In an
intemperate outburst- some might call it an emotional spasm - John McTernan, ex-adviser
to Tony Blair, told Newsnight viewers
on 21st July that MPs who "lent" their nominations to Mr
Corbyn to "broaden the debate" were "morons".
One such MP was former Labour stand-in Leader, Dame Margaret Beckett. During an interview with BBC Radio 4's World at One today Mrs Beckett
was asked if she was a moron for nominating Mr Corbyn.
She replied: "I am one of them."
McTernan
is the same political advisor who in the months running up to May’s General Election advised Labour's
outgoing leader in Scotland, Jim Murphy, the viscerally pro-Trident former shadow
defence secretary, who led Labour to an unprecedented historic electoral
wipe-out in Scotland, with only one Labour candidate winning a seat, an openly
anti-Trident politician, Ian Murray, MP for Edinburgh East, who is now shadow Scottish Secretary
After
a weekend of collective political assassination by the press- when all the
heavyweight Sunday papers from the left-leaning Observer and Independent on Sunday,
the right wing Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph ran endless d columns
berating Corbyn personally and politically, liberally buttressed by endless
supine comments from Corbyn’s Labour Party colleagues, all gutlessly quoted
anonymously attacking him and all he stands for.
The
result? Today’s Times reveals Corbyn is now even further ahead, putting
him 17 % ahead of nearest rival, Andy Burnham, of those recorded as planning to
vote for him when the ballot opens early next month.
One
of the staunchest and best thought out of Corbyn’s policies is his opposition not just to the replacement of
the Trident nuclear WMD system - with the planned £100 billion modernization – but also his
opposition to all nuclear weapons, everywhere. In this he differs markedly from his three Labour leadership
rivals, Burnham, Yvette Cooper, and Liz Kendall, each of whom, at a time of extreme
austerity, countenance spending that £100 billion of taxpayers’ money on a high
tech mass killing system, instead of on housing, health care, the environment
and “green jobs”, or global peacekeeping and international aid
And mainstream
political commentators, including Jason Cowley, astonishingly the editor of ther formerly leftist political weekly,
The
New Statesman, who chose to peddle his anti-Corbyn, pro-Trident
views in the right wing Daily Mail
today, still attack Corbyn’s policies.
So
what does the ”moron” Dame Margaret Beckett think of nuclear weapons? Below is a
her valedictory keynote speech as Labour Foreign Secretary, made to a
prestigious conference in Washington DC, eight years ago, entitled:
“
A World Free of Nuclear Weapons?”
Whose
views – Corbyn’s, Burnham, Cooper or Kendall – do they most resemble?
Margaret
Beckett June 25, 2007 Washington, D.C.
Summary
What
we need is both vision - a scenario for a world free of nuclear weapons. And
action - progressive steps to reduce warhead numbers and to limit the role of
nuclear weapons in security policy. These two strands are separate but they are
mutually reinforcing. Both are necessary, both at the moment too weak.
Remarks by Margaret
Beckett, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, United
Kingdom
Carnegie International Nonproliferation Conference
June 25, 2007
Photo Gallery
Good afternoon.
I expect that many - if not all - of you here today read an article which
appeared in the Wall Street Journal at the very start of this year. The
writers would be as familiar to an audience in this country as they are
respected across the globe: George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, Sam
Nunn.
The article made the case for, and I quote, "a bold initiative consistent
with America's moral heritage". That initiative was to re-ignite the
vision of a world free of nuclear weapons and to redouble efforts on the
practical measures towards it.
The need for such vision and action is all too apparent.
Last year, Kofi Annan said - and he was right - that the world risks becoming
mired in a sterile stand-off between those who care most about disarmament and
those who care most about proliferation. The dangers of such mutually assured
paralysis - as he termed it - are dangers to us all. Weak action on
disarmament, weak consensus on proliferation are in none of our interests. And
any solution must be a dual one that sees movement on both proliferation and
disarmament - a revitalisation, in other words, of the grand bargain struck in
1968, when the Non-Proliferation Treaty was established.
What makes this the time to break the stand-off?
Today the non-proliferation regime today is under particular pressure. We have
already seen the emergence of a mixture of further declared and undeclared
nuclear powers. And now, two countries - Iran and North Korea, both signatories
of the NPT - stand in open defiance of the international community. Their
actions have profound and direct implications for global security. Each of them
also raises the serious prospect of proliferation across their region.
In the case of Iran, in particular, if the regime is trying to acquire nuclear
weapons - and there are very few either in that region or outside it who
seriously doubt that that is the goal - then it is raising the spectre of a
huge push for proliferation in what is already one of the most unstable parts
of the world.
That alone makes the debate on disarmament and non-proliferation we must have
today different in degree: it has become more immediate and more urgent.
On top of that, we must
respond to other underlying trends that are putting added pressure on the
original non-proliferation regime. One of those is the emergence of Al Qaeda
and its offshoots - terrorists whom we know to be actively seeking nuclear
materials.
Another is the anticipated drive towards civil, nuclear power as the twin
imperatives of energy security and climate security are factored into energy
policy. How can we ensure that this does not lead to either nuclear materials
or potentially dangerous nuclear know-how - particularly enrichment and
reprocessing technologies - being diverted for military use or falling into the
wrong hands? How do we do so without prejudice to the economic development of
countries that have every right under the NPT to develop a civil, nuclear
capability.
Lastly there are some very specific triggers for action - key impending
decisions - that we are fast approaching. The START treaty will expire in 2009.
We will need to start thinking about how we move from a bilateral disarmament
framework built by the US and Russia to one more suited to our multi-polar
world.
And then in 2010 we will have the NPT Review Conference. By the time that is
held, we need the international community to be foursquare and united behind
the global non-proliferation regime. We can't afford for that conference to be
a fractured or fractious one: rather we must strengthen the NPT in all its
aspects.
That might all sound very challenging - I meant it to. But there is no reason
to believe that we cannot rise to that challenge.
Let's look at the facts. Despite the recent log-jam, the basic
non-proliferation consensus is and has been remarkably resilient. The grand
bargain of the NPT has, by and large, held for the past 40 years. The vast
majority of states - including many that have the technology to do so if they
chose - have decided not to develop nuclear weapons. And far fewer states than
was once feared have acquired and retained nuclear weapons.
Even more encouragingly, and much less well known outside this room, many more
states - South Africa, Libya, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, [Belarus], Argentina, Brazil
- have given up active nuclear weapons programmes, turned back from pursuing
such programmes, or - in the case of the former Soviet Union countries - chosen
to hand over weapons on their territory.
And of course the Nuclear Weapons States themselves have made significant
reductions in their nuclear arsenals, which I will come to later.
So we have grounds for optimism; but none for complacency. The successes we
have had in the past have not come about by accident but by applied effort. We
will need much more of the same in the months and years to come. That will mean
continued momentum and consensus on non-proliferation, certainly. But, and this
is my main argument today, the chances of achieving that are greatly increased
if we can also point to genuine commitment and concrete action on nuclear
disarmament.
Given the proliferation challenges we face, it is not surprising that so much
of our focus should be on non-proliferation itself.
For the reasons I gave a moment ago, stopping and reversing nuclear
proliferation in North Korea and Iran has to remain a key priority for the
whole international community.
With North Korea the best hope to reverse their nuclear programme remains patient
multilateral diplomacy underpinned by sanctions regimes.
As for Iran, the generous offer the E3+3 made in June 2006 is still on the
table. Sadly Iran has chosen not to comply with its international legal
obligations, thereby enabling negotiations to resume. That forced us to seek a
further Security Council Resolution. We will do so again if necessary.
The US contribution on Iran has, naturally, been critical. It made the Vienna
offer both attractive and credible - showing that the entire international
community was willing to welcome Iran back into its ranks provided that it
conformed to international norms on the nuclear file and elsewhere. And I have
no doubt that the close co-operation between the US, Europe, Russia and China
has been a powerful point of leverage on the Iranians. We must hope it
succeeds.
The US has also taken the lead on much of the vital work that is going on to
prevent existing nuclear material falling into the hands of terrorists and
rogue states. That framework is more robust than ever before - the Global
Threat Reduction Initiative, the Proliferation Security Initiative, the Global
Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism and efforts to prevent the financing of
proliferation.
Meanwhile, there is some imaginative work going on aimed at persuading states
that they can have guaranteed supplies of electricity from nuclear power
without the need to acquire enrichment and reprocessing technologies. For
example, the work on fuel supply assurances following the report of the IAEA
expert group; the US's own Global Nuclear Energy Partnership initiative on more
proliferation-resistant technologies; and the UK's own proposal for advanced
export approval of nuclear fuel that cannot subsequently be revoked - the
so-called "enrichment bond".
But the important point is this: in none of those areas will we stand a chance
of success unless the international community is united in purpose as well as
in action.
And what that Wall Street Journal article, and for that matter Kofi
Annan, have been quite right to identify is that our efforts on
non-proliferation will be dangerously undermined if others believe - however
unfairly -that the terms of the grand bargain have changed, that the nuclear
weapon states have abandoned any commitment to disarmament.
The point of doing more on disarmament, then, is not to convince the Iranians
or the North Koreans. I do not believe for one second that further reductions
in our nuclear weapons would have a material effect on their nuclear ambitions.
Rather the point of doing more is this: because the moderate majority of states
- our natural and vital allies on non-proliferation - want us to do more. And
if we do not, we risk helping Iran and North Korea in their efforts to muddy
the water, to turn the blame for their own nuclear intransigence back onto us.
They can undermine our arguments for strong international action in support of
the NPT by painting us as doing too little too late to fulfil our own
obligations. And that need to appear consistent, incidentally, is just as
true at the regional level. The international community's clear commitment to a
Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free Zone in successive UN resolutions has been
vital in building regional support for a tough line against Iran.
So what does doing more - and indeed being seen to do more - on disarmament
actually mean?
First, I think we need to be much more open about the disarmament steps we are
already taking or have taken. Here in the long-standing, and understandable,
culture of secrecy that surrounds the nuclear world we may be our own worst
enemy. There is little public remembrance or recognition of the vast cuts in
warheads - some 40 000 - made by the US and the former USSR since the end of
the Cold War. Nor, for that that matter, the cuts that France and the UK have
made to our much smaller stocks. We all need to do more to address this. And I
welcome the US State Department's recent moves in that direction.
But we'd be kidding ourselves if we thought that this was a problem of
perception only - simply a failure to communicate. The sense of stagnation is
real enough. The expiry of the remaining US-Russia arms control deals; the
continued existence of large arsenals; the stalemate on a Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty and Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty. They all point to an absence of
debate at the highest levels on disarmament and a collective inability thus far
to come up with a clear, forward plan.
What we need is both vision - a scenario for a
world free of nuclear weapons. And action - progressive steps to reduce warhead
numbers and to limit the role of nuclear weapons in security policy. These
two strands are separate but they are mutually reinforcing. Both are necessary,
both at the moment too weak.
Let me start with the vision because it is, perhaps, the harder case to make.
After all, we all signed up to the goal of the eventual abolition of nuclear
weapons back in 1968; so what does simply restating that goal achieve today?
More than you might imagine. Because, and I'll be blunt, there are some who are
in danger of losing faith in the possibility of ever reaching that goal.
That would be a grave mistake. The judgement we made forty years ago, that the
eventual abolition of nuclear weapons was in all of our interests - is just as
true today as it was then. For more than sixty years, good management and good
fortune have meant that nuclear arsenals have not been used. But we cannot rely
on history just to repeat itself.
It would be a grave mistake for another reason, too. It underestimates the
power that commitment and vision can have in driving action.
A parallel can be drawn with some of those other decades-long campaigns
conducted as we strive for a more civilised world.
When William Wilberforce began his famous campaign, the practice of one set of
people enslaving another had existed for thousands of years. He had the courage
to challenge that paradigm; and in so doing he helped to bring an end to the
terrible evil of the transatlantic slave trade.
Would he have achieved half as much, would he have inspired the same fervour in
others if he had set out to 'regulate' or 'reduce' the slave trade rather than
abolish it? I doubt it.
Similarly the Millennium Development Goals, the cancellation of third-world
debt, increased overseas aid were all motivated by the belief that one day,
however far off it might seem, we could "Make Poverty History".
So too with nuclear weapons. Believing that the eventual abolition of nuclear
weapons is possible can act as a spur for action on disarmament. Believing, at
whatever level, that it is not, is the surest path to inaction. If there will
always be nuclear weapons, what does it matter if there are 1000 or 10 000?
And just as the vision gives rise to action, conversely so does action give
meaning to the vision. As that Wall Street Journal article put it:
"Without the bold vision, the actions will not be perceived as fair and
urgent. Without the actions, the vision will not be perceived as realistic or
possible"
By actions, I do not mean that the nuclear weapons states should be making
immediate and unrealistic promises - committing to speedy abolition, setting a
timetable to zero.
The truth is that I very much doubt - though I would wish it otherwise - that
we will see the total elimination of nuclear weapons in my lifetime. To reach
that point would require much more than disarmament diplomacy, convoluted
enough though that is in itself. It would require a much more secure and
predictable global political context.
That context does not exist today. Indeed it is why, only a few months ago, the
UK took the decision to retain our ability to have an independent nuclear
deterrent beyond the 2020s.
But acknowledging that the conditions for disarmament do not exist today does
not mean resigning ourselves to the idea that nuclear weapons can never be
abolished in the future. Nor does it prevent us from taking steps to reduce
numbers now and to start thinking about how we would go about reaching that
eventual goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons.
That is why in taking the decision to retain our ability to have nuclear
weapons, the UK government was very clear about four things. First that we
would be open and frank both with our own citizens and with our international
partners about what we were doing and why. Second that we would be very clear
and up front that when the political conditions existed, we would give up our
remaining nuclear weapons. Third that we were not enhancing our nuclear
capability in any way and would continue to act strictly in accordance with our
NPT obligations. And fourth that we would reduce our stock of operationally
available warheads by a further 20 per cent - to the very minimum we considered
viable to maintain an independent nuclear deterrent.
This was our way - and I can assure you that it was a difficult process - to
resolve the dilemma between our genuine commitment to abolition and our
considered judgement that now was not the time to take a unilateral step to
disarm.
It's the same dilemma that every nuclear weapons state faces. And we can all
make the same choices in recommitting to the goal of abolition and taking
practical steps towards achieving that goal.
Practical steps include further reductions in warhead numbers, particularly in
the world's biggest arsenals. There are still over 20 000 warheads in the
world. And the US and Russia hold about 96 per cent of them.
Almost no-one - politician, military strategist or scientist - thinks that
warheads in those numbers are still necessary to guarantee international
security. It should not therefore be controversial to suggest that there
remains room for further significant reductions. So I hope that the Moscow
Treaty will be succeeded by further clear commitments to significantly lower
numbers of warheads - and include, if possible, tactical as well as strategic,
nuclear weapons.
Since we no longer live in a bipolar world, those future commitments may no
longer require strict parity. They could be unilateral undertakings. Certainly
the UK experience - and indeed the United States' own experience with the
reduction of its tactical weapons in Europe - is that substantial reductions
can be achieved through independent re-examination of what is really needed to
deter: that approach has allowed the UK to reduce our operationally available
warheads by nearly half over the last ten years from what was already a
comparatively low base. We have also reduced the readiness of the nuclear force
that remains. We now have only one boat on patrol at any one time, carrying no
more than 48 warheads - and our missiles are not targeted at anyone.
Commitments like these need not even be enshrined in formal treaties. The UK's
reductions, after all, are not. But clearly both the US and Russia will require
sufficient assurance that their interests and strategic stability will be
safeguarded. Part of the solution may be provided by the extension of the most
useful transparency and confidence building measures in the START framework,
should the US and Russia agree to do so.
And I should make clear here again, that when it will be useful to include in
any negotiations the one per cent of the world's nuclear weapons that belong to
the UK, we will willingly do so.
In addition to further reductions, we need to press on with both the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty and with the Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty. Both limit - in
real and practical ways - the ability of states party to develop new weapons
and to expand their nuclear capabilities. And as such they therefore both play
a very powerful symbolic role too - they signal to the rest of the world that
the race for more and bigger weapons is over, and that the direction from now
on will be down not up. That's why we are so keen for those countries that have
not yet done so to ratify the CTBT. The moratoriium observed by all the nuclear
weapon states is a great step forward; but by allowing the CTBT to enter into
force - and, of course, US ratification would provide a great deal of impetus -
we would be showing that this is a permanent decision, a permanent change in
the right direction.
At the same time, I believe that we will need to look again at how we manage
global transparency and global verification. This will have to extend beyond
the bilateral arrangements between Russia and the US. If we are serious about
complete nuclear disarmament we should begin now to build deeper relationships
on disarmament between nuclear weapon states.
For our part, the UK is ready and willing to engage with other members of the
P5 on transparency and confidence building measures. Verification will be
particularly key - any future verification regime for a world free of nuclear
weapons will need to be tried and tested. In my opinion, it will need to place
more emphasis on the warheads themselves than the current arrangement which
focuses primarily on delivery systems. That will become particularly true as
numbers of warheads drop.
Finally we have to keep doing the hard diplomatic work on the underlying
political conditions - resolving the ongoing sources of tension in the world,
not least in the Middle East and between Pakistan and India. We also need to
build a more mature, balanced and stable relationship between ourselves and
Russia.
And since I have the non-proliferation elite gathered in one room, let me emphasise
the importance this and future UK governments will place on the agreement of an
international and legally binding arms trade treaty. Conflicts across the globe
are made more likely and more intense by those who trade arms in an
irresponsible and unregulated way. An arms trade treaty would contribute to a
focus on arms reduction and build a safer world.
When it comes to building this new impetus for global nuclear disarmament, I
want the UK to be at the forefront of both the thinking and the practical work.
To be, as it were, a "disarmament laboratory".
As far as new thinking goes, the International Institute of Strategic Studies
is planning an in-depth study to help determine the requirements for the
eventual elimination of all nuclear weapons. We will participate in that study
and provide funding for one of their workshops, focussing on some of the
crucial technical questions in this area.
The study and subsequent workshops will offer a thorough and systematic
analysis of what a commitment to a world free of nuclear weapons means in
practice. What weapons and facilities will have to go before we can say that
nuclear weapons are abolished? What safeguards will we have to put in place
over civil nuclear facilities? How do we increase transparency and put in place
a verification regime so that everyone can be confident that no-one else has or
is developing nuclear weapons? And finally - and this is perhaps the greatest
challenge of all - what path can we take to complete nuclear disarmament that
avoids creating new instabilities potentially damaging to global security.
Then we have the new areas of practical work. This will concentrate on the
challenge of creating a robust, trusted and effective system of verification
that does not give away national security or proliferation sensitive
information.
Almost a decade ago, we asked the UK's Atomic Weapons Establishment to begin
developing our expertise in methods and techniques to verify the reduction and
elimination of nuclear weapons. We reported on this work throughout the last
Non-Proliferation Treaty review cycle. Now we intend to build on this work,
looking more deeply at several key stages in the verification process - and
again report our findings as soon as possible.
One area we will be looking at further is authentication - in other words
confirming that an object presented for dismantlement as a warhead is indeed a
warhead. There are profound security challenges in doing that. We need to find
ways to carry out that task without revealing sensitive information. At the
moment we are developing technical contacts with Norway in this area. As a
non-nuclear weapons state they will offer a valuable alternative perspective on
our research.
Then we will be looking more closely at chain of custody issues - in other
words how to provide confidence that the items that emerge from the
dismantlement process have indeed come from the authenticated object that went
into that process to begin with. Here we face the challenge of managing access
to sensitive nuclear facilities. We have already carried out some trial
inspections of facilities to draw lessons for the handling of access under any
future inspections regime.
Last we intend to examine how to provide confidence that the dismantled
components of a nuclear warhead are not being returned to use in new warheads.
This will have to involve some form of monitored storage, with a difficult
balance once again to be struck between security concerns and verification
requirements. We are currently working on the design concepts for building such
a monitored store, so that we can more fully investigate these complex
practical issues.
Those initiatives I have announced today are only small ones. But they are in
the right direction - a signal of intent and purpose to ourselves and to
others. We will talk more and do more with our international partners - those
who have nuclear weapons, those who do not - in the weeks and months to come.
I said earlier that I doubted that I would live to see a world free of nuclear
weapons. My sadness at such a thought is real. Mine is a generation that has
existed under the shadow of the bomb - knowing that weapons existed which could
bring an end to humanity itself. We have become almost accustomed to that
steady underlying dread, punctuated by the sharper fear of each new nuclear
crisis: Cuba in 1962, the Able Archer scare of 1983, the stand-off between
India and Pakistan in 2002.
But there is a danger in familiarity with something so terrible. If we allow
our efforts on disarmament to slacken, if we allow ourselves to take the
non-proliferation consensus for granted, the nuclear shadow that hangs over us
all will lengthen and it will deepen. It may, one day, blot out the light for
good.
So my commitment to the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons is undimmed.
And though we in this room may never reach the end of that road, we can take
the first steps down it. For any generation, that would be a noble calling. For
ours, it is a duty.
