The Times view on arms production: Moral Maze
Britain should be investing with a clear conscience in the defence of the realm
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In the 1970s a tax-cutting Danish populist scooped up votes by announcing plans to replace the Ministry of Defence with an answering machine message saying “We surrender” in Russian. The idea was laughed out of play at the time but it is a useful reminder in this age of wars that a country without an arms industry has a stark choice: either dependency on imported off-the-shelf weaponry or taking a gamble that the invasion will never happen.
A nation’s capacity to manufacture its own weapons is a commitment to power projection, to a degree of sovereign control that it doesn’t enjoy when it simply puts its trust in regular supplies from more prudent allies. The story of the current Ukrainian war is that even with