Nuclear Weapons Expenditure And The Peace Dividend

EDM number 2445 in 1992-93, proposed by Llew Smith on 18/10/1993.

That this House welcomes the overwhelming vote at the Labour Party conference calling for United Kingdom defence spending to be reduced to the average level of other West European countries, allied to constructive plans for defence diversification, arms conversion and the transfer of the savings made to economic and social priorities by investment in job creation and economic development and the restructuring of Britain's crumbling infrastructure; recognises the importance of the call for making retraining of the defence sector workforce a priority; applauds the conference majority decision calling for the immediate scrapping of the Trident submarine and weapons programme as an essential step towards the elimination of nuclear weapons worldwide; believes that in rejecting Trident the United Kingdom can demonstrate genuine support for strengthening the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and bolster the consolidation of a comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; further believes that the lifetime costs of Trident deployment will be at least ú33 billion when re-fit, replacement and decommissioning are included and that it is the hidden extra costs of continuing the United Kingdom nuclear weapons programme that is bound to reduce drastically the possibility of a positive peace dividend; and therefore calls upon Her Majesty's Government to support the cancellation of the Trident programme and to plan the investment of resources saved into job creation and industrial innovation in the civil economy.

This motion has been signed by a total of 38 MPs.