Peter Rhodes on arming Ukraine, nuclear fusion and a lesson from a 1930s book
Royal Navy sailors were rushed to hospital with sickness after consuming contaminated drinking water on the frigate HMS Portland. This raises a number of questions. What was the infection? Was human error involved? And most puzzlingly, how long have British sailors been drinking water?
“How have Conservatives let this happen?” despairs General Sir Richard Shirreff, Nato's former deputy supreme allied commander in Europe. In a column this week, he's horrified at years of savage cuts to the British Army. And if you look at the thousands of missiles and millions of bullets being shipped out East from denuded UK military warehouses, you may think the critics have a point. But I was struck by the general's implied assumption that Conservative governments ought to be expected to spend more on defence.
I remember a conversation years ago with an old artillery officer who served from before the Second World War into the Cold War and whose last posting was to a nuclear-missile regiment. He had an unusual view of the army's political friends. “We always do better under Labour,” he confided. “It's the old working-class patriotism.”
In the meantime, catch the excellent series Putin vs the West (BBC2) which closely examines Vladimir Putin from KGB agent to leader of the largest country in the world. He is intelligent, well-read and utterly focused on his aims, no matter what the cost. I was reminded of 1066 and All That, W C Sellar and R J Yeatman's brilliant 1930 spoof of history lessons. In a black-comedy chapter devoted to the British Empire's “Wave of Justifiable Wars,” the book offers these exam notes: “War Against Zulus. Cause: The Zulus. Zulus Exterminated. Peace With Zulus.”
Nearly 100 years later, as seen in Syria and Chechnya, Vladimir Putin remains faithful to the doctrine of peace - preceded by extermination.
You may want to cut this out and keep it. The Government's science minister George Freeman reckons it will take only 15 years from now to solve the problems of nuclear fusion and construct a large-scale fusion plant. Good luck with that. But given the history of fusion, don't be surprised if 15 years from now it will still be 15 years in the future.
