Gordon Brown, the incoming British prime minister, is to put a new focus on the need to secure global nuclear disarmament, amid signs that he is determined to make the issue a strong foreign policy priority.
In a speech in Washington, Margaret Beckett, the UK foreign secretary, will on Monday spell out details of how Britain wants to become a “disarmament laboratory”, unveiling concrete steps to champion multilateral nuclear reductions.
Mrs Beckett, who has been foreign secretary for little more than a year, might lose her post when Mr Brown unveils his government line-up on Thursday. However, senior British diplomats say she has discussed Monday’s disarmament speech at length with Mr Brown.
Diplomats say the speech – two days before Mr Brown takes over as premier – reflects the extent to which he wants the goal of multilateral disarmament to be a foreign policy priority.
He this year firmly backed the retention of Britain’s Trident nuclear weapons programme, saying the UK needed a deterrent against states such as Iran.
However, Mrs Beckett will argue on Monday that “acknowledging that the conditions for disarmament do not exist today does not mean resigning ourselves to the idea that they can never be abolished in the future”.
She will say: “What we need is both a vision: a scenario for a world free of nuclear weapons; and action: progressive steps to reduce warhead numbers and to limit the role of nuclear weapons in security policy.”
The two strands were separate but mutually reinforcing – both necessary but “at the moment too weak”.
Mrs Beckett sees the expiry in 2009 of the Start disarmament treaty between the US and Russia as a spur to action, raising questions of how a new framework for nuclear weapons cuts can be moved to a multipolar world. But she will also say that the UK wants to take specific steps to boost its own expertise in this area.
Britain looks likely to back studies by the International Institute of Strategic Studies, a security think-tank, to help determine the requirements for the eventual elimination of all nuclear arms. The IISS’s research will analyse what a commitment to a world free of atomic weapons might mean in practice – such as the kinds of weapons and facilities that would have to be abolished.
