§ Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Maude.]
10.16 pm§ Mr. Keith Best (Ynys Môn)I am pleased to initiate this important debate, because we all have an interest in peace. There can be no dispute that arms control, particularly in respect of nuclear weapons, has a major part to play in achieving greater global security and prolonged peace. Verification is an essential part of that process. As was pointed out in the United Kingdom working paper of 1 August 1983 to the Committee on Disarmament, entitled "Verification aspects of a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty"
What is at issue is the political will to recognise that the correct path towards an agreed Treaty—however long it may prove to be—leads through detailed considerations of verification issues. Once we are confident that those problems have been resolved—and the solution must not permit disequilibrium in international relationships by allowing one side to gain advantage over another—then we can move towards the final banning of all nuclear tests.In that same document it was pointed out that verification is not detection alone but detection and identification.The Government remain firmly committed to the pursuit of a verifiable comprehensive test ban and are actively working on the problems that remain in achieving one. This was reaffirmed as recently as 7 June 1985 in this House when my right hon. Friend the Member for Shoreham (Mr. Luce), then in the position now occupied by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Renton) whom I welcome, not least as my mother's constituency Member, was replying to an Adjournment debate on a test ban treaty. He pointed out then that:
We should be proud of the fact that Britain played a leading and distinctive role in the early 1960s, in drawing up the partial test ban treaty … Together with the United States and the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom participated fully from 1977 to 1980 in trilateral negotiations on a comprehensive test ban treaty … The United Kingdom has played a full and active part in … multilateral discussions at the Geneva conference on disarmament, where a nuclear test ban working group was established in 1982.The United Kingdom tabled two working papers on "Peaceful Nuclear Explosions in Relation to a Nuclear Test Ban" and the paper to which I have already referred.My right hon. Friend the Member for Shoreham said that the Government
remain convinced of the value of further work in Geneva towards a comprehensive test ban".We are committed to seeking progress towards it. During that debate he also saidno test ban treaty can be truly worth pursuing which does not contain adequate safeguards of compliance by all its signatory parties.that is a contention with which I agree. He also pointed out:
we are not looking for perfect or 100 per cent. verification".—[Official Report, 7 June 1985, Vol. 80, c. 616–17.]The whole House will know that of the non-proliferation treaty we are required to show that we are using our best endeavours to make progress towards nuclear disarmament, and the final declaration of the third review conference of the NPT, held in Geneva last August to September, called upon the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom to reconvene their trilateral negotiations on a comprehensive test ban treaty by the end of 1985.1045 My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, in a speech at Harrogate on 27 March 1982, said
We want a Comprehensive Test Ban. Negotiations under that Committee (The Committee on Disarmament at the UN in Geneva), alas, are going far too slowly, but it remains this Government's objective.Our commitment to a comprehensive test ban treaty is not unique. Yet, I believe that we have a particular role to play in acting as a catalyst and seeking to remove obstacles. Clearly, however, bearing in mind that we possess only about 3 per cent. of the world's nuclear weapons compared with 95 per cent. in the possession of the United States and the Soviet Union, we must look to agreement between the super powers, and the effect that we can have on it. Hon. Members may recall that in his written statement on 24 February 1986, President Reagan said,
We are also pleased that the Soviet Union has indicated publicly that it now recognises our long-held position that verification of negotiated agreements is critical. We intend to pursue in specific terms at the negotiating table General Secretary Gorbachev's public offer to resolve any necessary verification issues.Even more recently, on 6 March of this year Paul Nitze, special adviser to the President and Secretary of State on arms control matters, said that it was vitally necessary that any new arms control agreements incorporate stringent verification measures including measures more comprehensive and exacting than in any previous agreement. He welcomed implicit recognition of that point suggested in those parts of Mr. Gorbachev's public statement dealing with on-site inspection and other co-operative measures that may be necessary. Accordingly, Mr. Nitze stated, the United States intended to pursue Mr. Gorbachev's overture on verification. He spoke of the ultimate goal of a world committing the total elimination of nuclear weapons, and the fact that the new Soviet leadership tried to deal concretely with the problem of achieving a world free of nuclear weapons, or at least gave the appearance of doing so. He complained, nevertheless, that the Soviet proposal was front-loaded in that its first stage called for measures that would assure the USSR superiority in virtually all categories of military capability at the end of that stage, reserving for stages two and three things that could be of interest to the West, and leaving a number of the essential preconditions to the non-nuclear world wholly uncovered.Almost exactly a month after the Adjournment debate last year to which I have referred, the Government submitted a paper to the conference on disarmament entitled "Seismic Monitoring for a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban". This is a full and technical document dealing with the matter, and acknowledges that seismoligical methods offer the only practical long-range means of monitoring compliance with the treaty banning underground nuclear weapon test explosions. We should not forget that the limited test ban treaty which came into force in 1963 prohibited nuclear explosions in space, in the atmosphere and in the oceans, and there has been no serious objection raised to the monitoring of compliance with that treaty. The threshold test ban treaty was signed in 1974 between the United States and USSR limiting underground nuclear weapons tests to yields of 150 kilotons, and I have not heard of any difficulties in monitoring compliance with the specific nature of that treaty.
1046 The United Kingdom's paper to the conference on disarmament states that a negotiated ban on underground nuclear testing would certainly demand setting up a global seismic network for monitoring at teleseismic ranges. How such a network would be provided has not been decided, although the activities of the ad hoc group of scientific experts appointed by the conference on disarmament suggest that parties to a treaty would contribute existing stations to the network. If ihat were the case the network would not be optimised from the technical point of view, the locations of stations would not be ideal for the global monitoring role, and the equipment at some stations would not be of the highest possible quality. It concludes that on the basis of data currently available it is estimated that a properly designed and deployed global network of seismic stations would achieve a detection threshold of a magnitude of four, and art identification threshold of a magnitude of four and a half throughout the world, which could enable nuclear tests with yields above a few tens of kilotonnes to be undiscovered. The paper concludes:
At least for the present it appears that monitoring at teleseismic ranges by itself would be insufficiently effective to permit a test ban to be brought into force.The most interesting section of the paper, however, is that which deals with high seismic frequencies, and paragraph 55 which states:
It appears from the above that there are possibilies for test ban monitoring in observing higher seismic frequencies than have hitherto been considered. It will be necessary to demonstrate that high frequency signals can indeed be detected over a variety of source/receiver paths and to investigate whether the sources of detected high frequency signals can be identified as earthquakes or explosions with adequate assurance. If a high frequency programme was successful in these respects, there would be promise of at least a partial technical solution to the low yield and the decoupled explosion problems. However, for monitoring against low yield decoupled explosions, regional stations would certainly be required because the seismic magnitudes would be equivalent to a strongly coupled explosion of 200 tons or less.One major obstacle to this advance in detection and identification has been removed by the Soviet Union reaffirming its position at the Geneva summit in November 1985 that it is prepared to have internal seismographic stations installed. In an interesting article in the Financial Times of 19 November 1985, Mr. David Fishlock in an article "Monitor to Beat Test Ban Cheating" wrote:
If a complete test ban on nuclear explosions were ever agreed between the US and the Soviet Union the system could give the necessary assurance that neither was cheating. But first the Soviets would have to gain the kind of confidence the US is beginning to show in NORESS, its prototype seismic detector in Norway. The Norwegian Regional Seismic Array is a pattern of seismic detectors laid over a circular area of pine forest three kilometres across near Hamar, one hundred kilometres north of Oslo. The array of 25 seismometers detect and pinpoint the explosion. Regional seismometers overcome the objection about confusion between nuclear explosions and earthquakes. The differences are readily apparent in seismograms, but lessen with distance. Moreover, another objection to existing verification techniques, decoupling or the carrying out of explosions in caverns rather than in holes or in highly compressible ground so as to muffle to shock waves, can be spotted by NORESS. As NORESS has a range of about only 2,000 kilometres it will need to be located on Soviet as well as Western soil. Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, thinks that arrays can be installed for about one million dollars each.Verification requires that each nation has a reliable and objective means of monitoring the military activities of the other. In the debate on verification and in the interests of our goal of a comprehensive test ban treaty, we cannot rely on the evidence of yesterday. We must constantly review 1047 the technological advance of verification techniques which are being rapidly enhanced. Satellite and aerial photography, seismology, radar and radiation detection have been refined and improved since their introduction. New methods of infra-red sensors, image and data-processing techniques and synthetic aperture radar are available. Synthetic aperture radar enables the United States to monitor areas in the Soviet Union that are covered by clouds and are in daylight only for a few hours each day. It does not have great resolution but images can be computer-enhanced.Advanced conventional radar based on land, sea or air, can easily track Soviet missile tests and is very reliable. Over-the-horizon radar is utilised by the United States. These devices project beams that the ionosphere which acts like a mirror and reflects into the interior of the USSR. Radar of this type also provides useful information about the velocity of the missile. Radio receivers on the ground and on high orbit satellites intercept the stream of messages that the missile during testing sends back to the ground and those messages describe the performance and conditions of the various parts of the missile.
The messages, known collectively as telemetry, include information on how much fuel is being burned, the commands that the guidance system is sending to the rocket, and the temperature and pressure that different parts of the missile are experiencing. All these signals are intercepted by US monitoring facilities. By correlating such telemetry data with information about the motion of the missile gathered by ground based radars, US intelligence officers know not only that the USSR has tested a missile, but also discover many of its performance characteristics.
These are means of gathering intelligence about missiles, but the means of monitoring underground tests are also highly advanced. A nuclear explosion is a point-like event that releases a huge amount of energy abruptly into the environment. The limited extent and the suddenness of such an event, force the device to release its energy in much shorter waves which have far higher frequencies than an earthquake, which is a widespread event. As a result, the waves from a nuclear explosion can be detected and recognised by their frequency characteristics even if they are accompanied by those of an earthquake.
The unmanned seismic stations which Sandia National Laboratories has devised have been tested, and there are now five such stations in the US and Canada for practice and demonstration purposes. These stations communicate constantly by satellite relay with a central control facility in the US, making them virtually tamperproof. The USSR has accepted a proposal for the emplacement of such stations on its soil during negotiations for a comprehensive test ban treaty. Consequently, there appears to be no technical obstacle to monitoring with great competence underground nuclear tests releasing as little as one kiloton or less of energy. These assertions need to be investigated critically and carefully. I hope that my hon. Friend will do so.
We are committed to a comprehensive test ban treaty. The United States House of Representatives has passed a motion calling upon the President to: 1048
Propose to the Soviet Union the immediate resumption of negotiations towards conclusion of a verifiable Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.The Soviet Union is prepared to have unmanned monitoring devices on its own territory and the United States Administration seeks the total elimination of nuclear weapons, yet that does not happen. I do not underestimate the problems associated with adequate verification, but these are capable of solution in the near future if not at the present time. Perhaps there is a need for a third party exerting influence. With the high international reputation that the United Kingdom enjoys, a reputation that has been enhanced under this Government, we are ideally suited to that task.Six world leaders in the five continents peace initiative recently made an offer to Moscow and Washington to assume a direct role in the monitoring process of verification. The proposal grew out of the peace initiative presented by the six leaders in May 1984, a summit meeting of the leaders in New Delhi in January 1985, and scientific studies of nuclear test monitoring undertaken by US seismic experts. The leaders have said that they are ready to offer their good offices in order to facilitate the establishment of effective verification arrangements.
The violence and uncertainty of the world is manifested by the tragedy that one of those leaders, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated. Her son, Rajiv, has taken up his mother's mantle in this regard and pursued it with great energy. Another of those leaders was Mr. Olof Palme, tragically assassinated so recently. The five continents peace initiative has been sponsored by Parliamentarians Global Action, formerly Parliamentarians for World Order, of the international council which I have been privileged to be the chairman. A comprehensive test ban treaty will by itself not give greater global security. The potential use of nuclear weapons is not wholly inhibited by banning tests. The effectiveness of modern nuclear weapons can now be tested increasingly by computers without the need to rely on tests at all. We still need to find a system of international arbitrament of disputes which is universally acceptable and removes the need for possession of weapons of mass destruction. Only then will there be the capacity for prolonged peace but, as is acknowledged and pursued by this Government, a comprehensive test ban treaty is an important step forward. It is within reach if we are prepared to stretch out and grasp it.
§ The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Mr. Tim Renton)I should like to thank my hon. Friend the Member for Ynys Mén (Mr. Best) for the opportunity which his keen interest has given me to restate the Government's view on this important subject of verification in arms control. I should also like to thank him for complimenting the Government upon their commitment to the arms control process. I congratulate him, too, upon the extent of his technical knowledge that he has shown in the remarks that he has just addressed to the House.
My hon. Friend has joined other hon. Members in calling for the resumption of trilateral negotiations for a comprehensive test ban treaty, so it is timely that I should now restate clearly that the Government remain firmly and actively committed to the arms control and disarmament 1049 process, in which our aim is the strengthening of peace and security at lower levels of armaments and military expenditure.
However, as my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said in her speech to the United Nations second special session on disarmament in 1982, verification is the heart of the matter, not an optional extra. It is an essential ingredient if any arms control agreement is genuinely to enhance stability and security. It is virtually impossible to achieve perfect verification. On the other hand, inadequate verification is unacceptable since it would undermine the very confidence which arms control agreements seek to promote. It is equally impossible to quantify in precise terms what level of verification would be acceptable for any particular arms control agreement.
The degree of verification required in each case will be a matter for considered political judgment, taking technical considerations into account. This judgment will include the extent of political confidence on one side that the other side will comply with the treaty in question. Effective verification and confidence have to go hand in hand.
To build this confidence we need to have satisfactory answers to some basic questions. For example, will undetected evasion of the agreement provide a significant military advantage? Will significant non-observance of the agreement be detected early enough, in time to allow the necessary counter-measures to be taken? Even if the evidence of such non-observance is available, will it be convincing enough to justify such counter-measures? And if we feel satisfied on these points, will we then have the ability to deter any temptation to depart from strict compliance with the agreement?
Arms control agreements, if they are to work, must therefore contain clear, unambiguous and effective provisions dealing with these questions and providing the maximum guarantee of strict compliance.
As my hon. Friend has just said, the Government remain fully committed to the goal of a verifiable, comprehensive test ban treaty. We see such a treaty as an important objective in our overall arms control policy, but we remain seriously concerned on the self-same score of verification. It is wrong to dismiss these concerns, as some do—though not my hon. Friend—in a cavalier fashion. Key security interests would be affected by any such treaty, and the risks created by undetected non-compliance would be especially grave.
There are at present inadequacies in our ability to detect and identify nuclear tests. Claims that these technical problems no longer exist, and can therefore be ignored, are simply not borne out by the scientific advice available to the Government. Wishful thinking on this key matter must not be allowed to over-ride impartial scientific analysis. Our experience of previous negotiations in this area suggests that these remaining problems will not be easily resolved; and against this background we consider it premature to resume negotiations until solutions become more apparent.
Let me explain our reservations. Seismology offers the most realistic prospect for verifying a comprehensive test ban treaty. Every year thousands of earthquakes occur which in seismic terms show similar characteristics to those of nuclear tests. When such events, and nuclear tests, occur above a certain level of seismic activity, we can detect them and we are confident that we can distinguish between them. At lower levels of seismic 1050 activity, we are less confident that we have the necessary ability both to detect and identify them correctly especially for small nuclear explosions. In the present state of the art our assessment is that the best which could be achieved is thresholds of detection and identification above the level at which militarily significant testing can occur.
Another argument is that the risks involved in this leakage are acceptable. We do not agree. Let us remember also that we know relatively little about the geological data of other possible testing sites, such data being essential for the accurate interpretation of seismic events. We may indeed be able to detect and identify high-yield tests conducted at sites whose geological features are familiar to us. Tests involving small nuclear explosions elsewhere could be more difficult—even impossible—to identify, especially if they were conducted with deliberate subterfuge.
As my hon. Friend said, the full range of issues involved in seismic monitoring was thoroughly aired in the paper the United Kingdom tabled at the conference on disarmament at Geneva last July. It followed two earlier papers to which my hon. Friend also referred.
We do not believe that these papers have received the attention they deserve. One way for them to receive this attention would be for more work to be done in the ad hoc group of scientific experts in the conference on disarmament, to which the United Kingdom would be prepared to contribute. In parallel we will continue to seek an appropriate mandate for an ad hoc committee to discuss these and related matters.
Another idea for verifying a comprehensive test ban Treaty is third country monitoring or an international seismic monitoring network. In this context my hon. Friend has referred to the "six nation" offer of October 1985 to set up monitoring stations on their territory as part of an international network to monitor a nuclear test ban. This offer was directed to President Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev in the run-up to their summit meeting in Geneva. The latest six-nation appeal, at the end of February, was similarly directed at the leaders of the two super powers.
There are difficulties with these ideas. First, the seismic stations would have to overcome all the difficulties I have described. Even if any stations used high-frequency monitoring, we do not yet know enough about the capabilities of this technique to place confidence in it achieving adequate verification. But third country monitoring could have a role to play in any adequate verification regime. We certainly hope that those of the six Nations which are members of the conference on disarmament will pursue their ideas at Geneva. As for satellite monitoring, it may help to complement seismological verification, but no more. It is one thing for a satellite to discover and photograph a hole in the ground but it is another to say what that hole is for or what is in it.
In my hon. Friend's interesting speech he also referred to the NORESS experiment being developed in Norway. On 20 November last year I said in the House that this is an interesting development which merits further study. I assure my hon. Friend that our minds are open to all new developments in this area.
My hon. Friend also referred to the announcement by the Soviet Union that it is prepared to have internal seismographic stations installed on its territory. It is true that Mr. Gorbachev in his January proposals offered some 1051 form of on-site inspection, but this was in vague terms and only, in his words, "where necessary." Let the Russians explain in detail what they mean. The Americans, on the other hand, deal in specific proposals. For example, in July last year President Reagan offered technical exchanges on verification problems, including the idea of a visit by Soviet experts to witness a US test with any equipment that they wanted to bring.
The Russians have so far failed to address this offer with any seriousness, but it would be a useful step forward in discussing verification in the context of the threshold test ban treaty to which my hon. Friend referred, or the peaceful nuclear explosions treaty, signed but not ratified in the 1970s. Progress towards ratifying those treaties would help to build confidence before tackling the much more difficult issue of a CTBT. Despite the lack of a positive Soviet response to the July offer, President Reagan has just repeated his invitation for a visit to Nevada at a specific time in April. This would allow the Russians to examine a specific and highly promising technology called CORRTEX, which might well provide an adequate basis for verifying yields of explosions and thus help resolve verification issues in the context of the TTB and PNE treaties. We would welcome progress towards ratification. The Soviet response so far has unfortunately once again reportedly been negative, but I very much hope that this will not be their last word.
In contrast with those practical proposals, which President Reagan has been making since 1983, the Russians have been promoting an unverifiable moratorium on testing. This is accompanied by claims that existing means of verification are adequate, or that if only others would join the moratorium verification would not be a problem. I ask my hon. Friend to contrast the realistic, practical approach of seeking to make progress in areas where it should be possible with the approach of proceeding from the outset on the assumption that the desired objective is already a fait accompli.
Has Mr. Gorbachev's position moved beyond the Soviet position of the early 1960s that verification should be concerned only with the reduction phase of an agreement and not with verifying the residual armaments remaining in place? The answer to that important question must be found at the various negotiations which are now in progress. We were frankly disappointed by the first such evidence of how we are to interpret Mr. Gorbachev's positive words when translated into deeds. He stated in January that in the Vienna talks on mutual and balanced force reductions he was willing to accept reasonable verification measures. We therefore looked for a constructive response to the Western proposal of December 1985.
This proposal removed the apparent obstacle of prior data agreement which the East had claimed to be a 1052 stumbling block to progress. The West at the same time accepted the Eastern concept of a time-limited agreement involving the United States and Soviet reductions put forward in the Eastern proposal of February 1985. Thus, the Western proposal represented a significant concession and provided a sound basis for progress after so many years of deadlock. Yet the Warsaw Pact's response last month was, alas, merely a rehash of the proposals that the Eastern side tabled in 1983. They were inadequate then and they are inadequate now, because on both information exchange and verification they fail to provide the necessary basis for ensuring the accurate monitoring of compliance.
Verification is also a key issue in the search for a comprehensive and lasting ban on chemical weapons at the conference on disarmament in Geneva. The proposed verification regime for the convention in question is the most extensive yet envisaged for an arms control agreement. Given the widespread industrial application of many chemicals which can be used to produce such weapons, the verification procedures must on the one hand ensure compliance with the convention yet, on the other, they must not compromise commerical confidentiality, or interfere with the day-to-day operation of countries' chemical industries. The United Kingdom, I am glad to say, has taken a leading role at the conference in recent years in proposing verification methods with this aim.
A system of international inspection will, it is generally accepted, be required to monitor the destruction of chemical weapon stockpiles. Routine international inspections will also be necessary, we believe, to check that such weapons are not subsequently produced. In addition, we maintain that an extra element of inspection on challenge is essential in order to deter cheating. The United Kingdom is this year chairing these negotiations for a chemical weapons convention in Geneva and we are pressing very hard for progress.
I agree with my hon. Friend that an agreement with inadequate verification is worse than no agreement at all. The aim of verification must be to generate confidence in arms control agreements.
Once again I should like to thank my hon. Friend for his recognition of the Government's efforts in this most important sphere. Arms control is very much on the East-West agenda this year, more so than for a great many years. In these circumstances of hope it is even more important than ever that we find agreement on realisable measures of verification. That will move the arms control process forward.
§ The Question having been proposed after Ten o'clock and the debate have continued for half an hour, MR. SPEAKER adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.
§ Adjourned at fourteen minutes to Eleven o'clock.