Many Members have been in this debate all day and will have heard me give the cost for building the four submarines and the proportion that the costs will take when the submarines are in service.
My hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), the hon. Member for Stirling (Steven Paterson) and the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) asked about the delivery of the Successor programme. It will be managed by a
new delivery body for the procurement and in-service support of all nuclear submarines. That will ensure that, unlike in previous warship programmes, the submarines are delivered on time and on budget. If they are not, the principal contractors involved will suffer penalties as a result.
Finally, I was asked about disarmament. We certainly want to see a world free of nuclear weapons. We have made significant reductions to our nuclear forces. We have cut our nuclear stockpiles by over half since the end of cold war. I reduced the number of deployed warheads on each of our submarines from 48 to 40 last year, and we are continuing work to reduce our stockpile to no more than 180 warheads by the mid-2020s. We continue to play our part in talks through the non-proliferation treaty, and as has already been said, Britain has been leading the way in trying to get other countries to make progress, collectively, towards disarmament.
In conclusion, our continuous at-sea deterrent may have been born of the cold war, but it is no relic of the past. The cold war itself has been succeeded by a complex environment of emerging threats, rogue states and unpredictable non-state actors, some of whom have nuclear weapons, while others are intent on getting hold of them. Those threats will not disappear because we refuse to look at them. On the contrary, we must confront them head-on. We cannot predict the future, and we should not gamble with the long-term security of our citizens by assuming that no extreme threat will emerge while so many nuclear weapons remain. That is what this Government intend to do by replacing our Vanguard submarines to sustain the deterrent that has protected us successfully for so long.
As we contemplate this fundamental decision, I urge Members across the House to do what successive Governments have done and to do the right thing, not just for today, but for tomorrow, and vote to maintain our nuclear deterrent for as long as security conditions require it.
Question put.