Cold War debt

Published on 14/01/2013 00:00

Nobody whose “family had a hut on the shores of Loch Long” can be all bad. Joyce McMillan’s nostalgic piece about Faslane (Perspective, 11 January) must have stirred some memories, but she omits to mention the debt of gratitude owed to the Scottish people and the governments they elected from the early Sixties onward in consistently resisting the blandishments of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

For 30 years, the threat of annihilation from behind the Iron Curtain was very real and only the certainty of instant retaliation saved the western world.

Much has changed since then. Not only the scientific certainty of a “nuclear winter” following an exchange of these weapons, but the collapse of Soviet Communism itself. Uncertainties remain, but regardless of the good sense of the SNP’s position on this, the party might find it being simply ignored in the event of a Yes vote in the independence referendum.

Peter Laidlaw

Edinburgh