CONVENTIONAL OR NUCLEAR ARMS?

From Sir Stephen King-Hall
SIR,-Canon Drinkwater seems to think my booklet "Common Sense in Defence" which you were good enough to recommend to the attention of your readers is like the curate's egg: "Good in parts, my Lord!" I am at loss to understand his two criticisms.
In the first he attacks me for writing about "our way of life" as the object of our defence. Since I am criticising Government policy which is officially described as being for the defence of "our way of life" my use of this phrase seems logical. Moreover, I am careful to explain-as you pointed out editorially-that the important part of "our way of life" are the ideas thereof.
I never claimed that we lived up to them in all respects; in fact I was criticising on sound radio many aspects of the western way of life at about the time the Canon was writing his letter.
1 fail to sec why, in a defence booklet, I am at fault by not "starting to admit that in certain aspects the Soviet 'way of life' is preferable to ours." What respects has Canon Drinkwater in mind? Rocketry or space travel?
The fact is that the choice lies between the Soviet (and Chinese) "way of life" and "our way of life" and, imperfect though ours may be, I think it to be the better of the two and worth defending, preserving, and improving.
His second criticism is that it is crazy of me to suggest that one of the consequences of abadoning nuclear weapons would be a reduction in size of our conventional forces, since we shall only need armed forces for non-nuclear police force operations. The Canon apparently wants to increase our conventional forces for dealing with local incidents. I may be, as the Canon remarks, "no great psychologist" and indeed have never claimed to he even a little psychologist -but I think I know something about defence problems, and the notion that our present conventional forces are too small to deal with local incidents provoked by non-nuclear powers is nothing short of comic.
Stephen King-Hall
The Athenaeum