Nuclear weapons have kept us safe

Last week’s letter from Kent CND was like receiving a communication from the age of the dinosaurs, as one would have thought that historical events since the Aldermaston marches of over 60 years ago would have proved conclusively that the policy of the unilateralists had been thoroughly debunked.

Had those naive demonstrators, manipulated by fellow travellers, who wished to see the triumph of Communism, succeeded in their aim of fatally weakening the West by throwing away our nuclear weapons, then, far from this evil ideology collapsing as it did, it would have been able to force us into surrender by threatening, or by using its own H-bombs. Can anyone who understands human nature doubt that, if Stalin, or his successors, had obtained a monopoly of such weapons, we would not have been obliged to yield or die? One does not defeat a bully by kneeling before him.

One wonders if the adherents of CND would have been quite so fond of disarming if the enemy had been Hitler, or perhaps a regime such as apartheid South Africa, as our survival would then have been at the cost of Jewish or black lives. Today North Korea, and potentially

Iran, are among those whom we must face down.

I remember that, in the early 1960s, a group of sixth formers at my grammar school announced that they would not take their exams, as there was clearly no point, due to the fact that we were all going to die in a nuclear war. I doubt they went through with it, but they must now be retired, so look pretty foolish in retrospect, as indeed do those scientists who set the Doomsday clock to three minutes to midnight decades ago, and yet here we still are.

The reality is that CND could not have been more wrong. No rational person wants to use our nuclear weapons, but their very existence has kept us safe from those of others. It’s called deterrence.