Brian Quail and Iain Mann attack me, as is their right. Brian Quail makes the reasonable statement, "there are many right-thinking people". I have no quarrel with that, but, to me, Iain Mann's "all" statement means everyone without exception. Even if true it is a weak argument, for right-minded people can be wrong. A few centuries ago it was held by the church and many others that the Earth was at the centre of the solar system.
Brian Quail quotes the views of a number of prominent people, as if that were scientific evidence. We should remember that in writing memoirs, people can have selective memories. Ernest Bevin, after a conference in US, said to his cabinet colleagues that we must have the atom bomb at any price, for he did not want any future UK foreign secretary to go through what he went through, a view supported by Nye Bevan who opposed unilateral disarmament on the grounds that it would send the UK foreign secretary naked into the conference chamber.
Of course, Japan would have been defeated without the atom bombs. They were defeated more quickly with them and many of our PoWs survived, which was prominent in the minds of those of us who were in that theatre.
Oppenheimer said that it would have been better had his work in Los Alamos shown the impossibility of explosive chain reaction, but it was not so, and the cost of joining the nuclear energy club has become increasingly cheap. Cost no longer prohibits the entry of smaller countries. The physics is in the public domain.
Like Margaret Thatcher, I believe that mutually-assured destruction (MAD) works and I have no fear of attack from the larger nuclear powers. My concern is the rogue state that may build such a bomb. The defence is the pressure from the existing nuclear powers, and we have seen in Iran and N Korea that it works. We are a small power, and if we give up we will have no say whatsoever in what is done. I feel we should retain what little say we have. Protesting at Faslane is not going to eliminate bombs elsewhere.
Chris Parton, 40 Bellshill Road, Uddingston.
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