They do have quite an array of bombing options. But during the Gulf War only about seven per cent of the bombing was by smart weapons. Some quite inflated claims were made about the amount of destruction they were able to achieve.

Question: What did the arms dealers say they could do?

Spiers: Well, basically they were offering high accuracy levels with high reliability and with minimal risk to coalition pilots and minimal collateral damage to Iraqi civilians.

Q: How did these smart weapons actually perform?

Spiers: They certainly destroyed a large number of structures, some military infrastructure, bridges, that sort of thing, and severely impeded the Iraqi war effort.

Q: Were they better than conventional weapons?

Spiers: Not necessarily. Better in the sense that they didn’t put coalition pilots at greater risk because they didn’t have to overfly their targets and drop bombs by line of sight.

They could fire their weapons from a distance and, of course, with Tomahawk Cruise Missiles the pilots weren’t at any risk at all.

But a proportion of the smart weapons didn’t perform effectively: in the order of around 20 per cent not hitting their desired targets. And, of course, those that did hit their targets certainly did a lot of destruction. But whether they destroyed a high proportion of the weapons of mass destruction is another matter.