Originally Posted by
Hangarshuffle
Good evening.
Started the thread, like bubonic plague someone had to bring it in for a while.
Was going to open it up on Jet Blast, but somehow.....think its just too infantile at times (jet blast that is).
Well, its massively easy to be emotionally blinkered, politically biased as well in these sort of threads. Would be like soap without water if it wasn't so.
So, try to keep it military aviation based, or even militarily based then?
Have to ask this because I saw it in the letters page of a serious unbiased newspaper today. Has Fallon said we would use nuclear weapons in a pre-emptive strike if we were required to?
Was that true? Is it policy of HMG? Did anyone else see it? Has policy now changed?
It was mentioned in the Independent three days ago, complete with audio of the SoS saying this.
He refers to the most extreme of circumstances and in ambiguous language, making the point (in unambiguous language) that you don't tell would be adversaries who might wish to attack the UK directly whether or not they'd get a Trident warhead in return.
The subtext of such - very, very rare - utterances, if one believes Peter Hennessey [a usually reliable judge] is along the lines of '...and if you have CBW, and are about to use the latter on the UK population, don't think that you can assume that we wouldn't target your delivery systems with something rather more powerful than a TLAM' and '...if you are seen to be opening the silo doors on your missiles in the vicinty of [say] Yongbyon after saying that a weapon will be heading in the direction of London in a few hours, don't be surprised if the wind speed and temperature in that locale go up very, very dramatically as we do a spot of pre-emptive counter-force.'
I assume that in this instance, it was to draw a further distinction between Mrs May and Mr Corbyn, given the latter's statement which was reported as being that he would never authorise nuclear release under any circumstances.