‘Britain is exposed to the threat of missile attacks’

Dr Sidharth Kaushal, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, said the Ministry of Defence’s traditional approach “is to assume long-range ballistic missiles are tipped with WMD [weapons of mass destruction], which are dealt with by the nuclear deterrent. However, there is a recognition that a power such as Russia might use conventionally tipped ballistic missiles to weaken our ability to respond in a crisis.”