SO it has happened. Fylingdales is to be offered up to the Americans.

It is grossly unfair for the Pentagon, thousands of miles away, to impose this burden on Yorkshire.

As I listened to the flat, carefully-controlled announcement, I became newly aware that most of the time we are all listening to ministers with a successful legal background. Many of us have reason to be grateful for help from humane and skilled lawyers. My own MP is one such. This is a great profession.

But at other times the political legal mind can become severely intellectual, confrontational by definition, with a fine grasp of detail directed towards narrow aims, without the necessary tragic sense of general human need and suffering.

So we get clever talk and, at the other extreme, charismatic speeches which face one way only, well-laced with double standards, as if to a jury.

Brilliant, emotionally incomplete leaders may be as much a threat to peace as the terrorists. They have handed Fylingdales, and us, over to George W Bush, ignoring our feelings. They offer us nothing except endless confrontation. But there is a way between this and abject surrender to terrorism. It implies imagination. There isn't much of that around in Washington.

We could do with a few poets in the Cabinet just now.

Roy Stevens,

Willow Bank,

New Earswick, York.

...It was no surprise that the Government granted permission for the Americans to upgrade their radar facilities at Fylingdales which forms part of their proposed Missile Defence Initiative, despite the fact it is unproven, extremely expensive and is to protect the USA not the UK from intercontinental missile attack.

The September 11 terrorist attack, and subsequent events, have shown the real threat is from terrorists using crude weapons, not advanced conventional devices. But this seems to count for nought.

Should we be concerned that the Americans will be wasting vast resources on an irrelevant system which may or may not work? The system could make Fylingdales a target for attack... but why would any terrorist group bother?

What should concern us is that the system will strengthen American unilateralist tendencies and lead it to act only out of self-interest, not as a world leader.

Richard Lamb,

Greystoke Road, York

Updated: 11:58 Thursday, January 23, 2003