Joe Sturge (Your Letters, July 2) chose an odd time, and an odder place, to claim our local theatre shouldn't host a defence science conference.

A couple of days after his letter appeared, ITV screened a drama documentary about Hitler's planned invasion of Britain in the Second World War. A few weeks earlier, we celebrated the 60th anniversary of D-Day.

The former might not have been fiction and the latter could never have happened if it hadn't been for the scientists of what was then TRE. Their work on radar and other military technologies saved us from defeat in the Battle of Britain and made the D-Day landings - and later allied victory - possible.

After their arrival in Malvern in 1942, TRE quickly became the town's biggest employer by far. Now as QinetiQ, it still is.

I don't know the figures, but I'd be surprised if Malvern could afford a theatre of such high quality if it wasn't for the presence of this large organisation with its several thousand high calibre employees.

Objecting to the presence of defence scientists in Malvern's theatre and elsewhere in the town is a bit like living in Portsmouth and complaining the pubs are full of sailors.

As for the wider issue of defence expenditure and the rights and wrongs of individual wars, I would have thought these are matters for governments, not for researchers.

My gut feeling, though, is that Mae West had it right. She said she'd been rich and poor but that rich was better. In wars, you can be on the winning or on the losing side. I suspect winning is better.

David Robertson, Croft Bank,

West Malvern.