London, July 10: British Prime Minister Gordon Brown says his country will not unilaterally reduce its nuclear weapon cache unless other countries engage in disarmament.
“Unilateral action by the United Kingdom would not be seen as the best way,” the British premier said in Italy on Thursday.
Brown told journalists present at the G8 summit in the quake-stricken city of L’Aquila that his country will not negotiate its 160 strategic nuclear warheads, Trident missiles capable of launch from nuclear submarines, should other countries continue their pursuit of nuclear weapons.
He stressed that London would not “revisit the decision to press ahead with a replacement for the Trident nuclear weapons system.”
“What we 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,” the premier added.
Brown said, however, that the island nation could shrink its nuclear stockpile only after other countries manage to prove that they were not after developing nuclear weapons.
“We need a tougher regime so the onus will be on the countries that do not have nuclear weapons to prove this,” he said without elaborating how it is possible for the countries to prove they are not intended to develop nuclear weapons.
His comments come after US President Barack Obama called for an autumnal G8 summit in Washington in a bid to discuss security issues surrounding fissile material usage ahead of a review of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Earlier this year, Brown had said Britain’s next generation of nuclear arms could be on the table as part of multilateral arms reduction negotiations. Yet he failed to elaborate on the scale of arms reductions for which he expressed readiness.
Furthermore, the British PM also said that his cabinet had no plans to replace the country’s flotilla of ballistic submarines maintained for ‘deterrent’ purposes.
The US, UK, Russia, France and China are the signatories of the NPT treaty with the largest caches of nuclear munitions in the world.
—–Agencies