Welcome to the 13th Book Space Annual Conference,
which this year explores the theme Peace in the nuclear era, threats, treaties and public understanding.
In normal times we would have a whole day, but we will try to pack into this morning a look at the present state of nuclear
treaties and capabilities and assessment of upcoming threats and opportunities.
And a look at the present state of public understanding and education and thus the role of civil society in influencing the future.
Please use the Q&A to send in your questions to speakers.
And the conference will be recorded. The podcast will be available via the ofspace website in due course, it usually takes a few weeks to get there.
And please just Google Workspace and you will get through quite easily to the ofspace web pages.
I want to thank especially the three people who have put today's programme together, and that is laudable.
Allderdice Christopher Watson and Jeremy Cunningham.
And before I hand over to Lord Allderdice John Allderdice to chair the opening session I'd like to bring,
we would like to bring you a short introduction to space.
Space is a multidisciplinary network across Oxford University to promote the study of peace and of peace, making peacebuilding and peacekeeping,
so it brings together academics, researchers, students, practitioners and policymakers from across the world.
Literally every subject is drawn into the conversation to really connect ideas in a way that has not happened before,
and not just to connect the ideas and have the research and the thought leadership, but also then to move from those ideas to action.
One of the focal points during the Year for Peace is its annual conference.
So when picking a topic, it helps develop that subject in respect to peace.
But it also engages a broader network that then in turn helps develop new ideas and research opportunities, as well as practical action.
The compelling vision for peace is to establish an endowed chair in perpetuity at Oxford,
which would be transformative in terms of its intellectual reach and practical impact.
I think Oxford has a contribution to make in terms of academic rigour and understanding that would really benefit the world of peace studies.
But that, in turn, would benefit Oxford itself because it would bring people here who are not just activists,
but academics and indeed senior political figures from around the world who are involved in addressing conflict issues.
So I now hand over to the Lord Allderdice to chair the first session.
Liz, thank you very much indeed. Thank you very much for the introduction, and I'm really delighted that Oaks Peace is addressing this issue today.
It's a not, of course, a new one for Oxbridge, but for some time we've been preoccupied with other issues and people globally have been preoccupied,
for example, with the question of climate change and the catastrophe that is unfolding before our eyes.
Year by year. But one of the things that troubled me was that although it's absolutely right
to concentrate on that from from time to time and the question of nuclear,
if it's spun out of control, it could bring us a nuclear winter before the end of this year.
No, not in five or 10 or 15 years time.
And of course, even over the last few days, we've seen a violent outbreak in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which involves a nuclear state.
And there are many other nuclear states around the world where we have anxieties and
concerns about the fact that they have these extraordinary weapons of mass destruction,
which could bring not just civilisation but human life to an end on this planet.
And yet we seem to be focussing much less on that than on that and on other issues.
And so I'm delighted that she's excited to have this event today, and I think we all look forward to it.
I'm particularly pleased to be kicking off the first session here with two colleagues at Lourdes Brian Ablated and Dez Bryant,
an old friend of colleague and Dr. Nick Ritchie. So let me just introduce the two of them.
Some of you will know one or the other, and some of you will know both of them, but not everyone will.
So let me just briefly introduce them.
Then I'm going to invite them, make their interventions, and then we're going to have some conversations and then I will.
Dez Bryant became a member of the House of Lords in 2010 after a career first low
in his native Scotland and then in the House of Commons as a member of Parliament,
where he also served in a range of ministerial posts.
And I first came to notice in the early 2000s when he was a minister at the Northern
Ireland office and was involved in negotiations there with a number of of the parties.
He went on to serve in a number of senior roles, including cabinet level roles,
and the most relevant of those for us today was his time as Secretary of State for Defence with responsibility for the Trident programme,
of course, between 2006 and it. Subsequently,
he served as vice chairman of the Washington D.c.-based Nuclear Threat Initiative and his convenor of both the European Leadership Network
and the top level group of UK parliamentarians or multilateral nuclear disarmament and Non Liberation is a signatory of Global Zero,
a non-profit international initiative for the elimination of all nuclear weapons worldwide
and a committed activist on the question of peace of various parts of the world.
We are bills from find ourselves in the same bed with the support of the West on a peace issue in various parts of the world.
But of course, the nuclear question is an important preoccupation of his.
Dr Nick Ritchie researches and teaches in the areas of international relations and international security at the University of York,
where he is a senior lecturer in International Security in the Department of Politics.
His particular focus is on nuclear disarmament, proliferation and arms control and use of UK national security.
After completing his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Bradford in 2007 on the evolution of US nuclear weapons policy after the Cold War,
Nic spent four years researching and teaching at Bradford's very well known Department of Peace Studies before joining York in 2011.
He previously worked for five years at the Oxford Research Group,
an independent NGO working with policymakers and independent experts on the challenges of global security.
I was an adviser to R.G. for some years until Sandy was done in February of this year,
one of many victims of the financial stringency during this time of pandemic.
But while warg may not be there.
Nick Ritchie is very much alive and operational, and we look forward to that contribution because if I might come to you, first of all,
for your intervention on this and I know that I just want to remind people that
you have advised colleagues to to link to download the nuclear power in a new era,
a document which had very recently produced so colleagues will have done that.
But if not, you may want to look at that subsequently, but does.
In normal times, we'd say you have the floor, but no, you have.
You have the mic and you have the video camera, and we look forward to what you have to say. Jason, thank you very much, John.
It's an honour to be asked to speak at this important conference, and I am an admirer of the work of SpaceX and it's a particular honour to share
this virtual platform with you and their network to both of mine or both of you.
I know it's you as you then made clear a relationship, but in my view, you're both admirable peacemakers.
So thank you also for circulating Steven Miles.
I mean, I hope some of you have taken advantage of the opportunity to read it, but will understand if you have not been able to do.
It's not essential what you have in order to hear what I have to say, but I think it is, and it's a comprehensive,
I think but accessible account of the history of nuclear weapons,
nuclear weapons policy and offers an excellent foundation, I think, for your deliberations today.
So for my part, I want to focus, you know, bidding and made who I am.
I mean, I am a politician who has been involved in policy and how we can progress on addressing the risks posed by nuclear weapons and policy,
and that we must and can achieve global disarmament,
resulting in the removal of what I believe is not only a significant but perhaps an existential global threat.
And for me, at the outset, I shall draw from my own experience, which you've already referred to John and start from 2006 when I always go back.
To my surprise, I was made secretary of State for Defence. The appointment of a former human rights lawyer to this post was a surprise to many.
I have to say the least to me.
So the transition from air chief secretary to the Treasury, which had envoys to the military, had life-changing consequences for me,
for my family, for my parliamentary and constituency office staff and my way to social circle.
And some of this will be with me for the rest of my life.
That was and is multifaceted, but I wanted you to concentrate on one aspect of it for a short time to.
Couple of sentences only I was not prepared for,
and nothing could have prepared me for assuming responsibility for the awesome, destructive power of nuclear weapons.
I agreed to take this job on the condition. I would be allowed to pursue opportunities for disarmament.
I was then and I am no of the strong view that disarmament is an essential element of improved human security.
I suspect that no one who is here today will need any persuading for that. So I move on.
So shortly after I was appointed in January 2007, an important issue appeared in The Wall Street Journal,
authored by former American statesman George Shultz, Bill Perry, Henry Kissinger and someone who Sam Nunn, who all of whom I came to know well,
it laid out the vision and steps,
a series of practical actions for achieving the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and a credible argument in a rapidly changing world,
even even if nuclear weapons had kept the peace during the Cold War.
It become a clear and present danger, and that was the beginning for what is now almost a university assessment that
the probability of nuclear weapon use is increasing and in some people's views,
more probable than ever has been in their lifetime.
So these views immediately were endorsed by former statesmen and women across Europe and the globe.
And in June 2007, in a speech at the Centre for Sorry at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
Margaret Beckett, the then foreign secretary, embraced them, becoming the first representative of any government so to do.
She announced that the UK would lead the world and become a disarmament laboratory, and on the 5th of February 2020,
I became the first ever Minister of Defence to address the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva.
I think I think I may be the only one who's ever done that,
and in a speech entitled Laying the foundations for multilateral disarmament or being a disarmament laboratory could mean.
My speech contained the following paragraphs, and I quote them to you as the preamble to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty makes clear,
all states parties to the treaty should work towards the easing of international tension and the strengthening
of trust between states in order to facilitate the cessation of the manufacture of nuclear weapons.
The elimination of all that existing stockpiles and the elimination from national arsenals of nuclear weapons and means of delivery.
The next steps in this short a chronology were extraordinary.
Both candidates for US president embraced the vision and steps in 2007 and 2008,
and President Obama made this the centrepiece of his first major major foreign policy address and prime.
With some modesty and a little played a key role in this effort was significant.
Amongst these last actions is Prime Minister Gordon Brown set a road map to disarmament and successive
governments of both other parties have followed the path of incremental disarmament in the UK.
That is until this year. In March, the government published its integrated review,
which reversed under section of travel and ditched the previous domestic cross-party consensus on reducing the number of nuclear weapons.
The IAEA called for increasing the cap in the UK's overall nuclear weapons
stockpile from not more than 180 by the mid-2020s to no more than 260 warheads,
44 percent increase from the previous target and a 15 percent increase from the current level of 225.
Also, the government announced it would no longer publish details of its nuclear stockpile and missile numbers and expanded the potential scenarios,
but would consider the use of nuclear weapons to include threats posed by emerging technologies.
For more than a decade, the UK had been reducing numbers of warheads. Now apparently that are evolving threats that we do not yet understand,
but we intend to deter with nuclear weapons and apparently we need more warheads to do the job.
And the absence of transparency of a comprehensive explanation or justification for this
change are able to do anything other than speculate about whether that analysis is right.
All countries are threatened by the same emerging technologies.
If the UK says nuclear weapons are an acceptable response, then why should not other countries,
both nuclear and non-nuclear, follow the same line of reasoning? That logic seems to have been lost on the government.
This decision apparently was made without consultation.
There was no consultation with Parliament or anyone outside a very small circle of politicians, military officers and officials.
And apparently not with the government of our strongest ally, the US.
But President Biden is a strong proponent of reducing the role of nuclear weapons in national security policies,
including as an advocate for sole purpose that nuclear weapons have only one rule deterring nuclear use of the threat of.
Our position is no the antithesis of Biden's. The UK's nuclear policy is more aligned with the Trump administration's policies.
I think perhaps there may have been consultation with the US, but it was with the Trump administration.
The government's approach is illustrative of the secrecy surrounding these weapons,
the propensity of governments to make decisions without serious or sometimes any consultation.
Or indeed, explanation of the thinking or the rationale for the decision.
We should care about this, and it's important to be clear why we should care.
So let's be clear. Many experts are telling us that the risk of a nuclear weapon being used is increasing.
The Doomsday Clock is now inching nearer and nearer to midnight every year and the consequences.
Of the use of just one nuclear weapon against a major setback, London, Washington, Tokyo, Mumbai and Moscow would be widespread and devastating.
We don't want it to explode in London, it would likely destroy the entire city.
When little boy was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, approximately 90 to 120000 people were killed.
Temperatures near the explosion, but estimated to be 300 degrees Celsius.
It was not killed by the immediate impact or the firestorm eventually and excruciating, we were killed by exposure to huge amounts of radiation.
The warheads that bomb Japan achieved blasts significantly lower than those of today's weapons.
Let's also remember that no government is capable of an effective humanitarian response following the use of a nuclear weapon.
As the world continues to struggle with COVID 19, it gives us a small glimpse, a window into the horror that could and would unfold.
Well, this could be a single nuclear weapon incident.
Even a regional war with nuclear weapons would be a catastrophe, the likes of which we have never known.
Since 1945, we've had an unacceptable. We've had unacceptably close encounters with nuclear war.
And today we're entering a whole new phase of risk driven by nuclear modernisation and technological
change and rising tensions amongst nuclear powers and the demise of Cold War era arms control agreements.
For example, today, because of the nature of existing postures and the possibility of a hijacking,
a technical malfunction or a misperception of an incoming attack coupled coupled with say,
use it or lose it mentality, we run the risk of community miscommunication or miscalculation could lead to a nuclear exchange.
With almost 2000 warheads capable of launching on relatively short notice modernisation and technological change,
or reducing the timelines for decision makers and adding much further uncertainty to the decision making process,
for example, the introduction of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the nuclear decision making process has
raised concerns whether a computer system would be able to differentiate between a nuclear or conventional pill.
This strikes with the rise of dual use dual capable missiles,
many of which are being developed to travel at hypersonic speeds, further reducing decision times.
The election of President Biden and exchanges in nuclear policy between the US and Russia bring hope.
Presidents Biden and Putin agreed to extend the new Start treaty for five years,
ensuring verifiable limits on the number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons in their arsenals.
Apparently,
these two governments believe that continuing transparency and numbers of warheads and delivery systems is essential to strategic stability.
We, for our part, appear to believe the opposite. The two leaders are expected to meet after President Biden attends a G7 summit in June,
providing essential high level dialogue between the two nuclear powers,
a commitment to advance strategic stability and begin talks in the next phase of arms
control would be a positive step to halting what is looking like a new arms race.
The US is also engaging with the regime to revive the Iran deal, which would ensure Iran is not acquiring nuclear weapon.
There's also movement in the international community, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons entered into force in January of this year.
This is the first legally binding treaty with the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons.
Although the nuclear weapon states and the nation states have not signed,
the treaty is indicative of the impatience and frustration and the lack of progress in
nuclear disarmament and increasing nuclear risks amongst most of the countries of the world.
These are positive signs. However, it's important to ask ourselves why it's so difficult to give up our reliance on these weapons.
One of the students drastically from the 1980s for nuclear deterrence theory
was developed by a small group of analysts for a different and simpler world,
with fewer nuclear weapons and weapons and slower delivery technology.
Nuclear weapons policies and postures have hardly changed, and yet, as societies face a different range of risks, including pandemics, climate change,
mass migration, drug trafficking, organised crime, cyber warfare, terrorism and proliferation not only of nuclear weapons but of other weapons.
We had an important time in history and risk to continue to rely on nuclear weapons is heavily outweighing any perceived security benefits.
I'd like to highlight four observations of how the nuclear system operates, any the actions we can take.
First, like pandemics and climate change, nuclear weapons and a global systemic problem.
All countries must live under the threats posed by nuclear weapons.
You have no real control over policies which remain in the hands of governments, the governments of the nuclear weapons possessing states only.
Just as we have to problem, solve and take collective action to resolve global warming, the same is true for nuclear weapons.
We must approach this as an intractable problem that we need to solve.
So we do not, but in future generations with the costs and risks of the current system.
Civil society organisations and the recently entered into force and W have focussed efforts
on the impact of such weapons and try to broaden out this issue into the global movement.
This is an important step in turning the debate from one focussed on national security to one of global empire like COVID 19.
None of us are safe until we are all safe.
Second, we have lost sight of the vision of a world without nuclear weapons, we are no longer talking about how we should disarm.
Instead, the debate has reverted to whether we should disarm.
We need to create a realistic and credible vision for a world without nuclear weapons would look like.
What the necessary verification provisions, governance structures and controls over the fuel cycle that are credible shared vision.
We are unlikely to have serious engagement with reluctant governments and how we get there.
Third, states that possess nuclear weapons have so far avoided serious engagement with the
rest of the world on the broad nuclear risks of continued reliance on these weapons.
Even more concerning these states are not currently engaging constructively with one another on how to mitigate and manage these risks.
Tensions have been high between the US and Russia and the US and China, and consequently dialogue has been halted.
While risks of nuclear weapons use increase and finally, we do think about the nuclear narrative the way we talk about the nuclear weapon.
For a long time, this subject has become increasingly accessible to the public.
Experts and governments use technical language in a way that removes the abilities of publics to engage and by default,
sustains an environment of secrecy. We need a real global discourse about the future of the.
And this, in my view, sweatshops peace comes in as what facing a systemic problem, we need broader ownership.
Nuclear weapons do not exist in isolation from the rest of the world.
We need to think about the ways the weapons impact us and prop up the inequalities of our societies.
If you nuclear weapon states with power to impact millions of lives, the millions of pounds spent on retaining these weapons,
it could be applied to addressing security concerns most impacting us.
The lack of diversity amongst those who hold decision making power and the fact that the
decision to use such catastrophic weapons is in the house and hands of so few people.
This is a complex, systemic problem, it needs smart people from across different fields,
caring and thinking about how this issue intersects with different fields.
It's a shared challenge, but also she had the opportunity to problem, solve,
engage S. long term of a global risks and ultimately make the world a safer place for future generations.
Also means more people should be involved and demanding an end of the cycle of inconsistency between government commitments and their actions,
and to demand explanation for policy changes, as we have just seen in the UK.
After this conference, I encourage you to apply your means on how to engage.
Conferences are great, but this must be a process. Thank you.
There's thank you very much indeed, we invited you to start us off with a keynote and introduction to the current threats and challenges.
You have absolutely fulfilled that already with your initial intervention.
Thank you very much indeed for. Mick, we like to come to, you know, that you have the microphone on the screen, no.
Very many thanks and thanks to OK space and to the conference organisers for inviting me to speak to you today,
and it's great to be on this opening panel and following Des and on with you, John, I'll draw on some of his remarks.
But I want to talk a bit more about the problems and the possibilities for change, which, as Des has intimated, seem really difficult at the moment.
And I want to do that by drawing on my experience of being involved in the humanitarian initiative on nuclear
weapons that led to the negotiation of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons or the Ban Treaty,
as it's often referred at the UN in 2017.
I think the first thing I want to say is the rational argument will only get you so far in trying to bring about change on this issue.
And why is that? It's because in my view, we are dealing with very deeply embedded cultures of nuclear thinking in nuclear armed states.
And by comparison, I think about the way in which perhaps the Brexit debate seemed pretty impervious to
rational arguments about the economic harm that would likely be caused by Brexit.
And you start to get the idea of of the limits of engaging in rational argument.
And back in 1991, a US psychologist called Robert Lifton working with a US political scientist,
a legal scholar, Richard Falk, described this culture as nuclear ism.
And you rarely come across this term. I've been involved in nuclear disarmament as an activist, NGO and and scholarly level for many years now.
A couple of decades, in fact, and you rarely come across this term,
but I think it's really essential to understanding the politics of nuclear weapons.
They defined nuclear ism as follows. It is the psychological, political and military dependence on nuclear weapons.
The embrace of weapons as a solution to a wide variety of human dilemmas.
Most ironically, that of security. For those interested, I'll put the reference for that in the chart at the end.
So nuclear is and then is a culture. More specifically, it's an ideology.
And what we mean by that is the system of meanings principles that tell us what nuclear weapons mean in relation to ideas of the state of war,
in relation to ideas of international order and to power in world politics.
And we've seen how set of meanings about nuclear weapons gets over time conflated with the very thing itself, the nuclear weapon.
And we've seen how a set of principles about nuclear weapons end up becoming axioms of political life.
So, for example, the way in which the Trident system in the UK is always referred to by policy makers as the deterrent,
as if somehow it unproblematic deters simply by existing.
And we see the the axiomatic aim that's made that Trident simply is the ultimate insurance of our security.
And policy makers and military leaders and the wider publics get socialised into this ideology such that it becomes a common sense,
something that's communicated and understood through a particular language between weapons and around the state and security,
a language that then shapes and limits how we can think about and how we can pull these weapons, something that dares also referred to.
But this ideology of nuclear ism, something that.
You have a different set of understandings about nuclear weapons, and we might call this anti-nuclear ism prohibit the nuclear weapons ban treaty,
I think is perhaps the most high profile iteration of this and the ban treaty and what was what was the
humanitarian initiative on nuclear weapons that was initiated in 2010 and led to the ban treaty negotiation.
They were both based on delegitimizing and stigmatising nuclear weapons as honour to the months of statecraft in world politics.
And they are rooted in a quite different set of meanings about nuclear weapons.
So in the nuclear armed states, we see the focus of nuclear thinking of nuclear ism is the weapons themselves,
the state military competition with other states, proliferation of the military balances of power.
But Asari Initiative and the ban treaty focus on different things and four in particular, stand out.
The first of these is violence, violence against people, not states or weapons,
but people in terms of the extreme violence against human bodies and human societies that nuclear weapons inflict.
And the illegality and illegitimacy of that violence under international humanitarian law.
The second focus of anti-nuclear and is on postcolonial relationships and resistances, primarily across the global south.
A set of issues that rarely enter into the debate in the UK.
But this is about resistance to nuclear hierarchy inequality and discrimination
in global nuclear politics that is dominated by the industrialised north.
The third focal point is gender and gendered inequalities in the global politics of nuclear weapons.
And this highlights the differential effects of ionising radiation on women and
girls and associated risks of cancer and mortality from female specific cancers.
Drawing on the experiences of those affected by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and nuclear testing,
it also refers to the absence of women in nuclear weapons, policymaking and in nuclear disarmament diplomacy,
and how that affects how policy elites think about and talk about nuclear weapons,
but also in terms of gendered language in nuclear discourse that tends to normalise nuclear weapons in very masculine eyes.
Terms of strength, protection, reason and rationality.
And the final focus that I want to draw out is ecological in terms of the nuclear contamination
of the natural environment in relation to human health in the planetary ecosystem.
And this is underpinned by research that I'm sure many of you are familiar with that
shows how a nuclear conflict involving the use of 100 Hiroshima sized weapons in
South Asia would have a catastrophic impact on the global climate caused by the vast
amounts of smoke and particulates that will be released into the upper atmosphere.
Thinking in this way about nuclear weapons and global nuclear politics is impossible within the ideology of nuclear,
and it is a different mode of thinking with different reference and different language.
And I highlight these differences and ideologies because the possibilities for change lie
in the ongoing contestation between the two between nuclear wisdom and in and in many ways,
this is what disarmament diplomacy is all about.
In fact, Richard Falk, who I referred to earlier described the band as full frontal rejection of the geopolitical approach to nuclear ism.
And we've seen how contestation of this type has driven change in other areas of global politics like human rights,
colonialism and more recently, the climate crisis, as well as in related areas like chemical weapons and cluster munitions.
And as deadset civil society has been absolutely central to these processes.
Now, the idea of contestation and comfort confrontation between quite opposite in command positions like nuclear ism,
an anti-nuclear ism in the end leaves little by way of middle ground, and that can be quite discomforting for some.
But when it comes to the possibilities of nuclear violence, it is either accepted as something that is in the end, legitimate or illegitimate.
And we must acknowledge as well that debate division contestation are vital to the processes of change,
and they are a necessary feature of the democratisation of debate in nuclear politics,
and this is something to which I think the ban treaty has made an important contribution.
But it's also, I think, bigger than this too,
because we can see how those involved in nuclear disarmament and the ban treaty have connected nuclear injustices,
nuclear inequalities and nuclear violence in world politics, with a wider set of global hierarchies and inequalities and violent practises.
Not least in relation to social, environmental, economic and racial justice and change.
And in fact. The future of the nuclear disarmament movement, I think,
arguably lies in its closer integration with multiple movements that are confronting global injustices,
including on the issues of who gets to act besides violence over whom, by what means to what ends and on what basis.
And when thinking about the possibilities for change,
I think we also need to remember and acknowledge that the ban treaty and anti-nuclear ism are pushing in the right direction.
It might not seem so at the moment,
but here I think it's useful to understand nuclear disarmament as something that needs to be invented, invented and then sustained.
And I think some of Dess remarks at the end of his of his comments were speaking to this as well.
I'll say a little bit more about this before I close.
So inventive nuclear disarmament, I think, is about building on what already exists and about inventing new norms,
new practises, a new institutions, it requires innovation, it requires creativity and it requires lots of collective work.
But a couple of things we can say it won't be neat and linear.
It will be messy. It will be contingent and it will be multi causal.
So that we we can't really know with any degree of certainty what will work and when until we get there,
we can also say, I think with some degree of certainty that it's going to be transnational.
It's going to be done by lots of different people in lots of different places, in lots of different roles,
pursuing a whole range of different ideas, and it's going to be a continuous process rather than an endpoint.
And whilst there's nothing to guarantee that nuclear disarmament can't be invented, there's also nothing to guarantee that it will.
But I think thought of this way. It becomes clear how much has already been achieved at a very broad level.
Nuclear disarmament as an idea.
An idea that kind of makes sense to us that is firmly rooted in a much deeper set of ideas and institutions that are embedded in our global politics.
So these include things like human rights, humanitarian law, the sovereign equality of states, development and justice,
decolonisation limits to violence, environmental protection and the criminalisation of state aggression in world politics and in nuclear politics.
Specifically, lots of important things have already been invented.
Like the ideas in the institutions of nuclear arms, options like ending nuclear testing, verification safeguards,
non-use non-proliferation, regional nuclear weapon free zones and the very idea of global prohibition itself.
And none of these ideas and institutions are natural or predetermined.
They have. They have been invented and they have been embedded, even as they've been pretty consistently contested.
And we can see through that lens that nuclear deterrence and the ideology of nuclear
ism are also a set of ideas and practises and institutions that have been invented.
And just as they have been invented, they can be disrupted,
dismantled and on invented through contestation that diminishes the power of nuclear ism and that challenges cultures of nuclear thinking.
And I don't know if death knows this, but the timing of his speech at the Conference on Disarmament in 2008 that was originally put on
the on the Ministry of Defence website was laying the foundations for multicultural disarmament,
not multilateral nuclear disarmament. It was on there for a couple of days until it was changed.
But I wonder if perhaps that was closer to the mark.
Now, the asymmetries of power between supporters of nuclear ism and anti-nuclear ism are clearly formidable,
and we've seen this in the pushback against the ban treaty from the nuclear armed states.
And with that in mind, I think we have to accept that we're unlikely to change the minds of current
policymakers that are socialised into or or really enamoured with nuclear ism.
But I think we can't over time shape the understandings of future leaders and future
voters about what is and isn't politically possible when it comes to nuclear weapons.
And by doing so, by building on what exists and inventing what's needed.
So in some ways, nothing is certain in nuclear politics.
There are no risk free nuclear futures.
As a good friend of mine, Wheeler, who I think in the is in the audience, has has stated, but we do have agency positive change does happen.
The unexpected end of the Cold War being an important example.
There are better ways in which we can organise our global nuclear politics that can involve the elimination of nuclear weapons,
and we have come a long way towards a better nuclear world.
And the ban treaty and what it represents, I think, is an important part of the process of inventing what we need for a world without nuclear weapons.
Thank you. Nick, thank you very much indeed for taking further along the line.
The comments that Desmond and thank you very much indeed for laying things out in such a way as you suggested,
I rather suspect that pretty much all of those who are on this webinar or web conference
would be of a similar perspective in terms of the wish to see an end to nuclear weapons.
But I want to try to provoke something of what Nic was talking about in this debate contestation argument side of things,
because I think he's right to say that, that that's really important.
And so I'd like to pick up a number of things I wanted to kind of clarify and some for us,
perhaps for us to engage in a little bit of conversation with each other.
And then in a little while, we'll open it up to questions which have already begun to appear on the on the Q&A and chat.
You have both outlined very clearly the increasing dangers of nuclear weapons increasing not so much,
perhaps just because of numbers, but because of distribution.
More states now have weapons with the possibility of weapons.
We all felt the Cold War was a bad thing and it certainly wasn't a good thing, but at least at that time.
Largely speaking, there were two pillars that needed to engage with each other.
And negotiate a way of pulling back. I remember I used to work quite a lot to work to some extent with the World Federation of Scientists,
which originally was a number of scientists, some of whom developed the bombs that we were referring to.
Did not want their technology to be used. Their science to be used for the technology of warfare, but the technology of peace.
And one of the pieces of work that they did were permitted to do by their paymasters in the government
of the Ministry of Defence was to look at what would actually be the outcome if there was a nuclear war.
How many people would die if there was a strike or a response to strike its own missile?
And so they produced this material under the generals who were running the show.
We're very happy for the scientists to do that, and they exchange the papers between the USSR as it was then and to.
And the generals looked at it and they said, Oh, my goodness,
we knew this would happen to the other side quite quick that it was going to happen to our side.
And so they passed it back to the politicians who were the paymasters of the generals, and they had the same response.
And the result of this and many other interventions by people like voice that was
involved with anti-war meant that people started to think about the conflict.
And all of us kind of hoped that the end of the Cold War would take us forward.
But in many ways it hasn't, because what it has happened is it has fractured think so, that there are not simply two pillars anymore.
There are lots. It's like a it's like a blob of mercury that's been whacked on the table, and it's spun off into a whole lot of other areas,
like the so-called War on Drugs in the United States by taking out some of the kingpins.
Lots of other lower level gangsters were able to spread the use and abuse of drugs.
So I guess I'm keen for us to push back on teasing out not what we would wish to believe to be the case,
but what is actually the case about the human condition to which Robert Davis and of course, many of his books, including his book of the.
It seems to me that quite clearly the nuclear problem is an expression of violent political conflict.
Especially of all out war, I mean,
I think almost everybody accepts that the context in which it might be used was one in which effectively an all out war was being contemplated.
So are we suggesting? That it is actually possible to move to a place in any foreseeable future where we can prevent violent political conflict.
Or are we saying something else about all out war?
That it can be conducted in some other, less harmful way or that it can actually be prevented.
And this is not a theoretical question this past weekend when we look at what's happening in Israel, Palestine.
So what is it? How can we if if nuclear conflict?
Is to date perhaps the ultimate expression of violent conflict.
Are we saying that that expression of conflict can be tamed or are we saying that violent political conflict itself is able to be contained,
controlled, managed or prevented in some way? Would either of you like to pick up that?
That query a question. I'm willing to do so, I mean, not make definitively if we you to do this, I mean,
I just say this to you at the beginning, you know, I mean, we're all on journeys.
I mean, I think probably everybody who's in this and this conference is somewhere and moving towards the same destination,
the hope that we all share, which is a much more peaceful world.
And you know, we are affected by our experiences and them.
And I think also we can only make a limited contribution to this.
In a long time ago, I gave up. And you know, the what the I do trying to tell other people how we ought to behave,
and I spend most of my time in them and dialogue and quite a lot of tough dialogue across the Atlantic space, from Vancouver to Vladivostok.
Talking about issues of this nature with people many of whom have, you know, have and have held a big responsibility.
I'm much more interested in their perception of how we appear than my perception of how they appear.
And I learnt more from that. So I mean, I'm going to I'm going to restrict my observations to try not to generalise too much about this.
But you know, I mean, I live in a country here in the United Kingdom with a government who think they can do just what you have suggested.
They think that we can, you know, we can move to a world without nuclear weapons.
And and that's the assessment. You know, we have regular assessments of where the risks and threats to this country lie.
And I kind of remember since we started to publish them, any of them seeing that we are,
that there is there is a risk of an all out state on state conflict that we would be involved in.
You know, I mean, we had pandemic at the top of that risk, that threat analysis for many years and didn't prepare well for a lot, as it turned out.
But that's another discussion. And so that is their view.
And even in this same and this integrated review and I have opened the relevant page here in my pride beside me,
we there are two very strong paragraphs that expressed the government's commitment to the long term goal of our website nuclear weapons.
So, so they have committed themselves to that.
Successive governments have done that, you know, and then they spell out in the second paragraph what we will continue to do.
The problem is that when I read that, they're not doing any of it.
But nobody's actually asking them, you know, so, you know, every time I open my mouth in a political environment in the United Kingdom,
I get accused of being a unilateralist, which is a kind of pejorative, right?
And I say, no, I'm, you know, I'm interested in multilateral nuclear disarmament, but I spend almost every day trying to achieve it.
You know what? What did you last do or ever do to achieve this ambition that you have for multilateral nuclear disarmament?
You know, and and I think that's so, so and honestly, you know,
if you look at the immediate history, our history is devastated by conflict and violence,
but it is much less than it was in the 20th century and in particular in the second half of the 20th century, much, much less than it was then.
That wasn't accounted for by the absence or presence of nuclear weapons because this conflict has changed significantly.
It's more interstate now than it was before it's conducted in different fashions.
These are the things that we need to be worried about for when we get rid of conflict.
Yet we spend so much of our resources on something that just creates a threat it
doesn't actually keep is any safer because we don't believe that we are at risk.
You know, Nick and I both express, you know, what were the consequences of these, of the use of these weapons be and the vast majority of leaders?
Want to avoid that as well? You know, there's no point in using a weapon system that impacts you citizens as badly or in some cases,
worst, depending on weather systems, then it will your adversaries.
So, you know, within a world that we shouldn't allow other people to create the environment for the way in which we discuss it,
we should challenge them. This is what you say you want to do.
Tell us what you are doing about it. You know, ask every everybody who's interested in AP.
What do you know and understand about this risk and threat? And what have you done to try and achieve it because you've all signed up to this policy?
Thanks very much. And as I said, we're reminded of dangers by the events of this last weekend,
and I had a rather difficult discussion with some political colleagues yesterday who
kept on both the two state solution perspective of the situation with Israel-Palestine.
Which is something that people have been going on about for decades now, and we're not any closer to it,
and in a sense, it's the same kind of thing that you're saying that is people keep mouthing the words.
About what they want to see without necessarily exploring the consequences of developing what is necessary to achieve that.
And and that's the challenge in that that's a challenge for all of us to pick up in terms of our thinking about and understand.
Nick, would you like to pick up on that? Yeah, I if if I can come in as well, I mean, first, John, I think your your question presupposes a lot.
Nuclear weapons is the manifestation of violent conflict. I don't think that's right.
It's a manifestation. It's not the manifestation of it.
So nuclear weapons is a manifestation of of of the possibility of this type of a violent conflict.
I mean, history shows that states have acquired nuclear weapons for lots of different reasons and not not just to
deter this specific type of conflict of of all out total war of the type experienced from 1939 to 1945.
So it's it's part of how we understand why states acquire nuclear weapons,
but it's certainly not the sum total of reasons states have acquired and retained
taken decisions to retain nuclear weapons for for lots of different reasons,
including around ideas of national identity and relationships with with significant other allies as well as adversaries.
But I think the way you posed the question also implies that nuclear deterrence is the answer to preventing this type of this
specific type of conflict of industrialised All-Out War between the major powers at the heart of the international system.
But there's a real problem with with that in terms of demonstrating that that has in fact been the case.
What we often see is is a correlation between the existence of nuclear weapons
after 1945 and then the lack of the absence of something like World War Two.
And we go from from correlation to causation and say that it's nuclear weapons that, of course,
that are no doubt they are part of the part of the answer as to why there's been no no recurrence of something like World War Two.
But people tend to to forget that there have been other massive developments since 1945 that do a good deal of the explaining.
I mean, we've learnt from the horrors of World War Two.
We've established the United Nations and an organised international economic and trading system.
We've seen the process of decolonisation of the sort of hundred and fifty or so years before
1945 continued major decolonisation up to and including the end of the Soviet Empire.
And we've seen from the 1970s onwards really and really escalate in the post-Cold War period.
The processes of interdependence and globalisation.
I mean, it's dead, Set said, we live in a very different world to that that nuclear age and the thermonuclear age that emerged in the 1950s.
And for good or ill, it has knitted states and economies and societies together.
So I think. I think in this context,
we we we mustn't assume that nuclear deterrence is kind of an problematically the answer to why haven't we seen something like World War Two?
Why that nuclear deterrence assuredly explains the absence of total war?
I think what we need to ask, which is a question my good friend of mine,
Benmore pull up at us asks, is what can we say about the added deterrence of nuclear weapons?
There's an awful lot of stuff, an awful lot of very, very good,
powerful reasons as to why major powers are not going to fight something like World War Two again,
irrespective of whether nuclear weapons are in the mix or not. It's a very good, powerful reasons.
What the nuclear weapons add to that sort of deterrent effect.
What is the added deterrent value? That's the question we need to be asking.
And I think it's very difficult to make a clear,
concise case that sustaining a system of world security based on the threat of total calamity is either necessary or legitimate today.
I find that difficult to to accept that there is a clear case that the necessitates taking the risks
that we know of the risks of nuclear war that are baked into the very cake of of nuclear deterrence.
And the idea that I guess one last point. I mean, it's often taken as read that the the nuclear piece is it's as it's being called.
From from the the end of World War Two, OK, to say certainly the end of the Cold War through that sort of 45 year period,
that that was something anomalous in world politics and that therefore the correlation with the existence of nuclear weapons is really strong.
But it's not. It's not anomalous. There have been plenty of periods of long peace between the major powers in world politics of similar duration.
So I think we need to be very careful when when we're talking about nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence that we kind
of acknowledge the assumptions that we're making and the claims that we're making on behalf of nuclear deterrence,
all of which are really very contested. I think one of the things that we need to be careful about is that.
We don't pick up what someone else says and assume that we understand it because it fits in with the arguments we've been making.
You see, I didn't say anything about states and conflict. I said an expression of confidence.
And one of the issues that I've been working on for quite a long time is the notion that we've got to move beyond the understanding of individuals.
And states. To the complex systems analysis of relationships.
And that conflict is an expression of a relationship problem, whether it's to do with individuals or states.
So to say that something is an expression of conflict does not mean that it is the reason that a state gives itself for developing a weapon.
And certainly what I'm trying to explore is not some justification of a kind that has been given or would be given.
I don't think anybody on this call is. But it's absolutely clear that many of the things that we thought would lead to a resolution,
haven't you mentioned the U.N. the UN can't make a decision about anything worthwhile at the moment.
The General Assembly is completely dominated by China. Know anything that you try to get decided just doesn't get decided in the General
Assembly unless China agrees UN the Security Council can't make a decision on anything.
So and when we talk about the multilateral system, it's in disarray.
This is not a reality of 10 or 15 years ago, but it is a reality of today,
and it seems to me that we've got to find a way of pushing our thoughts forward.
Inevitably, of course, we're influenced by our own experience and my experience,
and to some extent, desert is a little bit influenced by the Irish question.
When the argument was perennially about those who wanted to remain within the United Kingdom and those who wanted an independent united Ireland,
and we thought that was moving forward into a different argument, if at all being part of the United Europe, but that has started to fragment.
But the key question, really in the end, is what kind of set of relationships if we simply argued back and forth?
We may not move forward. Even good arguments become weaponized.
So for example, one of the concerns I have about the notion of an anti-nuclear narrative.
Is that it simply sets itself up as another struggle against against a previous argument, rather than something that provides an alternative?
One of the successes I think of the climate debate has been the alternative ways of producing energy.
Our proposed. And I suppose the question for me,
the implicit question that I was putting forward is what is the alternative way of dealing with that aspect of the human condition,
which is expressed in conflict?
What is the alternative way of dealing with that that we are proposing as distinct from what we are opposing about a particular expression of?
So I'm so to engage with that challenge question.
Good. So. So let me just disaggregate this a little, Ray.
I mean, I mean, I think I think, you know, interestingly, I think, you know,
observing the two of you talking to each other, you both write about this. I mean, that is right.
You know, we. And you know, I'm really struck at the beginning, Amy and his excellent contribution.
He he drew you draw attention to why. Up until now, I've said the weapons.
These weapons dictate the policy. But I mean, these weapons are more influential,
their existence on the decisions that are made about their continuing dependence on them than almost anything else.
You know, I mean, if you talk about reducing their numbers to anybody or disarming,
the first thing we say to you is you have no and you have no right to deny future generations of security that you have enjoyed from these weapons.
So the weapons cannot pay you in now.
I think the point is that that's not the case in other areas, which are areas of threat and risk.
And you yourself identified one climate change, but that's not the only one.
So, you know, we are, for example, you know, going to convene COP26 for Goodell in Glasgow in some months to come.
So this is a world conference which we have a common objective, you know,
and we will seek to get the world to buy into that common objective and to agree a road map to it where we would mean open all of this.
And that's not the only thing, you know,
we operate across all of these bodies with countries that we feel we need to deter with nuclear weapons on other areas of terrorism.
We've done it in relation to the pandemic risk. So we all have to do this.
The question the question is why will we not do it for the shared objectives the official nuclear weapon states say they have,
which is ridding the world of these nuclear weapons, and that is because of the nature of the weapons, right?
And as much as anything else once you have them, and also because we've allowed them to elevate countries into a position of.
Particular power and a very small number of people who are very unwilling to give that up.
So it is, you know, is wrong to call these five nuclear weapons states to be five.
Is not the nuclear weapons that qualify them to that, we believe, but actually just may be.
That's why we have the and the ah, the p-, you know, so.
And we know how to do that and it's relatively simple, which is you embark upon a dialogue of common interests.
And we do that in many areas of international relations.
For particular purposes, so it's not as if we can't do it and we can do it to affect,
you know, you can you can get an American president to get, you know,
to get the leader of China to agree in a particular area on something or to get the Russians to go off,
to get the Brits can get other people to do it. We can even get India and Pakistan on occasions to do it with us.
But in these weapons, they have this sort of power of their own.
Somehow that prevents us from doing that and why we don't just do what we can do.
You know, we come together and look for issues of common interest in terms of our security and stuff to work our way through this.
And we we have done that. We have made the progress that Nick suggests that we have, which is really about, you know,
all of these and all of these successes in terms of disarmament and arms control, KTB, NPT, all the rest of them.
He he he indicated, with one or two exceptions, have involved nuclear weapons states and in some occasions of being led by nuclear weapon states.
So it's not it's not impossible to do. We just need to be a means to it and we need to own the objectives politically.
We see that we subscribe to in relation to these weapons systems.
We can't do that. And Nick's analysis of this when he shared with us may be the right reasons for it.
I'm not sure. But, you know, we just need to, you know,
we need to mobilise people to start asking these people who make these decisions about these inconsistencies,
explain them to me, you know, I mean, are you taking us in this?
And the weapons not only are a determinant of the policy, but they generate this threat intermingled with these new technologies.
They generate this, which some of these people don't even understand, we have people, you know, raising artificial intelligence and programmes.
They do not themselves understand. And then we intermingle them with the command and control of these weapons.
Well, of course, that's absolutely true. And we now have a situation where the artificial intelligence is writing its own
programmes at which the people who set them up in the first place don't understand.
So this is absolutely true, and I'm pretty terrifying.
And there are a couple of things that have been flagged up in the trap if I could just refer to them before I come back to Nick.
The first one is picking up on on on Beck's comments. But also referring to what you just mentioned,
as if that is the prospect of nuclear disarmament for the UK alone would probably mean the UK losing its U.N. Security Council seat.
I might say that whether or not that's true, there's another perhaps other question about whether or not if Scotland and Northern Ireland leave,
whether England on its own can return retain a U.N. Security Council seat.
But that's a whole other debate, though not one that's irrelevant to Dasa and myself given where we come from,
those that wanted the link to that list lifting up folk book.
Nic has kindly put it up. That's indefensible weapons published in 1991, and I think you'd be able to get it on on Amazon,
but refer yourself there to the chart and you'll see the the reference evidence
asked Are we allowed to reach out to the panellist via email after the event?
I'm sure that the answer to that is yes. Does I see a thumbs up from Naga?
You content to be contacted as? Yes, absolutely.
So that's there's not a there's not an issue there. And.
We're going to come shortly to some of the other questions that have been raised on me today, but I want to come back to nick about about what?
Well, I flagged up on this question of the nuclear versus anti-nuclear narrative and whether
or not we can't move to something that goes beyond oppositional kind of way of nick.
I'll tell you your point, John, and yeah, apologies if I sort of misrepresented in my own mind the basis of the question that you were asking, but.
I mean, I think this is, as I said in my remarks, I think fundamentally nuclear deterrence is an ideology that needs dismantling.
If we if we're going to get towards a nuclear weapon free world, I mean,
that's that just seems like a part of the definition of the process to get to a nuclear weapons free world.
Nuclear deterrence as an ideology will need dismantling and with it, of course, the material infrastructure infrastructure of that.
But in terms of kind of what's the alternative then?
Well, in the nuclear field specifically, you know, we've had countless blue plausible blueprints about what we might do differently.
And we've obviously been doing a lot of this over over the last sort of four or five decades, you know, arms control itself.
So that doesn't undermine the logic of nuclear deterrence. It certainly constrains it.
Non-Proliferation verification, the plans for actual nuclear disarmament that have been developed by a numerous international commissions and so on.
The alternatives are there in the nuclear field, but I don't think that's quite what you're you're asking.
I think you're asking more about how how can we? I don't know.
I think I think you're asking of, correct me if I'm wrong kind of what?
What should then give it, given that we're not going to eliminate human conflict conflict between states,
if we assume that we're going to still be living in a state system where we're adversarial
relations and competition and so on and and conflict isn't going to go away then is that is
the question you're asking kind of what should then replace nuclear weapons that some something
needs to hold in check the escalation of violent conflict up to kind of All-Out War?
I'm not sure. I mean, if if it is, then I think a perfectly legitimate response to that,
to the question of what could or should replace nuclear deterrence is nothing.
I think I think that traditional foreign and defence policy approach approaches to to dealing with crisis crisis mitigation, crisis management,
take over and prioritise the practises of conflict resolution that have developed significantly over the post-Cold War period.
I mean, there's tons of stuff to draw on. I mean, I mean,
a lot of the nuclear confrontations at areas in world politics where there is serious concern are around managing and resolving border disputes.
Yeah. You know, and then there's a lot of work that has been put in in different contexts over time to resolve seemingly intractable border disputes.
There are reconciliation processes, community level dialogues across divides, especially those developed by women and mothers,
processes of demilitarisation, shuttle diplomacy, mediation, supporting organisations like the OSCE.
We see things like conflict taskforces and contact groups to manage and prevent, perhaps even transform violent conflict.
So there are lots of choices about what we can do rather than rely on nuclear deterrence,
which is, you know, deeply a deeply problematic system to lot to rely on indefinitely.
But but these are choices that states have to make to engage in and manage
conflict using this range of tools as opposed to the tool of nuclear deterrence.
And I think, as Das said, relying on nuclear deterrence in many ways, you know, the logic of the enemy ultimately deserving of nuclear annihilation,
I think inhibits the the the turn to these other ways of a very established ways of managing and transforming violent conflict.
Now are any of these, you know, provably going to work in every case?
Of course not. But then is nuclear deterrence provably going to work in every case?
Of course not. So we do come back to judgements on balances of of risk and probability.
But I think given the the, you know,
the seriousness of the consequences of certainly a large scale nuclear war which would put at risk 10000 years of human civilisation.
And I think we need to be asking the questions around the necessity and the legitimacy of basing a system of world
security on on nuclear deterrence and the threat of nuclear war is that gets more to where you are coming from,
John or not. I think we could.
The three of us have a really interesting and stimulating further conversation with just the three of us,
and I really hope that we get the chance to do that,
preferably over a glass of wine, because I do think that there are some quite fundamentally important issues here.
And you know, there is a sense in which we are actually in the third global conflict right now in cyberspace.
If what is going on in cyber was going on in land, sea, air or in space, it would already be regarded as a global company.
But like some of the other things that Des was mentioning, 90 percent of the population aren't aware of what is actually happening at the moment.
And of course, it has the crossover that you've mentioned two to nuclear with the question of the control of nuclear with artificial intelligence.
But I would like to try to bring in some of the the questions that have been posed by other colleagues on the call.
There are a number of what I'm going to do is pick up two or three of them and ask you what you would like to pick up on in our last moments.
Nick, you talked about the nuclear question being addressed in a broader cultural context.
And the question is, will the argument be most effective if we frame it explicitly in terms of the existential risks,
including the risks of nuclear itself or in terms of this wider cultural question?
Tony Otis, as I said, can we comment on the extent to which nuclear weapons are seen as a symbol as symbolic of national identity?
I think that something actually that you've already some extent attracted to ask does one question, which I think really important aspect to Crossley.
And you mentioned at the start of your intervention. You're absolutely right, Nick.
We assume rationality, she says. But should we consider the possibility of subversion coupled with radical ideology?
I think the broader question is really that she's referring to it, which pointed out it is that thinking that people and countries act in an entirely
rational self-interest basis is a misunderstanding of the nature of humanity.
We are not purely rational. So there are a few a few questions which might perhaps pick up just a minute or two.
We're coming to the end of the session, which if you would like to, to kick off first.
Nic, would you like to pick up for for a minute or two and then go come to desk for the last minute?
Yeah, we'll all be done. And thanks, thanks for the questions from the audience as well.
In terms of I mean, the rationality question is is a furrow that has been well and truly ploughed in in the akina of nuclear deterrence.
Thinking and its rationality when it comes to nuclear weapons is a deeply problematic concept.
But, you know, even if we just kind of just look at it as you were suggesting, John, look at how this applies to kind of human beings.
I mean, when we look at human beings who rise to positions of authority in nuclear armed states,
as does suggested, where you have, you know, it's it's the divine power of kings returned in the nuclear age.
When you think of the the consolidation of the power to annihilate societies in the hands of a single individual.
And then we know from lots of good empirical research that people in positions of
authority are capable of extraordinary miscalculations of extraordinary fanaticism.
And and research in psychology and political psychology shows us that, you know, we all have preferences for simplifying that.
We're pretty averse to things that are dissonant and ambiguous and that we are not intuitively good at estimating probabilities,
including the probability of violent conflicts escalating out of all control pretty rapidly up to nuclear war.
And that is just profoundly concerning. I find that profoundly concerning.
And you know, we can we can think, well, the risks of this happening are very, very low.
But the consequences are, you know, supremely high.
So how much of a risk do we want to take given what was understood to be at stake in the late 40s and 50s?
And given what we understand to be at stake now, compounded by other major challenges that we're facing that require collective transnational work,
if we're going to have any hope of dealing with them, not least the overlapping climate crises,
then I think it becomes very problematic to put all your bets on on nuclear deterrent for now and for the long term, an on on on national identity.
I mean, certainly in the UK of our main political parties, the Conservatives, but also Labour have routinely wrapped Trident and before it,
Polaris in the flag and and framed the sort of state that they imagine the
UK to be on the world stage as being quintessentially a nuclear armed state.
And that is part of the particular culture of nuclear ism or nuclear nationalism in the UK.
That will need to be, as I said before, kind of disrupted, destabilised and picked and separated.
Thanks very much indeed, Tess, if we can finally come to you. Thank you, John.
So, I mean, I think the the the integrated review actually in many ways is is explains well,
the sort of contested environment the modern international environment is,
and it makes the point that you make of, you know, the green zone and warranty green zone and an ability to be able to deal with alone.
And I mean, it's another global problem that we will need to work with together.
But it seems to me interesting that you know that that that that very rational and helpful explanation,
which is not comprehensive, but you couldn't be comprehensive without requiring people to reach for the rest of their lives.
And, you know, identify identifies this cybersecurity and other challenges that you mentioned.
But but somehow seems to think that the answer lies in nuclear weapons.
You know, when there is no evidence to suggest that those when you know, secondly,
there is nobody you know who understands the rules that do apply to nuclear weapons.
It thinks that that that that sort of response would be proportionate.
And actually, there's nobody believes we would do it.
You know, so and that sort of decision, they undermine the whole, you know, the whole policy of the canons by using,
you know, the weapon system to declare something which it won't deter and and nobody believes it.
You know, so. And you know, I think that's another outstandingly good example of the point that was making,
which is the existence of these weapons creates a mindset. They have to be useful.
You know, we have to and and the dialogue has one assessment of a clear and present danger and that it surprisingly to me,
says expressly and one sentence that the government assesses that there will be a successful CBRE terrorist event in the United Kingdom before 2030.
So, you know, we expect that for some of these materials, you know, the use of Western weaponry in two cases of completely banned in any other case,
you know, is a consequence of nuclear and nuclear itself will get into the hands of a terrorist can be used now.
The problem there is terrorism, not these weapons systems. And there's no amount of deterrence is going to stop that from happening.
You know, so it seems to me to be an example of, you know, a very rational, I think, analysis of what the real problems are they need for some reason,
we meet this jump into the space of nuclear deterrence for an answer to it because
we don't have capabilities that we can see what would stop it from happening.
So I mean, I know the broader the broader cultural context, but just bring it to a, you know, I mean,
I agree that we should we should look at these things together because they are all interrelated.
But Nick made a very strong argument for a justice argument about this.
There is a justice argument that we need to get up and running and looking at the
other questions of the really interesting question of the development deployment.
Seventy six one is a warhead. I'm personally not convinced that that will ever be built because I'm not sure the Americans
will do the necessary that we need for it to be built because we can't we can't develop.
A German withdrawal is is asked from nuclear sharing.
I mean, the Germans have been in this situation before and not been able to see this through.
But you can still be a neutral and not be in the nuclear sharing position of and, you know,
the country I live in Scotland and independence wants to be, you know, a non-nuclear member of NATO.
If that is possible, I don't think it necessarily is. But but but it wants to be.
And I mean, somebody asked the question of Kazakhstan denuclearising, I think we should look at what kind of extent it has done.
And denuclearising Kazakhstan was to a large degree denuclearised because these weapons really belong to Russia,
and they wanted them back and the Americans wanted to get them back there because
Kazakhstan couldn't look after them because Eckstine is is developed this into,
I think, an admirable position in the world.
But that's because of the inexperience of semi-private times and the damage that testing these weapons is done to the people.
So are know there are very strong with people that are very strong advocates for some of the
things that we are expressing concerns about because they have suffered from them to some degree.
Thank you very much indeed and and thank you to Nick as well.
You've really done a tremendous job in starting off the day newly expects that we are going to solve this problem in today's conference,
much less in the introductory panel. But I think we have succeeded in flagging up some of the important questions,
and I'm extremely grateful to both of you for all the work of preparation and
presentation and indeed to those who have contributed in the shop and in the Q&A.
And hopefully we've been able to pick up some of those things.
And you saw both Nick and Antares are happy to continue the conversation by email subsequently to today.
Thank you very much indeed. Let me take you back to this.