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CND in the News
CND in the News: 14-21 September 2005
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1. CND: Back with a bang?
Sunday Herald
http://www.sundayherald.com/51722
New Labour has discarded the old badges as it prepares to replace Trident,
but with nuclear weapons back in favour, can CND regain
former heights to lead the struggle for disarmament?
By Torcuil Crichton
IT is market day in the small Leicestershire town of Lutterworth and Bruce
Kent is about to unfurl his banner for another meeting. From Lutterworth,
the theologian John Wycliffe, who translated the Bible into English, set
out his doctrine against the established church of Rome some 200 years
before the Reformation swept Europe. As vice-president of the Campaign
For Nuclear Disarmament, Kent, a former Catholic priest, is also
a revolutionary figure, although these days, many people would be hard-pressed
to recognise his name.
During the organisation’s heyday in the 1980s, Kent – then
the nationally recognised face of CND – could expect
hundreds at a meeting. Today, just over a dozen people wait inside the
the town’s historic Anglican church hall to hear his softly-spoken
address.
“I think the British bomb is a complete waste of money,” says
the old campaigner. “I believe in unilateralism, though the best
way of getting rid of the British bomb is probably through negotiation.
But I don’t care which way it goes so long as it does go.”
Unilateral nuclear disarmament – the words transport you to another
era, one in which half the world’s population feared an invasion
by Russian tanks while the other half waited tensely for US president
Ronald Reagan to fulfil his joking promise to begin bombing Russia “in
five minutes”.
For those who worried about it, the last nuclear age was a strange make-believe
place where the threat of instant annihilation co-existed with the ridiculous
and the profane. The student bedsit poster said it all, with its image
of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Reagan as Rhett
and Scarlett in a nuclear re-make of Gone With The Wind. “She promised
to follow him to the end of the world,” ran the tagline. “He
promised to arrange it.”
It was always a minority who wanted to “Ban The Bomb”. Nevertheless,
Europe was convulsed to its political core over the deployment of US cruise
missiles and Russian SS20s that were capable of limiting a nuclear war
to one continental “theatre”, and in the UK a bizarre “protect
and survive” civil defence programme attempted to persuade families
they could live through a nuclear war if they whitewashed their windows.
Even less realistically, the earnest promise to get rid of “the
Bomb” (there was only ever one and it was always capitalised) featured
in the Labour Party manifesto at each election. That was until the lessons
of failure were finally drummed into the party after 1987, and the commitment
to a nuclear-free defence policy was dropped.
Ironically, it is a Labour government that finds itself taking a decision
on whether to replace Britain’s own nuclear deterrent which, all
countries agree, would never be used independently of US military policy.
Last Monday, defence secretary John Reid announced he wanted a full public
and parliamentary debate on the replacement of Britain’s ageing
Trident missiles and the Vanguard submarine fleet that operates out of
Faslane on the Clyde. Reid denied what many suspect: that he has already
secretly decided to spend £15 billion on leasing a new missile system
from the US government. Previous replacement plans, like the Labour government’s
1974 decision to extend Polaris with the Chevaline programme, have been
almost shameful secrets with limited cabinet involvement, but Reid said
it would be foolish not to have a debate on one of the most controversial
parliamentary decisions of the next two years.
Until last week, many people had all but forgotten about “the Bomb”.
Of course the missiles are still out there. T here are 20,000 nuclear
weapons stockpiled around the world and several countries – particularly
North Korea and Iran – are racing to join the nuclear club.
The sole weapon system in Britain’s deterrent arsenal, the Trident
submarine-launched ballistic missile system, went into service in 1994.
Britain’s total warhead stockpile is under 200, which makes its
arsenal the smallest of the five official nuclear weapon states, with
possibly even fewer weapons than Israel.
In an age of environmental and terrorist uncertainty, nuclear weaponry
seemed to be the least of our worries . Certainly, the broken cross lapel
buttons, which where part of Labour orthodoxy from the 1960s to the 1980s,
had been discreetly removed by politicians like Tony Blair and Jack Straw
by the time Labour came to power in 1997.
Robin Cook may have argued in one of his last Guardian columns that Britain’s
nuclear deterrent should be negotiated away, but as a former Foreign Secretary
he would have recognised that Britain’s position in international
affairs and on the UN Security Council owes everything to possession of
nuclear weapons. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, when he became Prime Minister
after the second world war, argued that we needed a hydrogen bomb “to
secure our place above the salt at the negotiating table”. That,
in the end, may be the over-riding argument for the £15 billion
Trident replacement bill.
Of the current cabinet only Peter Hain, secretary of state for Northern
Ireland, makes no secret of his CND membership, although
he disagrees with the organisation’s avowedly anti-American stance.
However, t here are 49 members in the cross-party parliamentary group
led by the left-wing Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn.
Nationally there are 32,000 CND members – slightly
more than the shoe-box full the campaign started with in 1958 –
whose involvement in events such as the recent anti-war demonstrations,
and the nuclear “convoy watch” that keeps tabs on the transportation
of weapons across the country, proves that the campaign is not moribund.
Current chair Kate Hudson believes the debate on Trident might spark a
revival.
Reid, clever politician that he is, has already set the debate over the
future of Trident in terms of deterrence, as a security blanket that we
will never use. There are about 30 nations with weapons of mass destruction
programmes, as well as “non-state actors”, the euphemism for
terrorists, who, it’s feared, could act independently or under sponsorship
by an enemy. A reasonable defence policy, Reid argues, requires preparation
for threats that are possible though perhaps unlikely today.
The strategic thinking on nuclear warfare is far more sinister than that.
A chilling Pentagon document called the Doctrine For Joint Nuclear Operations
envisages nuclear weapons being used to pre-empt an attack by a non-nuclear
nation or a terrorist group using weapons of mass destruction. It also
gives the option of a nuclear attack on stockpiles of chemical or biological
arms. Although scarcely reported on, the document marks a fundamental
shift away from the old world order of a nuclear stand-off between nations.
The significance, says Hudson, is that “ the US has abandoned the
deterrence notion and sees nuclear weapons as part of a useable arsenal.
The draft doctrine on nuclear weapons specifically talks about them being
used in a proactive, first-strike policy against non-nuclear powers. ”
Spooky as it may seem, the US defence department’s desire for “mini-nukes”,
“bunker busters” and other battlefield nuclear weapons only
serves to make the colossal Trident system look more redundant. One Trident
submarine out of a total of four is always supposed to be on patrol, in
a secret location, at any time. E ach sub has a destructive power equivalent
to 300 Hiroshimas, capable of destroying an entire city.
There are also more than 100 nuclear weapons at the US Lakenheath base
in Suffolk, home of American F-15 strike jets. Nearly 400 further bombs
are deployed across Europe by the US military. The massive power of those
weapons – and the guarantee of an equally massive response –
was what MAD, mutually assured destruction, and the whole idea of deterrence
were based on. With the Cold War over it has been taken for granted that
nuclear weapons are somehow useless.
The taboo over the use of nuclear weapons, the idea that their use crosses
the threshold to Armageddon, is being blurred by the new thinking coming
of the Pentagon. Defenders of the new US policy on nuclear war call it
a “robust” doctrine that shows America’s determination
to use nuclear weapons if necessary. Detractors say that making the use
of nuclear hardware practical from a military standpoint will undermine
the argument that they represent a unique and forbidden type of weapon.
Accordingly, the Dr Strangeloves of the modern age believe that this will
make their use unlikely to provoke an all-out war.
Naturally, Kate Hudson sees things differently. “ There is a very
real danger. Any use of nuclear weapons on a battlefield, be that in Iraq,
Iran or anywhere, would have an environmental, political and military
impact worldwide. It will end any restraint on nuclear proliferation.
Any country holding back now will not if nuclear weapons are used against
a non-nuclear country.”
Hudson, in her book on CND’s history, claims great
victories for the peace movement from the atmospheric test ban in the
1960s through to the removal of cruise missiles from Britain in the 1990s.
Historian Gerard De Groot, in his biography of “the Bomb”,
is less sympathetic, particularly of the women who camped outside Greenham
Common until cruise missiles were removed. “When the missiles were
removed they congratulated themselves on their achievement, rather like
the lunatic who thinks the sun rises because he wakes up in the morning.”
De Groot, and other historians, credit Reagan, the warhead-turned peacemonger,
and Soviet reformer President Gorbachev with setting the doomsday clock
back several minutes from midnight when they signed the 1987 treaty that
banned short-range nuclear weapons in Europe. Momentarily, the world seemed
a safer place.
CND insist their popular pressure, and millions of other
global protesters, had an effect on Nixon’s policy on Vietnam, the
European campaign against the neutron bomb and the end of the Cold War.
“We may not have a full impact at the time but we do have a significant
role and mass protests, from the struggle for votes for women, to civil
rights campaigns in the US, do bring about change,” says Hudson.
The organisation has already planned its campaign against Trident’s
replacement. A strategic meeting in London, drawing together activists,
trade unionists and faith groups to spread the message through grassroots
activism, has already taken place. The banners are being dusted down once
more.
Some might have thought Bruce Kent was the last man standing wearing a
CND badge, but Hudson is determined he is not on his
own. “Now, more than ever, CND is relevant because
the US is taking us, not to a cataclysmic superpower conflict, but to
a conventional war when nukes are not on the other side. Then, the genie
will be out of the bottle and we will be heading for the nuclear age mark
II, and that will lead to the destruction of us all.”
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