BRIAN Quail is wrong about Hiroshima (Letters, January 8). Try telling the families of the hundreds of thousands of US troops who would have been killed if required to take Japan by frontal assault if the atomic bomb had not been dropped.

Not using the bomb was out of the question. The Allied troops deserved to live. The nations were at war and the Japanese behaved with abominable cruelty throughout, paying no respect to the Geneva convention or any other moral rule. Apply the principle “love your enemies” while the war was going on and you lose the war. Once begun at Pearl Harbour, that rule was correctly seen to be inappropriate.

We have Trident so that countries such as Russia that are deeply corrupt morally, know that if they attack us we will retaliate. Remember the takeover of Crimea and Ukraine; the poisoning of the Skripals, Litvinenko and others; cyber attacks on the US elections and the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner. If you were so foolish as to love Vladimir Putin, he would would walk over your country and kill all of its people. He would do it because he could. The ability to retaliate is essential for our defence.

Matthew is an impractical, unattainable and even dangerous ideal. Two thousand years have not altered that.

William Scott,

23 Argyle Place, Rothesay.