"Arthur Figgis" wrote in message
...
John Rowland wrote:
Brian Watson wrote:
"Alistair Gunn" wrote in message
. ..

People are always claiming that the UK Tridents can't be fired
without the USA authorisation (or even that only the USA controls
them), but they never seem to be able to provide any evidence for
this (or any evidence as to why the UK would be foolish enough to
sign up to such a deal).
Might be something to do with incurring HUGE debts to the US during
WW1 and the rematch between 1939 and '45.

Those debts were paid off in December.

Only the WWII-related ones. We still (now largely theoretically) owe the
USA money from Round One, but we are owed rather more money by other
countries than we ourselves owe. The various debts were all pretty much
put to one side during the depression between the wars, except for Finland
who paid up their bit.

While there are various books on how the west would have dealt with a
Soviet attack and the resulting WWIII, has anyone looking into the other
angle, and what the USSR thought the evil capitalist imperialists would do
when they launched an attack on the workers of the eastern bloc?
--
Arthur Figgis Surrey, UK

Case in point. I had an East German visitor staying here for a while after
the Wall came down. He had been a tank driver in the East German army during
the 80's and I asked him what he thought about it all. He, and his thousands
of similarly engaged compatriots, were sitting there in their massed tanks
waiting for the NATO forces to come pounding eastwards across the German/
German border. I mentioned that we rather thought that it might be the other
way round. He appeared genuinely astounded to hear this.