would be no question of proceeding beyond a certain point without definite instructions to do that.

Similarly, talking in mechanical terms of the weapons themselves and their release mechanisms and the possibility of their failing in some way, all I can say is that there are extremely detailed precautions taken in the design of the weapons, in their handling equipment and in the procedures which are followed in handling them both on the ground and in the air, including, of course, the switching sequences to be followed by air crews before a weapon actually becomes live.

We have a nuclear weapons safety committee, under the chairmanship of Sir Solly Zuckerman, and including very high-ranking officers and other departmental experts as well as outside specialists, which deals in very minute detail with this whole question of nuclear safety. There are very detailed procedures laid down.

Mr. Philip Noel-Baker (Derby, South)

My hon. Friend has been speaking of the fail-safe procedures with reference to aircraft and bombers. There cannot be fail-safe procedures for a missile. One cannot have a permissive link for a tactical or battlefield weapon. I gather that my hon. Friend is about to come to missiles. Will he deal with that point?

Mr. Millan

As my right hon. Friend says, I was talking about the V-bomber system. I was not talking about I.C.B.M.s, to which different considerations apply, obviously. But that does not affect the point I was making. I was speaking originally from the British Government's point of view. As regards tactical nuclear weapons, the answer I gave about political control applies here as well as to strategic nuclear weapons, and this is where the safety procedures are involved.

I have read the article on Polaris submarines to which my hon. Friend referred. Obviously, I cannot deal with it in detail this evening, but I must tell the House that, so far as that article implied that safety procedures on British Polaris submarines would be inferior to the safety precautions on American Polaris submarines, it is completely misinformed. There is no question of there being any inferior safety devices in British Polaris submarines.

Now, the possibility of false radar warnings. There have been a few well-publicised examples of spurious indications on radar screens, but my information is directly contrary to what my hon. Friend said. In fact, as radar equipments become more sophisticated and more effective, the danger of a misinterpretation of a signal becomes less. If we take the worst possible example, the identifying of a missile, and thinking in terms of four minutes' warning or something like that, it must be remembered that the ballistic missile early warning system at Fylingdales, in Yorkshire, is linked with similar B.M.E.W.S.s in other parts of the world, and that there would be no question of any irrevocable action being taken simply on the basis of a reading at Fylingdales and without this being authenticated from a number of different sources. I can assure my hon. Friend that the position as regards radar warnings is, in fact, improving and not getting worse.

My hon. Friend referred to the possibility of human error, and human beings suffering from the mental strain of working either as V-bomber crew or in any other connection with nuclear weapons. Of course, people who are selected for V-bomber crews in the first place—this will be similarly true of Polaris crews later—are subject to vetting procedures which include the whole question of their character in terms of integrity, stability and the rest, and I can assure my hon. Friend, having visited V-bomber stations, that a very close watch is kept on the health and general behaviour of V-bomber crews. I am not suggesting that there is any sort of special spying on them. This is not the position at all. But they live in such a closely-knit community that the kind of mental strain which my hon. Friend is worried about would soon become apparent to their colleagues in the crews and to the station commander.

Therefore, I do not think that mental stress and human failing are likely to lead to the accidental release of nuclear weapons, and the procedure I described earlier for the use of the weapons provides, in the case of the V-bombers, for at least two or more of the crew out of the five members, so one individual is not likely to do anything that is absolutely disastrous in the way my hon. Friend fears.

Of course, this is an extremely difficult problem and I hope that nothing I have said can be taken as sounding complacent or as suggesting that we are not concerned to see that our procedures are made as foolproof as we can possibly make them. I assure the House that a considerable amount of care and attention has been given to this whole question of the procedures, which are as foolproof as is humanly possible to make them in the state of our present knowledge about all these problems.

Mr. Philip Noel-Baker

I thank my hon. Friend—

The Question having been proposed after Ten o'clock and the debate having continued for half an hour, Mr. SPEAKER adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.

Adjourned at one minute past Twelve o'clock.