The case for Nuclear “Global Zero”

For much of my lifetime, we have lived under the shadow of the bomb – knowing that nuclear weapons existed that could bring an end to humanity itself. In some respects, we have become accustomed to these weapons, only truly paying attention with each new nuclear crisis: Cuba in 1962, the Able Archer scare in 1983 and more recently the stand-off between India and Pakistan in 2002.

I have always been an advocate for a world free from nuclear weapons. In fact the last Labour government was the first government in the world, in a nuclear weapons state, to commit to the goal of a world free from nuclear weapons. Even before President Obama. It was that commitment coming from a government in office which led directly to the foundation of the global zero campaign.

Such is the ferocity of the debate around nuclear weapons that we can forget how much has been achieved, not least during the period of the last Labour Government.

The grand bargain of the Non-proliferation treaty, signed in 1968, has proved resilient and since the end of the Cold War we have seen the steady decline of the number of warheads worldwide. America and Russia have reduced their stockpiles, and alongside other smaller nuclear nations such as France, we have also reduced ours.

It is also too easily forgotten that many states have given up their weapons entirely. South Africa, Libya, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Argentina and Brazil all possessed nuclear weapons at one point, but have now turned their back on their nuclear programmes or handed over the weapons on their territory.

At its peak, the USA and Russia combined had over 60,000 nuclear warheads. That number is now estimated to stand at just over 16,000 and is projected to fall to less than 8,000 by 2022. In the UK, our stockpiles have reduced from close to 500 in the 1980s to just over 200 today.

This is clear evidence that multilateral negotiations have begun to produce concrete results. In the same way that we achieved reductions in other weapons of mass destruction such as land mines, chemical weapons and cluster munitions (all negotiations in which the UK played a key part), the same approach is working with nuclear weapons.

But we cannot be complacent. As I argued in 2007, we need both vision and action in order to make progress. The vision of a world free from nuclear weapons and the action of countries taking progressive steps to reduce warhead numbers and to limit the role of nuclear weapons in security policy.

This is precisely what the Labour Party did in Government and the position we continue to adopt today. We have a commitment to a Global Zero enshrined in our party’s policy and, in Government, we started the process to reduce our stock of operationally viable warheads by a further 20% – to the very minimum we considered viable to maintain an independent nuclear deterrent.

This is significant progress, but to reach Global Zero, we need a stable and predictable global context. And we are not yet there. With several states still attempting to obtain nuclear weapons and the security threat fifty years from now unclear, it remains the case – as we set out in 2007 – that we could not in good conscience give up our independent deterrent and at the same time guarantee our safety. That is why we are committed to the minimum, independent, credible deterrent delivered through the continuous at sea deterrents.

That does not mean our commitment to a world free from nuclear weapons is dimmed. Far from it. We showed vision and action in Government, and we have done that again with the policy we adopted at Labour Party Conference this year.

Later this year, with the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference we have another chance to progress towards the goal of global zero, with Britain leading the way. If Labour win the election in May, I know that we will be leading from the front.

Margaret Beckett is the Labour MP for Derby South and former Foreign Secretary