Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (Hansard, 7 March 1989)

§ 1. Mr. Boswell
To ask the Secretary of State for Defence what recent representations he has received on defence policy from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; and if he will make a statement.

§ 15. Mr. Hunter
To ask the Secretary of State for Defence what recent representations he has received on defence policy from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; and if he will make a statement.

§ The Secretary of State for Defence (Mr. George Younger)
Since last year's summer recess, I have received three letters, four petitions and one questionnaire from representatives of CND regarding aspects of defence policy.
The low level of correspondence from CND reflects, no doubt, the decline in support for that organisation. It is clear that the Government's, and NATO's, policy of defence and detente is the only sure way of achieving peace, and that unilateral disarmament gestures would undermine efforts towards multilateral disarmament.

§ Mr. Boswell
I am sure that my right hon. Friend will pay CND the courtesies appropriate to its declining membership. Will he ensure that he does not listen too hard to its views, any more than he did on cruise missiles? As a result of his resistance to CND, we now have a multilateral intermediate nuclear forces agreement and we hope to achieve similar mutually beneficial agreements on other weapon systems.

§ Mr. Younger
I strongly agree with my hon. Friend. Although my disposition is normally to listen to everyone on all subjects, I am very glad that we did not listen to CND because if we had done so we should not have the current arms reductions.

§ Mr. Hunter
As the debate on CND is one that my right hon. Friend clearly wins, will he undertake to challenge robustly CND's opposition to the modernisation of short-range nuclear weapons because such modernisation may well be necessary to maintain deterrence and to negotiate from a position of strength?

§ Mr. Younger
Yes. My hon. Friend makes a valid point. As I have said, there may be arguments for having no 738 weapons at all, although I do not accept them, but in my view there are no arguments for having weapons that are ineffective and out of date.

§ Ms. Ruddock
Will the Secretary of State acknowledge that he has received from CND a briefing on the competitive strategies doctrine? [Interruption] Yes, a briefing—and I am sure that the Secretary of State has read it. Did the Americans consult him about that doctrine and what are its likely effects on NATO strategy in relation to conventional arms talks?

§ Mr. Younger
I am grateful to the hon. Lady. I did, indeed, receive a piece of paper stating that it was a briefing on that matter and I found it interesting, as I always do. I do not think that the doctrine has any effect on the conventional arms talks which are a very specific set of talks with very specific objectives. Our objective is to achieve equal ceilings of conventional weapons at much lower levels than they are now. A very good start was made at the Vienna talks yesterday.

§ Mr. Ian Taylor
Does my right hon. Friend agree that the British Government's success in pursuing a multilateral policy flies in the face of everything that CND has proposed? Does he share my concern that the SLD party—the old Liberals—seems to be riddled with CND members, including the current general secretary of CND, who is on the committee considering defence?

§ Mr. Younger
My hon. Friend has raised a very interesting point. The hon. and learned Member for Fife, North-East (Mr. Campbell) made some excellent remarks in the Navy debate last week. The only trouble was that they seemed to conflict diametrically with the views of the leader of his party who recently made it clear that he was against all nuclear weapons.

§ Mr. James Lamond
Does the Secretary of State recall that when he last answered questions in the House he was asked whether he was prepared to match the initiative of President Gorbachev in reducing nuclear weapons, and boasted that he had left President Gorbachev far behind as he had reduced the number of nuclear weapons in Britain by 30 per cent. Why was he pretending to be a unilateralist then but now he is a multilateralist?

§ Mr. Younger
I am not sure that I come into either of those categories. The point that I made then is equally valid today—that NATO has reduced its nuclear warheads by about 2,400 since 1979 and, as I understand it, Mr. Gorbachev recently announced that the number of Russia's systems has been reduced by about 24, so it seems to me that he has an awful long way to go.