I accept the right hon. Gentleman's point. All that I am saying is that, while I realise how sensitive she is about it, the moment India accepts, as she must, military assistance in some form or another from the United States and from us, she can no longer claim that she is completely uncommitted.

The Leader of the Liberal Party was anxious that there should be no discrimination in favour of Right-wing dictators as apposed to Left-wing American dictators in Latin America. I am all for that. The same thing could be applied in reverse nearer home. There has been naked and open aggression by China against India. I have been waiting to see people whom I might call banner-minded marching about with placards reading "China, hands off India". I have had letters from all sorts of people about Cuba, but I have not yet had one about India's plight.

I think that there has been a certain amount of prejudiced thinking about Cuba. There has been a lack of understanding among certain sections of the public about the extreme sensitivity of the American reaction to a build-up of missile bases within 90 miles of the American mainland. Here I exclude the speech of the right hon. Member for Huyton today and the speech of the Leader of the Opposition yesterday, in which they put the point very clearly. But I repeat that in the public mind and in certain sections of the Press there has been a lack of understanding about the natural sensitiveness of the Americans at the build-up of these missile bases. Suppose for the sake of argument that there were a Communist coup in the Irish Free State or in Belgium or in Holland and that there were unmistakable proof of the siting of missiles pointing at England from about 90 miles away. I have a feeling that the very people who in recent weeks have criticised the Americans for being trigger-happy would be the first to ask Her Majesty's Government in no uncertain terms what they were doing about it.

There has also been a tendency to confuse the real issues. Of all the transparently specious arguments used over the Cuban crisis, the prize must go to those who try to equate the N.A.T.O. base in Turkey with the new ballistic missile site in Cuba. That is not comparing like with like. To make such a comparison is completely to ignore the whole history of N.A.T.O. The hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. S. Silverman), who is not present at the moment, made this false comparison. The base in Turkey is part of the general N.A.T.O. defensive system. It was started only after half Europe had been swallowed up by the Soviet Union in 1947, and it has been there ever since.

I ask the House to consider what the result would have been if the Russians had succeeded in doing what I might call an Aladdin's Lamp deal, swapping the new bases for the old. If it had been successful in Cuba, it would have been repeated elsewhere. All that the Russians would have to do would be to provoke a new crisis in Berlin and say, "We will call off this crisis provided the rocket bases in England are dismantled". This process would then be repeated again. They would engineer tension in the Far East and say, "We will call off this one provided the rocket bases in Alaska are dismantled". Before we knew where we were, piece by piece the whole defensive system of the free world would be dismantled in return for the Russians agreeing to relax tension which they had no right to create anyway. This is a variation of the old gold watch trick which deceives no one in a train after a good day's racing.

There is something else that I wish to say, and I am surprised that this point has not been brought out. If ever there were justification for the deterrent value of nuclear weapons it has been provided by the events in Cuba. It is a strange paradox that precisely because of the frightful nature of the weapons which both sides held, at the crucial moment the maximum restraint was shown. I should have thought also that events in Cuba were a strong argument —here I disagree with the Liberal Party —for Britain retaining an independent nuclear deterrent. I ask members of the Liberal Party to answer this question. Suppose the "balloon had gone up" in one form or another. Do they think that the British people would have felt more safe or less safe if Britain had no independent nuclear deterrent at all?