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.
A Box Of Chocolates 