UNDETERRED
MEMBERS of the Opposition cannot be blamed for finding it difficult to keep a straight face in the defence debate this week. Sir Walter Monckton is confessedly inexperienced, but even a paragon among Defence Ministers could have done little with the chaos which confronted him at the Ministry. The conventional weapon situation, for example, is farcical, and grows more farcical each year. The tribulations of the Hunter aircraft are the classic example. Sir Walter insists that it could fight tomorrow if necessary : but with what? One man without his trousers, George A. Birmingham once recalled, is no match for four fully clothed armed men. The poor old Hunter could only do its duty in the same sense that the Home Guard, armed with pikes, would have done theirs in an inva• sion. The Navy is in an even worse position. After the war it staked its future on the aircraft carrier as capital ship. This was unwise, as carriers are extremely vulnerable; but in any case their usefulness is limited when no suitable aircraft can be found for them.
The Minister, in fact, would have done better to admit the deficiencies in his conventional defence store, and to pass on to the more pertinent problem of graduated deterrence. What he had to say suggests either that he has not studied the subject with much care—or that he has not understood it. It is true, as he says, that there are difficulties in the way of initiating a full-scale graduated deterrence programme. But there are even greater difficulties, as time has shown, in the way of initiating the type of comprehensive disarmament scheme to which the Government still pins its faith. Besides, the value of graduated deterrence is that it encourages clear thinking on the whole problem of defence—a clarity absent from the Government's White Paper. Money is squandered on useless conventional weapons largely because the no man's land between conven- tional and nuclear warfare has not yet been fully explored and charted; and it is the measure of the weakness of the Govern- ment's defence case, that it is still reluctant to conduct the exploration.
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