 On Tuesday, Britain's Tory government published a long-awaited integrated review into the country's security, defence, development and foreign policy. Now it's billed as a manifesto for a global Britain in a competitive age, which is obviously a reference to the international role the Tories promised for Britain after Brexit. Now the review includes a commitment to an Indo-Pacific tilt with a goal that Britain will be the European partner with the broadest and most integrated presence in the Indo-Pacific committed for the long term with closer and deeper partnerships bilaterally and multilaterally that will include seeking partner status at the Asian group of East Asian states and increased involvement in free trade agreement between East Asian countries, Australia and parts of the Americas. It also labels Russia a direct threat with China a systemic challenge and links the so-called levelling up agenda with security by aiming for Britain to become a leader on digital innovation. Most controversially though and the element of the review that surprised most people was the announcement on nuclear weapons. So the government announced that they are reversing plans to reduce their nuclear weapon stockpile and instead will be raising the cap on nuclear warheads to 260. They had been due to drop to 180 under previous plans, that was from 2010. To discuss this move, this about turn on nuclear weapons, I'm joined by Kate Hudson, general secretary of the campaign for nuclear disarmament who I know joins us directly from a big rally that CND have been have been organising. So thanks for making time for us this evening. Was it a surprise for you? So, I mean, I think many journalists, they didn't, you know, this hadn't been trailed in advance. I certainly didn't have on, you know, on my wavelength that the Tories were going to plan to increase the number of nuclear weapons we had. Were you taken off guard by this? Yeah, completely. Because this didn't the integrative review has been trailed for ages, you know, and then because of the pandemic, it was postponed and because Boris Johnson has made his big defence spending announcement in the autumn, you know, 14.5 billion extra kind of thing. Everyone thought, oh, well, that's not the stuffing out of the integrated review. It's not going to be much because it was about money. And they've done that. And then, hey presto, you know, as well as things you might expect like the Indo-Pacific tilt and doing more on cyber and so on, you know, suddenly massive increase in the nuclear arsenal. And as you say, no one thought that that was going to happen. The great thing is that pretty much everybody thinks it's crazy. And someone on our rally just now was saying that they don't normally quote the sun in public meetings. But actually, the sun thinks it's a crazy idea. So does the times. And so does pretty much everybody, you know, including cross party opinion on it. So I mean, why that's got to be the big question out of the blue and no real rationale behind it. Can you spell out the significance of this? Because I mean, you could think, look, the limit was supposed to be 180 nuclear weapons, it's going up to 260 nuclear weapons. How much more damaging is 260 nuclear weapons than 180? I feel like, you know, you can do enough damage with 180. What is the significance? Why does it matter if we're going to have 260 as a limit instead of 180? What's what's what's the significance of this? Well, the trend since the end of the Cold War has been down. It's been down globally. I think we had about 70,000 at the end of the Cold War globally. Now there's about 14,000 globally. Biden and Putin have just renewed the new start treaty. One of the first things Biden did when he came in, that's their bilateral nuclear reductions treaty. So they're on track to continue reducing their nuclear arsenals. And Boris Johnson turns down and says, actually, we're going to increase our arsenal, even though we've been on the same downwards path. And as you said in 2010, the government then, the Cameron government said, okay, we're going to reduce our arsenal down to 180 by the mid 2020s. And that was completely all of a piece with post Cold War policy here and globally. So he's kind of turned the whole thing upside down really. At the moment, we've got about 195 were sort of on the way down to that were on the way down to the 180. Each of those nuclear weapons is round about eight times the power of the Hiroshima bomb, which as you know, killed over 200,000 people. So kind of ballpark calculation, given that they're dropped usually on cities and dense population centers. We already have the capacity to kill over 300 million people. So it's like kind of, let's have kill another 100 million people. So to speak, you know, so it's kind of you already, we already have enough to deal with any conceivable risks. If you see, even in their own argument, in terms of their own argument, they have enough, they have, they have more than enough. So why do that, particularly at a time when the MOD even with the extra spending, it's strapped for cash, they've got these huge big budget things as the new aircraft carrier, they're going to send that off to the, the South China Sea, which is another complete piece of madness, you know, all this kind of ratcheting up tension. So why are they going, why are they doing that now? There's there's one kind of debate around it, which is sort of a bit esoteric for normal people, which is that the Americans haven't been wanting to spend money on a new nuclear warhead to replace our existing one, which would be standard replacement. So they've been holding back, Britain's been putting huge pressure on the US Congress actually to build new nuclear warheads. So there's some idea that this is trying to shame the US into actually going ahead with the new warhead. That may be the case, but it doesn't, doesn't seem quite right to me. Maybe it's more to do with the whole kind of global Britain positioning, wanting to show that Britain's still a force to be reckoned with, you know, the kind of punching above our way, which, I mean, Blair had that idea around the Iraq war. Prime Ministers tend to have some notion of that kind. It's a status thing as well. So maybe he thinks it's a way to re put Britain on the map, bit of a crazy way to do it. One of the first responses, and you said, you know, the message this sends, and I think it is very clear, the message it sends if you're increasing the number of nuclear weapons you have. And one of the one of the first responses to that announcement was from Iran's foreign minister, who on Twitter tweeted, in utter hypocrisy, Boris Johnson is concerned about Iran developing a viable nuclear weapon. On the very same day, he announces his country will increase its stockpile of nukes. Unlike the UK and allies, Iran believes nukes and all WMDs are barbaric and must be eradicated. As a reminder, Russia currently has 6,372. These are all estimates. The United States, 5,800 China, 320 France, 290 Britain will be increasing the cap from 195 to 260 Pakistan with 160 India with 150 Israel with 90 and North Korea with 35. My final question for you is sort of a broader one, which is, where are we in terms of multilateral disarmament? I mean, obviously, you know, since the decline, the Cold War has become, or to most people, less of a political issue that's at the top of their agenda. But are we in general, other than this announcement from Britain moving in the right direction, or do you see that actually tensions are being increased and the danger of some sort of nuclear blow up is on the increase? It's a kind of, it's a bit of a mixed bag, because as I said, the weapons are coming down of those big stockpiles with the US and Russia. Most of those are in mothballs in the cupboards somewhere and are going to be bought riddles. So they've only got about one and a half thousand each actually ready to use, so to speak. So it's kind of, it's sort of less bad than it might seem on one level, you know, but at the same time, all countries with nuclear weapons are so-called modernizing, which means they may have less, but they have state of the art kit because they've modernized them. You know, so there's a kind of other difficulty around that. But definitely, there is a very strong trend globally for nuclear disarmament. There's a new treaty that's come to the United Nations. It was ratified, come into force in January, which is led by the countries of the global south, which is called the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, otherwise known as the Nuclear Ban Treaty. And they got so sick of no progress being made by the nuclear weapons states, the Nuclear Armed for Reformation Treaty and other, you know, tedious things like treaties and stuff like that. They got so fed up that they introduced the new UN treaty just to ban nuclear weapons and countries, one after the other, signing up to it. You know, so there's kind of trend. It's like the global south and the countries without them are trying to take matters into their own hands and really push for nuclear disarmament. So globally, it's not kind of some weird thing which CND is just interested in. It's actually the majority of the world. And the whole of the global south and other parts of the north, they're already self-organized into nuclear weapons-free zones. You know, it's only in places like Britain that people think, oh, they're very important. We have to have them for our security. Everyone else thinks, well, you know, just get rid of them.