Chris Parton justifies nuclear weapons by citing the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I defer to his personal wartime experience, and do not dispute that this act brought the war in the far east to an abrupt end and probably saved the lives of many British PoWs, thousands in the armed forces on both sides and large numbers of home-based Japanese. But the two bombs also killed almost 100,000 innocent civilians, and condemned many thousands more to a lifetime of sickness and disease.
Mr Parton also overlooks the fact that at that time the US was the only nation to have an atomic bomb, and had no fear of reprisals. It is debatable if the Americans would have dared to use it if Japan and perhaps the USSR had had similar weapons at their disposal. Today, a dozen countries around the world have nuclear armaments, some less scrupulous than others about using them. The solution is not continually to increase the proliferation and strike power of our own nuclear weapons, but rather to encourage their disposal by international agreement.
So while Chris Parton may be right to state that dropping the atomic bombs on civilian cities was correct in the circumstances of 60 years ago, it is no longer defensible today. Such weapons of mass destruction cannot be targeted precisely on military installations or bases, and their only purpose is to wipe out defenceless civilian populations in huge numbers. I believe that nuclear weapons are fundamentally evil and should not be tolerated in a modern civilised world. I think that most "right-thinking people" would agree with me.
Iain A D Mann, 7 Kelvin Court, Glasgow.
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