Don’t bin Bomb

Brian Quail regales us with the iniquities of the UK’S nuclear deterrent (Letters, 21 June). Pacifists tend to think that everyone reasons as they do and that people like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim Jong-un, ad infinitum, are really all good chaps and would not hurt a fly if only their opponents would disarm. If only that were true.

Unfortunately, there are many who wish to do us harm. Our necessarily horrible nuclear deterrent does what it says on the tin – it deters. For 70 years and more it has keep us free from attack. A former mayor of Nagasaki made the point that detestable as it was, the dropping of the atomic bomb on his city in August 1945 saved the lives of around one million human beings – the civilian and military lives that would have gone in an invasion of Japan. Denis Healey made this life-saving point many times during his long career in politics.

It is ironic that Mr Quail does not appreciate that the freedom for him to write his anti-trident missives is guaranteed because we were not overrun in the aftermath of the Second World War when the Soviets were rampaging across Europe. The thought of nuclear annihilation for the attackers prevented that. Had that not been the case, Mr Quail would be writing his protests from a gulag somewhere in Northern Siberia.

ALEXANDER MCKAY New Cut Rigg, Edinburgh