Nuclear weapons have become a top election issue following a series of attacks on the resurgent Liberal Democrats’ policy on the Trident nuclear weapons system.

The party’s leader Nick Clegg has been criticised by the Labour and Conservative leaders for opposing a ‘like-for-like’ Trident. At the same time, he has been attacked by the Greens, Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party (SNP) for refusing to rule out nuclear weapons altogether.
While the Liberal Democrats say that they would keep their options open on nuclear arms, party leader Nick Clegg has focused on the possibility of replacing Trident with an alternative, cheaper nuclear weapons system.

But when questioned by the Friend in London on Monday, senior Liberal Democrat Simon Hughes chose a different emphasis. He said that it was ‘absolutely possible’ that if the party were in power they would choose the option of ‘no nuclear weapons at all’.
‘We haven’t made that decision’, he said, explaining that the party would ‘wait until the [international] disarmament talks’ in May.

But the Green Party suggested that Hughes’ comments appear to deviate from Nick Clegg’s position. In a television interview on Sunday, Clegg said that the Liberal Democrats ‘are not suggesting that we scrap the nuclear deterrent’, adding, ‘Do not vote for the Liberal Democrats if you think we’re advocating immediate unilateral nuclear disarmament. We’re not.’

Martin Whiteside, Green candidate for Stroud, and a Quaker at Nailsworth Meeting, told the Friend that ‘hearing Nick Clegg speak… the Liberal Democrats seem to be open to replacing Trident with other nuclear systems’.

But Lucy Care, Liberal Democrat candidate for Derby North, a Quaker at Derby Meeting, said that she did not think that Hughes and Clegg had contradicted each other. She said the Liberal Democrats were agreed on conducting a full defence review, which would keep the options open. She added that they were a democratic party in which ‘policy can evolve honestly’.
Trident renewal has been backed by both prime minister Gordon Brown and the Conservative opposition, although the cabinet is reported to be split on the issue. Trident has been condemned by a range of faith groups, charities, NGOs and trades unions. Christian leaders in Scotland issued a joint condemnation of nuclear weapons at the beginning of the general election campaign.

Quaker Peace & Social Witness’s peace and disarmament programme manager Sam Walton said: ‘Nick Clegg may be commended for raising Trident as an election issue, especially given the reticence from the Labour and Conservative parties to support alternatives to a like-for-like replacement of Trident’. But he urged the Liberal Democrats to ‘go further, like Plaid Cymru, the SNP and the Green Party and say they will scrap Britain’s nuclear weapons altogether’.

The debate on nuclear arms hotted up last week after former generals signed a letter to The Times calling for Trident to be included in the defence review planned by all parties for after the election. They said they wanted a real debate on the question of renewal.

Sam Walton described the generals’ concerns as ‘all valid’, especially given the recent agreement between the US and Russia to reduce their warheads and the upcoming nuclear non-proliferation summit in May. But he added: ‘Unfortunately the generals still remain blinkered by the paradigm of military security’.

Meanwhile, energy and climate change secretary Ed Miliband was reluctant to answer the Friend’s questions when asked why the government puts so much funding into research and development (R&D) in the arms industry, when the money and skills involved could be used to tackle climate change.

He insisted that ‘decisions have to be made on defence’ but that the government is increasing funding for projects involving environmental technology. In response, the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) pointed out that in 2007, the government had spent £42million on R&D for renewable energy, but £2,598 million on R&D for the arms industry.