Banning the bomb 1957-2022
The crisis in Ukraine, resulting from a Russian invasion, is a reminder that nuclear war remains a possibility. Putin has large numbers of Nukes, which he has reportedly placed on alert. The US and NATO have equally large numbers of them. Ukraine got rid of all its nuclear weapons some years ago.
Having an unpredictable hard right politician called Trump in the White House might have been the first time numbers of people felt that the world and with it their own lives could all end rather quickly in a nuclear war. In the event Trump pursued other preoccupations, but the possibility of war remains a very real one.
For those who are older there have been a number of such episodes since Hiroshima in 1945.
In the early 1950s the US came close to using nuclear weapons in the Korean War, which ended with the division of the country. In the early 1960s the Cuban missile crisis sparked real fear of a nuclear war between the US and Russia. This time the hawk in the White House was a Democrat- Kennedy. Not so long after in 1969 a Republican President, Nixon, was close to using nuclear weapons
The story goes that Nixon, a heavy drinker, ordered a nuclear strike while drunk one evening after North Korea had shot down a US spy-plane. The Generals sat on it until the morning when a hungover Nixon decided not to proceed.
All this serves as a reminder that we are approaching the 65th anniversary of the foundation meeting of CND in February 1958.
Its arrival as a mass campaigning force in British society- still very much with us- did not of course come from nowhere.
The spark for the organisation that led to CND was a series of nuclear tests in 1957.
In 1957 it was Britain that was testing a nuclear bomb in the South Pacific, and likewise these were not in any way officially sanctioned.
Part of the motivation after the debacle of Suez in 1956 was to put Britain back on a military footing with the US and this indeed was what happened.
The impact on the left was significant.
It was the 1945 Labour Government that had sanctioned the development of British nuclear weapons in the first place and around the nuclear tests a familiar discussion between multilateral and unilateral disarmers took place.
Nye Bevan, the de facto leader of the Labour left in the 1950s, was no fan of nuclear weapons but took the position that while others had them Britain needed them too. Whether or not he would have backed a ‘first use’ policy didn’t seem clear.
Beyond that however there were large numbers who simply wanted to get rid of all nuclear weapons and being in the UK, to start with British ones.
The moves that led to CND started with letters from Bertrand Russell in the Guardian and an article by J. B. Priestley in the New Statesman. Canon Collins, based at St Pauls, was also a key figure.
In other words the ‘great and the good’ of the liberal-left became attracted to the cause. But the foot soldiers were of course the left- many constituency Labour Party members and the wider left.
Peggy Duff a Camden Labour Councillor who had worked for Tribune and went on to become the first General Secretary of CND summed up in her autobiography what the original activists were like.
‘They belonged to no political party. Many of them belonged to no church. They had no politics. Their interest in banning the bomb was mainly ethical. They thought it was wrong. Most of them were young.. they believed that the bomb immediately threatened the future of civilisation, that it had to be banned very quickly or Armageddon would come’.
Current events should mean that a new generation will join those who first opposed the bomb 65 years ago.
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