EMILY Thornberry seems to have a difficult time convincing her Labour colleagues that the official party line on Trident makes sense (“Trident is compared to retired Spitfires”, The Herald, February 9) and it's not hard to see why.
While Jeremy Corbyn's suggestion of sending the boats to sea without warheads must at first sight rank among the daftest of recent pronouncements (although one should remember that the only intentional military damage ever inflicted by a nuclear submarine was the sinking of the Belgrano with a conventional torpedo), the position of others in the Labour Party is no less illogical.
There is no real moral equivalence between maintaining the capability of mass destruction and preserving shore-based employment: if you want the Trident fleet as a means of ensuring the latter then you have to accept that it is meaningless without its armaments, unless the Corbyn fudge appeals as a kind of job-creation scheme.
Brian Chrystal,
55 Craiglockhart Road,
Edinburgh.
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