(CB):...However,
even if Israel does not admit to its undoubted possession of
nuclear weapons, the hard fact is that the Middle East has not been
“denuclearised” for many decades. Finding some way of moving
towards a Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction is
going to be a key issue at next year’s NPT review conference, at
which the UK, as one of the three NPT depositary states, needs to
use as imaginative and constructive an approach as possible. I
wonder whether either of the two aspirants to be Prime Minister
know any better than the right honourable revealed yesterday: I rather
doubt it...
(GP):...There
is also the unequal way in which the West treats emerging nuclear
powers, casting a blind eye to the nuclear weapons
of Israel India and Pakistan
while taking a hard-line stance against Iran and North Korea. All
the while, the non-nuclear countries which signed up to the nuclear
non-proliferation treaty must feel cheated that the nuclear
countries are not holding up their end of the bargain to
progressively disband their nuclear arsenals. Instead, we are
renewing Trident and expanding nuclear
arsenals...
(Lab):...First, to state
the opposite, there has not been a complete absence of nuclear
proliferation. The number of nuclear states has almost doubled,
from five to nine, during the time of the treaty. The four
nuclear states who are outside the NPT have a fraction of the
number of warheads held by NPT nuclear states, but they
are significant none the less. We list them in our report.
It is estimated that Pakistan has 140 to 150 nuclear warheads;
India has 130 to 140; Israel has 80; and North Korea 10 to 20.
Of course, North Korea is a special case for all sorts of reasons
that I cannot possibly go into, but are the other nuclear states
outside the ambit of the NPT now in the “impossible to resolve”
category—“We can’t do anything about it, so let’s not even
try”—or is there a medium or longer than medium-term strategy to
try to bring all the states of the United Nations within the
ambit of the treaty?
Then there is the question of the proposed Middle East
nuclear-free zone. It was as long ago as 1995 that the review
conference of that year stated that the development of
nuclear-free zones, of which I have mentioned a number, should be
encouraged as a matter of priority, and specifically mentioned
the importance of establishing one in the Middle East. Since
then, progress has been glacial. Last year, however, a UN
resolution called for a conference on a weapons of mass
destruction-free zone in the Middle East to be held in 2019. In
our report, we state that the UK should continue to support work
towards such a conference and should encourage Israel to participate. I am afraid that
the Government in their reply say that the UK remains committed
to the 1995 NPT resolution—of which, incidentally, we were
co-sponsors —but they remain undecided about whether to
participate in the forthcoming UN conference, giving a long list
of difficulties...
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