The Peace Movement And Me Part II – My Work With CND

The Menwith Hill Radomes

By the time I got around to being active in CND 1991, its membership was probably in decline, which had a number of effects on its atmosphere. The people still actively involved were kind of a hard core of members who were particularly committed to the cause, and took a deeper, more philosophical approach to the ideal of peace, something which I hadn’t seen so much in FoE, Greenpeace or the Green Party. I found this quite impressive, and it’s also the case that with CND, people were more prepared to take direct action against things and go to prison for their beliefs, although this is obviously also true in other situations as with animal liberation. Sarada’s experience begins much earlier than mine, and she may be aware of how the organisation had been in its heyday.

Speaking of Sarada, at the time our relationship was still in the future and a misunderstanding occurred which I didn’t clear up definitively until many years later. Many Leicester CND members were leaving the organisation because of our opposition to the Gulf War in 1991 as I got involved, one of whom was Sarada, officially speaking. Much later I found out that this was nothing to do with her, but that he partner had resigned instead as she was not in the country at the time. However, before this was resolved this temporarily placed her in the “outer darkness” for me because it appeared to me that she had supported the war.

1991 was the best and the worst of years for me. It was extremely traumatic to see the whole country so enthusiastically support the war, and it also seemed very much to me that we’d made no progress since 1914, as the rhetoric used I found strongly reminiscent of that time. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn spoke of the “short twentieth century”, which he saw as stretching between those two years and ending with the breakup of the Soviet Union. I don’t know the details of his analysis, but it struck me that the progress one associates with that period was utterly trashed from the end of the 1970s onwards in this country and that this became starkly demonstrated in the outrage of that war, and even more in its popular support. My reaction was one of utter despair.

But I want to focus on CND itself. Due to the rather depleted membership, I found myself becoming office manager and later chair of Leicester CND, and at the same time I was translating German papers and articles for the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) and the Trust for Research and Education into the Arms Trade (TREAT). I also became newsletter editor, regularly staffed the stall and and just generally did a lot for them, although it must also be observed that I didn’t do it particularly well. Clearly I had my strengths but the trouble with being in a declining organisation is that you can’t necessarily stick to the areas you do best in and I found myself having to do a lot of stuff which I wasn’t much good at. I stayed because they seemed to be the one organisation whose perspective went deeper than just the activism, but this, as I’ve said, may be an artifact of being in decline, as there was not much of popular `οι πολλοι one might find in a larger group such as the Labour Party or Greenpeace Supporters at the time. However, I also think there’s a stronger tradition of this in CND and the peace movement generally than there is in other pressure groups. There is a stronger religious component to the membership than elsewhere, and also there are more Marxists, which is a good thing. However, they are to some extent in conflict with anarchists, who tend to consider them too moderate. In particular, Quaker involvement is very strong. All of this means that they are more intellectually-oriented, as can be expected of an organisation whose president was Bertrand Russell. Just briefly, and this deserves more discussion elsewhere, Bertrand Russell is rather a paradoxical figure in his involvement with progressive causes because his motivation was clearly conscience-based, but as a philosopher he was practically an ethical sceptic, i.e. he didn’t really believe right and wrong had any meaning, entailing that had he lived his life authentically he would be a sociopath, but definitely wasn’t. This is extremely odd and is worth going into in greater depth at some stage.

CND has a number of broader involvements than just the issue of unilateral nuclear disarmament. For instance, it supports the Hibakusha (被爆者), i.e. the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. As I once ranted on the megaphone in Leicester City Centre, “people not yet born are still dying”, which was one of those things which comes out of your mouth when you’re trying to keep the flow going, but it is kind of true. Damage to chromosomes from ionising radiation to one generation of organisms can increase in future generations even though they’ve never been exposed to that dose, meaning that some of the children and grandchildren of the Hibakusha will be dying of cancer, for example, even if they were born outside Japan. In 1976, one of my teachers said that “fifty years from now there will be children born who will die of cancer from Hiroshima”. This will be true unless some other cataclysm wipes us all out. As OMD said of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb, “that kiss you give is never ever gonna fade away”.

I’m not writing this primarily to propagandise although I inevitably will, but I do want to say this. We often think of the Japanese nation as the only direct victims of nuclear weapons, but this is not so. Test sites around the world such as Bikini Atoll and the Nevada Test Site mean that the Marshallese and Western Shoshone nations, for example, are also victims. Whereas they may not have been killed by the blasts of nuclear bombs themselves, their lives have been devastated by them and deaths have resulted. The Western Shoshone found themselves in the ironic position of not being able to find paid employment except in organisations which were destroying their nation, and many of them therefore chose to boycott employers globally.

Another aspect of this is arms conversion. As the Cold War ended, there was supposed to be a peace dividend resulting from the end of the colossal sums of money spent on the likes of Trident. This was not forthcoming because the political system needs us to imagine we have enemies, but trade unions and other organisations investigated the opportunities for manufacturing other products than the subs, warheads and the like which they were oriented towards producing up until the end of the 1980s and found that it was eminently feasible to do so. It was also found, by CAAT, that the efficiency of investment into healthcare and education produced several times the number of jobs investment in arms companies yielded. For instance, four times as many jobs are produced by the equivalent sum of money paid into a school than into the defence industry, where the money mainly goes on expensive equipment. It’s also worth observing at this point that the price of components provided by defence companies to the UK military is vastly inflated, often beyond the realms of reason. This is true across NATO. There are cases of single bolts for sale at retail for less than a dollar going for $5000.

CND is also opposed to fission power, as am I. There is a constant effort to chip away at public opposition to nuclear power which has to be continually renewed when accidents occur. In my opinion the solution to our energy problems is orbital solar power. This has the drawback of the beams being sent back to this planet being very dangerous if they miss their targets and also of the technology for these beams being used for nefarious purposes, but there are straightforward engineering solutions for the former and the latter assumes that human behaviour as it is now is something we’re stuck with. I’m not here to persuade you though.

One of the brutal things members of the public have said to us about Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that two bombs weren’t enough, and that the whole of Japan should’ve been bombed. This assumes that everyone in the country was complicit in the imperialism, torture and other atrocities, and it’s notable that I’ve never heard the same suggested as action against those nicely “Aryan” Germans. In other words, this is nothing but racism. It penetrates far into the alternative community too, as I’ve heard the same sentiments expressed by ageing hippies. I’ve also been called a “traitor”, which is like water off a duck’s back because to me, I just happen to be born in this country and am like everyone else coerced by a monopoly of force to obey the government, so how could I owe anything to my “nation”? The only people I owe that kind of allegiance to is the human race as a whole.

While I’m on the subject of being shouted at in the street, as we all know the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Before that time, shouting “get back to Russia!” made a minimal bit of sense, but this was still shouted at us well into the twenty-first century, and I think the last time I heard it was probably about twenty years after the end of the Cold War. It isn’t clear to me what someone means when they say this more recently, and to me it advertises that they are not putting any thought into their political position.

The internal machinations of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament are broadly similar to those of any organisation, and it’s remarkable that the same kinds of dynamics and interactions occur across the political spectrum. You might just as well be in the Conservative Party as far as that’s concerned, and it occurs to me that if we are to invent a new way of relating to each other, that might be expected to be reflected in the organisations committed to doing that. It’s no longer an option, and hasn’t been for over six dozen years now, to continue in the same vein as before. To be fair, there are people dedicated to relating differently within such organisations. There’s an elusive political idea in my head which I’ve had for a number of years that the interactions and behaviour we don’t politicise but seem to assume are universal could in some way be extended into the overtly political realm in order to come up with an entirely new form of politics, but as I say I’m very hazy about the nature of this.

Unilateralism is one of those doctrines which appears superficially to be left wing because of tribalism and the adoption of such a policy by the Left. However, if you go back far enough there used to be a Conservative branch of CND and Enoch Powell was a unilateralist. Conversely, if you consider Stalinism to be left wing, the pro-Soviet communist parties in NATO countries would clearly have supported the Soviet Union and its weapon stockpiles. Even the Socialist Workers’ Party in Britain supported retaining nuclear weapons, and their slogan was, famously, “neither Washington nor Moscow but international socialism”. It is not fundamentally a left-wing idea.

The reason the “U”K has nuclear missiles is not in fact to do with defence, or even attack, but because it keeps the country on the UN Security Council. I’ve never understood why the Conservative Party aren’t honest about this because although I don’t agree with it, it does seem to be more defensible than the idea that we have them against a nebulous enemy when suitcase and dirty bombs can easily be used against this country whether or not we have them, and also provide the materials to make them. Although I initially corralled myself into agreement with CND from a left wing position, their policy doesn’t actually have a close connection to left wing politics per se, and in a way it’s odd that a right wing government is happy to throw countless billions of pounds at the defence industry, because that’s the kind of thing you might expect a left wing government to do. But I find myself propagandising again.

Editing the newsletter was a very useful enterprise. At the time, desktop publishing wasn’t the kind of thing most CND members felt willing to wrestle with and there were problems with scale, so this involved spraymounting the edited articles onto boards for reproduction at a local printer. As I was committed to using unbleached paper, the printers used to complain about the colour. We did it all on a typewriter for quite some time and only very slowly did we begin to word process it. You might think that editing would’ve cured me of verbosity and for a while it did, but I find it creeping back in recently and most of what you see me write today will have that flaw. I don’t know why this is but I worry it may be linked to cognitive decline, as the word:idea ratio climbs with the risk of dementia. Very soon after I began, I abandoned spraymount as a potentially nasty sticky stuff which did goodness knows what if you inhaled it and replaced it with Prit Stick. There was an issue with people being rather attached to the way things had always been done, and also problems associated with rather simplistic world views. For instance, some people in the group were opposed to almost any kind of scientific or technological change and often saw it as part of a conspiracy to maintain the status quo. Sometimes it is, but not always.

CND is also something Sarada and I have done together, although Sarada’s attitude has been much more relaxed than mine. One of the biggest difficulties she encountered was when she became treasurer and discovered that her predecessor, who seemed notably disengaged with the whole thing at the best of times, had simply bunged all the receipts for the previous year into a plastic bag which she then had to go through to get the books into an auditable condition. The post of treasurer is always an unpopular one, in that nobody ever wants to do it, and given Sarada’s experience it’s easy to see why.

At times, CND seemed to turn more or less into my “day job” except of course that I wasn’t paid. By this I mean that once you are involved in campaigning, or more broadly working, with something much of the time for years on end you can lose sight and enthusiasm for the cause. Although I still support the cause of unilateral nuclear disarmament, I also find the task of advocating for it quite tedious and tend not to bother much nowadays. It isn’t that I don’t believe in it so much as that all the arguments, responses and counter-arguments have become very routine and tiresome to me, which is a great pity because they are of course vitally important life and death matters. This is a strange juxtaposition because it superimposes apathy and passion. I imagine many people feel this way about what they do.

There is also a question of priority. There’s a sense in which the abolition of weapons of mass destruction trumps all other political issues because it would also be ecocide and there isn’t any point in campaigning for more unionisation or a better NHS if it could all be reduced to cinders at any moment, but likewise there isn’t much point in ignoring civil liberties either since their curtailment could prevent one from standing in the way of a nuclear holocaust either. Most of the time, though, there is a broad consistency across these issues. Voluntary Human Extinction, for example, might sound like a movement which would positively welcome nuclear destruction but in fact the reason most people in VHEMT are in favour of the end of the species is to protect the environment from us, which nuclear war obviously wouldn’t do. I’ve unsuccessfully attempted to come up with a sentence which says something like “nuclear weapons kill without a shot being fired”, which in that form makes no sense, but the very existence of nuclear weapons means that the NHS and all other public projects in this country and around the world are less well-funded and the régimes relying on their existence either economically or directly are not friendly places to live. Mordechai Vanunu comes to mind as a particularly obvious human rights issue here.

It’s probably been roughly a decade since I was involved with CND or the peace movement directly, although I do still go to the Hiroshima vigils. I’m not today, but it’s Friday and my life is rather limited anyway. If you want to think of it as parallel to a career, I ended up on the board of East Midlands CND and might have got further if certain other issues hadn’t impinged, notably the “Labour” government’s attack on home education and complementary medicine at the end of the ‘noughties. Consequently I haven’t done much in recent years, but it’s impossible to be involved so heavily in something for two decades without it having an impact on one’s life and being significant.

Naturally the reason I’m blogging about this today is that it’s the seventy-sixth anniversary of Hiroshima, and we must never forget that atrocity. This must never happen again:

The Peace Movement And Me Part I – Prelude

I can’t remember when I first heard of CND, but I can remember when I first became aware of Hiroshima. It was in 1973 and I found it absolutely horrifying. I wasn’t aware at the time of the Cold War or the arms race, although I did know about Vietnam and the rivalry between the Russians and Americans, particularly in the context of the Space Race. The issue of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came up for me due to my interest in nuclear physics. I didn’t then fully understand how nuclear fission worked, but it was clear to me that the Bomb was a stupendously destructive weapon compared to any chemical explosive by many orders of magnitude.

My focus as a child, however, was not on these issues. If anything, my interest in political terms would probably have been centred on environmentalism and endangered species. At some point I will come back and look at my life as a prelude to becoming vegan in 1987, but not today. It could also be said that you don’t get a bigger threat to the environment than a nuclear holocaust, and I was concerned about nuclear power and also the possibility of fusion power, which for some reason I saw as dangerous in the same way as a fission power station was, but not particularly the Bomb.

This was in the days before the Nuclear Winter theory had emerged. That did so in part because of the Viking missions to Mars, when attempts were made to model the influence of particles in an atmosphere on surface temperature, although some evidence was noted from the early ’50s. Consequently, the threat of nuclear war seemed a little less serious in the ’70s than it would in the ’80s, and Détente in the previous decade seemed to take the pressure off. The first dated diary entry I ever wrote is from 17th July 1975, the day of the Apollo-Soyuz test project, and so at the time things seemed very hopeful. They would get a lot less so in the coming decade.

The fundamental issue about any weapon with the potential of causing human extinction which comes within easy reach of any power in the species is that once it’s been invented, it can’t be “un-invented” unless some calamity befalls us which either causes us to lose knowledge or changes the infrastructure in such a way that the technology becomes unfeasible. Since either of those things is pretty close to actually being human extinction, the existence of weapons of mass destruction requires us to re-invent how human beings as a whole relate to each other, such that the knowhow to produce the weapons might exist but it becomes psychologically unfeasible to use them. With the advent of easily available genetic engineering or nanotech and the Grey Goo Scenario (which is actually unfeasible), this gets quite a bit more dangerous because it puts such technology within the reach of the likes of moody teenagers (and I was a moody teenager – this is not ageism) or sociopaths who end up destroying the human race on a whim. Although it is possible to build a nuclear reactor in the garage, as the teenage David Hahn in Michigan did in the 1990s, this was only a local problem. I’m not about to spell out how to produce either a nuclear weapon or a deadly bacterium here, but there is an issue with the information being freely available online and it really isn’t that hard, so the rational response, unless you’re happy with the extinction of Homo sapiens, is to address the possibility of people being willing to do such a thing. You can’t just leave it and hope for the best.

Many would say that the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction is in a way an organically-developed situation which did prevent nuclear holocaust. Again, I don’t know what people know and don’t know, so just in case you don’t, the justification for the Warsaw Pact and NATO stockpiling nuclear arsenals was that in order to maintain peace, there needed to be enormous amounts of nuclear missiles aimed at the enemy on both sides so that using them would be inconceivable. This sounds to me like a rationalisation of a situation which had arisen already although perhaps surprisingly I’m not aware of its history. That is, I don’t know if we went from a situation where we had few nuclear weapons to one where both sides had many as a deliberate policy or not. This kind of organic development, from NATO’s viewpoint, is in accord with conservative politics, where the practices which have grown up without planned intervention are often seen as things which have worked okay and should therefore be kept. However, it also assumes, like many other policies, that the system will work perfectly in spite of being maintained by imperfect human beings, and that imperfection is a central part of conservative political theory, so it’s a bit odd really. It would be interesting to know how the Soviet Union saw it though, because it’s a question of conscious planning versus a situation arising through some kind of “invisible hand”-type process, so maybe the USSR actually did plan it, or maybe they saw it as an inevitable operation of the forces of history. Again, this is a gap in my knowledge.

By about 1980, I was aware of the Cold War and the threat of nuclear holocaust, but had a firm division in my mind between that threat and the use of nuclear power for peace. Not everyone maintains that position, and I didn’t, but there are people who take it much further than I and even see the likes of the LHC as a threat to peace. I think this goes too far, although I do think the LHC is probably a waste of money and resources, and in that sense a threat to peace. I was, however, very much opposed to nuclear power, although by that time I also believed that fusion power was a good solution. At this point I was unaware of the constant deferral involved in the development of fusion power because I simply hadn’t lived long enough to notice, but I definitely saw it as benign. Although it probably isn’t, the issue isn’t a live one because it seems to be unattainable.

My belief in unilateral nuclear disarmament took a lot longer to develop than my agreement with any other left-wing or Green issues. By this I mean that although I felt emotionally committed to the idea of supporting CND, which is how I saw unilateral nuclear disarmament at the time, I was also concerned that this was a merely emotional commitment rather than one I could base on rational argument, and there was also a question of mild peer pressure. The 1979 Afghanistan situation had rekindled the Cold War and brought the issue to the fore again, to the extent that one of my big worries about the Falklands/Malvinas in ’82 was that it could provoke a nuclear confrontation in some way simply because of the very delicate balance in international relations. The Greenham Common peace camp began in 1981 and there were large CND marches into central London in the early ’80s which some of my friends went on, but I didn’t and felt guilty about it. At the time, my approach to demos was that they could directly change government policy. As you will know if you read this, my approach has considerably changed since then, and in fact had done so by the end of the decade. My attitude, though, was somewhat paradoxical because although I felt like supporting the peace movement was the right thing to do, I didn’t feel their arguments were convincing. This I would attribute to the heavy governmental propagandising against it.

If you examine at the popular culture of the time, you’ll see a resurgence in songs, films and TV programmes expressing the widespread fear at the threat of nuclear war. As my adolescence wore on, this kind of merged with my general teenage angst and I can’t distinguish between them. I thought that nuclear war was inevitable at that point, an attitude which reached its peak in about 1984. Even so, and it amazes me to look back on this now, I was still not convinced that M.A.D. was the wrong policy. Although I didn’t think about it much at the time, Alphaville’s ‘Forever Young’ sums up my and many other youths of my generation’s philosophy of life at the time:

The general idea was that we would never see even middle age because by then we’d’ve been killed in a nuclear war, so from our perspective we would indeed be “forever young”. This intimation may be missed by the youth of today when they hear this.

It’s also true that I got it into my head that I was going to die at twenty-seven, in fact live exactly 10 000 days, and therefore die on 19th December 1994. People who are trying to deduce my personal details will of course enjoy that I’ve just shared that date. Although I had various reasons for supposing that to be the case, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of those was subconsciously the expectatio that sooner or later there’d be an apocalyptic exchange of missiles. It was not a good thing to live under the shadow of this prospect. Even now, I would expect people who were young in the early 1980s to have nightmares about this. It must also have consequences for aspiration. We were facing the prospect of unemployment or annihilation, and neither of these were very motivating for bothering to do very much academically or vocationally. On another note, Gen-Xers are known to have poorer employment prospects and underachievement in their careers due to the conditions into which they entered the job market in the ’80s. Maybe nuclear armageddon also had something of a hand in this.

Even though I was communist up until about 1984, I continued to find the arguments for unilateral disarmament unconvincing. I had peers who only voted Conservative because of the Labour Party’s unilateralism and were otherwise left wing, and they continued to do so into the late ’80s when I lost touch with them. It’s astounding how powerfully persuasive the Tory propaganda on this was. In ’84, I abandoned communism because I considered it to be too optimistic and began to gravitate towards the Green Party although I wasn’t particularly aware of doing so because at the time I thought of them as a single-issue party and didn’t realise how left wing they were. It being 1984, there’s a sense of doublethink in all this because on the one hand I feared nuclear war and wasn’t in the “better dead than red” camp, but nevertheless was unconvinced by unilateralism.

Then I left home and went to university, substantially because it was an opportunity for political activism. It wasn’t until the start of my second year that I felt comfortable enough with the policy to join CND itself, but I wasn’t active in it. Once you’ve done something like that, you become emotionally invested in it and tend to rationalise your decision by bending your opinions in that direction, and since I’d joined the Green Party, Greenpeace Supporters, Lynx and Friends of the Earth, three of which were also unilateralist, sometimes to the chagrin of some of their members, that was probably a factor in my persuasion. I also studied Game Theory as part of my degree, which is famously applicable to the M.A.D. situation.

In January 1987, I went on an anti-Sizewell B protest. This was partly organised by the local CND group as well as FoE, so by that time I was beginning to make the connection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. However, at that time at least a certain kind of rhetoric was used, particularly focussing on the half-lives of radioisotopes, which was not particularly scientific as it made it appear that the half-life was a measurement of the period during which it would be dangerous, which isn’t at all how it works. I am, however, still convinced that one reason nuclear fission is so popular as an energy source is that it provides material for nuclear weapons. This was also a few months after the Chernobyl disaster on 26th April 1986, which had made nuclear power exceedingly unpopular. Like M.A.D., nuclear safety’s weak point is the human factor. Fortunately, in the case of the former, we were all rescued from certain death by Colonel Stanislav Petrov on 26th September 1983 when he decided an apparent US missile launch must be a false alarm and didn’t “retaliate”. There seemed to be many other pressing issues though, so I still didn’t really engage. However, another thing that happened around that time was that I became a committed pacifist. Nowadays I’m not so convinced of that position for several reasons, mainly to do with the idea that it may be very easy for a middle class White person in the developed world to commit to pacifism, but not so much for, say, a Third World peasant. I’ve also never been convinced that the Nazis would have had any problem with a pacifist Britain, and I think it’s entirely feasible that certain despotic orders would just continue slaughtering their pacifist opponents until there were none left without that leading to any kind of effective resistance. However, it should also be said that if future Nazis had committed to pacifism the Third Reich would never have happened either, so the principle of universalisability could operate there.

In October ’87 I went vegan, which again I see as closely allied to pacifism. I also managed to set up a university CND group which unfortunately only really served as a register of those who were sympathetic to the issue. From early ’88 onwards my psyche, some might say my mental health, fell down the Vicky crevasse and it’s hard to say much meaningful about that period, except that on 22nd January 1988 I joined the Labour Party. This was also around the time of the “Labour Listens” campaign, which was of course a way of surreptitiously dumping the radical policies which had lost them the last two elections, including unilateralism. I didn’t become politically active again until the autumn of that year. The next few years involved being rather cynical about CND for a couple of reasons. One was that I was persuaded of the argument that they were pro-imperialist and I was uncomfortable with the Christian involvement in the group. Someone also claimed they were “a front for the Labour Party”, which is obviously absurd at that point in time. I was committed at this stage to rotating my activism between different groups with an aim to finding employment in a pressure group in the long term, although I was also interested in an academic career. I began to move away from the idea of direct action into a means of addressing the problem of a scarcity-based economic system via psychological means: “the revolution starts from within”, as one of my friends put it. This put much of my approach to politics on a more spiritual basis, though not by any means within any religious tradition or group.

Then came a second emotional crisis linked to the imminent first Gulf War, where I was frankly disgusted and traumatised by the apparent fact that so much of the British public were so easily manipulated into supporting a war for the fossil fuel industry. Since the most prominent group involved in opposing the outrage was CND, I became active in the anti-war movement and CND itself. This marked the start of more than two decades of intense involvement in the peace movement, mainly CND but also other things less associated with the central issue of unilateralism. But I’ll tell you about that tomorrow.