Letters: Trident

Trident: Blair keeps the power to vaporise innocent millions

Sir: Martin Copsey (Letter, 14 March) wants this government to spend between £25bn and £70bn on a possible hypothetical danger to Britain in thirty or forty years time.Would he then be prepared to press the nuclear button that will vapourise millions of innocent men, women and children and slowly kill by radiation poisoning hundreds of thousands of others around the globe?

The use of a nuclear bomb is genocide and one would hope that anyone who uses it - including any British prime minister - would be convicted of crimes against humanity. We cannot fight one evil by committing an even greater evil. This is not "defence" but simply mass murder for the sake of dead man's revenge.

My wife comes from Minsk, Belarus (in the former USSR) and while her fellow countrymen pointed their nuclear missiles to presumably kill us, we in retaliation would have then vapourised people like her. And Mr Copsey thinks that I should be proud that Britain can still do the same for the next 50 years.

Canada, Spain, Germany, Brazil, Australia, Japan, Italy have no nuclear weapons for their "defence"; so why do we need them? How can we condemn countries like Iran or North Korea for wanting nuclear weapons when we continue to have them? Our soldiers, plus tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis, are dying in Iraq because we were falsely told by Mr Blair that Saddam Hussein had WMDs - but apparently it is perfectly acceptable for white British Europeans to have weapons capable of reducing entire countries to radioactive and uninhabitable wastelands for thousands of years.

GARTH GROOMBRIDGE

SOUTHAMPTON

Sir: Those who argue that we need to spend £20 bn (and does anyone seriously think this isn't a massive underestimate?) on upgrading our "independent" nuclear "deterrent" - just in case some unspecified threat materialises 30 or 40 years down the line - are quite often the same people who argue against action on climate change, on the grounds that we're "only" 95 per cent certain that human activities are a major cause.

MIKE WRIGHT

NUNEATON, WARWICKSHIRE

Sir: David Cameron has supported the Government over Trident, as the Conservative Party also did over the war against Iraq. Someone should remind him of that profound observation by G K Chesterton in 1919: "English experience indicates that when two great political parties agree about something, it is generally wrong."

PATRICK LAVENDER

TAUNTON, SOMERSET

Climate Bill opens door to trade wars

Sir: Hamish McRae makes an interesting point: regulation may not be so good as taxation when it comes to climate issues (14 March). It seems that, under the Climate Control Bill, if the Government exceeds its self-imposed limits it may become subject to a judicial inquiry. That may then impose an order for the Government to buy carbon credits from other countries to correct its own balance.

What side-effects will such an inter-state market have? Will wealthy nations compete for spare credits, forcing prices to unaffordable heights? If so, then what? Or will poorer nations undercut each other, so losing much of the financial benefit that would otherwise automatically help to relieve their poverty.

Either way, a door would seem to be opening for some extremely ruthless economic wars, which recent decades have already shown can be just as lethal and economically damaging as military wars.

KENNETH J MOSS

NORWICH

Sir: Channel 4's film "The Great Global Warming Swindle" was a polemical film which contributed to the climate change debate.

Further to Professor Wunsch's piece (Comment, 15 March) we support Wag TV in its rejection of Professor Wunsch's claims that he was misled as to the nature of the programme. The correspondence with Professor Wunsch clearly indicated the subject matter of the programme: "The aim of the film is to examine critically the notion that recent global warming is primarily caused by industrial emissions of CO2. It explores the scientific evidence which jars with this hypothesis and explores alternative theories such as solar induced climate change. Given the seemingly inconclusive nature of the evidence, it examines the background to the apparent consensus on this issue, and highlights the dangers involved, especially to developing nations, of policies aimed at limiting industrial growth.'

With regard to Steve Connor's article of 14 March, there was an inaccuracy in the x axis of one graph shown in the film and this was rectified for the second transmission. However it didn't materially affect the substantive point being made by the graph: that temperature fell from 1940 to 1970 and rose thereafter. That is, during the post-war economic boom, when CO2 emissions increased, temperature fell.

Martin Durkin's film brought together a number of respected scientists who question the prevailing view on the causes of global warming and he used data to support his argument. We acknowledge that there is considerable debate over the data for climate change and how it is interpreted by various scientists. However, we stand by our decision to explore the views of the scientists who stand outside the current consensus on what drives climate change.

HAMISH MYKURA

HEAD OF HISTORY, SCIENCE & RELIGION, CHANNEL 4 TELEVISION LONDON SW1

Sir: What a relief to read Steve Connor's article "The Real Global Warming Swindle" (14 March) on the C4 programme on climate change. Of all the reputable, peer-reviewed journals that are available to earth scientists (many of them full of articles on climate change) the Medical Sentinel is not a mainstream journal.

Ironically, the much more widely recognised "hockey stick" plot (IPCC 2001), that illustrates the marked temperature increase on the planet over the last 1,000-2,000 years, did not get the recognition it deserves. The juxtaposition of the C4 erroneous "plots" against real data in the The Independent would be a useful first-year exercise for students.

Undergraduates are taught not to manipulate data. Where you do not have data, you do not fabricate data by extending the axis on a diagram to make a point and you do not rationalise complex data (wiggly line) by drawing a simple line through a data set. If you do, you fail as a scientist.

PROFESSOR MARTIN MENZIES

ROYAL HOLLOWAY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

Stubbs on loan to New York

Sir: I'm pleased that Tom Lubbock ("Hanging offence", 12 March) liked some things about our new BP British Art displays, but I sympathise with his disappointment at finding so few works by George Stubbs included for the time being.

Several of our Stubbs are currently on loan to the Frick Collection in New York, in an exhibition of his work we organised there with the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. It is the first Stubbs show ever in New York and has been widely acclaimed. The international dimension to our promotion and celebration of British art is an important part of our role as the national gallery of British art.

But Stubbs will be back at Tate Britain in strength this autumn - in a special display of sporting art to mark the centenary of the birth of Paul Mellon, his greatest collector.

STEPHEN DEUCHAR

DIRECTOR TATE BRITAIN, LONDON SW1

Sir: Tom Lubbock thinks that all the labels at Tate Britain are designed to "distract and relieve the public from the wearisome task of looking". Most visitors are not trained art historians. How much imagination does it take for an art critic to put himself in their shoes?

Good labels focus attention on the work of art, and help the process of looking. The research I conducted while I was at Tate Britain, with Professor Christian Heath of King's College, clearly showed that a well-written label actually increased the amount of time visitors spent looking at the painting. It really is time we put an end to the idea that labels are a "distraction".

SARAH HYDE

LONDON SW20

Whiff of hatred in Levy coverage

Sir: Tony Greenstein misses the point (Letters, 14 March). It is not the police investigation of Lord Levy that is regarded as anti-semitic it is the reporting thereof.

We are constantly told of his humble Jewish beginnings, of the religious affiliations of his parents, the size of the house in which he lives and the name of the synagogue he attends. We are then reminded of another Jew, also a close friend of a prime minister, who was found to be dishonest some forty years ago.

However we are given no information as to the antecedents or religious affiliations, if any, of Ruth Turner, Jonathan Powell, Des Smith or anyone else questioned in connection with the cash for honours inquiry. No reference is made to their beginnings, the size of their houses or their lifestyle.

It is not only Lord Levy's friends and supporters who detect a whiff of the oldest hatred.

FRANCES FIELD

LONDON NW11

Cyclists reclaim the streets of Paris

Sir: On a recent weekend in Paris I was amazed at the number of cycles now on the grands boulevards, and, in line with the recent correspondence, Gazelles were to the fore. I too have a Gazelle from the early 1920s, a lady's loop-frame roadster with 28-inch wheels. A bit too big, but I can perch on the saddle like a sparrow and meander into Oxford on cycle tracks alongside the A40. I cannot match Romy Dunn's 112.6 miles, my round trip is only 26 miles, but then I have been riding a bike since 1938.

Every correspondent from Britain (Letters, 12 March) seems to be buying their bikes in Europe now, and when we see the offerings lauded in The Independent that only appeal to cyclists with Lancearmstongmania; one wonders if the compilers of The Information have got any nearer bicycles than the posh catalogues. Let's see a selection of ordinary bikes.

And in the heart of Paris, Decathlon, the largest chain of cycle shops in France, have a very wide range of bikes, from child bikes like the one I rode 69 years ago, though urban bikes of the type we want, right up to carbon-framed road bikes weighing about 8kg. The British have a long way to go to match the European standards for urban cycling, and with our high traffic densities, this must be the way forward.

DAVID J BOULLIN

SECRETARY, COTSWOLD SECTION, VETERAN CYCLE CLUB WITNEY OXFORDSHIRE

Keep politicians out of housing market

Sir: Mark Steel's rant of 14 March is clearly intended for comic effect. However it displays a complete ignorance of what the Adam Smith Institute actually says, and raises some important issues about the housing market.

If the housing market seems sometimes divorced from reality, that is because it is not in fact a free market. There is growing demand for new housing (smaller families, immigration), but the supply is tightly restricted through planning controls. Regulations on rented property dry up the supply of that too, forcing people to buy when they might prefer to rent. Capital taxes on other assets make people willing to invest more in (untaxed) property. The list is endless.

The solution is not to hand our over our housing to the politicians and let them run it. We tried that with council housing, and the result was mismanagement and decay. Rather, the politicians should step back and let the market do what it does best - the efficient allocation of scarce resources.

DR EAMONN BUTLER

DIRECTOR ADAM SMITH INSTITUTE LONDON SW1

Victim support

Sir: The Prime Minister's wife is in favour of offenders meeting their victims. That being so, could she ask her husband if he could possibly find time to make a hospital visit to at least one British soldier wounded in Iraq?

BILL JACKSON

GORING, OXFORDSHIRE

Poor service

Sir: If ex-prisoners, guilty or innocent, may be charged for bed and breakfast, they become customers ("Wrongly convicted men must pay lodging costs for prison", 15 March). Prisons will have to get rid of rats, filthy bedding, violence and bullying, blocked toilets, poor food and daylong inertia. There is no legitimacy in charging for arbitrary detention in squalor and fear.

FRANCES CROOK

DIRECTOR, THE HOWARD LEAGUE FOR PENAL REFORM, LONDON N1

Pommie proof

Sir: I have the commemorative volume on the Sydney Harbour Bridge issued by Dorman Long, the British contractors who worked "in accordance with designs prepared by their Consulting Engineer, Mr Ralph Freeman" ("Did a pommie really design Sydney's beloved 'coathanger'?" 13 March). Further reading reveals that Mr Freeman submitted alternative designs with Dorman Long's original tender, "with the design of the pylons however being modified by Sir John Burnet and Partners" to incorporate the pylons from design A2. The only Australian input seems to have been requesting some mix-and-matching from two British designs.

DAVID MITCHELL

CROMFORD, DERBYSHIRE

Shirt off your back

Sir: I glanced at the "Ten Best" (14 March) and was gob-smacked to see that the "best buy" T-shirt costs £85. Is that really within the typical price range for Independent readers? If so I fear I am reading the wrong newspaper. But I suppose it is something of a bargain compared to your "best luxury buy" at £130, which is perhaps two or three months' wages for the factory worker who made it. Feet back on the ground please!

ROGER KIDLEY

LONDON SE3

Train speaking

Sir: Anthony Evans (Letters, 15 March) highlighted the challenge for everyone to carry a dog on the tube. I suggest that he avoids taking the train from Norwich to London. At each station, passengers are asked to "take all your belongings with you". To follow this advice we would need extremely long trains and stops. My belongings alone would fill a whole carriage and take several hours to load and unload.

NICHOLAS WATERS

VÄXJÖ, SWEDEN

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