Letter: Two steps that would help Trimble come to the table

Letter: Two steps that would help Trimble come to the table

Sir: David McKittrick, your Ireland correspondent, reports (27 August) that "Britain and Ireland last night took the significant step of signing an international agreement on arms decommissioning in readiness for next month's crucial political talks".

When these talks do at last take place, the representatives of the British state and those of the political arm of the Provisional IRA, sitting down to frank discussions, will find that they hold certain military assets in common. On one side of the table Sinn Fein, representatives of the possessors of Kalashnikovs and Semtex. On the other side, representatives of the possessors of thermonuclear arms. It should prove a strange and sobering encounter. The IRA hold fearsome weapons, illegally. Britain's armed forces hold weapons which Zeus, the Thunderer, could only have had bad dreams about. These weapons, too, being void of humanity, are beyond legality.

My own unhopeful estimate (I speak as an old soldier from the Second World War, part English, part Irish) is that the English Parliament may wish to retain its nuclear arms, its generalised threat of terror, long after the wise people of Ulster have designed for themselves forms of self-government suited to their dual culture, history, and genius.

DENIS KNIGHT

Brent, Devon