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
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. The Conservatives, too, referred to their grant-maintained schools as ‘independent state schools’, with slightly more justification since they were more independent of local education authorities than Labour will allow its ‘Trust schools’ to be. The interchangeability of statements on education between Labour and Tory ministers is nothing new. In the late 1980s Mrs (now Dame) Angela Rumbold, as minister of state at the then Department of Education and Science in the third Thatcher government, said her ‘real ambition in life is that there should be no need for an independent sector as the state sector will provide parents with the standards and choice currently provided by the independent sector’. The same words are probably already in the draft of Ruth Kelly’s next speech.
David Woodhead
Leatherhead, Surrey
Dying with dignity
Alasdair Palmer is right (‘Killing old people’, 29 October); sometimes we treat the elderly very badly and sometimes, but not always, geriatric wards can be depressing places. However, he is wrong on two matters. First, he assumes that ‘Do not resuscitate’ means ‘Do not treat’; unfortunately a common mistake also made by many working in health. Second, he implies that being ‘Not for resuscitation’ equates with an undignified death when often quite the opposite is true.
In the event of a major cardiac arrest — even in hospital — only a very small proportion of elderly people will make any kind of meaningful recovery. Vigorously pounding on the chest of an elderly person when all present know there is little hope is anything but dignified.
Dan Wheeler
Cambridge
Too nice to like
In my memoir, Tricks of Memory, published as far back as 1992, after expressing regrets for that unfortunate Sunday Telegraph profile on John Julius Norwich, I tried to explain my reasons for having commissioned it. ‘What stuck in my throat about John Julius,’ I wrote, ‘was that he had lived in public life through years of Britain’s decline without making enemies.’ My objection was the same as the one Flaubert made of George Sand: ‘a lack of hate’.
For rather similar reasons, the Sunday Telegraph under my editorship also carried a comparably disobliging profile of Isaiah Berlin, another bien-pensant public figure who had managed to remain bland and charming throughout those dreadful years. John Julius, as Petronella says in her Spectator Diary (29 October), was and is ‘a genuinely delightful man’. Quite so — too nice, too bland, too, in a word, tolerant. So of course I never told her that John Julius was ‘the most evil man in the world’. If she thinks I did, she really did get hold of the wrong end of the stick.
Likewise with her suggestion that my recent review of John Julius’s father’s diaries was part of a personal vendetta. True, John Julius is not my cup of tea, but that is no more reason to conclude that my unfavourable review in the New Statesman was based on personal antipathy than that Philip Ziegler’s very favourable review in The Spectator was based on personal affection.
Incidentally, a few weeks ago, Petronella, on behalf of the notoriously mischievous ‘Ephraim Hardcastle’ gossip column in the Daily Mail, rang me in search of the lowdown on quite another matter. So perhaps her claim that doing my bidding all those years ago was ‘the only journalistic work of mine of which I am truly ashamed’ should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Peregrine Worsthorne
Hedgerley, Buckinghamshire
On the defensive
Writing as someone who has been in a senior position in the UK defence industry, I do not recognise the picture painted by Richard North (‘Europe is costing us a bomb’, 15 October) of a UK government policy of ‘Europe first’ in defence procurement. Where he cites particular decisions on armoured-vehicle programmes as evidence of this policy he has simply got the facts wrong.
The UK approach is, broadly, to source from UK companies when the right equipment is available at sensible cost. When it is not, the MoD looks mainly to the US, but also to Europe, for allies with advanced technology to fill the gap. Which way to go on an individual project is a function of cost, technical performance, risk, employment and industrial considerations, and a desire to keep some balance between transatlantic and European commitments.
In this sense UK policy on defence procurement is a microcosm of broader national policy, which is precisely not to choose between US and European destinies. Nothing discomfits Whitehall more than the idea that it might one day have to. Until now this has been a broadly sensible policy in defence procurement.
The real and interesting question is whether it will continue to be. Because of rising costs and shrinking budgets, especially in research and development, the UK is increasingly looking overseas for defence technology. But the US relationship is an unequal one. We need their technology much more than the Americans need ours. As a result the US is loth to share key aspects; for example, critical software for the Joint Strike Fighter. Without this the UK does not have sovereign use of a system which could be fundamental to national security.
For all the difficulties in funding and efficiency that afflict European co-operative programmes, it is at least possible to establish true reciprocity in technology exchange. But while Continental firms are consolidating in Europe, UK firms are focusing their expansion efforts mainly on the US market. In the long run, this, combined with the UK government’s commitment of resources to transatlantic programmes, may make it more difficult for the UK to participate as a full partner in European defence technology development. Then we may not
get what we need from either flank. In the words of the Swahili proverb, ‘He who rides two horses breaks his backside.’
Nick Prest
Former chairman of Alvis plc and the Defence Manufacturers’ Association,
London W11
Mussolini and the Jews
Ian Thomson states (Books, 22 October) that ‘these days’ it is ‘fashionable’ to portray Benito Mussolini as a ‘decent fellow’, and cites my biography of Mussolini as his evidence. I am not aware that I am fashionable, but anyway such a view of Mussolini is not mine. My (unfashionable) view is that Mussolini was a genius, which is also how Winston Churchill once described him; not a good man, but not half as bad as portrayed.
The fashionable view of Mussolini, on the other hand, is that he was simply a grotesque buffoon. Naturally, as a fashion victim, Thomson supports it. This is why he states that ‘Italian Fascism relied on bludgeons and intimidation’. Nonsense. Italian Fascism was wanted, not imposed. There was no Fascist Terror à la Danton or Lenin. There was no need. One reason for this is that Fascism tried to address spiritual, not just material, poverty.
On the subject of Mussolini and the Jews, Thomson states, trendily, ‘Musso- lini’s gangs helped to deport more than 6,800 Italian Jews to Auschwitz and other Third Reich camps.’ Actually, no Jews were deported from Italy until after the fall of Mussolini in July 1943, by which time Mussolini and his Fascists had saved huge numbers of them from the Nazis and local collaborators in places like France and Croatia. To suggest that Mussolini wanted to exterminate Jews is absurd. Fascism (as distinct from National Socialism) was not intrinsically anti-Semitic. As the Israeli historian Yehoshua Porat wrote in the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot on 30 November 2003, the Fascist regime ‘with the explicit approval of Mussolini’ saved the lives of ‘thousands of Jews’.
En passant, Thomson also bashes ‘Mussolini’s birthplace of Predappio (where Farrell has chosen to live)’ as apparently ‘awash with Fascist trinkets and other blackshirt memorabilia’. Even if true, this is with the approval of the council, which has been ‘red’ since the war! Lord preserve us from fashionable pundits who choose to see the world in black and white and not in colour.
Nicholas Farrell
Forl
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