Norman Dombey

Ferdinand Mount writes that ‘the PM is surrounded by toadies he appointed, and alternative sources of criticism are silenced or sidelined,’ giving as an example the ‘sceptical advice’ on weapons of mass destruction ‘proffered by Dr Brian Jones, head of the nuclear, biological, chemical, technical intelligence branch of the Defence Intelligence Staff’ before the ‘dodgy dossier’ on Iraq’s...

In his review of Hassan Abbas’s book Pakistan’s Nuclear Bomb, Owen Bennett-Jones refers to A.Q. Khan as the country’s ‘leading nuclear scientist’ (LRB, 18 July). Khan is a metallurgist, not a nuclear engineer or physicist. Two men in particular were responsible for building Pakistan’s bomb. One was Munir Khan, a nuclear engineer who worked at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna...

‘Once the Iraqi nuclear threat had been removed by the Israeli strike on the Osirak reactor in June 1981,’ Joost Hiltermann writes, ‘Iran no longer felt the need to pursue a nuclear path’ (LRB, 4 February). The opposite is true. Following the destruction of Osirak, Iraq decided to launch an independent nuclear programme in order to reduce its reliance on foreign suppliers. In the LRB of 24...

R.W. Johnson (LRB, 2 December) makes many telling points about Mrs Thatcher’s time as prime minister. One point that he gets completely wrong, however, is her claim to have influenced Reagan’s SDI policy. She in fact played a decisive role in ensuring that the United States did not ‘break out’ of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which was the goal of Edward Teller and many SDI-backers in...

We are glad that Denis MacShane (Letters, 19 November) has raised the question of US policy with respect to nuclear co-operation between Britain and France. It is true that the US has provided France with informal help on her nuclear programme, but as MacShane points out, this help did not breach US Atomic Energy legislation. After over thirty years of US-UK collaboration any exchange of nuclear weapon...