My hon. Friend, with a certain Scottish clairvoyance, has antici- pated something I was about to say. I suggest that we should analyse the nature of the Soviet naval threat and its history to get a more balanced picture of that threat.

Obviously, the Soviet Union intends its Navy to deter any attacks on its allies and client States. In other words, the Soviet Navy would prevent us from doing a Suez or carrying out another Lebanon landing operation. If it is preserving us from follies such as that, it is doing a worthwhile job. It is also being used to extend Soviet influence throughout the world. I would have thought that that can hardly be counteracted by trying to build a navy of the same size. There are many ways of counteracting Soviet influence. Soviet naval power has been greatly increased for two purposes. The first is to counteract the threat of the United States Polaris submarine and the United States nuclear carrier force, and the second is to have a strategic deterrent.

If we examine the history of the rise of the Soviet Navy we find that it began in 1962 during the Cuban crisis when the Soviet Union was exposed to the utmost humiliation because it had no naval power at all worth talking about. As a result, Mr. Khrushchev got Admiral Gorshkov to take over the Soviet Navy and to initiate a programme of enormous expansion. In 1960 the most tremendous innovation took place, namely, the beginning of the first Polaris submarine, the "George Washington". Here for the first time was a nuclear warhead missile system which could be discharged from a totally invulnerable site. No one thas any illusions that nuclear submarines are easy to find. It is extremely difficult to find them at all in deep water.

In 1968 we had the multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles—or MIRV—introduced in the Poseidon submarine. This posed an even greater threat to the Soviet Union. Now we have an even more efficient nuclear submarine for nuclear ballistic purposes, the United States Trident submarine. Those advances have been an enormous threat to the Soviet Union. I do not think that we attach sufficient importance to the psychological effect of the United States Navy being able to destroy Soviet cities with comparative ease from a position of almost total invulnerability.