Are we ready for war? Welcome to The i Paper’s new opinion series in which our writers tackle a grim question that, until recently, few had thought to consider.

• Ray Mears: This is the golden rule of preparing for war
• I’ve seen the state of our weaponry – helping Ukraine has left us exposed
• Our nuclear weapons are no longer enough to keep us safe
• Not enough people want to die for Britain – and who can blame them?

The last time Britain went to war on its own was in 1982, to recover the Falkland Islands after an invasion by Argentina. That was unusual. Modern British defence planning has always been based on the notion that if the country were to go to “war” in the way we normally understand the term, it would always be alongside our Western allies.

Britain’s long-standing defence policy therefore assumed that “collective war” might arise in Europe through a challenge to Nato’s famous Article 5, that an attack on one is an attack on all. Or else, we might fight alongside our Nato allies even if not for Nato, as in Iraq in 1991, where the whole alliance effectively decamped to the Gulf and........

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