Dear Sir,

I read both Jonathan Smith and Colwyn Burchall Jr’s books, Island Flames and They Called Him ‘Roose’ respectively. They both touched on the topic of Bermuda’s strategic military role, particularly during the Cold War. However, that item needs to be expanded upon to put the issue of the tumult and uprisings in proper context.

The books highlighted the uprisings and the militancy of the late sixties and seventies as an appendage to the notion of racial justice and the tide of self-determination and movements towards independence, which was a feature of decolonisation during those periods.

Without busting anyone’s bubble, we are talking about a threat to a revolution that was never going to happen, at least successfully. It’s a common tendency to promote national heroism, but without understanding the ultimate nature of a struggle, the acclaimed entitlement when confronted with realism is a seriously diluted construct. Bermuda was the centre for detecting the movement of Soviet nuclear submarines in the Atlantic Ocean. The Cold War military dynamic was based on mutual destruction. When one ponders the trillions of dollars of war effort and the global balance of power hinged upon it, we get a truer picture of what a presumed revolution in Bermuda meant. Political reform, perhaps, but the remit on internal and external security was not going to be arrested from its strategic military role.

Remember the baselands did not come as a result of a vote in Parliament. We must remember also in even a limited form of war between the nuclear powers, among the first essential targets eliminated are command and surveillance stations. It sounds cowardly to say there was never going to be the revolution and that all the seeming posturing amounted to no more than the similitude of individuals carrying BB guns or bows and arrows on a real and sophisticated battlefield.

The role of the Governor in the Bermuda-Atlantic theatre was that of commander-in-chief. Many may have seen only the plumes, pomp and ceremonies performed as the vestige of an aristocracy.

However, quite beyond that facade, was the naked role of a military protector of the free world.

While we gained no applause for the role we play, the higher objective for us is to see the sacrifice and role we played in the broader world of which we are a part.

Any threat to that role was not going to be entertained, except to the level that it proposed to the ultimate objective of Nato.

Bermuda’s role was not that of a small fish; we played an important, unheralded part in the Cold War. I remember chatting with an American lawyer friend, trying to cash in on our position by attributing a value for the role we played throughout the years. His quick rebuttal and dismissal of any gratitude was superseded only by his contemptuous question, “Well, what have you done lately?”

This world has lessons and we must learn them quickly. Bermuda did something and the presumption seems to be that we have got our rewards already, and if we didn’t know it, we should have been getting it while they were getting theirs.

The sad lesson in this world, in spite of cross-border business and even the legalised invasion of privacy, is the idea that self-interest and even narcissistic nationalism still have effect.

At the very least, we need to know what we are doing now and in any future roles we play in the global interplay, whether intellectual or military.

KHALID WASI