Let us, in the best Socratic tradition, apply logic to our situation (Trident whistleblower warns of disaster waiting to happen, News, May 17).
Either the whistleblower able seaman William McNeilly's report is correct, and Trident is a disaster waiting to happen, or it is not, and the Vanguard submarines are operationally effective, ready to launch 48 H Bombs and bring disaster. Either way, the result is disaster.
This being irrefutable logic, one must question the psychopathology of the mindset that chooses to engineer catastrophe. Exactly why do we deploy this infernal suicide/mass-murder machine?
The answer cannot lie in an intelligent consideration of the defence needs of the UK. Global suicide is not a rational defence policy. The answer lies at a much deeper, subconscious level of human behaviour. Our nuclear devotion is a primitive, pre-rational and essentially religious phenomenon. The bomb is what keeps us safe and gives us security of life, it is our saviour and our god. This is our fetish, the great British idol.
The besetting sin of our age is not as imagined the ever-popular attractions of sex. It is the desire for power over others, to become like God - which is madness. Hence our nuclear insanity.
The only way to escape from this lunacy is to abandon British nuclear idolatry with its delusions of global power and status. Scotland must establish its identity as a normal, nuclear-free state.
Brian Quail
Glasgow
The more I consider the concept of Trident and the controversy over its current maintenance and eventual replacement, the more I wonder if this rearmament for Armageddon would prove any more effective as a deterrent to war than the Maginot Line proved to France, 75 years ago this month.
No doubt spending billions of pounds on replacement would prove a wonderful money-spinner for certain US armaments industries - but how much would this profit the UK's taxpayers?
As a former officer for morre than 25 years in the sparsely equipped, indifferently trained, but nonetheless well-motivated Territorial Army, I feel that funds earmarked for Trident might be much better spent on modern conventional equipment and training for the regular services and their reserves in the light of contemporary threats.
A moratorium on cutbacks in the regular army, together with the best weaponry, communications and bomb-proofed armoured personnel carriers available, a couple of squadrons of maritime reconnaissance aircraft, aircraft for the new carriers under construction, more conventional submarines, surface warships and helicopters, might be a far better option.
Willie Morrison
Inverness
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