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Poland buys HIMARS launchers to ‘avoid going to war’ says president

"If you live in a building in which also both a notorious thief and a burglar live, you have two choices: You can have no possessions and live in constant poverty or put in some strong locks and buy a shotgun so that you can sleep soundly," said the president.
Radek Pietruszka/PAP

Poland’s acquisition of 500 HIMARS rocket launchers from the US is meant to serve as a deterrent in order to avoid going to war, Andrzej Duda, the Polish president, said in an interview whose excerpts were published on the niezalezna.pl website on Saturday.

“There is a magic word used by Nato, and that word is ‘deterrence’… These purchases were made so that we can avoid going to war,” Duda said in the interview that will be published in full in the ‘Gazeta Polska’ weekly magazine on Wednesday.

“It’s a kind of paradox,” he noted. “You spend billions on weapons in order not to go to war.”

The president also responded to the criticism of some retired military officers who commented that a peacetime army should be “compact” and that a 300,000-strong army was “madness”.

“If you live in a building in which also both a notorious thief and a burglar live, you have two choices: You can have no possessions and live in constant poverty or put in some strong locks and buy a shotgun so that you can sleep soundly,” said the president.

“We are buying strong locks and a shotgun in the hope that it will not be worthwhile for anyone to attack us,” he concluded.

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