10 DECEMBER 2005, Page 21

Red or dead

From Sir Peregrine Worsthorne Sir: Unquestionably, as Oleg Gordievsky points out (Letters, 26 November), the Soviet Union, long after it had ceased to believe in communism, remained a military threat to the West. But did that military threat — no longer accompanied by a uniquely deadly ideological poison — continue to justify a Western defence policy based on the assumption that it was better for all mankind ‘to be dead than red’? That was my question. Perhaps it did, but I am no longer so sure.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne Hedgerley, Buckinghamshire