YOUR editorial today (“A nuclear weapon-free world is truly a noble goal”, December 9) is encouraging but irritatingly ambivalent. On the one hand you (rightly) laud the Church of Scotland for its “sterling efforts” in opposing nuclear weapons yet undermine this goal by asking whether ”we can rationally do without them”.
This presupposes that existing policy is “rational”, which it clearly is not. Trundling hydrogen bombs along our roads regularly is irrational and extremely dangerous. Accidents happen.
Nuclear convoys have had many mishaps. Brakes have failed, fuel has leaked and engines have overheated. I witnessed the occasion when a convoy broke down on the slipway off the Erskine Bridge in 1993) Smoke was pouring from the vehicle; it pulled up at the side of the road and lay helpless for four hours.
A convoy was stopped at Raploch near Sterling on September 15. I crawled under one of the vehicles and held it up for 20 minutes. Mercifully, I am committed to non-violence, but just think what terrorists could do.
Aside from such tactical considerations, our nuclear weapons make no strategic sense. Trident is a weapon of mass destruction “ne plus ultra” and belongs to a banned class of weaponry. An illegal defence policy projecting global suicide is not rational; it is stupid.
Evoking the bogeyman of North Korea or the psychotic egomaniac Donald Trump, as you do, is an irrelevant distraction. Trident can protect us from neither. The logic is irrefutable: if we are permitted to defend our interests by deploying nuclear weapons, it must be allowed for all other sovereign states to do likewise. We really can’t object to North Korea doing what we do; nor can we body swerve this dilemma by evoking “realpolitik”, as you suggest. It is misleading.
Our only escape from this nightmare is to support a global ban on nuclear weapons. The world has already banned biological weapons (BWT 1972) and chemical weapons (CWT 1993) and banned nuclear weapons on July 7. Either we support the present ban or, like demented lemmings, we continue the Gadarene race to oblivion. I believe you should lead the campaign to support this treaty.
Brian Quail,
2 Hyndland Avenue, Glasgow.
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