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Almost the mildest remark that Sue Miller makes about nuclear weapons is also the scariest: “The last people to take a big interest in any of this were Gordon Brown and Margaret Beckett.” Those people seem such a long way away – Brown, of course, still campaigns valiantly against poverty, and Beckett is a working baroness, but as voices against the global buildup of nuclear arms, theirs are so historical as to be almost nostalgic.
Yet the Doomsday Clock, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ symbolic representation of how near the world is to destroying itself, has never been closer to midnight than it is now: 85 seconds (and this was prior to the current war in Iran). Russia has been making thinly veiled threats of “tactical” use since its invasion of Ukraine, while its drone incursions into Nato nations have “heightened European threat perceptions” (as the bulletin puts it), without those perceptions driving anyone’s thoughts towards nuclear de-escalation, let alone disarmament. Meanwhile, non-nuclear European nations are talking about developing “nuclear latency” – building the ability to develop nuclear capacity at speed.
Nuclear nations, of which there are nine, are geared towards modernisation, not risk reduction. The majority (by a whisker) are in the P5, nations committed, at least on paper, to non-proliferation – that’s China, the UK, Russia, the US and France. “Now there is talk of nuclear weapons in space, hypersonic technology,” Lady Miller says, speaking to me from Totnes in Devon. The Lib Dem peer, 72, is a lifelong campaigner against nuclear weapons and a patron of the new all-party parliamentary forum on global nuclear non-proliferation and arms control, which had its first meeting at the end of March. She’s also co-president of Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, an international body whose membership – including Bangladesh, South Korea, Canada, the European Parliament, Japan – reads like a list of countries with petrifying nuclear neighbours. Plus the UK, of course – we’re our own worst enemy.
Non-proliferation hasn’t been jettisoned as a goal, Miller says, but “there’s a slight doublespeak, because the original treaty in 1970 really only looked at numbers – it was much more primitive”. If you have fewer weapons that are much more powerful, that counts as non-proliferation even while posing a much greater threat. Also, Miller points out, the harder it becomes to detect nuclear weapons, the more likely it is that other missiles will be mistaken for them. “I thought the danger of hypersonic weapons was in their speed, but apparently it’s in the stealth,” she says. “They’re much harder to detect.”
Of the four nuclear nations outside the P5, the conflict that broke out between India and Pakistan in May 2025 was accompanied by nuclear brinkmanship that made neighbouring Bangladesh very nervous, and should have made us all more nervous. North Korea’s nuclear buildup continued throughout last year, “and we’re allowed to talk about Korea’s nukes. We’re not really supposed to talk about the fact that Israel has nuclear weapons,” says Miller. The only country with a no-first-use policy is China. “There is a … complete absence of communication on strategic stability among nuclear adversaries,” the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists notes.
And that’s all the risk governments are unleashing on purpose. “If you look at the Chatham House study on near-misses and risks,” Miller says (this runs from the cold war to the 21st century), “there are things that would have been disastrous each time but for an individual who decided that it wasn’t an attack. One time it was geese, flying in formation.” There are plenty of less baroque but no less-threatening mistakes – misperception of a rocket launched; misinterpretation of a military training exercise. Some near-misses are filed simply as “miscommunication”. Interestingly, one of the authors’ recommendations, when they updated the report three years ago, was that awareness should be improved as to the effects of nuclear weapons. It seems such a preposterous thing to have forgotten, while at the same time it makes sense; even Armageddon looks less bad if you completely stop talking about it.
In the 1980s, Miller wasn’t in politics at all, but was running a bookshop in Sherborne in Dorset (she has also worked in publishing, for Penguin). She went to see her MP because her father had disappeared in Turkey and “the Foreign Office wasn’t helping at all”. (Sadly, he had died, she thinks most likely of a heart attack.) That MP was Paddy Ashdown in Yeovil, and he asked Miller to stand for the district council. “I said: ‘Certainly not – it’s full of old blokes and it’s probably really boring.’” All the same, she did stand for the council as a Lib Dem, lost, and won the next time. Meanwhile, in 1983, the first US missiles arrived at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire, “which coincided with my daughter being a baby. I never camped at Greenham because she was so little, but we went there.”
It was a time of seismic change at the geopolitical level. “The most unlikely people, like Reagan and Thatcher, the Soviet Union, were really pushing for better treaties, to limit proliferation and talk about verification,” Miller says. “It was just a different world to what we’ve got now.” Throughout the 1980s, nuclear anxiety infused even mainstream culture (the authors of Scarred for Life, horror-nostalgia books about the 1980s, once counted 101 songs about the nuclear apocalypse).
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s ambition was vast: not limiting nuclear weapons (except as a waypoint), but getting rid of them entirely. (The clue was in the name.) Miller is clear-eyed that those days are long gone: “Disarmament is so far off the agenda, we just need to talk about risk reduction now. There is a parliamentary CND officer, but I think that for parliamentarians, being associated with CND and disarmament has become a real non-starter, especially after Jeremy Corbyn.”
There’s an interesting conversation to be had about the rifts in the Labour party over unilateral disarmament back then, but that’s for some other time. Perhaps the most important point about nuclear buildup and risk today is that opposition to them has somehow become associated with the hard or fringe left, when in fact this is the least partisan issue imaginable. We’re seeing increased aggression and threat perception at a governmental level giving nuclear weapons a veneer of respectability and good sense, and “the only counter to that”, Miller says, “is citizen movements … for most people, I think they would find being blown up very unacceptable. We need to get back to that way of thinking.”
By the 1990s, the fall of the Berlin Wall had suddenly taken imminent annihilation off the table, and there was an atmosphere of euphoric relief. But there was still, Miller notes, “a collective memory about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even when I first went into the Lords, which was 1998, a couple of ex-military people, Lord Ramsbotham and Lord Bramall, were very keen that we progressed this agenda, and as ex-military people they carried a lot of weight. But they’ve all died now and the younger ones aren’t taking up the issue.”
Current affairs discourse swallows whole the idea that nuclear deterrence makes us safer, and therefore to support it is innately patriotic; but one of the great misapprehensions of the mainstream is that military people all share this view. In fact, “every pound spent on Trident is not going into the conventional army or navy,” Miller says, and nobody knows that better than the people who have to strategise without resources. The nuclear plans scoped out in the most recent Strategic Defence Review would, if followed through, swallow between 30% and 40% of the entire defence budget. Which would, theoretically, be OK if the military were awash with money, but in actuality leaves conventional forces so depleted as to flip the nuclear option from last to only resort.
We also, at a democratic level, seem to have lost the expectation of transparency. So, Miller says, “the fact that we’re hosting American weapons, or are about to at Lakenheath [in Suffolk] – the issue is really quelled in parliament. There is unwillingness to talk about it in government.” The activists Nukewatch have been tracking the weapons’ arrival, but the only mention of Lakenheath in Hansard is two questions from local MP Peter Prinsley, so saccharine they read like satire: “Does the Minister agree that the US remains our most essential ally, and will he join me in expressing gratitude for the service of those brave US servicemen and women, who are so important for our security?” He doesn’t mention which weapons those brave servicemen and women have accompanied at all.
Lone voices at the end of the 20th century were no match for what Miller calls “the ‘history is over’ period. It really did lull us into thinking things were going to go on improving – we’ll get more treaties, we’ll spend less on the military generally. And that was very dangerous.”
The Iraq war was a turning point, but in contradictory directions. Certainly, it made the world seem dangerous again, but it simultaneously, in the UK, left a civic pessimism: “So many of us marching against the Iraq war, and that whole feeling that the government was going to go to war, no matter what.”
Brown’s period in office, though, kickstarted a new seriousness. “There was suddenly a lot more interest again in working on the nuclear non-proliferation issue,” Miller recalls. “I was a member of the Inter-Parliamentary Union and I proposed that the UK put forward a motion on non-proliferation. To my great surprise, that was accepted. That resulted in a handbook, which addressed both non-proliferation and nuclear-free zones. It has been quite a successful movement – there are a lot of nuclear-free zones in the world – but that’s overshadowed by the fact that nuclear states are intent on buildup and modernisation.”
Miller adds that one of the most surprising developments this century has been the post-crash economic blind spot around nuclear weapons: countries, including the UK, have been tightening state spending in the most damaging ways with the justification of urgent necessity, yet “still modernising their nuclear arsenal”.
The UK’s place in that is “it’s got the Trident system, which is entirely in submarines, and those carry intercontinental ballistic missiles, which are nuclear armed. We have committed to modernising even more – the system now links in very much with the American system.” This is necessarily vague, since “if you asked for the details in parliament you wouldn’t get told. American nuclear bombs may or may not be at Lakenheath, the bombs can’t be used without the say-so of the US president, but at the same time, as far as I understand, we don’t have a veto over their use.”
What are the implications for us? “All I know is that it’s a move in the absolute wrong direction,” Miller says. “It’s back to hosting American nuclear bombs – that makes us more of a target. And we’re not talking about coming down the ladder, which I believe we should be.”
On the new all-party parliamentary forum on global non-proliferation, there are a number of MPs – such as the Conservative Julian Lewis – who wouldn’t have been there if it had been as trenchantly anti-nuclear as its corresponding group in the 1980s (which went under various names, like All Party Parliamentary Group for World Governance). Others, such as Fabian Hamilton, who was shadow minister for peace and disarmament under Corbyn, haven’t deviated from the aim of disarming altogether. Fundamentally, the group has come together in a spirit of realpolitik: “If you said, tomorrow, the UK didn’t want nuclear weapons, it wouldn’t change the world dynamic. What would change the dynamic is one of the P5 saying: ‘This is really dangerous. We need to properly start de-escalation.’”
In 2024, the UK voted not to take part in the UN study on the humanitarian consequences of nuclear war. While 144 states voted for it, only the UK, France and Russia voted against. “That is such an important thing for the public to know and talk about,” Miller says. “How can you move forward in a conversation about mutually assured destruction if you don’t know what it looks like? That was shocking to me. Why did we want to bury our head in the sand about the humanitarian consequences?”
The P5 Process, which the UK currently chairs, has a non-proliferation treaty review meeting every five years. The last one was completely overshadowed by the pandemic. Lady Miller would like to see the conversation modernised, with countries prepared to make clear what their nuclear posture is. She wants the UK’s to be: “Last resort, not first use. Conventional weaponry is more important in defending our islands; if we’re hosting American bombs and purchasing bombers to carry them, that’s the wrong message.”
Fundamentally, that meeting – which will take place in April and May in New York – needs to reiterate the world’s commitment to non-proliferation, since the alternative is “proliferation – and what if there were 20 nuclear states? What’s the likelihood that by the end of this century there’s a war or an accident? We would all be in the destruction zone.” The rest of us, meanwhile, need to start making some noise.
