by Dr Dave Sloggett

During the Cold War rational actors prevailed. In the Cuban Missile Crisis of late 1962 the world stood on the edge of an apocalypse, yet President Jack Kennedy and Chairman Nikita Khrushchev recognised nuclear war was not, in the end, an option. For the sake of all Mankind they stepped back from the brink. Today, almost exactly half a century on, as the world faces the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, the images and rhetoric of the Cold War are resurfacing. British Foreign Secretary William Hague has gone on the record to draw a comparison between the Cold War and a world coming to terms with a nuclear-armed Iran. This was not a matter of political hubris.

Commentary - Odin’s Eye

The Strategic Defence Review (SDR) in 1998 committed Britain to an expeditionary strategy, which included replacement of three Invincible Class aircraft-carrying ships with two larger, more versatile, carriers. Shortly afterwards Britain joined the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) programme, which had emerged from something called the Common Affordable Lightweight Fighter (CALF). The British bought their way into the JSF development programme as one of the founding partners. The JSF was intended to produce a replacement aircraft for the USAF, US Navy, US Marine Corps, the Royal Navy and RAF. Many more countries would join the programme and eventually thousands of JSFs would be built, making it a cheap, mass-production aircraft.