Claiming credit
Sir: Noel Malcolm (12 December) says that the deployment of cruise and Pershing missiles 'seems' to have been vindicated by the signing of a treaty made possible because the West resolutely negotiated `from positions of strength'.
No doubt it so 'seems'. With an army of docile journalists in the field ever willing to accept the latest Government briefing on `defence' matters it could hardly help but so seem.
The facts are rather different. Threaten- ing the Soviets with cruise missiles and Pershing II produced exactly the result which was promised and predicted. The Soviets deployed, late in 1983 and early in 1984, SS-22 and SS-23 missiles in the GDR and Czechoslovakia. As usual, deployment produced an opposite and supposedly equal reaction. Such has long been the history of the arms race.
What has happened is that ideas have changed. Both in the East and in the West there is a new awareness of the irrelevance and indeed the dangers of seeking for nuclear parity, of the fragility of deterrence and of the risks of nuclear 'flexible re- sponse' strategies. We, and organisations like ours, can claim some part of the credit for injecting new ideas into a sterile pro- cess.
But the great British propaganda machine, so much more subtle than its Eastern counterparts, unhappily just grinds on.
Bruce Kent
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 22-24 Underwood Street, London N1
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