Sir – Supporters of the new National Health Action party are right to say the NHS is not unaffordable, but under-funded.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has been arguing for years that public money should not be spent on weapons of mass destruction, but on the NHS — and on measures to fight global warming, and on public services  to improve the lives of ordinary people.

But a surprising number of people do not know that we have — and pay for — 180 nuclear warheads, each eight times as powerful as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

Many people think the nuclear threat vanished when the Cold War ended. Many and various are the efforts supporters of CND have made to alert the public to the truth: not only do we maintain these monstrous weapons, we have one nuclear submarine with 8 multiple armed Trident  missiles permanently on patrol at sea, ready and able to destroy 40 cities world wide.

There have been marches and demonstrations, peace camps and blockades and dramatic invasions of bases — some women even swam out to a nuclear submarine at Faslane,  climbed on board, and tossed computers into the sea...

But the general public knows nothing of these events, because the national media do not report them —  footballers’ misdemeanours are more interesting than vigils at the entrance to nuclear facilities.

A recent effort is called Wool Against Weapons. Hundreds of people knitted sections of a seven-mile-long pink scarf, which were joined up and stretched out between Aldermaston and Burghfield, the two sites near Reading where our nuclear weapons are designed, manufactured, and maintained.  No national newspaper reported this attempt to draw attention to them.

The same scarf will be assembled again on January 24, this time in London, and wrapped round Parliament and the Ministry of Defence, where the decision to spend billions on a new generation of nuclear weapons will be made. Will anybody notice?

Irene Gill, Oxford