Mikhail Gorbachev (letter, March 8 ), though unfortunately no longer in power, is one of few living politicians who merits the elevated title of statesman. Is it too much to hope that his wisdom will be heeded? Apparently yes, to judge by Margaret Beckett's letter of reply (March 10 ).

Ever since Mr Gorbachev brought the Cold War to an end, the deterrence argument for British nuclear weapons has been void. What remains is only anachronistic national pride and a childish, technophiliac lust for boys’ toys. Conflict of some kind, unfortunately, is to be expected into the future. But it will not be the kind of conflict between nation states that could plausibly be deterred in the old Cold War sense. On the contrary, as Mr Gorbachev points out, the nuclear danger is likely to come from stolen weapons falling into terrorist hands. And terrorists hungry for martyrdom have a peculiar immunity to being deterred.

RICHARD DAWKINS, frs University of Oxford

Mikhail Gorbachev hypocritically claims that the British decision about Trident is in contradiction to decisions that helped to end the Cold War. He should have directed his attention to his own country. Russia has got a thousand times more nuclear weapons than Britain. Russia possesses several thousands intercontinental ballistic missiles and is developing ultra-modern replacements of them. It has thousands of medium-range and tactical nuclear missiles. Many of those are targeting Britain. Recently, several senior Russian generals publicly threatened to attack Britain, Poland and the Czech Republic in case they improve their defence capability.

OLEG GORDIEVSKY, London, WC1

Margaret Beckett does a service with her forewarning of the artifices and deceptions which the Trident debate will evoke from the Government.

No doubt “40 further nuclear warheads” will indeed be done away with. Being obsolete, however, they will be no loss to Britain’s strike capability. By the same token, the enhanced accuracy and penetrative potential of what is left will so far outstrip the claimed 75 per cent drop in “explosive power” (a term unknown to the nuclear trade), as to render the reduction nugatory.

The letter’s protestations of virtue are similarly disingenuous. The “practical multilateral steps” in the context of the test ban treaty will be notably easy to take because Trident needs no further testing. Reducing, uniquely, our nuclear capability to “just one system” is not the selfless sacrifice as which it is presented because one system is all that we, or anybody else for that matter, need to threaten the world with obliteration. The setting-out attributed to Kim Howells of how and when we would be prepared to join multilateral negotiations to stop proliferation disguises the fact that we are already bound by the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty to do just that and are defaulting. Worst of all is following the recipe for world disaster implicit in “updating” our deterrent on the ground that all the other nuclear states are doing the same.

As well as their consciences, MPs will need the acuity to perceive the dodginess that is part of the whole Tridentine mess.

AIR COMMODORE ALASTAIR MACKIE, Vice-President, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament London SW15

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