ON August 6 of all days (remember Hiroshima), let us try to find some common ground shared by proponents, and opponents, of nuclear deterrence.
I agree with Joe Hughes (Letters, August 6) that there is no moral equivalence between what goes on at Faslane and what went on at Belsen. Back in 1971 when I was a cadet pilot in UGSAS (The Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde Air Squadron) I remember having arguments in the mess bar at RAF Abingdon with pilots whose nightly duty was to fly nuclear bombs in the direction of Moscow, and turn back (unless otherwise directed) at a designated failsafe point. I said that if I were given the order to proceed, I would disobey it. I have no doubt that had I been a guard at Belsen and uttered similar sentiments I would have been summarily shot. As it was, I was treated with good humour and dubbed “the pacifist intellectual” – wrong on both counts.
Mr Hughes notes that the UK has unilaterally reduced its stockpile of nuclear weapons by 65 per cent since the end of the Cold War, and if I understand him correctly, he considers this to be a good thing. Churchill recognised the folly of a nuclear arms race and devoted his second premiership to the cause of a stable international peace. He tried to convene a summit with America and the Soviet Union but President Eisenhower said no. Churchill remarked ruefully that he had achieved a lot in his life, in the end to achieve nothing.
I can understand the logic and the potency of the deterrence argument, but are we permanently locked into it? Can’t we find a way out? Surely our best minds can find a way to rid the earth of these hellish contraptions.
Dr Hamish Maclaren, Stirling.
Hopeful signs
READERS might feel, quite reasonably given the evidence, a wee bit depressed and hopeless about the state of the whole world's ecology and the damage we're doing currently to our environment.
It is worth remembering the one success that reminds us that we humans can and must do some things to stop this disaster that is so obviously an emergency.
When the Montreal protocol, in 1987, banned the man-made chemicals responsible for depleting the ozone layer it showed that emergency action internationally by governments was possible. While the damage has not been reversed, the ozone layer has started to thicken and the hole over the Antarctic to close.
We have to do so much more than this by supporting and encouraging movements like Extinction Rebellion as well as telling our governments to do much more with our taxes and resources in the face of this emergency.
Norman Lockhart, Innerleithen.
Pen and think
THE letter from Robin Dow (August 6), caused me to smile nostalgically with his reference to writing implements and his implied taste for style, or lack of it, regarding such. I instantly recalled from my childhood, a beautifully enamelled metal advertising hoarding, which was mounted on the boundary wall of the old St Enoch Railway Station, from whence we departed for summer holidays to Girvan.
This notice captured my young imagination with its finely worded message, “They come as a boon and a blessing to men, The Pickwick, The Owl and the Waverley Pen”. I felt sure that this poetic message had more to offer than the simple promotion of a range of products, about which incidentally I had never heard. It must surely, I reasoned, be somehow steeped in the mysterious world of academia? I cannot imagine such simple, yet colourful verse, capturing the imagination of a 2019’s child or even an adult, but by the same reasoning, how many of today’s promotional ditties will be recalled some 70 years on?
Ian Cooper, Bearsden.
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