If I lived in Scotland I’d be voting for Nicola Sturgeon’s stance on Trident (Why I would never press the nuclear button, Journal, 25 November). But her ethical case could well receive some ballast from one of the best reports of the Church of England, The Church and Bomb, in 1983. That report named the central ethical dilemma of deterrence as one of bluff.
The possession of nuclear weapons entails that you have to be prepared to use them, in spite of the fact that using them would break two main principles of just war theory: no indiscriminate killing of the innocent and proportionality (the final state after war must be better than before war).
No ethical leader wants to use them, but you have to say that you will. It’s a bluff, and bluff is no way to conduct an ethical foreign policy, if that’s what we still aspire to.
Rev Canon Dr Alan Race
Market Harborough, Leicestershire
• Nicola Sturgeon’s article throws into sharp relief the dilemma I and others face in this election. I live in one of the constituencies in which my preferred party, the Greens, are standing aside in order to give the Liberal Democrat candidate the best chance of beating the Tory incumbent. If my vote contributes to the Liberal Democrats’ success, will Jo Swinson be able to spin that as an endorsement of her appalling willingness to press the nuclear button? I wish I could vote for Nicola Sturgeon instead.
Katy Jennison
Witney, Oxfordshire
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