Like the Sword of Damocles, nuclear destruction has hung
over the world since the mid-1940s.
But a nuclear conflict never happened. Why not?
It’s dumb luck that we haven't had a nuclear catastrophe
in the last 65 years since the Second World War.
Nothing to do with good leadership or the inherent stability
of the nuclear armaments system. It's sheer dumb luck.
We got lucky, pretty much, for 65 years and didn't have a nuclear war.
It's unreasonable to think that the luck will continue forever.
Stories of near nuclear disaster during the Cold War are easy to find.
My favourite one dates from the Cuban Missile period
when we now know that there were nuclear weapons on Cuban soil
and on Soviet submarines in the area,
not just the one that was coming in by ship that was blockaded.
One of the incidents was that during the course of this naval blockade
the US was dropping depth charges just to indicate
that it wasn't to be fooled with, not intending to destroy anything,
and one of those knocked out
the communications in a Soviet submarine,
and the protocols said that when submarines lost communication
and didn't know if the war was on,
was that the decision as to whether to fire their nuclear weapons
was left to a vote of the three senior personnel on the submarine.
It went to a vote whether they would fire their nuclear-tipped torpedo,
and by 2 to 1 the decision was that they wouldn't.
We came within the vote of one Russian sailor of World War Three.
During the Cold War a deterrent was seen as being in the national interest.
Now, some see the reverse as being true.
We are going to be the one who is attacked
by terrorists or revolutionary states.
So we’re better off trying to mobilise everybody
to make these weapons anathema, and that's a basic national interest.
Whatever utility nuclear weapons might have had,
as a stabilising force during the Cold War years,
in the 21st-century, the retention by anybody of nuclear weapons
is causing far more trouble than it's worth.
Nuclear weapons serve primarily as a deterrent,
but apart from that how useful and safe are they?
The military around the world don't like them,
because they take money from other things that they could have,
and they don't think they can use them.
So, they are pretty useless, and yet they threaten us all.
We still have 2000 weapons on very high alert.
We have command and control systems
that are not that much better than they were during the Cold War,
and in some countries not good at all, that now have nuclear weapons.
And we have the prospect of much more sophisticated cyber attack.
Misinformation going into systems, generating confusion,
anxiety, possible machine and human error.
The US and Russia are part of a coalition
insisting that the Islamic Republic of Iran face consequences...
This changing view has led to new attitudes
on both disarmament and proliferation.
I don't think the problem is worse than it was at other times.
It's that we have less utility for nuclear weapons.
So we feel less inclined to defend nuclear weapons
and find them more problematic.
So when someone else wants them, it seems a much worse thing.
The two leading nuclear weapons states
have committed themselves to moving down the path towards zero.
You know the steps may be of a halting nature
and not particularly large steps,
but the direction is a positive one.
And so we reach 2010. With such a spotlight on nuclear issues,
will it be a key year in the nuclear odyssey?
When you add together the things that are on the table,
the two conferences, the summit on nuclear security
and the review conference in May, then there are other issues as well,
including the big one of Iran.
If we can get through the year with net positives on most fronts,
the momentum can be sustained.
They are important, the nuclear posture review in the US is important,
we have had one in Russia already.
But I don't think it's going to be a sort of crucial year.
The world knows that the administration in Washington
would like to have disarmament
and there would be a certain forgiveness about that.
So there would be more like a time out now.
Regardless of progress made in 2010
some nuclear threats may remain completely unpredictable.
I worry about India and Pakistan in the sense that if and when
there is another Mumbai attack, there's a big terrorist attack on India,
the Indians have said they won’t be restrained
and will teach Pakistan a lesson for supporting terrorist organisations.
Pakistan says: We’ve listened to the US,
we've moved our forces to fight in Afghanistan.
We're vulnerable to India.
So if India tries to teach us a lesson, we will use nuclear weapons.
Given that the probability of a terrorist attack in India is much higher
than Al Qaeda acquiring nuclear weapons,
the nuclear threat I worry about is a conflict between India and Pakistan
that neither one of them wants.