CND | ukwatch.net

Britain's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament: After 50 Years, Alive and Kicking

tim — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 21:21:51 +0000

In July 2008, at the invitation of CND, I traveled to London to address the national council of this venerable peace and disarmament group. The assumption in CND circles was that, thanks to my authorship of a scholarly trilogy on the history of the worldwide antinuclear movement (i.e. The Struggle Against the Bomb, published by Stanford University Press), I might be able to provide activists with some useful information. While meeting in London with CND leaders, however, I decided to gather some information myself about CND’s recent ventures.

CND was founded in February 1958 by Bertrand Russell, A.J.P. Taylor, J.B. Priestley, Michael Foot, and other British luminaries who were appalled by the nuclear arms race and the drift toward nuclear war. Determined to “ban the Bomb,” CND organized annual antinuclear marches from Aldermaston (the site of the British government’s nuclear weapons research facility) to London, where thousands of antinuclear activists rallied in Trafalgar Square. The emblem designed for these first Aldermaston marches — a circle encompassing a stick figure with arms outstretched in the semaphore signals for N and D (i.e. nuclear disarmament) — grew immensely popular and soon became a worldwide peace symbol. Meanwhile, CND churned out vast quantities of antinuclear literature, held public meetings throughout the British Isles, converted politicians to its position, and emerged as Britain’s largest, most influential peace and disarmament organization.

Of course, CND activists did not succeed in banning the Bomb. But they did have the satisfaction of turning British public opinion against the nuclear arms race, thereby pushing Britain and other nuclear-armed nations toward nuclear arms control and disarmament measures and helping to prevent nuclear war.

Today, although CND’s membership is far from the heights that it reached during the heady 1980s, it is also well above the depths to which it sank during past periods of decline. Indeed, having grown by roughly 10 percent in the last three years, CND now has a very respectable 35,000 members, with branches all over the country. It draws on older, long-time stalwarts like Bruce Kent, as well as on younger, newer activists, such as its current chair, Kate Hudson.

As in past decades, CND’s primary goal is abolition of nuclear weapons. Last year, it led a tumultuous campaign against the British government’s plan to replace the country’s aging Trident nuclear missile-carrying submarines with an upgraded nuclear weapons force. The largest of the numerous demonstrations organized against Trident replacement drew up to 100,000 participants, and polls found that 72 percent of the British public opposed the nation’s acquisition of new nuclear weapons. Although the government managed to carry a key Trident replacement vote in parliament, it was shaken by the extraordinary level of opposition. As a result, officials promised to bring the issue back to parliament for further consideration.

This concession to antinuclear sentiment might actually mean something, for there is growing pressure to move Britain’s defense policy away from its decades-old reliance upon nuclear weapons. Recently, for example, a number of former top British government officials spoke out in favor of the Shultz-Kissinger-Perry-Nunn call for nuclear abolition. Furthermore, the European parliament has voted to make Europe a nuclear weapons-free zone. In addition, Barack Obama — who might well become the next U.S. President — has pledged to make the building of a nuclear-free world a top priority. In these circumstances, CND’s efforts to block the development of a new British nuclear striking force might yet bear fruit.

Despite the centrality of nuclear issues to CND, it does grapple with other foreign and defense policy issues. As a participant in Britain’s Stop the War Coalition, it works to end the war in Iraq. Also, like its U.S. counterparts, CND is attempting to head off the possibility of a U.S. military attack upon Iran. Moreover, CND seeks to block the deployment of a controversial U.S. missile defense system in Eastern Europe, including the Czech Republic, Poland, and Lithuania. There is substantial resistance to this revised “Star Wars” system in the host countries, and especially in the Czech Republic. In addition, the Russian government — which, despite its decline in the international power hierarchy, possesses more nuclear weapons than any other — views the deployment of this system as a highly provocative act.

CND also faces some significant problems at home, including a largely hostile press, an escapist television and mass culture, and a poverty of public discussion and debate on defense issues. Perhaps most worrisome are the rising political fortunes of the Tories, who seem poised to sweep into power in the next nationwide elections. Conservative-dominated local governments have begun denying tabling rights to CND, while the newly-elected Conservative mayor of London has pulled his city out of the Mayors for Peace campaign, a nuclear abolition venture comprised of 2,317 member cities in 130 countries, headed by the mayor of Hiroshima.

Even so, CND has managed to emerge from fifty years of antinuclear agitation as a sprightly and effective force on the British political landscape. It might even live to see that bright day when, thanks in part to its efforts, nuclear weapons are banned forever.

The Bomb Stops Here

Ellie Keen — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 22:01:06 +0000

‘When the bomb dropped on Hiroshima I was one kilometre from the explosion. I was 14. Now I’m 77 – a lucky number in Japan.’

It’s Easter Monday, and I’m listening to Yushio Sato’s story in the Great British drizzle, outside Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment. ‘My mother and sister died in the months following,’ he tells the crowd. ‘My brother and I survived – but we have had many diseases. 26 years after the explosion, I had an operation to remove half my stomach because of cancer. My brother died of liver cancer. Now I am the only survivor of my family.’

Around 5,000 of us have gathered at our country’s nuke factory to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first protest march from London to Aldermaston. The 1958 march was a defining moment in the history of the peace movement. It marked the founding of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), the launch of the iconic peace symbol, and the beginning of annual Aldermaston marches which – at their height in the 1960s – attracted hundreds of thousands of people.

But this isn’t just a symbolic event. We are here to protest about what’s happening today. The British Government is spending $11 billion developing Aldermaston in order to research, build and test a new generation of nuclear weapons – including ‘mini-nukes’ intended for actual use in the battlefield.

After we have all spread out to surround the base and declare to the slightly soggy media that ‘the bomb stops here’, I decide to take a stroll around the perimeter fence. It turns out to be an eight kilometre hike. The place is vast, and the scale of new construction work staggering.

I’ve always found it hard to get my head around the idea that my country even possesses weapons of such indiscriminate and cataclysmic destructive power – let alone that we are prepared to use them. Surely the suffering of Yushio Sato and his family, and the hundreds of thousands of Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims, should have been enough to shock the world into banning the atom bomb before it could be used again?

Apparently not. Political leaders express their commitment to nuclear disarmament on a regular basis. But my trip to Aldermaston has provided a grim dose of reality. As I gaze through the fence at the shiny new dome built to house ‘Orion’ – a super-powerful laser that will simulate the conditions of a nuclear explosion so that the British Government can bypass the pesky Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty – it becomes quite obvious that, behind the rhetoric, maintaining our grotesque ‘deterrent’ decades into the future is the real plan.

So it has come as a welcome surprise to find that disarmament campaigners are more optimistic than they have been in years. In fact, circumstances have converged to create a window of opportunity to begin ridding the world of nuclear weapons for good. The question is whether we can seize the moment.

A new kind of madness

Before I started working on this magazine, nukes weren’t very high up my list of things to be worried about. Like acne and exams, fretting over atomic armageddon seemed to belong to a bygone era. The fact that the NI hasn’t done a magazine on nuclear weapons since the 1980s shows I’m not the only one to have deprioritized the nuclear threat.

Back then, the Cold War was at its height. NATO and the Warsaw Pact were deploying 65,000 nukes, sucking up 85 per cent of the world’s military expenditure. One NI focused on how to break the ‘suicide pact’ of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) in which the US and USSR were locked in a state of common vulnerability. Military strategists at the time argued that MAD helped keep the peace, but in fact it was having the opposite effect, fuelling a potentially apocalyptic arms race which was being played out through proxy wars all over the Majority World.

In the 1990s the Cold War melted away, and stockpiles were scaled back substantially. The world stepped back from the brink and breathed a sigh of relief. The NI started laying into globalization instead.

However, in recent years we’ve entered a frightening new phase of nuclear proliferation, and the rules have changed. It’s a new kind of madness. Since Hiroshima, the bomb has been a building-block of empire: every US President has threatened to nuke at least one country, ignoring arms control treaties to continue expanding its arsenal. But now the US is the sole superpower, for the time being. It has attained a state of nuclear supremacy, striving for ‘full spectrum dominance’ whereby it can destroy any country without fear of nuclear retaliation: and thus rule the world.

The 21st century has so far been marked by jaw-dropping hypocrisy, with Bush and his war poodle Blair outraged at the very idea of other countries developing their own nuclear capability; and in the case of Iraq, even using non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMD) as an excuse to invade and occupy.

The US and Britain are not alone in flouting their disarmament commitments. All the other major nuclear weapons states are busy ‘modernizing’ their nukes, although both Russia and China have been more than a little provoked by Bush’s aggressive push for a ‘Son of Star Wars’ ballistic missile defence system that looks suspiciously like it’s aimed at them.

Since the end of the Cold War, despite – or rather, because of – the refusal of states to disarm, we have seen a new phenomenon: the rise of the ‘nuclear poor’. A Russian entrepreneur making megabucks out of the nuke trade describes how ‘at some point this change occurred. The great powers were stuck with arsenals they could not use, and nuclear weapons became the weapons of the poor.’1 India and Pakistan built themselves the bomb in the late 1990s, and North Korea enraged its southern neighbour with a test in 2006. At least 13 nations have the ability to ‘go nuclear’ in the next decade, including Algeria, Indonesia, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Syria. Many more could soon join them as nuclear energy spreads across the world, providing access to bomb-making technology.

Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, expressed exasperation last February over the actions of the ‘big boys’ which are encouraging poorer countries to want their own weapons. ‘Any country with an average infrastructure can develop a nuclear warhead. Iran is just one example of the new phenomenon of becoming “nuclear weapon capable”: you don’t really need to have an actual weapon. It’s enough to buy yourself an insurance policy by developing the capability and then sitting on it. But let us not kid ourselves. Ninety per cent of it is insurance, because the big boys continue to say “we need nuclear weapons but it is bad for you to have them”. Nuclear weapon states have to lead by example.’

As if the prospect of a multi-polar nuclear world weren’t disquieting enough, it’s conceivable that terrorist groups might get their hands on the technology to build and detonate some kind of nuclear device. ElBaradei can confirm 150 cases a year of illicit trafficking in nuclear materials: ‘But a lot of material stolen has never been recovered and a lot of the material recovered has never been reported stolen. This system leaves a lot to be desired.’2

Seismic shifts

So what possible reason can anti-nuclear activists have to be so upbeat? Well, quite aside from the moral issues, nuclear deterrence is a laughable dogma these days. A journalist who recently went on a tour round a Trident nuclear submarine asked who the missiles are pointed at. ‘Nobody,’ came the answer. So who is the enemy? ‘We don’t have an enemy. It’s a deterrent.’3

But the real security threats for countries like Britain cannot be deterred by the promise of a nuclear attack. Terrorism, climate change, global economic meltdown – however many ballistic missiles you’ve got, they won’t help. Instead, as Commander Robert Green, now retired from the Royal Navy, summarizes: ‘Weapons stimulate hostility, create instability, promote proliferation and generate an arms race. They are dirty and poisonous and the ultimate virility symbol. They represent terrorist logic on the grandest scale imaginable.’4 And they’re incredibly expensive to maintain.

Many countries agree with this analysis, perhaps even some nuclear states, who are realizing that having nuclear weapons makes them more, not less vulnerable. There is growing support in the international community for a Nuclear Weapons Convention that would provide a framework and timetable for disarmament – a ‘palpable buzz about reaching a tipping point, where disarmament becomes respectable and achievable’, reports expert and activist Rebecca Johnson.5 It’s a matter of bringing the big boys on board – and this is just starting to look possible.

In the US, a seismic shift in attitude is taking place. While the Bush administration has continued to love the bomb, many mainstream military strategists have had a startling change of heart, epitomized by an open letter to the Wall Street Journal in January. Entitled ‘Toward a nuclear-free world’, it is signed by four notorious Cold Warriors: two former Secretaries of State (George Shultz and Henry Kissinger); a former Secretary of Defense (William J Perry) and a retired Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee (Sam Nunn). They argue that nuclear weapons are fuelling insecurity, which is in no-one’s interest, and that the US and Russia must take the lead in disarming.

Congress has vetoed many of Bush’s bids for new spending on nukes, and US warmongering in the Middle East has never been so unpopular. In the Presidential primaries, Barack Obama broke with the tradition of always keeping the ultimate threat up your sleeve by stating: ‘it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance’ in Afghanistan or Pakistan – to snorts of derision from Hillary ‘I’d-obliterate-Iran’ Clinton. Using such weapons in situations involving civilians is ‘not on the table,’ he continued, and has since pledged to work towards elimination.6 If he wins the Democratic nomination, and then the election, he could turn out to be the most pro-disarmament President of all time.

Of course, the motives of Kissinger et al are by no means pure. They partly spring from a hawkish calculation that a world bristling with other countries’ nukes is dangerous for the US, and prevents it from the total military domination it could otherwise be enjoying. Nevertheless, it’s an extraordinary volte-face and opens up a political space for campaigners that there has never been before.

In Britain, campaigning against Trident has reached a pivotal moment. The fleet of nuclear submarines is based in Scotland, which now has its own Parliament. In 2007, against a backdrop of year-long anti-nuke direct action, the Scottish National Party came to power. They don’t want their country to host Britain’s bombs anymore, and 70 per cent of the Scottish public agree. A parliamentary coalition has been set up to explore legal options, such as using health, safety and environmental legislation to whack Westminster with a massive fine every time a convoy carrying warheads up from Aldermaston crosses the border.

Finding a new home for Trident would be a headache of ballistic proportions for the British Government, as their attempts to upgrade their WMDs may also prove to be. Blair won a preliminary vote last year to replace Trident, but it caused the biggest MP rebellion since the Iraq war, and another vote will be needed for the final go-ahead. In the meantime, campaigners say a colossal defence spending crunch is looming, and the rhetoric on disarmament coming out of Gordon Brown’s Government is the most positive they’ve ever heard. Britain’s submarines are now the weakest link in the nuclear chain.

Profits of doom

The ball is clearly in the court of the US and Britain to start serious negotiations to eradicate nukes completely. We have perhaps a handful of years before nuclear weapons spread to more countries and are used in anger once again. But let’s not be naïve: the barriers in our way are enormous.

Perhaps the most formidable is the so-called military-industrial complex: a term coined in 1961 by a disparaging President Eisenhower to describe the unholy matrimony of war-making and money-making. Its influence helps explain why the US now spends a third more on nuclear weapons, in real terms, than the Cold War average.

The current US plan for massive investment in new facilities and warheads is known as ‘Complex Transformation’. William D Hartung, a specialist in the politics and economics of military spending, argues that it has ‘more to do with bailing out the nuclear weapons industry’ than anything else.7 We’re talking seriously big money: well over $200 billion over the next two decades. The main beneficiaries will be eight companies – including Bechtel and Lockheed Martin – who between them received $11 billion in US Government nuclear contracts in 2005. It’s surely no coincidence that these same eight spent $15.3 million on lobbying in 2006 alone.8

The nuclear industry’s talent for persuading politicians to keep on spending is not confined to the US. The reason the Trident replacement vote was rushed through the British Parliament was that the main beneficiary – arms company BAE Systems – went into lobbying overdrive. Most of it was behind the scenes, but Murray Easton, BAE’s Submarines Managing Director, is on record as warning the Parliamentary Defence Select Committee that any delay in replacing Trident would have ‘a significant impact’ on BAE’s ability to develop and build nuclear subs for Britain in the future. Design and drafting staff would have nothing to do all day, he complained, and so would no doubt leave the sector, taking their skills with them forever.9

While this may sound, to some, like a perfect opportunity to diversify British industry away from arms, to my Government it sounded like an order. And when BAE tells them to do something, they do it – as evidenced by Blair’s illegal suspension of a bribery investigation into a BAE arms deal with Saudi Arabia.

While the case against nuclear weapons may seem watertight, countering the influence of the ‘defence’ industry will require massive popular pressure. This is where a second problem kicks in: public apathy. The anti-nuke movement is nowhere near the size it reached in its heyday, despite including some of the most dedicated and heroic activists I have ever encountered. People have been lulled into a false sense of security, believing that nukes are no longer a threat. CND were pleased with a turnout of 5,000 at Aldermaston, but much larger mobilizations are going to be necessary to burst the tyres of this military juggernaught.

A final, escalating problem is the rapid spread of nuclear energy, which is being erroneously touted as a ‘clean’ alternative to fossil fuels. Ban-the-bomb campaigners are split on this issue so tend to keep out of the debate, with damaging consequences for the movement.

Seizing the moment

If the moral case were enough, nuclear weapons would have been banned long ago. It’s time for a more strategic approach that makes the triple obstacles of military-industrial power, public apathy and the spread of atomic energy work to the advantage of the anti-nuke movement.

We should be linking the abolition of nuclear weapons to the fight against climate change. Nuclear energy is a dangerous diversion, and nuclear weapons are worse than useless against the multiple insecurities that global warming will unleash. By uniting the two causes, a case could be made for channelling the piles of public money currently being blown on building bombs into financing large-scale changes to cut greenhouse gases and build a safer future.

Let’s take Britain as an example. Trident replacement will cost around $154 billion over the next three decades. Why not use that money to finance a wholesale shift to renewable energy? Britain could supply 50 per cent of its energy from offshore wave and wind power by 2030 by diverting funds and skills directly from nuclear submarine manufacturing.10 A mere 1.3 billion Trident bucks a year would fund the transition from car-dependent gridlock to an affordable nationwide public transport system.11 Junking nukes would go a long way towards meeting the estimated $25.4 billion a year cost of helping every British household become low carbon, cutting overall emissions by 80 per cent.12

This ‘two birds with one stone’ approach could help revitalize an ageing peace movement. It could bring the genuine threats posed by nuclear weapons to the attention of a new audience of activists, and push it up the agenda of an environmental movement growing in strength. It makes a case for diverting funding from the bomb that even the most trigger-happy politician may find compelling – especially when the challenge of publicly financing major carbon-reduction infrastructure projects during an economic recession begins to bite…

It’s time to seize the moment. There are fewer and fewer survivors like Yushio Sato left to remind us of the horror humans can now unleash upon each other. We’ve never been good at learning from history and the signs point towards a whole new generation experiencing a nuclear attack first hand in the not too distant future. This struggle is too important to leave to the committed few. It’s up to all of us to grab the window of opportunity we’ve been given and ban the bomb, before the shutters slam back down, for good.

1. William Langewiesche, The Atomic Bazaar: the rise of the nuclear poor, Penguin, 2007
2. Mohamed ElBaradei, speech at the 44th Munich Conference on Security Policy, 9 February 2008, reported by Press TV
3. Sam Alexandroni, ‘The 365 ways to say no’, New Statesman, 26 February 2007
4. Spoken at CND’s ‘Global summit for a nuclear weapon-free world’, London, 16 February 2008
5. Rebecca Johnson, ‘Time to outlaw the use of nuclear weapons’, Disarmament Diplomacy, Issue No. 87, Spring 2008
6. Anne E. Kornblut, ‘Clinton demurs on Obama’s nuclear stance’, Washington Post, 3 August 2007
7. William D Hartung, ‘Nuclear bailout: a critique of the Department of Energy’s plans for a new nuclear weapons complex’, New America Foundation, 25 March 2008
8. William D Hartung and Frida Berrigan, ‘Complex 2030: the costs and consequences of the plan to build a new generation of nuclear weapons’, World Policy Institute, April 2007
9. BAE Systems, ‘Investor brief – November 2006’, http://tinyurl.com/6jce2r/
10. Steven Schofield, ‘Oceans of work: arms conversion revisited’, British American Security Information Council (BASIC), 27 January 2007
11. Simon Bullock, Tony Bosworth and Vicky Cann, ‘Way to go – paying for better transport’, May 2004, http://tinyurl.com/yu8em5
12. Brenda Boardman, ‘Home Truths: a low carbon strategy to reduce UK housing emissions by 80% by 2050’, University of Oxford Environmental Change Institute, November 2007

Join the Peace Chain

Ellie Keen — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 01:03:55 +0000

Join the Peace Chain around Faslane on June 14th!

From the website of Scottish CND

When? Saturday 14 June 2008 – 11.30am assemble,12 noon march off to form Chain

Why? All the nuclear weapons held by the UK are based in Scotland. The Peace Chain is a peaceful protest against the UK Government’s plan to build a new nuclear weapon system (‘Trident replacement’), which would be at Faslane until 2055. Opinion polls show that 72% of the Scottish people are against the plan. The new system would cost £75 billion. What else could £75 billion buy? There are better ways to use the money.

The Peace Chain date marks several important anniversaries:

One year ago, 14 June 2007, the Scottish Parliament voted against the UK Government’s plan for a new nuclear weapon system.
The day of the Peace Chain also sees the celebration of the 26 th birthday of Faslane Peace Camp.
40 years ago, 14 June 1968, the first British nuclear patrol – HMS Resolution – sailed from Faslane.
This year is also the 50 th birthday of CND and its struggle against nuclear weapons.

In SCND’s history never before has there been such concerted and widespread opinion against nuclear weapons in Scotland – both amongst elected officials and the general public – and so with this Peace Chain we intend to mark not only anniversaries of past events but a real hope for the future.

Where? We will assemble at Faslane Peace Camp, which is close to Helensburgh (35 miles from Glasgow). See Transport to Peace Chain.

How? We will be forming a chain of people and banners along the main perimeter fence at Faslane, which is about 2000m long. The fence has about 64 panels which will be divided into sections, with a marshal responsible for making sure each section is covered: setting people in place, keeping them in place and spaced out for the duration of the demonstration and distributing people/materials to cover the entire length.

As much as possible we want to link everyone, at least all the people in the same section, by a common chain. This can be made from anything that you like (that you think has a chance of withstanding the elements)! Bunting, rope, old sheets, washing line... SCND will bring as much material like this as possible but we need you come along with whatever you can. We welcome organised groups to sign up with us beforehand and to take responsibility for a certain length of the fence, whether this is 10m or 100m.

We are looking for the strongest possible participation on the day, but from those who are not able to attend we would welcome some kind of representation to be sent to us or brought by someone else on the day – for example decorate your own personal CND peace sign, or put your name to a big banner representing your local area. There will be an opportunity to make/sign these at CND local meetings and street stalls which will be happening across Scotland in the next few weeks. Or you can send us items to slot onto the Peace Chain: SCND, 15 Barrland Street, Glasgow, G41 1QH

Join in Please use our online form if you would like to take part

Need to know more ?
Visit the SCND website
email: scnd@banthebomb.org or phone: 0141 423 1222.
Download information pack

A Sign of the Times

Ellie Keen — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:59:00 +0000

While the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was being set up, another organization had been making plans for action. The Direct Action Committee against Nuclear War (DAC), which had sent Harold Steele to Tokyo, bound for the Pacific, met in November 1957 to discuss its next move. Hugh Brock, the editor of Peace News who had organized the first demonstration at Aldermaston back in 1952, suggested the DAC arrange a four-day march to the atomic weapons factory for Easter 1958. The members of the DAC were mostly from an anarchist-pacifist background and, like Brock, were influenced by Mahatma Gandhi’s pacifist fight for Indian independence.

They were determined to use his nonviolent principles in their own campaign to rid Britain and the world of nuclear weapons. Their intention was to tackle the problem head-on: to bypass the politicians and engage the attention of workers at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE) directly, to try to convince them to stop working on weapons of mass destruction. However, unlike the 1952 demonstration, this one would be preceded by a march that they hoped would focus attention on the issue so that people at Aldermaston would be ready for the debate when the DAC marchers arrived.

An ad hoc Aldermaston march committee was set up, comprising Member of Parliament Frank Allaun, Hugh Brock from Peace News, Walter Wolfgang, organizer of the Labour Party’s H-Bomb Campaign Committee, and Michael Randle, in charge of promoting Peace News. Meetings were held every week or so in the House of Commons, in a committee room that Frank Allaun would book for them. There, surrounded by heraldic wallpaper and Victorian paneling, they debated how to change policies made in similar rooms in the same building.

The CND had only existed a few days and had not yet held its first public meeting, so DAC was cautious when asked if they wanted to be involved with the march. The members agreed to give their blessing to the march . . . “but should make it clear at this stage of the Campaign that they could not be very closely involved.” The DAC march committee had originally envisioned about 50 or 60 people walking all 53 miles from London to Aldermaston, but with the launch of CND and all the attendant publicity, it now seemed that many more people would be coming. Many members of the Labour Party were sympathetic and intended to march, including members of parliament; a number of labor unions intended to march, bringing with them their magnificent banners.

The Universities and Left Review club, people involved with the forerunner of the New Left Review, formed a contingent, as did the Victory for Socialism group. The Quakers were the largest religious group planning to march from the beginning, but many other Christian organizations soon became involved. The march committee realized that things had changed, and several hundred people could be expected to attend.

Banners Against the Bomb

This changed the nature of the demonstration, making a change of policy necessary: The original idea of calling upon the staff at Aldermaston to stop working there was now overshadowed by the potential size of the march. The committee was divided, with Hugh Brock and Michael Randle remaining in favor of addressing the workers, and Frank Allaun and Walter Wolfgang now opposed to the idea. In a compromise the march was followed by a nine-week picket of the Aldermaston bomb factory, during which the workers were asked to withdraw their labor.

Given the enlarged size of the march, the issue of banners became of prime importance. The whole point, after all, was to express their views with leaflets and conversations; banners and slogans were a key part of the mix if they wanted people to know all the players as they marched through the streets.

Gerald Holtom

A member of the Direct Action Committee’s Twickenham branch, textile designer Gerald Holtom was involved in the planning of the march from the beginning. Because he ran his own graphic design studio, he was given the role of designing the banners and placards to be carried to Aldermaston. Holtom was a committed Christian and pacifist: he was tall and soft-spoken. He graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1935. His deeply felt pacifism led him to spend World War II working on a farm in Norfolk as a conscientious objector. Holtom took his responsibility for getting the peace message across seriously. He wanted to create a design style that was not only informative but also one that summed up the message – something that these days might be called a “brand.”

Holtom was best known for appliqué work rather than graphic art. He made the striking covering for the east wall of Sir Basil Spence’s 1957 St. Oswald’s Church in Tile Hill, Coventry, but his most famous work was the appliqué altar cloths and sequence of acoustic panels on the west end of St. Paul’s Church, Lorrimore Square in south London, built in 1959-1960 to replace a Victorian church bombed during the war.

The U.S. religious right later tried to suggest that whoever designed the peace symbol must have been a devil-worshipping communist, but Gerald Holtom was as far from this stereotype as humanly possible. He was part of a quiet, pacifist element in the Church of England active after the war, helping rebuild the churches they saw as a focal point for communities, destroyed by the bombs. Many of those seeking to discredit the symbol thought that Bertrand Russell, noted for his left-leaning atheism, had designed it. Which was also fiction.

Prototype

Toward the end of February 1958, Gerald Holtom arrived at the offices of Peace News, where the actual planning of the march was taking place. The practical organizing was done by Hugh Brock and Michael Randle, from the March Committee, who were both on the staff of Peace News; Gene Sharp, a Peace News staff member, largely responsible for the Briefing Leaflet for the march; and Pat Arrowsmith. It was Randle, Brock, and Arrowsmith who met Gerald Holtom to review his sketches. Under his arms Holtom carried two large rolls of heavy brown paper. One roll contained drawings of designs for banners for the march: checkered flags, semaphore code flags, and Christian flags with crosses as well as a curious symbol that no one had seen before that he was proposing to represent the antinuclear campaign. He had drawn a line of marchers carrying these flags to show how the designs would look in use.

On the other roll of paper, he had made more detailed sketches of this new insignia he thought might be useful as a symbol for the march and the nuclear disarmament campaign. He had recognized early on that the biggest design difficulty was finding a shorthand way of expressing the lengthy slogan “Unilateral Nuclear Disarmament.” His solution was a circle, and within it the now familiar symbol, a cross whose horizontal arms had slipped 45 degrees downward.

He explained to his small audience that the symbol was made up of the British navy semaphore letters for N and D. This semaphore system used two handheld flags to spell out messages from one ship to another, provided the signalmen were within telescope range. One flag held vertically and the other pointing directly down signified D, while two flags at 45 degrees from horizontal was N. The symbol embodied an encoded message calling for Nuclear Disarmament. He showed them versions in brown ink, with the circle superimposed on a brown square, and a version in purple ink. According to one report, the committee was initially dubious, but his arguments quickly won them over, and with only slight hesitation they decided to formally adopt the symbol and asked him to work on some preliminary designs.

Michael Randle, however, remembers their support for the symbol as being immediately positive. “I recall particularly the day when a Twickenham artist, Gerald Holtom, arranged to see Hugh Brock, Pat Arrowsmith, and myself in the small Peace News offices in Blackstock Road, and showed us the enigmatic symbol he had designed and which he urged us to adopt,” Randle wrote in Campaigns for Peace. “He also brought sketches of how he envisaged the march, with long banners stretching across the road with his symbol at either end of it, and such was his enthusiasm and persuasiveness that we immediately agreed to his proposal. This was how the now famous nuclear disarmament symbol came to be adopted: Holtom himself remembered them being totally encouraging. In a letter to Hugh Brock in September 29, 1973, he said, “Without you, Michael Randle and Pat, there would have been no symbol.”

Doubts

However, Holtom still had his own doubts about it. In the same letter to Brock, he wrote: “The day after your unequivocal approval of the symbol. I made a badge the size of a sixpence in paper, black ink on white, pinned it on my lapel with some trepidation in fear of ridicule and forgot it.” Later that day, while visiting the local post office, a young woman behind the counter asked him about the badge he was wearing. He explained it was new and it called for nuclear disarmament. He later wrote that as he returned home, he was “filled with embarrassment and doubts.” Michael Randle wrote, “I think what enthused us was not so much the explanation of the genesis of the symbol, as the vision in his sketches of how the march might look if we adopted it.”

A week later Holtom arrived at the first meeting of what was to become the London Region CND, held in the small hall of St. Pancras Town Hall. He brought with him some of the long banners he had devised for the upcoming march.

At the back of the hall, he unrolled a bolt of black cloth about 6 yards (5 m) long, designed to be carried sideways on the march so people could read them as they walked past, like an advert on the side of a bus. This provided another solution to conveying a lengthy slogan to the public. He fixed bamboo poles to each end and asked two people to hold them up. Written on the black cloth were the words “Nuclear Disarmament” in white paint, and at each end was his curious new symbol, also in white. The results were striking. He explained to the meeting that it was the semaphore for the initials ND, Nuclear Disarmament, but that the broken cross could also mean the death of man, whereas the circle symbolized the unborn child. In combination it represented the terrible threat nuclear weapons posed to humanity, including the unborn.

This explanation of the symbolism comes from Rudoph Koch’s The Book of Signs, which is almost certainly where Holtom got his inspiration. Koch’s book, which contains almost 500 symbols from medieval Europe, was first published in Britain in 1930, but it was issued as a cheap paperback by Dover Publications in 1955 and became popular among art students at that time. As the director of a design studio, it is unlikely that Holtom did not have a copy. His explanation of the symbol for a dead man and the symbol for an unborn child match those of Koch precisely. The London Region CND was enthusiastic about his designs; they liked the stark black and white, which was easy to reproduce, and said they would like to use these designs on the march. They could not speak for CND itself.

Other Symbols

The symbol was more than just a design problem to Holtom; he believed passionately in the campaign and had thought long and deeply about a symbol to represent it. Years later, in 1973, Holtom wrote to Hugh Brock, telling him of his state of mind at the time and explaining in greater detail the personal symbolism involved in his creation of the logo. For him it was not simply another design job — in fact, the intensity of his feelings on the subject may be what inspired him to the rarest of creations: a new symbol that would resonate across nations and generations, gathering meaning, until it became part of the human visual vocabulary.

At first he had thought of using the Christian cross as the dominant motif, but he told Brock that he realized “in Eastern eyes the Christian Cross was synonymous with crusading tyranny culminating in Belsen and Hiroshima and the manufacture and testing of the H-bomb.” At the time, he had spoken with various priests about the idea, and they were not happy with using the cross on a protest march. He also rejected the image of the dove, then used extensively by the peace movement — in particular the one drawn for them by Picasso — as it had been appropriated by “the Stalin regime . . . to bless and legitimize their H-bomb manufacture.”

Holtom told Brock that on February 21, 1958, the day he designed the symbol, he was in despair. Deep despair. “I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outward and downward in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad in his painting, The Third of May 1808. I formalized the drawing into a line and put a circle around it . . . It was ridiculous at first and such a puny thing . . . “

In fact, Holtom may have been thinking of a different Goya. In The Third of May 1808 the man before the firing squad has his hands raised high in the air, albeit in the same V position. However, one of the most famous images from Goya’s Disasters of War series of 80 etchings is one of a peasant on his knees, slumped in depression, with his hands in exactly the position Holtom describes.
Dissatisfaction

Holtom was not happy with his design: In many ways he was asking too much of himself. Everybody believed nuclear disarmament was desirable. He felt that it was not enough just to call for nuclear disarmament. He wanted a symbol that conveyed the need for individuals to take responsibility for the direct creative action that was necessary in order to combat the nuclear threat. As he saw it, the key to nuclear disarmament was unilateral action.

Holtom returned to his studio in Twickenham, fresh from meeting with Brock and the others at Peace News, and put his staff to work, silkscreening lollipop signs and banners, all bearing his new design. Five hundred cardboard lollipop signs on sticks were made: half of them were black on white and half white on green. Holtom was a committed Christian, and as the Church’s liturgical colors change over Easter “from Winter to Spring, from Death to Life” he used the same symbolism for the banners.

The black-and-white lollipops were to be carried on Good Friday and Saturday, whereas on Easter Sunday and Monday the green-and-white ones were distributed. His design called for thin arms on the cross culminating in a serif where they met the enclosing circle. Many variations on this theme have been tried over the years, but this design remains the most elegant. Holtom still felt his design didn’t say enough.

A “Revolution of Thought”

Nonetheless, he turned his energies to making the banners and lollipop signs for the march. A few days later, in his workshop, he experienced a “revolution of thought.” He told Brock in his letter that he had been holding the symbol in his hand, turning it around, staring at it “in the struggle to find a way beyond despair:” It was then that it suddenly occurred to him that if the symbol was inverted, then it could be seen as representing the tree of life, the tree on which Jesus Christ had been crucified, and that, for Christians like Gerald Holtom, was a symbol of hope and resurrection.

Even better, the inverted image of a figure with arms stretched upward and outward was the semaphore signal for U: unilateral. And so for Holtom the symbol took on an even more symbolic meaning. Just as the American religious right later claimed the design to be an inverted cross, Holtom inverted the design to become a symbol of hope.

Holtom also made the lead banners for the march, the biggest of which read: “March from London to Aldermaston” in the striking white letters on a black background, flanked by the peace symbol. The banner was used every year, though the lettering was changed to read “March to London from Aldermaston” after the first year. Each year it was brought out, cleaned up, and a fresh bunch of daffodils attached to it as a symbol of spring and life. Its stark black-and-white design was modern-looking at the time and provided a template for antinuclear posters and banners in Britain for years to come.

The Ban-the-Bomb Button

The march also needed button badges, both for the marchers and to distribute and sell. Using Gerald Holtom’s design, Eric Austin of Kensington CND stamped them from clay and fired them in a kiln. They were white, with the circle and cross in black, and were distributed with a note pointing out that these ceramic badges would be one of the few human artifacts likely to withstand a nuclear attack unless they received a direct nuclear hit — the only evidence that a living person had once stood where it was found, Austin echoed Haltom’s reference to Rudolph Koch’s The Book of Signs by stating that the symbol had several layers of meaning embodied in it: both the semaphore for N and D and also the traditional symbols of life and death. “The gesture of despair had long been associated with the death of man and the circle with the unborn child,” he said.

After the original ceramic badges, which have now become collectors’ items, the Campaign made a large batch in plastic before settling on a cheap mass-produced tin button, with the symbol in white on black, which became the standard design. The design was distinctive, easy to draw and graffiti. But there were still doubters, as Michael Randle later wrote, recalling when the first pamphlet was printed bearing the symbol.

A veteran peace activist complained to Randle that he and the others on the committee must have been out of their minds in adopting it. Randle reports his friend saying, “What on Earth were you, Hugh, and Pat thinking about when you adopted that symbol? It doesn’t mean a thing and it will never catch on.” As Randle points out, had the march not been a success, his friend would probably have been proved right.

Barry Miles, a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org), was the chairman of the Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the early 1960s. Based in London, he has written numerous articles and books about the Beat Generation, including the New York Times bestseller Hippie.

CND says No New Nukes

Ellie Keen — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 12:33:48 +0000

Just one year since the huge backbench rebellion on Trident replacement, we have seen the largest protest at Aldermaston for two decades. Five thousand protesters converged on the Atomic Weapons Establishment, marking the 50th anniversary of the first Aldermaston march in 1958. But more importantly, we were protesting about what is taking place there now.

The government is currently pursuing massive redevelopment of Britain’s nuclear bomb factory. The scale of building works, investment and recruitment taking place make it inconceivable that these are just routine improvements to facilitate ongoing work. It is clear that this work — which includes supercomputer and laser facilities which can simulate nuclear weapons testing — is for the development and manufacture of a new nuclear warhead.

But Parliament has not yet made a decision to endorse such a development. In March 2007, Parliament agreed to proceed with the ‘concept phase’ of a Trident submarine replacement — no more than that. In the 2006 White Paper on the nuclear weapons system, it was made clear that a decision on a future warhead would be taken in the next Parliament. We have not yet reached that point, and no decision has yet been taken.

It would seem that the government has made a pre-emptive decision with its £5 billion spending on Aldermaston, and the work going on there, on the scale of Heathrow Terminal Five.

This continuing development is just one side of the contradictory approach which the government has pursued over nuclear weapons during the past year.

Some of what has happened has been positive. There has been an interesting shift by the government on multilateral initiatives for nuclear disarmament. On several occasions, there have been high level statements indicating that steps need to be taken. And crucially, the government has now recognised that there is a link between the failure of the nuclear weapons states to meet their disarmament obligations, under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and an increased likelihood of nuclear proliferation. In other words, disarmament and non-proliferation must go hand in hand. This was something that Blair refused to admit, somehow trying to argue that we are entitled to have nuclear weapons.

Recently, Defence Secretary Des Browne has announced that Britain intends to host a summit for nuclear weapons states, to discuss decommissioning nuclear weapons. This is a welcome initiative.

But if Britain is serious about contributing to global nuclear disarmament, it cannot say one thing and do another. A halt must be called to the Trident developments — both submarines and warheads. That will be a real indication of good faith to the international community, and will help support any initiatives towards multilateral negotiations.

Organising Against Britain's Bomb

Ellie Keen — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 01:28:45 +0000

In the autumn of 1957 a number of groups came together to form the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War and plan a protest march during the following year’s Easter holiday.

To highlight the way that Britain was joining the nuclear arms race it was decided to march to the government’s nuclear weapons establishment in Aldermaston, near Reading.

Aged 28 I was asked to take on the job of organising the protest – despite never having done anything similar before. I had time on my hands after being sacked from my job as a nursing orderly for taking a petition against nuclear testing around my workmates.

A new movement was growing in opposition to Britain’s programme of nuclear tests.

Prior to the march there had been a series of sit-in protests at the War Office in London and some military bases.There was a thirst for action.

When the march came, it was a great success. We started with a rally in Trafalgar Square with 8,000 people – which was regarded as very large.

The left was well represented in the campaign, as were the Quakers. And, although most of the marchers were middle class, there were also a few delegations of workers.

The effect of the Aldermaston campaign and the surrounding publicity was to help the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) get off the ground and generate many new activists, despite the somewhat stuffy attitude the campaign initially had towards such protests.

In the months after the demonstration we went on to organise regular pickets and even an occupation of the Aldermaston plant.

We issued appeals to the workers not to participate in the building of nuclear weapons, and had some success in persuading lorry drivers to turn around without delivering their cargo.

Soon after, we moved on to protesting against Britain’s new nuclear missile system. I became the field secretary for the Direct Action Committee. I saw my job primarily as working in the labour movement.

I made contact with trade unionists in the towns near to the missile bases that were being constructed and sought their support.

In 1959 we started a campaign in the new town of Stevenage, which was nicknamed “Missileville” because of its relationship to the arms trade.

The high point of the push in Stevenage was a weekday march through the town that was mainly formed by trade unionists, including militant building workers who had stopped work to join in.

There was a similar campaign in Bristol in the early 1960s at the aircraft factories. I travelled on my scooter from London to help organise picketing of the plants.

On one occasion there was a factory gate meeting at Bristol Engines Company that the union prolonged into a stoppage against the arms trade.

Shop stewards at many of the engineering plants had devised plans for how production could be switched from armaments to civilian uses, and were very eloquent on the subject.

For a time I was employed by the slightly maverick CND group in Merseyside in order to campaign for direct action against the bomb. I met with the dockers, and together we formed a local industrial committee.

Dock workers told me that whenever they saw a consignment marked for the British military base at Fylingdales they sabotaged it.

It is important not to overstate how widespread these campaigns were, but the fact that we were able to win some workers to taking action is important.

By the mid-1960s the movement against British nuclear weapons had effectively melded into the campaigns against the war in Vietnam.

A great many people believed that the conflict there could “go nuclear” and that we should put most of our efforts into stopping it.

It was at that time that I started to get involved in the movement to get British troops out of Ireland. I thought, “It is all very well to campaign against war in far away places but what about the war on our doorsteps?”

Together with other activists I helped leaflet British troops, urging them not to fight in Ireland.

As a result I was prosecuted for sedition and received an 18-month prison sentence – the first of 11. I escaped from prison and was recaptured after attending an anti-fascist demonstration. I found myself in solitary confinement for a long time.

At the end of the Vietnam War, CND went through a bit of a low period, and did not revive again until the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan started to ramp up the Cold War.

Today I am still involved with CND, and even though I don’t think we are on the brink of annihilation, I think the dangers of nuclear proliferation are greater than ever. And of course we have the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Despite that, it is true that the various treaties that constrained the arms race in the last three decades have made the world safer.

They did not come out of nowhere, however, they were a result of public pressure – a pressure that peace activists over the last 50 years should take some of the credit for.

We shall (not) overcome... Nuclear protest survived six Tory governments. But not New Labour

JamieSW — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 12:15:08 +0000

It survived six Tory governments, the end of the Cold War and the rise and fall of mass marches against the British nuclear deterrent. But after 50 years in which the tradition of peaceful demonstration has been maintained outside the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, the New Labour era has finally done for one of the most famous symbols of protest in British political history.

Today would have seen the latest gathering of the band of women who have assembled on the second Saturday of each month since the 1980s to object to the continuing development of the United Kingdom’s nuclear deterrent. Instead, following a High Court ruling this week, the protest tents are being removed, demonstrators are being threatened with arrest and “no camping” signs are being erected.

From being a symbol of the right to protest, Aldermaston has become the latest testament to the desire of successive New Labour governments to curtail the right to assemble, demonstrate and object to government policy.

Evidence from the Ministry of Defence to the High Court cited “operational and security concerns”. In their High Court appeal, legal representatives for the Aldermaston women argued that the by-law which ostensibly took effect last May banning “camping in tents, caravans, trees or otherwise” amounted to an unlawful interference with freedom of expression and the right of assembly guaranteed by articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights. David Plevsky, appearing for the Aldermaston Women’s Peace Camp, said the new regulations were “criminalising the peaceful, traditional and regular activities of the AWPC”.

It cut no ice. Before the ruling, Sian Jones a member of the peace camp, said: “If we don’t win this review our very existence will be under threat. But there are also wider implications for the long-held right to protest, which is such an important part of British society. Aldermaston has been known as a place of protest for the last 50 years, and this year is the 50th anniversary of the first CND march there.” That battle has now been lost.

As a result of the heavy-handed prohibition of a long-running series of protests which have never resulted in violence, a march this Easter to Aldermaston – intended to commemorate the pioneering protest of 1958 – has now taken on a wholly contemporary significance. After a series of assaults on the right to protest around Westminster and beyond, the 2008 trek through Berkshire is set to become the latest chapter in the fight to wrest back civil liberties that New Labour appears determined to take away.

The CND is planning a 50th anniversary day of action on Easter Monday, when the atomic weapons establishment is to be surrounded by a “human chain” to highlight what it says is the stifling of legitimate protest. The police have warned that anyone causing an obstruction during that protest is likely to be arrested and prosecuted.

Kate Hudson, the chairperson of CND said: “We feel this is an extremely serious matter where the long-established and hard-won right to protest is now under attack. People are extremely worried about the weapons of mass destruction being produced at Aldermaston and it is unrealistic of the Government to think that they will not take part in expressing their views. “We hope that on Easter Monday people will not only come because it is the 50th anniversary of the first march but also to show the need to defend their civil liberties.”

One campaigner planning to take part, 57-year-old Margaret Jefferson, from west London, said: “I think it is essential that people make a stand on this issue. I had stayed at that peace camp as have so many others without posing any threat to anyone. What is this Government afraid of, what do they think we will do?

“We live in a very dangerous world as it is and with the end of the Cold War there is even less justification for nuclear weapons. As long as these weapons are here there is the risk that a version of them will come into the hands of terrorists.”

One of the most famous figures to participate in 1958 is too frail to be there on Easter Monday. But there is no questioning his ongoing commitment to the protest and outrage at the modern Labour Party’s complicity in its suppression.

Michael Foot, the former Labour leader, who marched with his late wife, the actress and author Jill Craigie, said last night that he was “deeply saddened” to hear of the camp being closed down, and especially dismayed that this should happen under a Labour government.

“We thought the cause was right and just and we were glad to take part in these marches,” Mr Foot said. “I think it is wretched that they are now thinking of shutting down the camp after it had been goingsuccessfully for more than 20 years and I am sure Jill would have felt the same way as well.

“The governments at the time sometimes behaved very badly towards these protesters who were simply exercising their rights in a peaceful way. But these were Tory governments, the Labour Party supported them as I recall, I was the leader at the time. But times seem to have changed.”