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t h e u n i t e d k i n g d o m’ s n u c l e a r d e t e r r e n t（t h e u n i t e d k i n g d o m s n u c l e d e t e r r e n t）.doc

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“THE UNITED KINGDOM’S NUCLEAR DETERRENT IN THE 21ST CENTURY” SPEECH BY THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR DEFENCE KING’S COLLEGE LONDON 25 January 2007 I am pleased to be giving this speech here at King’s – the venue of the last major speech on this subject by any of my predecessors in this job, Malcolm Rifkind back in 1993. I re-read that speech in preparation for today, and I was struck by the continuity of approach. No doubt some will see that as evidence of inflexibility in the face of a changing world. I see it differently. By necessity this is an area of our security policy that spans the decades. We have had a nuclear deterrent for fifty years; in taking the decision we face now, whether to maintain it through the 2020s and beyond, we have to look ahead another fifty. There is merit in consistency – and I hope I will persuade you of that today. But first, since there is still a lively debate over whether we really do need to take this decision now, I want to tackle this aspect to begin with. The need for a decision is driven by the lifespan of the submarines. Submarines have been the basis of our deterrent since the late 1960s – and the sole basis since 1998, when we scrapped the WE177 free fall bomb, thereby becoming the only recognised nuclear state to restrict ourselves to a single weapon system. This was consistent with our general approach, of reducing our nuclear weapons to the minimum necessary. But we were only able to do it because of our confidence in the submarine based system – confidence earned over long experience. This year will see the Royal Navys 300th deterrent patrol. For almost forty years, there has been a Royal Navy deterrent submarine continuously on patrol somewhere in the world – and not once in all that time have they been detected. Some people argue that this cannot last – that technology will somehow render the oceans transparent. We do not believe this is remotely likely, any more likely than the last time this prediction was