WHAT'S TO BE DONE WITH OUR BOMB?
SIR,—Mr. Critchley's arguments in support of the Government's defence policy should not go unanswered.
His main justification for the independent British deterrent seems to be that we cannot rely on the United States to come to our aid if the Russians launch an attack on Western Europe. This may or may not be so, but in any case it is irrelevant be- cause the V-bomber force is so small, and so rapidly obsolescing, that it does not by itself constitute a credible deterrent.
Mr. Critchley asserts that 'Given crisis conditions and thus dispersal, the greater part of the force should survive [a Soviet pre-emptive strike]'. Here he perhaps relies on Mr. Amery's recent statement that the average reaction time of V-bombers is two minutes (while the radar warning time for missiles fired from East Germany is four minutes). If the Russians are willing to risk an American response, and if they believe Mr. Amery's statement (which is to be contrasted with American estimates that that half of the US Strategic bomber force which is kept on ground alert can be launched with fifteen minutes' warning), one can hardly doubt that in delivering a first strike upon us they would take the obvious precaution of destroying our bombers on the air- fields with missiles launched from submarines around our coasts, for which the warning time would be negligibly short. The deterrent value of those bombers which might survive would not be credible, since the Russians would retain so much second-strike power as could destroy these islands completely.
Mr. Critchley's claim that the V-bombers 'add to the effectiveness of the [US] deterrent' was sufficiently rebutted by Mr. McNamara before the Congressional Armed Services Committees in March, and we shall not take space to repeat that rebuttal here.
However, we must refer to the N-country prob- lem, which Mr. Critchley nervously skirts around. We cannot more easily controvert his opinion on this subject that by quoting from a recent Senate foreign policy document:
There are well-informed students of the [N-country] problem who believe that . . . a multiplicity of nations each attempting in its own way to build up strategic nuclear capa- bilities, and to use them in support of its own policy, will present a completely unmanage- able, situation.
It can be argued that no nation not of the very first rank has the spread of territory use- fully to deploy a dispersed, variegated, and secure retaliatory nuclear capability and the resources and scientific talent to develop and maintain one. . . . There can be little doubt, however, that the spread of strategic nuclear weapons among many countries . . . can in- crease towards instability.
Finally, Mr. Critchley writes: 'nor is there a choice, as some pretend, between a nuclear and a non-nuclear Europe, for Europe is littered with nuclear weapons of different kinds and under different forms of control.' In fact, all operational nuclear weapons in Europe are at present con- trolled by the SU, the US or the UK, and their withdrawal presents technical obstacles which will be easily solved once the political difficulties have been overcome. The choice in Europe is a real one, and its disengagement would constitute a valuable first step towards that disarmament which is urgent, before the spread of weapons makes it infinitely more difficult, and before the finite probability of accidental war becomes realised in a holocaust de- sired by neither side.
O. F. ELLIOIT F. A. E. MANI
University of London King's College, Strand, WC2
[Mr. Critchley writes : 'Messrs. Elliott and Pirani have failed to understand the point of my article. It was not, as they claim, a justification for the British independent deterrent. I wrote that whilst I believed that it was unnecessary for any European country to have become a nuclear power in its own right, it is clear that one of the fundamental reasons for their doing so was to insure themselves against the fear of abandonment by America.
'My article accepted the fact of British nuclear power and then speculated as to how best we might In rid of such an expensive and perhaps unneces- sary insurance. if we are to do so we must be certain that the maximum political advantage is extracted from it, and that nothing is done that would make an unstable situation even more un- stable—Editor, Spectator.]
Previous page
