Brown: We’ll cut nuclear weapons when Iran opens up
By Alice Cannet
The government is prepared to cut Britain’s nuclear arsenal in return for Iran’s promise to scrap its nuclear weapon plans, Gordon Brown announced yesterday.
The prime minister said that global non-proliferation action will be taken when countries like Iran and Korea abandon their plans to build nuclear weapons.
“What you need is collective action by the nuclear weapons powers to say that we are prepared to reduce our nuclear weapons but we need assurances also that other countries will not proliferate them,” he said.
Speaking at the G8, the prime minister said the government would retain its Trident plans and would not scrap the160-warhead Trident arsenal or submarines used as platform for the missiles.
Mr Brown said that the UK should act not unilaterally but together with other countries to cut their arsenal and prevent proliferation of nuclear weapons by other countries.
“Iran is attempting to develop a nuclear weapon, Korea is attempting to develop a nuclear weapon,” he told reporters at the summit in Italy.
“We’ve got to show we can deal with this by collective action and I think unilateral action by the United Kingdom would not be seen as the best way forward.
The G8 leaders agreed to US president Barack Obama’s proposal for a nuclear security summit held in Washington next spring to prepare for the review of the Non Proliferation Treaty.
In a speech in March, the prime minister said the government would try to make further cuts to its nuclear warheads, which had been halved since 1997, as part of global deals.
Yesterday, Mr Brown said Britain’s stockpile would not be reduced unilaterally and argued for a better weapons inspection regime as an incentive.
“We need a tougher regime so the onus will be on the countries that do not have nuclear weapons to prove this,” he said.
“One of the problems with Iran is the question of whether you can prove or not that they have nuclear weapons.”
He continued: “If there is an international agreement that requires all countries to be open with the rest of the world then Iran would have to prove to us that it did not have nuclear weapons, rather than us to prove they were developing nuclear weapons.”
In the next few days, Mr Brown will set out recommendations for a framework for a global deal which will assist non-nuclear states to develop civil atomic power provided they commit to non-proliferation.
