I hope that the House will forgive me if I do not seek to emulate the tour d'horizon of the hon. Member for Swansea, East (Mr. Anderson) or the more technical exposition of the hon. Member for Walsall, South (Mr. George), who speaks with much authority on these matters based on his long interest in them and on his long membership of the North Atlantic Assembly.

It is appropriate that we should be debating the Second Reading of the Bill on the occasion of the publication of the White Paper on defence for 1991. The White Paper's central thesis is that the reduction in tension between east and west has reached the stage where it can be asserted with some confidence that we have achieved the end of the cold war. The formal dissolution of the Warsaw pact in the past 10 days serves only to underline the accuracy of that assertion.

I have always believed that arms control and disarmament were most likely to be achieved by the hard bargaining that formed part of treaty negotiation, and that mutual reduction, enforced by treaty, was much more likely to be effective than anything unilateral.

Where I part company to some extent with the hon. Member for Swansea, East is on his suggestion that perhaps the conventional forces in Europe treaty had been superseded by the speedy passage of events since it was first promulgated. It cannot be regarded as something that is now part of history, the necessity for which can no longer be justified. I firmly believe that progress on the strategic arms treaty would not have been achieved but for the conventional forces in Europe treaty. I see the latter, essentially, as the key by which the door to the former can be opened. It is notable that, since the CFE treaty has been recognised and the difficulties eliminated, progress on the strategic arms reduction treaty has been notable—one might almost say breakneck.

These matters are never easy, as we know from the difficulties created by the Soviet Union's attempt to assign certain divisions from the army to the navy. It is wrong to assume that, because the Soviet Union has embarked on a different path from the one that it has followed for 40 years, everything will be sweetness and light, that negotiation will not need to be hard and sometimes abrasive and that verification will not have to be rigorous.

It must also be noted that the treaty that we are discussing creates rights in our favour and, as has been acknowledged, parallel obligations. In discharging those obligations, the United Kingdom and its citizens may be put to inconvenience or indeed to embarrassment. The success of the attempt to limit conventional forces in Europe depends of the mutual obligations in the treaty.

We are entitled to feel some sense of achievement about a treaty that controls conventional forces in Europe, but we cannot allow this occasion to pass without recognising that, as tension in east-west relations appears to have abated, the possibilities for conflict elsewhere in the world appear to have become much more likely. That should cause us soberly to reflect on the fact that, although there may be more comfort among European countries, elsewhere in the world there are still many opportunities for conflict, which are unpredictable and may arise at any time.

We should be grateful for what this treaty achieves, but recognise that it does not provide anything approaching a universal bulwark against conflict or difficulty elsewhere in the world. I hope that the Bill will receive a unanimous Second Reading.