Sir: Your leading article, 'A sterile argu- ment,' (30 October)

cannot be allowed to pass unchallenged. The report of the Church of England's working party on nuclear weapons, The Church and the Bomb, gives four very clear reasons for rul- ing out both the possession and use of such weapons on moral and theological grounds. (1) They are indiscriminate. A UN study

has calculated that even the tactical use of nuclear weapons in a battle over rural terrain in central Europe would cause five times as many civilian casualties as military. The larger

ballistic missiles would quite certain') kill far more non-combatants than combatants, even if targeted on militarY objectives. (2) They inflict death and disease on the in; nocent. Not only is there the early fal,,r out over several hundred miles to wily ward of the explosion, but also the tal:, dom distribution, during a long Pe° and across the whole world, of radioac" tive matter carried into the upper 3tr,. mosphere. It has been estimated (aga'A" by the UN) that 150,000 people arounv the world have contracted cancer as result of the atmospheric testing °, nuclear weapons before the Partin

,' Test-Ban Treaty. A nuclear war woul° unquestionably bring disease and dead' to people in countries which had part in the conflict.

(3) Harm to the innocent goes farther than this. There is genetic damage frel radiation which statistically must result in births of deformed or defective babies worldwide. Nor should it bee forgotten that all these effects would b visited on animals as well as humansT'a (4) They poison the environment• release radiation on the scale `sn'' nuclear weapons do is to turn the areasi where they explode into an irradiat, wasteland, and to deposit radioactil in the soil and water and so in the f°° chain over much wider regions. Str0Z tium-90 is still active after 28 years, aP plutonium-239 after 24,100. To pollutto' fe the planet with such material is .. destroy the God-given springs °i lilies itself, and renege on our responsibilit' as stewards of the Creation. It was for all these reasons thatvie stated

a

our conclusion that 'the cause of right ca, not be upheld by fighting a nuclear wda',,of and that `the evils caused by this meth ° 4, making war are greater than anY e:10 ceivable evil which the war is intended r a prevent'. This led us to our rejection °I if nuclear component in deterrence, evellse, this means the political and human c° For quences of blackmail and defeat. `au nuclear weapons cannot deter unlessZave are prepared to use them; and that, we argued, is morally unacptable.

For the writer of yourceleader to desrtibbee

such a report as 'not a document °,.,out Christian faith, but a point of view 3'.„. international relations in the 20th cent the and to attribute to it by argument that splitting the at°111.01plY somehow intrinsically evil, is, to us, si incomprehensible. We do, however, to rr

plaud him for his unconscious and MO

. • .

tional support when he writes:

the in-

nuclear weapons are directed against

nation.' implication Bi's nocent, the Church has reason for Coilco- tJohn Sarum

Bishop of Salisbury, South Canonry, 71 The Close, Salisbury, Wiltshire