Because I was less tied to Parliament, because I was freer to travel and investigate and explore, I found myself often with the odd jobs which nobody else wanted or had time for. One of these, I remember, was a study of the myxomatosis problem. Myxomatosis was a disease fatal to rabbits and without a cure—there had been prolonged examination of it on the Continent where there were dreams of eradicating or anyway reducing the rabbit population. A French chemical scientist carried out a series of experiments in the park of his chateau, with a view to rabbit control. He let the virus loose, apparently unaware that it could be carried by birds and insects. Very soon myxomatosis had spread like wildfire through France.

It is, of course, a bit of a drawback that science was invented after I left school.

On the question of … the horrors of conventional war…: men were capable of unimaginable cruelty and wickedness to each other without the aid of nuclear physics.

Partly because of improved technology, partly because of the pressures of inflation, partly from causes few understand or agree about, prices have soared. A Spitfire cost £5000 in 1940. A Tornado Air Defence Fighter costs £14 million today. That is a lot of inflation! And even when all has been said about the greater effectiveness of the latter machine, so that far fewer are needed, there still remains a mighty problem. There tend to be limits to the extent to which numbers can be reduced by superior quality. A ship can only cover a certain amount of ocean, however sophisticated it may be; and the most formidable of tanks can’t do much beyond the limits of its commander’s sight. There is a minimum numerical requirement, and meeting it with equipment capable of taking on the enemy was already, in 1955, a source of worry.

The best, particularly in the business of defence, is so often the enemy of the good. … Sophistication inevitably led not only to basic expense, but to additional cost because it usually involved design change during construction, technology having evolved since the start of the project.

The Soviet Sputnik had demonstrated what seemed a Russian breakthrough in missile technology, and the fear had taken root that … [we] were apparently becoming more and more vulnerable to missiles,… and it had become increasingly questionable whether our delivery aircraft could reach their targets—already assumed to be in the area of Moscow. This had led to the concept of a nuclear missile launched by rocket: the British deterrent ultimately … was to be such a missile, launched from an underground site. A British warhead and a British missile: Blue Streak.