Letters to the Editor | 5 November 2005

Nuclear hedge fund

Andrew Gilligan (‘A terrifying plan for nuclear strikes’, 29 October) is being unduly alarmist about the future of Britain’s small nuclear deterrent. The development of so-called ‘usable’ nukes does not imply a wish or intention actually to use them, but rather is an essential element of effective deterrence.

If you rely simply on the sheer awfulness of nuclear weapons for their deterrent effect (‘existential’ deterrence in the jargon), the person you’re most likely to deter will be yourself. You won’t then deter anybody else, which defeats the whole purpose of a deterrent in the first place.

However remote and awful the prospect, you have to come up with weapons, and strategies for their use, to persuade others that, in extremis, you would push the button. There, in the paradoxical logic of deterrence, lies the best hope that you won’t have to.

Gilligan is right to observe that in some future scenarios Trident is something of a ‘blunderbuss’. But as a response to a resurgent Russia, hostile China or newly nuclear- ised Iran it will do. However distant the prospect of conflict with any of these states, we cannot predict what the world will look like in 30 or 40 years’ time. Consider how much has changed in the last 20 years.

Retention of a ‘minimal’ nuclear deterrent (or rather the cheapest deterrent, a life-extended Trident) is simply a prudent hedge against a highly uncertain and unknowable future.
Jeremy Stocker
Centre for Defence & International
Security Studies,
Henley-on-Thames, Oxon

Same old schools policy

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Ameer Kotecha

Lindt has cheapened itself

Your leading article (29 October) is scornful of Labour’s vocabulary of school reform, in particular its use of the term ‘independent state schools’. But Labour is simply shamelessly resurrecting not only the terminology but also the education policies of Conservative governments which it so vehemently criticised when in opposition.