— Defence implications:-
After the collapse of Blue Stwak and Skybolt and with the V-bombers obsolete against Soviet intercontinental missiles, the Teries set out on their TSR-2 gamble. It is most unlikely that a TSR=-2 could ever have reached the Soviet Union. With a top speed of only 1,500 mph at high altitudes and 750 mph at 'tree-top' height, the Soviet Union could bomb Britain with missiles, capable of 15,000 mph, before the TSR-2 had even crossed over East Germany.
Mr, Healey has criticised the stategic role of such a plane and in the Budget the Labour Government came out against the TSR-2 on grounds of expense. The Government has emphasised that we cannot afford £5 million per plane. According to the Labour Government, there is no role for the TSR-2 in Europe (iee. against the Soviet Union). The 1965 Defence White Paper puts it this way:- "The only direct threat to our survival would be a major nuclear war arising from a direct conflict between East and West. This can almost certainly be excluded as a result of the present state of mutual deterrence, and, bearing in mind the high risk that any conflict in Europe would escalate, deliberate aggression, even on a limited scale, is unlikely in this theatre."
BUTeeessethe White paper does not extend this kind of thinking to Labour's 'East of Suez' policy, as this quotation shows :- "It would be politically irresponsible and economically wasteful if our bases were abandoned while they were still needed to promote peace in the areas concerned, though we recognise that they can ‘6 maintained only in agreement with the local governments and peoples." This is clearly an imperialist view of the Afro-Asian countries. And this is the main reason why the Labour Government is now considering the purchase of F llls, Phantoms or Bucanners, despite the fact that the Afro-Asian people themselves do not want "nuclear umbrellas". As Patrick Keatley, The Guardian Cammonwealth correspondent, put it recently :- "In the Afre-Asia of 1965, the wisest rule for those heading east of Suez bearing burdens is that they should not be in uniform and not carrying gunse It is a lesson that Andrei Gromyko and Charles de Gaulle have both quite evidently learned."
It is a lesson which the British Left will have to teach the Labour Government.
from an aircraft correspondent