Part of Oral Answers to Questions — Defence – in the House of Commons am 12:00 am ar 5 Mai 1987.
My hon. Friend is perfectly correct. There is no way in which the vital deterrent effect of the present Polaris and the future Trident programme could be replaced by the expenditure of any realistic sum of money on conventional weapons instead. It is simply not possible. On cancellation costs, it is very difficult to calculate in the abstract what would happen if this were done. Apart from losing a vast amount of jobs, there would probably be only a certain amount of the Trident money left to spend on other matters. Even if all of the money was used, it could provide only about one extra armoured division, which would make no detectable difference to the huge conventional imbalance that we presently face.