LONDON
(AP) - British Prime Minister will tell the UN that he was willing to
cut off the pride of the British submarine fleet carrying the missile,
Trident from four to three.
Gordon Brown
will make the offer at a meeting of the UN Security Council to stop the
spread of nuclear weapons and reduce existing stockpiles.
The proposed cuts were in line with government efforts to find ways to reduce the huge deficit in public finances.
But the Prime Minister said that keeping Britain's nuclear deterrent "not negotiable".
At UN meeting, Mr Brown will ask all countries to come together to achieve long-term ambition of creating a nuclear-free world.
He will say: "If we are serious about a world free of nuclear ambitions we will need statesmanship, not approaching danger."
Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg welcomed the proposal, saying it is an important development.
He told the BBC: "I really welcome the proposal that kicked off like this"
"It's unrealistic for us to believe that we can provide £ 100 billion cost of a replacement for the Trident for 25 years.
"I
think the strategic context in which the decision was a very different
place as well, we do not face the threat of the Cold War in the same way
as we advance."
The government has
announced that it has cut supplies from 200 to 160 British Trident
warheads, and many Labour MPs want the government to spend the entire
weapon.
Officials traveling with the prime
minister warned that reducing the number of submarines from four to
three would not result in costs that is proportional cuts of 25%,
because more must be spent to maintain the whole.
Earlier,
Defence Minister Bob Ainsworth said the future of Trident not included
in the review when lawmakers support reforms in 2007, but he suggested
during the interview Sky News that the cost of the project is reviewed.
The
Conservatives support the Trident, but said it will form part of a
review of the overall defense budget they plan immediately if they win
the next election.
Liberal
Democrats have called for a defense of smaller, cheaper to reflect the
changing nature of the weapons of war and the threat to Britain.
Liberal
Democrats argued that Britain can not afford to replace the Trident
replacement are equivalent when the pelayananya ended in 2024.
A
report by the think tank Reform, which was published on Tuesday, argues
that not renew Trident could save £ 70bn over 25 years.
£ 40bn more could be trimmed from the defense budget by removing some of the hardware and reduce waste, he added.
In
the upcoming UN meeting, U.S. President Barack Obama who will lead the
meeting of the Security Council on Thursday as part of the process of
preparing a substitute for the Non-Proliferation Treaty, designed to
stop countries to develop nuclear weapons.
Obama
said he would try to negotiate with Moscow to reduce U.S. nuclear
warheads and Russia, which make up 95% of the world total, from each of
the 2000 to 1500.
But the most
pressing issues for leaders at the meeting was to be how to stop the
further spread of weapons to countries that non-nuclear.