Mark Urban

The Brits with the Churchill, it may be slow, but it gets there and it does the job, you know.

And they sort of take on this character.

I think it's a bit like steam locomotives in a way.

And you read the Thomas the Tank Engine stories and the illustrations put faces and personalities to them.

There is something of that, I think, in the way these things in the machine age come to symbolize both national will and indeed just the high machine age warfare, I guess you'd call it.

Well, I mean, there is a moment after the war where everybody looking at the use of nuclear weapons thinks, hang on a minute, do tanks actually have a role anymore?

And of course, there are several moments.

You can argue it's there from the First World War as well, from the get-go, where people say, no, no, it's all over.

We don't need these anymore.

And there's this brief period in America, I think 1946, 47, where tanks actually go out of production for the only time in the Cold War period.

Obviously, they've got an awful lot of them left over from the war.

And they sort of think, well, hang on a minute, the whole idea with armoured warfare is that you concentrate at the decisive point.

And if you do that, you're going to get nuked.

So why would you use them in the warfare of the atomic age?

And of course, the Americans think, now what we need is air mobile divisions and marines and stuff like that to rush around.

And anyway, Korea and various other things teach them that, no, perhaps they do need tanks.

And the fact...

that the Soviet army kept 10,000 tanks in East Germany through the 40s and early 50s forces, Western countries, to think, well, hang on a minute, if we're going to fight them, we're going to need some pretty convincing weaponry of our own.

Anti-tank weapons, yes, the anti-tank missile gets developed, but also tanks.

Going back to this idea, sword and shield,