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Ed Arnold, senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, said defence and security would feature much more significantly in a future independence referendum than they did in 2014. He thought it would be impossible for the SNP to argue, as it did 12 years ago, to get rid of Trident at Faslane and for an independent Scotland to become a member of Nato, as the SNP would seek to do. "They will absolutely have to change their policy on the nuclear deterrent. I don't see any other option. They would be saying we don't want the UK deterrent but we are happy to be covered by the Nato nuclear deterrent," he said.

Defence analyst Robert Tollast of the Rusi think tank ... added that the long-running Iran alliance with Russia, which led to Tehran supplying Moscow with Shahed drones it now fires en masse into Ukraine, had considerably helped its military developments. Recent attacks on US airbases and key sites across the Gulf have highlighted Iranian capability to impact within metres of an intended target. That suggests a "dramatic improvement", Mr Tollast said, over earlier Iranian systems, which were inconsistent and had wide error margins.