Sir Keir Starmer has distanced himself from comments by a Labour frontbencher who said he would be “quite happy” if Russian hackers knocked out Britain’s nuclear deterrent.
Video from 2019 showed Fabian Hamilton, the shadow minister for peace and disarmament, saying Russia could “already hack into the software” controlling Trident.
Hamilton made the comments at a rally held by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in September 2019, when he served as shadow defence minister under Jeremy Corbyn.
He said he was quoting a “former senior Labour colleague who was in Tony Blair’s cabinet” who had described nuclear weapons as “utterly useless” because they are vulnerable to Russian hackers.
in the video, he says: “Now, I don’t know enough about this to know whether that’s true or not, but imagine for a minute that it is true. Not that they could actually set the weapons off, but that they could render them entirely useless. I’d be quite happy about that, as long as we could do the same to theirs.
“It seems to me that once it becomes generally known that it’s possible for someone to hack into the software system that controls our nuclear weapons then they stop being a deterrent altogether. It seems to me that now, more than any other time in our history, is the time to reconsider the weapons.”
Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, told The Mail On Sunday that Hamilton should be sacked. “It is one thing to disagree with the UK’s possession of nuclear weapons, but to take the side of a man who has deployed chemical weapons . . . is treasonous,” he said.
A spokesman for Hamilton described Wallace’s demands as “ludicrous”.
A Labour source said: “Starmer voted for the renewal of Trident and has been clear that Labour’s support for the deterrent is non-negotiable.”
The Labour leader has repeatedly distanced himself from his predecessor Corbyn, who is a long-standing campaigner against nuclear weapons.
He has expressed his full support for Nato and recently said the UK should increase its defence spending.”
