BRITAIN may soon need to be protected by a ballistic missile defence system, Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, said yesterday.

He said that the country could be targeted by rogue states, which were now trying to arm themselves with long-range ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction. If deterrence failed, Britain may need a back-up system to pre-empt such an attack.

Mr Hoon gave strong indications in a speech to the Foreign Policy Centre in London that the Government was seriously considering joining the Americans in deploying a missile defence barrier against rogue states such as Iraq.

He said: “The reality is that once a ballistic missile has been launched against us, deterrence has failed and the only recourse left to us is to try and shoot it down.

“There may come a day when we need to decide to add a further capability to our current range of responses by acquiring missile defences for the UK and for Europe as a whole, in the way the US has already decided,” he said.

Mr Hoon said that the Ministry of Defence planned to address the issue in the same way as it had developed the Strategic Defence Review published in 1998 which laid down the Government’s requirements for the Armed Forces for the next 15 years.

The Defence Secretary said that Britain’s nuclear deterrent, consisting of the Royal Navy’s four Trident ballistic missile submarines, was still needed to deter states with large nuclear capabilities.

Russia, he said, continued to keep up-to-date and effective nuclear systems and more countries were acquiring nuclear weapons all the time.

However, he said, there were now additional actors to consider, people who could be far removed in attitudes and values from the cautious and conservative members of the old Soviet Politburo.

He said: “Where an individual or tiny clique has seized power and acquired a WMD (weapon of mass destruction) capability, how might they react if facing the loss of power?” Mr Hoon said that a defensive system against a limited ballistic missile attack “might serve to reinforce and complement the deterrence provided by our conventional and nuclear weapons”.

He said: “We have a new problem — of the rogue state with a limited but dangerous capacity. It is in the interests of all responsible states to confront this.”

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