of that much abused expression. Would anybody in their senses contemplate that this ought to be our choice or would be our choice?" Powell further stated that the continental nations held the nuclear weapon in such esteem that they had conventional forces "manifestly inadequate to impose more than brief delay upon an assault from the East. The theory of nuclear deterrence states that, should Warsaw Pact forces score substantial military successes or make substantial advances this side of the Iron Curtain, the United States would initiate the suicidal duel of strategic nuclear exchanges with the Soviet Union. One can only greet this idea with an even more emphatic 'One must be mad to think of it'. That a nation staring ultimate military defeat in the face would choose self-extermination is unbelievable enough; but that the United States, separated from Europe by the Atlantic Ocean, would regard the loss of the first pawn in the long game as necessitating harakiri is not describable by the ordinary resources of language". The reason why governments, including in the US, supported nuclear weapons was that "enormous economic and financial interests are vested in the continuation and elaboration of nuclear armaments. I believe, however, that the crucial explanation lies in another direction: the nuclear hypothesis provides governments with an excuse for not doing what they have no intention of doing anyhow, but for reasons which they find it inconvenient to specify". On 2 June, Powell spoke against the stationing of US cruise missiles in the UK and asserted that the United States had an obsessive sense of mission and a hallucinatory view of international relations: "The American nation, as we have watched their proceedings during these last 25 years, will not, when another Atlantic crisis, another Middle East crisis or another European crisis comes, wait upon the deliberations of the British Cabinet, whose point of view and appreciation of the situation will be so different from their own". In 1983, his local agent was Jeffrey Donaldson, later an Ulster Unionist MP before defecting to the DUP. 1983–1987 In 1984, Powell alleged that the Central Intelligence Agency had murdered Earl Mountbatten of Burma and that the assassinations of the MPs Airey Neave and Robert Bradford were carried out at the direction of elements in the Government of the United States of America with the strategic objective of preventing Neave's policy of integration of Ulster fully into