THE Eurofighter 2000 will cost the British taxpayer £15.4 billion and that is not all of the defence burden on the taxpayers. Billions more are spent on nuclear weapons and the submarines to carry them.

Can those who sit in that foolish gabble shop in London think of nothing better to create employment than to build death-dealing machines?

If you listen to armchair warriors, they would have you garrisoning the moon to defend us from little green men from Mars.

This government bans all handguns. I agree with that, but should they not go much further and destroy all nuclear weapons and submarines?

In 1945, Hiroshima was virtually destroyed by one atom bomb and many thousands of people died in a split second.

Today, there are many thousands of these terrible weapons, each a thousand times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I know that I am shouting into the wind. I can only hope that someone will hear me. In a cemetery in Hiroshima, there is a monument to a young girl named Sadako Sasaki who died after years of suffering from radiation poisoning. That monument is warning to people all over the world.

Shakespeare with his King Lear has a word for Coun J H Hirst (Letters, June 9) and the people who support his views: "Tis times plague when madmen lead the blind."

And there is none so blind as those who will not see.

LESLIE JONES, Aviemore Close, Audley, Blackburn.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.