Armaments race

Press, 17 September 1976, Page 12

Armaments race

Sir, — With a simple, neatly packaged little theory, R. S. James explains the nuclear deterrent. Russia is, of course, the villain of the piece. The reality is quite different. In the years immediately following World War 11, the Soviet Union proposed banning the atom bomb and a total ban on nuclear armaments. President Truman, suffering from the delusion that the atom bomb gave the United States military superority over the Soviet Union, inaugurated the era of nuclear diplomacy with the aim of “rolling back communism.” In a speech at Westminister College, Fulton, Missouri, . on March 5, 1946, Churchill, with Truman on the platform, launched the Cold War. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was formed in 1949. The Soviet Union was therefore compelled to develop its own atom bomb and organise the Warsaw Pact Alliance in 1955. The responsibility for the nuclear arms race rests squarely with the Western Powers. — Yours, etc.,

M. CREEL. September 16, 1976.

Sir, — How can the nuclear arms race be a deterrent when in a matter of moments the nuclear war buttons can be pressed on both sides of the world? The deterrent argument was used to justify making the earliest atom bombs, said then to be so terrible no-one would use them. We know better now. Playing on enmity and fear in people, over 30 years, the arms race has accelerated because moral courage and good will have not been recognised and mobilised for the force it really is. The women in Ireland today show us that moral courage has a way of spreading itself when tried. Perhaps it is true that it is the meek who will inherit the earth? — Yours, etc.,

. N. BECK. September 15, 1976.