You say (CND membership surge gathers pace after Jeremy Corbyn election, 16 October) that replacing the Trident nuclear weapons system “is likely to cost well over £100bn”. However, as a House of Commons library research paper from March says, the “current forecast costs for the successor programme remain within the estimates initially set down in the 2006 White Paper”. Using the Treasury’s GDP deflator, we can therefore estimate the total cost of the entire programme is actually £76.84bn to £101.6bn at 2013-14 prices, over a period of 34 years (basing it on the lifespan of the current fleet).
It will be up to your readers to decide whether or not this figure constitutes being “well over £100bn”, or indeed whether regurgitating CND’s figures offers a more reliable estimation of costs than that provided by the Commons library. Your report also says that “previously, both the Labour and Tory leaderships were committed to replacing the fleet”. I would like to remind readers that such a position remains the official policy of the Labour party, as was recently reaffirmed at our conference in Brighton. It is of the utmost importance that this issue and the debate that surrounds it is well grounded in fact.
Kevan Jones MP
Labour, North Durham and Shadow armed forces minister
• Jeremy Corbyn may be silenced, but if an extremist regime managed to take over a state possessing nuclear weapons, then only conventional weapons could be used to dislodge it. Not even Donald Trump would authorise the use of first-strike nuclear weapons to achieve regime change in, say, Pakistan, North Korea or Iran. What better argument could there be for strengthening our conventional forces rather than Trident?
Dr Richard Turner
Harrogate, North Yorkshire
