At the Lib Dem Spring Conference, we debated a motion on “The UK’s Nuclear Deterrent“. As ever, the issue was debated hotly with passionate contributions from many members, including me. The full debate can be seen on the Liberal Democrat YouTube channel here, starting at 2:29:00 with my speech at 2:50:00. The Amendment I refer to can be seen on Page 8 of the Conference Daily.

Here is the text of my speech, as I wrote it which is slightly different to how I delivered it:

Conference,

So here we are again, discussing Nuclear Weapons and the spending of billions we don’t have (or there are better uses for) to replace our out of date Trident missiles & their out of date submarines used to not deliver them.

Let’s not delude ourselves, the UKs few nuclear weapons will not deter a dictator who doesn’t care about his citizens, who could obliterate much of the UK almost before our missiles were even launched if they so desire.

They do not deter terrorist attacking the UK with a dirty bomb because who would we fire them at?

They will not deter a conventional weapons attack as we have “No First Strike” rule for nuclear weapons.

The only case for keeping them was that they could be used as part of a mutual disarmament program with USSR / Russia.  Now that there are no such programs, and indeed it looks very unlikely there will be for the foreseeable future, even that case has disappeared.

Unless you are going to have nuclear arsenals on the scale of Russia, China or USA, there is no point having any.  Our potential enemies won’t be scare of the few we have & keeping them only runs the risk of a miscalculation leading to launching them in error, triggering a nuclear holocaust.

Meanwhile our conventional forces have been “hollowed out”. We have too few soldiers, too few ships, too few planes.  Spending money here would be a real deterrent to potential enemies.  It would also allow us enough manpower to deploy our forces in peacekeeping & humanitarian operations around the globe.  It would allow us to provide work here in the UK building the ships, the planes, the kit for these forces.

Conference, please have the courage to say no to new nuclear weapons and support Keith’s excellent amendment or, if it isn’t accepted, against this motion.