Moral and human dignity is lost by the UK so long as it has nuclear weapons, said the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, from Nagasaki last week.Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the United Nations he was willing to cut the UK’s fleet of Trident nuclear missile-carrying submarines from four to three, however Downing Street officials insisted that the UK must keep its nuclear threat.
Mr Brown described his move as a “grand global bargain between nuclear weapon and non nuclear weapons states”.
Britain’s nuclear capability would not be notably affected by the change, with one of the four submarines already serving as a spare.
The Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, Edward Davey, said: “Once again, Gordon Brown is tinkering around the edges rather than taking the radical action we need to see. It is no longer possible to justify replacing one obsolete expensive cold war nuclear system with another.”
Dr Williams said: “To plan a strategy around such weapons is to be defeated by them.”
The Archbishop quoted Ronald Knox in 1945 who described the atomic bomb as “an attack on the central virtues of Christian existence”.
Dr Williams said: “That attack will continue so long as weapons of mass destruction like nuclear armaments are used as threats in international conflict,”
“To threaten such an outrage against humanity and its world is to begin to lose one’s moral and human dignity. To work for a world free from nuclear arms is to work for the sake of that moral and human dignity.”
Mr Brown said: “This is exactly what the Non-Proliferation Treaty intended. In line with maintaining our nuclear deterrent I have asked our national security committee to report to me on the potential future reduction of our nuclear weapon submarines from four to three.”
The Archbishop sent out a rallying call for diplomats to remain positive about the possibility of achieving total nuclear disarmament.
He said: “However precisely we seek to make real the hope of a world without nuclear arms, we should not lose sight of the need to make real moral choices about them. Even a small step is an act of witness.”
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