MPs: Britain must cut down its nuclear arsenal
By Alice Cannet
The UK needs to take more steps to promote nuclear disarmament, in light of North Korea’s recent nuclear bomb tests, a select committee of MPs has found.
Despite having the best record out of the five nuclear states, the UK was still perceived by non-nuclear countries as bearing some responsibility for the group’s failure to honour their disarmament commitments.
Committee chairman Mike Gapes said: “We call on all five of the recognised nuclear weapons states to commit to further progress on nuclear disarmament.”
Although they welcomed the government’ efforts to “scale down” and “de-escalate their nuclear arsenal”, they insisted that the government needed to do more to emphasise the steps taken towards nuclear disarmament.
They supported Gordon Brown’s decision for the new Trident submarines to carry fewer missiles, but asked him to specify under what circumstances the UK would be prepared to suspend the programme.
A lack of information about the scale and operational arrangements of the Trident force made it difficult to check the government’s claims that it retained only a ‘minimum’ nuclear deterrent, the MPs found.
India, Pakistan and Israel were found to be a challenge to the international nuclear non-proliferation system for building nuclear weapons without signing up to the NPT.
“We support the government’s aim of bringing them in, although we are sceptical about prospects for this,” the committee commented.
Today’s report criticised North Korea and Iran’s ongoing nuclear ambitions as posing critical threats to international peace and stability which needed to be discussed further at next year’s Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference.
A range of economic and military sanctions against North Korea were being discussed by the United Nations Security Council on Friday to punish the country for last month’s nuclear bomb test.
According to the report, steps to further progress on nuclear non-proliferation would include entry into force of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and more negotiations over Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty.
Last, “measures to scale down, de-alert and make more transparent existing nuclear arsenals” were recommended by the committee, along with a concrete plan to take the multilateral nuclear disarmament process forward.
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