Senior Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes has said that his party may choose to decommission all the UK government’s nuclear weapons if they take power. His comments display a different emphasis to party leader Nick Clegg’s focus on replacing the Trident nuclear weapons system with a cheaper set of nuclear arms.

Speaking to the Friend this morning, Simon Hughes said that it was ‘absolutely possible’ that a Liberal Democrat government could choose the option of ‘no nuclear weapons at all’. Simon Hughes’ comments follow a weekend that has seen the Liberal Democrats under attack from Plaid Cymru, the Scottish National Party and the Greens for their implication that they would replace Trident with a different, cheaper nuclear system.

A Green Party spokesperson said, ‘The Liberal Democrats are not anti-nuclear, just anti-Trident’.

Earlier, in the televised leaders’ debates, Nick Clegg was attacked by both his Labour and Conservative opponents for his opposition to Trident. It seems that Nick Clegg’s ‘middle-of-the-road’ position has left him vulnerable to attack on both flanks.

But when questioned by the Friend after the ‘Ask the Climate Question’ hustings event in London today, Simon Hughes emphasised that while his party’s manifesto rules out replacing Trident with a like-for-like system, it otherwise leaves the options open.

‘We haven’t made that decision’, he added, explaining that the party would ‘wait until the [international] disarmament talks’ in May.

He said ‘Let’s hope that by 2015 we won’t need nuclear weapons at all’.

Simon Hughes, who is on the left of the party, has a more firmly anti-nuclear background than Clegg. It remains to be seen whether the Liberal Democrat leader will back up Hughes’ approach or try to shift the emphasis back to replacing Trident with a different nuclear system.