HOW welcome to get some serious focus on the complacency that has developed on the nuclear weapons threat ("Bring back the Ban the Bomb banners as Trump relights fuse", The Herald, October 24). An ill-informed "conventional wisdom" has developed with an unquestioning assumption that, apart from North Korea, some kind of managed stability has been achieved. The reality has been a constant stream of new technological developments driven by the military-industrial complex for their own profitability and power and pushing us to higher risk situations.

At the beginning of 2018 the US published its new Nuclear Posture Review threatening to go nuclear against non-nuclear threats with new investment for the appropriate technologies. Three weeks later Vladmir Putin, in his annual State of the Nation televised address, announced new nuclear-armed Cruise missiles and underwater drones. President Bush in 2001 pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty so that the US could proceed with the missile defence system intended to neutralise Russian missiles. The UK is pushing ahead with the new generation of Trident missiles with the support of Tory, Labour and Liberal Democrats.

The nuclear powers have had a completely contemptuous attitude to the Article 6 they signed up to in the Non-Proliferation Treaty to "undertake to pursue in good faith effective measures relating to the cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament".

One of the factors that makes people apathetic and inactive is the feeling of hopelessness. We in Scotland are in a special situation where there is some hope if we become an independent state. We can immediately join the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons which was agreed last year by a substantial majority of UN members. This would require us immediately to ensure that Trident was made non-operational by having warheads removed from the missiles and then the planned removal of the whole system. There is nowhere else in the UK from which the system could operate for around two decades. Seeing some nuclear disarmament progress will encourage people in many parts of the world.

Isobel Lindsay,

9 Knocklea Place, Biggar.

IAIN Macwhirter's mum certainly didn't waste her time protesting against nuclear weapons. Democracy isn't the right of fools to govern themselves – it's the right to keep an eye on the fools who govern us. After all, who but a fool would build a weapon so powerful that it could kill every mammal on the planet (for some reason insects seem to thrive on nuclear fall-out)?

When the Attlee Government secretly decided to build a British bomb after the war the Russians didn't even have it. The decision had nothing to do with self-defence and everything to do with Britain's fast-fading world power status. Even Tory Prime Minister Harold Macmillan admitted as much when begging President Kennedy for Polaris at their Nassau conference a month after the Cuban Missile Crisis in December 1962. The Caribbean show-down – that came much closer to ending the world than most people realised at the time –had been a wake up call and Labour answered that call by pledging to ban Britain's bomb at its party conference the following year (against the wishes of its then leader Hugh Gaitskell).

Labour was duly elected in 1964, by a public still trembling in the mushroom-shaped shadow cast by the Cuban crisis, but instead of being abolished our nuclear arsenal was upgraded with Polaris submarines and Britain retained its expensive national virility symbol. So much for the "will of the people".

Mr Macwhirter is right to hold Jeremy Corbyn's feet to the fire on this issue. As a lifelong member of CND the Labour leader should be pushing for British denuclearisation but his party conference – a bureaucratic stitch-up between MPs and union leaders – doesn't agree. In which case the membership should be given a meaningful vote on the matter. That, and every other facet of party policy. Mr Corbyn should stop dabbling in high politics as he seems no more suited for it than Mr Macwhirter's mum and just get on with the day job of democratising the Labour Party. Who knows? This time we might really be able to ban the bomb.

Sean Pigott,

Flat 2/L, 13 Wilson Street, Largs.

PRESIDENT Trump’s pronouncement that America will withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty is yet another reckless, morally bankrupt move. The Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev on December 8, 1987, was based on a resolve to eliminate land-based first-strike nuclear weapons on both sides. INF missiles – Cruise, Pershing, SS20s and their successors– represented less than four per cent of the total nuclear armoury. A formidable stockpile of sea-launched and air-launched missiles already occupied the gap between battlefield and intercontinental weapons.

Being a ground-launched system, women’s non-violent direct actions had disrupted every single practice exercise of Cruise missile launchers and the constant stream of women through the courts brought to focus the moral as well as legal arguments against nuclear weapons. According to one General of the (US) Air Force, this extraordinary resistance by non-violent, non-aligned women was 95 per cent responsible for bringing Reagan and Gorbachev to the table.

When the treaty was ratified in 1988, promises of a more enlightened, peaceful era were still being circulated by the media. The experience of women living at the Women’s Peace Camp outside the main gate of Greenham Common USAF/RAF base was different. None of us considered the treaty "a job done".

The pre-amble to the treaty, “Conscious that nuclear war would have devastating consequences for all mankind” was a brief nod toward the beliefs of a mass movement which they had never been able to understand. That the most significant political movement of the Cold War era will be written out of the situation today is neither here nor there. Women did what we had to do in the historical circumstances of the time. That will always stand and has effects in many manifestations of people-power today. As for the powerful, if one side reneges on an arms treaty, that is an opportunity to reopen the debate on nuclear proliferation, leading to a return to negotiations, not a justification for other signatories to engage in puerile tit-for-tat.

Beth Junor,

19 Scooniehill Road, St Andrews.