Nuclear Disarmament Commitments And Trident Renewal

EDM number 1127 in 2006-07, proposed by Dai Davies on 14/03/2007.

That this House recalls that when the then United Kingdom Labour Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, the right hon. Fred (later Lord) Mulley, addressed the Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee (ENDC) in Geneva, on 23rd January 1968, explaining why nations should sign up to the newly negotiated Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), he said: `My Government accepts the obligation to participate fully in the [nuclear disarmament] negotiations required by [NPT] Article 6 and it is our desire that these negotiations should begin as soon as possible and should produce speedy and successful results. There is no excuse now for allowing a long delay to follow the signing of this Treaty'; contrasts this commitment to disarmament with the statement made by Mr Mulley's modern day counterpart, the hon. Member for Pontypridd, who told the successor to the ENDC, the Committee on Disarmament, on 22nd February 2007 that the United Kingdom needed to ensure that it had the capability in 17 years' time to retain a submarine-based deterrent, and that the UK Government did not believe that the circumstances currently existed for the safety of the country for it to choose unilaterally to renounce its nuclear weapons; notes that the NPT does not require unilateral nuclear disarmament, but does require the entering of the UK nuclear weapons of mass destruction into multilateral nuclear negotiations; and condemns the Government, 39 years after making such strong public pledges to negotiate nuclear disarmament, for such a flagrant refusal to meet the United Kingdom's NPT commitments.

This motion has been signed by a total of 23 MPs.