STALINISM AND THE BOMB

The Political Committee of the Communist Party has called for full support for the CND demonstration this Easter. The demonstration will take the form of a two-day march from Glasgow to Faslane, where the British nuclear submarines are based.

The Stalinist leaders like to pose as great supporters of the movement against nuclear weapons. But their record is that when the fight began in the labour movement to end nuclear weapon production and stock-piling in Britain, the Communist Party opposed it. When the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament formed in 1958, the Stalinists condemned it as a sectarian organization, which would split the peace movement and could never win a large following.

The first resolution against nuclear weapons at a Labour Party conference was moved at Brighton in 1957 by a supporter of Trotskyism working within the Norwood Labour It read: This conference, believing that the time has come to abandon the pretence that there can be any protection in a nuclear war, records its belief that in a major conflict there will be neither victor nor vanquished, yet without war starting the tests of nuclear weapons well doom countless numbers yet unborn to an inheritance of insanity, blindness or malformation.

'Conference therefore:

(a) oppose the further testing of nuclear weapons by all countries.

*(b) calls upon the national executive to mobilize the whole of the movement against nuclear weapons tests by organizing through the National Council of Labour a national campaign, using all means including mass demonstrations in Trafalgar Square and other centres throughout the coun try along the lines of the Suez campaign last November.

"(c) pledges that the next Labour government will take the lead by itself refusing to test, manufacture or use nuclear weapons. and that it will apnea! to the peoples of othe: countries to follow their lead.

*(d) calls on the national executive, in co-operation with the international socialist and trade union movement, to enter into discussion on how best the full force of the international working-class movement can be mobilized to stop any further tests.' It was at that conference that Aneurin Bevan made his peace with the right wing by denouncing unilateralism as 'an emotional spasm' and claiming that a British Foreign Secretary could not go 'naked into the conference chamber'.

Bevan had just returned from a visit to the Soviet Union where he had had discussions with Khrushchev. His wife, Jennie Lee, explained to horror-struck 'Tribune'-ites that Bevan was taking his line from Khrushchey, who did not want unilateral disarmament by Britain.

VUUN I LOS European nuclear bombs could be a counter-balance to the United States and be bargaining counters at conferences, the Kremlin leaders had told Bevan.

The British Stalinists accordingly lined up with Khrushchev, Bevan Minister Harold Tory Prime Macmillan on the need for Britain to have the bomb. Aldermaston march: The CND leadership their ranks and fought bitterly - though Trotskylats. Otd arM'S BAL N í XXI 3119 Nº 800977,