Having recorded my disappointment with The Banquo Legacy, another Eighth Doctor Adventure just a few books earlier in the sequence which shares an author and a vague country house theme with The Burning, I felt that this time Justin Richards got it right; we have a well-realised late Victorian industrial/mining setting, a blasted heath, an alien presence which tempts gullible locals with promises of mineral wealth and military power, and some complex family relations among friends and foe. (Even some Biblical references, which is rare for Who.) The audio Industrial Evolution had a similar setting in some ways, but this is better. My only doubt is about the Doctor’s amnesia – not an immediate fan of that storyline – but there is so much else happening here that one can let it go, and indeed perhaps it makes the book more accessible for non-Who fans.
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If we went with the legal burden of proof then given the continuous policy of nuclear deterrence since the 50s the burden of proof would be on those wanting a change.
That said, philosophically speaking both sides should be required to prove their case, with no fudging of reality.
As for cost – plenty of national projects cost a lot, signalling one project out for special treatment and ignoring the others is a bit rich.
From a quick read-through Charlie makes a few mistakes in the evolution of delivery systems and fails to mention the early NATO “Trip-wire” policy (You invade, we nuke). As for his suggestions that UK nuclear weapons are possibly controlled by the US, from a military and an engineering background that is ridiculous: who would pay for a deterrent they could not control, and any deterrent with such controls could be circumvented by any technically-capable nation. Ditto for the suggestion that the RN’s new carriers are an annex to the USN’s Carrier force: the carriers can’t support the USN’s aircraft, and are more multi-role – to fit with the varied conflicts and relief operations the RN has been involved with since the end of the cold war.
Lastly, the suggestion that precision-guided weapons are a replacement for nukes is “not even wrong”. Nukes deter because of their terrible destructiveness. Precision-guided weapons are a part of conventional warfare, can be countered, and if used to bring a nuclear nation to its knees they would provoke a nuclear attack.