Robert Neild a professor of economics at Cambridge University and a fellow of Trinity College, has held several senior positions in the Civil Service and was the first Director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. He is the author of How to make up your mind about the Bomb, published last year.
Most people in Britain, I am sure, dismiss the notion of civil defence against nuclear attack as absurd. Twenty years ago or more, Peter Cook in Beyond the Fringe made a delicious mockery of the notion that you should get into a paper bag in order to protect yourself against nuclear fall-out, and the Government’s recent pamphlet, ‘Protect and Survive’, caused both protest and satire. But to dismiss civil defence as absurd without thinking further is not enough. Proposals for expenditure on civil defence keep reappearing. We need to ask ourselves why the subject recurs like this? What is the actual policy in Britain? And what could be done?
It is hard these days to open the newspapers without seeing a reference to the notion that Nato should improve its conventional defences. One day General Rogers, the Supreme Commander of Nato, is saying it, the next day it is Mary Kaldor, an advocate of unilateral nuclear disarmament, par excellence a ‘peacenik’. Strange bedfellows. Why this convergence on conventional defence? And where is it likely to lead us?
In landlocked Zambia, then Northern Rhodesia, where I was brought up, oysters were a piece of arcane folklore, one of those memories, precise but inexplicable, of Britain. Oysters were right...
As with the sword or the bow and arrow, making up one’s mind responsibly about the Bomb is not an easy task. For anarchists or pacifists the exercise of violence by state powers throughout...
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