Anti-Trident decision to cause damage to Scots communities

Currently around 6,700 people are employed at the base. This is due to rise to 8,200 by 2022.

The loss of jobs will cause a chain reaction that will affect the many other companies that supply the base with everything from complex engineering equipment to toilet paper. There will be no jobs in Scotland for the engineers who specialise in the many disciplines involved in design and manufacture of submarine systems.

You do not retrain an engineer who is part of a team designing complex electrical, electronic and mechanical systems to repair washing machines.

I fail to understand how a party that can be so passionate about the loss of jobs in the steel industry can have so little regard for the loss of thousands of jobs and apprenticeships that form the backbone of cutting-edge engineering both in Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom.

Robin Dyos Dip EM IEng MIET

Burwell, Cambridgeshire

The stance taken by the Labour Party and the SNP on nuclear weapons and their joint advocacy of unilateral disarmament verges on insanity.

Do they really think that the UK’s unilateral abandonment of Trident will convince our self-declared enemies to desist from their worldwide Caliphate aims and follow our pacifism?

Can they be serious?

Would self-declared enemies of the Western way of life be more convinced by a UK unilateral declaration or by the certainty that they would be instantly obliterated if they dared try to attack us with nuclear weapons? Our nuclear deterrent has given us seven long decades of unprecedented and blessed peace.

The weapons are indeed horrible, but they have been demonstrably effective and deterred aggressors.

The answer is a structured and guaranteed multi-disarmament, not the proposed lunacy of the SNP-Labour stance.

Alexander McKay

New Cut Rigg, Edinburgh

Given that there is a military bonus in bringing out a more destructive nuclear sub than the present Trident model based at Faslane, the question arises as to what use is the present one if it is seen as being necessary to spend approximately £150 billion on replacing it.

There must be something seriously deficient about the present one to justify spending such an enormous amount of money in terminating its use.

And if so then wasn’t there something of a previous gross waste of money in providing the present model which is now reportedly not fit for purpose?

Putting aside any obsolescence factors and any annihilation-capacity competition between nations, surely the scope for terrible destruction is already more than sufficiently present around the world among at least the nuclear nations for human societies not to have to engage in this “erase chase”?

As for a threat to jobs by closure of the Faslane nuclear base, since when has the provision of jobs become the main moral imperative and the question, “What kind of jobs?”, become a secondary concern?

There are many despicable and nasty enterprises that provide jobs, but are none the more deserving of approval for so doing.

Ian Johnstone

Forman Drive, Peterhead