THE nuclear impasse is more than 70 years old now (Letters, March 1 and 2). The arguments are well rehearsed. William F Wallace’s “only good can triumph over evil” is Bill Brown’s “unintentional moral myopia”.

But Mr Brown has taken his side of the argument much further than is usually the case. No lip service to multilateralism here, and no question about what the message in the Prime Minister’s “letter of last resort” should be. He paints a bleak picture of the possibility of tactical nuclear warfare. He is condemning us to teeter on the brink of annihilation for perpetuity.

Weaponry is all about the application of science and technology toward the acquisition of power. Hence the club, the axe, the sword, the longbow, the musket, the cannon, the machine gun, chlorine gas, anthrax, TNT, napalm, the cluster bomb, Little Boy, Fat Man, the thermonuclear device… the mistake is to imagine it stops here.

It doesn’t even stop at the Doomsday Machine. Once the mad boffins develop the Theory of Everything they’ll be minded to switch the Universe off.

The fallacy of redemptive violence – it’s the critical issue of our time.

Dr Hamish Maclaren,

1 Grays Loan, Thornhill, Stirling.