Nuclear talks in Washington

By David Lidington MP, Shadow Foreign Minister.

I am in Washington DC for meetings with the US Administration and congressional leaders about nuclear proliferation and the review of US nuclear doctrine initiated by President Obama.

I'm the Conservative member of a small cross-party delegation that includes Des Browne for Labour and Lord Hannay for the cross-benchers. The nuclear issue will present a major and immediate challenge to whoever forms the next British government. Our General Election is likely to take place at the same time as the opening of a critically important review conference on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that begins in May 2010.

The risks of nuclear proliferation are already great and continue to grow. Knowledge of nuclear technology is no longer confined to a handful of developed countries. It is global. Fears of climate change and of high oil and gas prices are driving more countries to develop civil nuclear power, adding to the demand for and the stocks of material that could be used for weapons. And it’s not just North Korea or Iran that we have to fear. The worst nightmare is of terrorist groups being able to get their hands on the material and the know-how to make a crude but devastating nuclear device.

There is a great deal of common ground between the political parties in Britain on this issue. In the Conservative Party, we have proposed a number of objectives for next year’s conference.

• Strengthening the power of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to police the rules of the NPT, by requiring all signatories to adopt the Additional Protocol that requires more information to be shared and permits unannounced inspections.
• Agreeing that a country breaching its NPT obligations or threatening to abandon the Treaty should face immediate sanction from the Security Council.
• Bringing the three nuclear powers that have not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty (India, Pakistan
and Israel) into the framework of inspections and controls.
• Establishing international control over the nuclear fuel cycle, perhaps through a UN or IAEA controlled bank of enriched nuclear material, so that emerging economies can be assured of access to what they need for civil nuclear power without having to set up their own enrichment facilities.
• Stronger international rules on the physical security and transport of nuclear materials.

We also want to see more determined and co-ordinated action to deter Iran from seeking a nuclear weapons capability and to persuade North Korea to dismantle its weapons programme. Such action needs to involve diplomacy, economic and financial sanctions and to be successful it will need a firm lead from the United States and the EU and support from Russia and China. That won’t be easy to get, but what is at stake is so important that Britain needs to make this one of its top foreign policy priorities.