Wastebasket Defense

After making a careful reappraisal of Soviet war potential, Sir Anthony Eden's military advisers came to a gloomy conclusion. They have now revised from ten years to five their estimate of the time it will take before Russian industrial strength reaches the point where the Communists may again be tempted to violent global conquest. Last week the Commons debated the government's preparations for war--old-style or nuclear#151; and found the country's defense ragged.

Outlining plans to spend $4.3 billion this year ($32.2 million more than in 1955), Sir Walter Monckton, a wealthy and urbane lawyer, ran into heavy going in his first big speech as Minister of Defense. When he calmly announced that the government was making plans in case of nuclear attack to evacuate 12 million persons, shouts of "Where to?" cannoned all over the Labor side of the House. "Areas of least concentration," replied Monckton lamely. Former War Secretary John Strachey dryly reminded him that his own ministry's pamphlet showed that "a bomb dropped on Liverpool would be lethal as far as the east coast."

Laborite Richard Rapier Stokes, acidly observing that Monckton was the fourth Tory at the Defense Ministry in four years, attacked the government for failing either to coordinate effective research for tomorrow's war or to provide the weapons for today's. "There are no airplanes," he said, "and it is no use pretending that there are." A successful industrialist himself (iron foundries, etc.), Stokes asserted that British aircraft manufacturers "have been living on their failures." In ten years, he said, Britain has spent $2.8 billion on 166 aircraft projects, 142 of which "went into the wastepaper basket as useless." Of these 166 aircraft projects, he said, only eight proved successful.

Early this month the government, with great fanfare, set up a flying column of 2,500 cold-war troopers supposedly in instant readiness to take off for any place--Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus. But according to Stokes, the government lacks the planes to move them.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.