Page "Enoch Powell" Paragraph 116

America's " European allies were brought along to acquiesce in the United States engaging in the rational activity of discovering whether there was after all some defence against nuclear attack ... by the apparent assurance obtained from the United States that it was only engaged in experiment and research, and that, if there were any danger of effective protection being devised, of course the United States would not avail itself of that protection without the agreement of its European allies.

That was the first recent event which shook to its foundations the nuclear deterrent with which we had lived these last 30 years ".

The second event was Mikhail Gorbachev's offer of both the Soviet Union and the United States agreeing to abolish intermediate ballistic missiles.

Powell said that Thatcher's " most significant point was when she went on to say that we must aim at a conventional forces balance.

So, after all our journeys of the last 30 or 40 years, the disappearance of the intermediate range ballistic missile revived the old question of the supposed conventional imbalance between the Russian alliance and the North Atlantic Alliance ".