C.N.D. and politics

[p006] CND and Politics THE Committee of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament were against any political banners being carried on the Aldermaston March and tried to suppress political slogans on the March. Those who agree with this attitude feel that the movement against the Bomb is a wide move- ment involving people of different political be- liefs and any attempt to move the campaign in a specific political direction would drive people away. ‘Therefore, the argument goes, the move- ment has to be confined to general demonstra- tions or to protests at particular sites and has to avoid other issues. Members of the Socialist Labour League who continually press for the Campaign to take a political stand against the Tories, who sell social- ist literature at CND meetings, who have ap- peared on the Aldermaston marches as a con- tingent with their own banners, who link up the struggle against the bomb with the class struggle of workers against employers, are regarded with suspicion by some supporters of CND. They are sometimes crudely accused of trying to latch on to the Campaign for their own ‘sectarian’ ends. More often it is recognised that the Socialist Labour League is genuinely opposed to nuclear weapons, but its insistence ou politics is said to split the movement and divert it from its real job. Against the Marxists, it is argued that the threat of nuclear annihilation is so great that it overshadows all other issues. To ‘drag in’ things like wage increases and nationalization is not only irrelevant but an obstruction. These things may be important, but they are secondary and quite separate. The thing to do is to con- centrate solely on the Bomb, and—by arousing such tremendous feeling against it—to compel governments to give up their nuclear policies. To this end there have been demonstrations at rocket bases and research stations all over Britain. There have been mass meetings ad- dressed by such people as Canon Collins, A. J. P. Taylor, Bertrand Russell, J. B. Priestley and Michael Scott. There have been the three great Aldermaston marches and tremendous gatherings LABOUR REVIEW — June-July, 1960 G. Gale in Trafalgar Square. There have been marches from Liverpool to Hull, all-night vigils at rocket siles, poster parades through towns and cities {and sometimes through miles of open country) and pickets and lobbies of members of the Government. Members of the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War have clashed with police at Swaffham and Harrington, and have suffered imprisonment. How elfective has all this been? It has cer- tainly spread an awareness uf the nuclear peril and brought many people intc the Campaign. fn particular, thousands of ycung people have been brought into activity. (These are the youth that paunchy Labour Party aldermen call ‘apathetic’ because they don’t attend ward meet- ings.) The mass demonstrations against the Bomb have been the most effective displays of popular feeling since the Suffragettes. This is a tremendous achievement, despite the efforts of the press in the early days to ignore the move- ment and later to present it as cranky. How- ever, this kind of activity does have its limita- tions. A writer in a recent issue of Peace News pointed out that there was a tendency of people to notice the form that the protests took rather than what they were about. And demonstra- tions become less effective if they are repeated too often without coming any nearer to achieving their objective. An annual Aldermaston would gradually become a meaningless gesture. The balance sheet of CND activity would ap- pear to be that it has succeeded in drawing many people into the anti-Bomb movement. But ii has not succeeded in affecting in any way the nuclear strategy of the governments, The tremendous spread of nuclear weapons and the increase in their power in the last three years emphasises the need to draw up a_ political balance sheet of CND’s activity. H-bombs are now fitted to the 60 missiles now ready in Britain. RAF crews are standing by 24 hours a day and, in case of emergency, the missiles are ready to go after six minutes’ warn- ing. There are continual patrols of aircraft carrying H-bombs over Britain. The recently

[p007] CND AND POLITICS acquired Thor rocket is now out-dated (it is only of use if fired first), but Britain also has the Corporai and Little John artillery weapons; ihe Bloouiiound and Sea-Cat surface-to-air mis- siles and the Thunderbird, Firestreak and Sea Slug missiles. Meanwhile, radio-activity in Britain’s drinking water approximately doubled between the first half of 1958 and the same period in 1959. In February this year France exploded an A- bomb in the Sahara. This was despite demon- strations at French embassies in many countries, an ail-night vigil at the United Nations building in New York, an international protest team led into Africa by the Rev. Michael Scott, and mass demonstrations in African States like Ghana. At the beginning of April a second French A- bomb was exploded, while Khrushchev was actu- ally in Franch on a goodwill tour. And _ this nuclear programme has just started in France. The government foresees by 1963-5 a hundred French nuclear bombers with ~ maximum speed of 1,320 mph. America now has H-bomber bases surrounding the Soviet Union from Greenland to Saudi Arabia and” from Okinawa to Alaska. The ‘Titan’ ICBM became operational in February last year—this missile weighs 110 tons, carries a nuclear warhead and has a range of about 9,000 miles. The United States Air Force is to use mis- siles mounted on railway trains roaming the country. The trains will carry two or more ‘Minuteman’ solid-fuelled ICBMs which have a range of 6,300 miles; and last December Wash- ington announced that American long-range bombers operating from overseas bases would be kept on continuous air-borne alert from the early 1960s. The United States also has nuclear submarines each capable of carrying 16 15,000- mile range ‘Polaris’ missiles with H-bomb war- heads. The Americans are designing new super- sonic low-altitude missiles that fly too low to be detected by radar. They already have bombs that explode at a high altitude and can blind people up to 300 miles away before they have time to blink. And in February this year the Annual Report of the U.S. Atomic Energy Com- mission reported that new tunnels for under- ground nuclear explosions ure to be dug in the Nevada desert. Developments are also going ahead in Germ Warfare. Last year a U.S. Congressional Com- mittee on Science and Aeronautics strongly recommended trebling expenditure on research into chemical warfare. They are concentrating on nerve gas and gases that cause paralysis. And the Chief Officer of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps has said: “We are seeking in addition new 41 toxic substances that will attack other vulner- abie systems of the body such as the eyes and the mind.” Some people argue that if only the statesmen can oe made to see clearly this alarming growth of nuclear weapons, rocket bases and germ sre- search stations they can be convinced of the necessity to do away with them. This argument wroagiy assumes that governments are in com- plete conirol over their own actions. Apart from the very real danger of an accidental outbreak of nuciear war, the development of capitalist in- dustry contains an inner logic of its own. It has pushed technical development to an extremely high level and at the same time concentrated real power in fewer and fewer hands. Intensi- fied international competition, at a time of rising colonial revolution, dominates economic and military policy and over-rides the fears and mis- givings of individual capitalists and ministers, ‘peace-loving’ or otherwise. From the very beginning, the Atom bomb was more than a military weapon. It was a product of world politics . The bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 5th, 1945, and Nagasaki on August 9th. But we now know that Japan had offered unconditional surrender before these dates. The only reservation she had was that the imperial system should be allowed to remain (in subordination to the authority of the Allied Supreme Commander). This condition was accepted by the Allies after the bombings, even though the excuse for dropping the bombs was that this was the only way unccnditional surrender could be forced. In fact, the bombs were dropped in order to find out their effects on human beings and also to demonstrate to the Soviet Union and the colonial peoples that America possessed, and was prepared to use, the most powerful weapon mankind had ever known. On August 8th, Molotov, then Soviet Commis- sar for Foreign Affairs, announced that Russia was joining the war against Japan. In the course of his speech he stated that Japan had requested the Soviet Union in mid-June to mediate in the war in the Far East. This had been followed by a personal request from the Japanese Emperor. At the Oppenheimer loyalty trial in America in 1954, Lieutenant-General Leslie Groves, who had been in charge of the Manhattan pro- ject manufacturing the first atom-bomb, testi- fied that within a fortnight of taking over his job in September, 1942, he became quite con- vinced that the power against which the A-bomb was being manufactured was not Japan but Russia (quoted in Blackett’s Atomic Weapons and East-West Relations). Rear-Admiral Zacha- rias, at that time Deputy Director of U.S. Naval

[p008] 42 Intelligence, writing in the American magazine Look said: “Japan would have surrendered by August 15th, 1945, without the use of extreme measures.” Admiral Zacharias broadcast on July 2Ist, 1945, oitering Japan the chance to surrender un- conditionally. Her reply was, he says, “in effect an open invitation to begin surrender negotia- lions on the terms we had proposed.” Anyone who doubts that nuclear weapons have been closely bound up with the whole inter- national strategy of western capitalism ever since, should read Aneurin Bevan’s famous ‘naked into the Conference chamber’ speech at the Brighton Labour Party Conference in. 1957. Bevan was opposing a resolution moved by Vivienne Mendelson of the Norwood Labour Party, which called for unilateral renunciation of nuclear weapons, for Labour to organize a national campaign against the government on this issue, and for an appeal to the international Labour movement.! Bevan pointed out that a demand for uni- lateral renunciation of nuclear weapons con- tained ‘implications which are not always under- stood.’ ‘These implications were ‘that all the international commitments, all the international arrangements, all the international facilities afforded to your friends and allies must be im- mediately destroyed.’ And again ‘it means you must immediately repudiate all the protection and all the alliances you have with anybody who uses, OF possess or manufactures H-bombs. That is our dilemma.’ But what is the purpose of these international commitments, arrangements and entanglements? A map of western nuclear bases ringing the Soviet Union would give this answer, as does the report of the U.S. Defence Department, issued on February 24th of this year. The latter states that: the main recipient of military aid from America in the 1950s was France—tfor the pur- pose of wars in Indo-China and Algeria. Next came the Chinese Nationalists, Italy, Turkey. and South Korea. And the White House re- quested two thousand million dollars to continue such military aid in the forthcoming fiscal year. But nuclear weapons are not only essential for preparations for war against the Soviet Union, and if necessary, the colonial revolution. They are also essential to American capitalism itself. In August, 1959, there was a significant reaction on Wall Street when it was announced that talks would take place between Eisenhower and 1 Vivienne Mendelson was expelled and the Norwood Labour Party disbanded as part of the witch-hunt against the Socialist Labour League in 1959. LABOUR REVIEW — June-July, 1960 Khrushchev. Arms industry, missile, aircraft, and electronics shares all fell heavily, and there were reacuons in associated industries such «s rubber. Disarmament wouid be disastrous to the American economy, where the annual milit- ary programme has reached the astronomical igure ot forty thousand million dollars. The huge combines associated with nuclear weapons have no intention of permitting such a disaster.: A serious attempt to put an end to the nuclear threat involves far more than trying to persuade a minister to be a litthe more reasonable. It in- volves a campaign against the whole system of western military alliances and strategy and can- not be contained within national boundaries. A campaign against the British bomb alone is not enough. it is quite possible, for instance, that Britain could cease to make an independent nu- clear contribution to the western military alli- ance. ‘This is the argument that Richard Cross- man put forward in the recent debate on the Defence White Paper. His opposition to the British H-bomb was in no sense a move to the left. His argument was that an attempt to main- tain an independent British nuclear deterrent was beyond the economic resources of the country, had led to a weakening of conventionally armed forces (especially in Germany), caused dissen- sions amongst NATO members and undermined the Western Alliance. But he recognised the need for a Western deterrent—‘Let the Ameri- cans have the deterrent in reserve behind, but we should concentrate in Europe on building up conventional forces.’ (Shinwell said the same thing: ‘NATO is departmentally weak. I want to retain it and inject some substance into it.’) This sort of opposition to the British bomb simply means a rationalisation of western mili- tarism to make it more efficient and more mono- lithic. It is significant that people recognised as being on the extreme right of the Labour Party, such as Denis Healey, are beginning to incline towards this view, and even Hugh Gaitskell, al- though he disciplined Crossman for opposing official party policy, was by nc means hostile to Crossman’s ideas. He said: “The issue between these people (i.e. those who want Britain to give up independent nuclear weapons but to retain NATO) and the rest of us is not anything like as fundamental as our differences with those who want us to get out of NATO altogether. I regard the issue of whether we have nuclear weapons under our own control—providing that we re- main in NATO—or whether we do not, is 2For instance, these firms hire, at fantastic salaries, former high-ranking service chiefs to push their pro- ducts in the right quarters.

[p009] CND AND POLITICS largely a matter of balance between economic, military and political factors. I do not take the view that this is an issue about which it would be wise permanently to dogmatise.’ Gaitskell is quite right. The fundamental ques- tion is not whether Britain shall have the bomb. Nothing at all would be gained if Britain gave up the bomb yet remained welded in a military system, the cornerstone of which was the Ameri- can H-bomb. The campaign against nuclear weapons involves a struggle against the whole system of military alliances and preparations for war, of which those weapons are a part.- The vote against NATO at the CND Confer- ence shows that more and more people recog- nise this political aspect of the campaign. After all, what are these alliances for? NATO, SEATO and CENTO (formerly the Baghdad pact) include in their ranks Adenauer, De Gaulle, Franco, Chiang Kai-Shek and Synghman Rhee.! Such allies are clearly not bound together in de- fence of peace, political liberty and personal freedom. Chiang Kai-Shek and Synghman Rhee are the allies of American imperialism in Asia. De Gaulle, Adenauer and Franco are bulwarks of capitalism in Europe. In short, these alliances are the military expression of international capital. The fight against the H-bomb is really the fight against its social basis, international capital. The fundamental forces which threaten this social basis are the international working class and the colonial revolution. French im- perialism is exploding nuclear bombs in North Africa. The greatest sore in the side of French imperialism is the Algerian revolution. Every success of the Algerian revolution is thus a blow against nuclear weapons. The Socialist Labour League has always advo- cated turning the anti-bomb movement towards the working class. By this we do not mean try- ing to persuade individual workers to leave their jobs on rocket bases. That is simply an indivi- dual protest and not a class action, and it is unlikely ever to be done in such numbers as to hinder the building of the bases. We have meant turning to the working class a: a class. In the first instance this meant campaigning within the organised labour movement for opposition to nu- clear war and for the trade unions to declare ‘black’ all work on nuclear weapons and bases. (See Black H-Bomb and Rocket Bases, by Peter Frver, published by The Newsletter in March, 1958.) We still think this should be done. But the situation is now even more urgent than it was then. The finger is well and truly on the 1 This was written, of course, before the recent up- heaval in South Korea.—Editors. 43 nuclear weapon trigger today—-and the gun is loaded. Now, more than ever, the campaign against the bomb involves more than just the bomb. Anything which weakens capitalism, weakens the class which has produced the bomb and which lives by the bomb. Every successful strike, every move forward by the working class, weakens the employers, weakens the Tories and thereby lessens the nuclear thieat. Every victory of the working class strengthens the confidence of that class and strengthens the movement against the bomb. In the early part of this year, the government was seriously worried at the threat of a national rail strike. At the same time the engineering employers were faced with a demand for a 40- hour week and £1 increase. The opposition of miners to redundancies broke out in the Bettes- hanger strike. And now the tremendous up- surge in South Africa is causing consternation in the finance houses of the City of London. All these struggles against the employers and the government are struggles against the class that produces the bomb. They are the kind of issues which could come together to bring down the government. That is, they could bring down the government responsible for Britain’s nuclear strategy. Such struggles are therefore struggles against the H-bomb, even though on the surface they might appear to have nothing to do with the H-bomb, and even though many of the workers concerned in them might be ‘apathetic’ towards CND, and some might even say they were in favour of Britain having nuclear weapons. Jt is in this way that the success of the anti-bomb campaign depends directly upon the industrial struggles of the working class. Unless the campaign can turn in the direction of this class force it will remain limited. The danger facing CND is not that it will turn in a political direction, but that it will turn in a wrong political direction. And any method of struggle which cuts across the class nature of the conflicts in capitalist society, which obscures it, is taking the movement in the wrong direction. The Communist Party’s anti-German cam- paign and appeals to British ‘patriotism’ come under this heading. In recent weeks the Daily Worker has carried more appeals to British patriotism than has the Daily Express. A speaker at the recent Scottish Regional Confer- ence of the Communist Party called on all ‘patriotic Scotsmen’ to oppose German bases in Scotland, and a recent Daily Worker editorial, condemning ‘Panorama’ for its attacks on the ETU, said that if the BBC wanted to be ‘truly patriotic’ it would oppose German bases in

[p010] 44 Britain. At the celebration of the Daily Workers 30th anniversary, John Gollan said the Communist Party would unite with anyone, irrespective of political beliefs, to ‘keep the Ger- man jackboot out of Britain’. And on March 31, the Daily Worker published a letter from a reader who reported that his grocer had agreed to distribute copies of a party leaflet saying ‘I don’t like the Germans, either’. This attempt to stir- up animosity towards the German people obscures the real enemy, weakens the fight against international capital, and makes nuclear war more likely. Nor will the threat of nuclear annihilation be averted by international conferences of heads of state. Macmillan is the representative of the capitalist class in Britain, and acts in the interests of that class. Eisenhower is 'n the same position in America. This class is responsible for the bomb and developed the whole war threat. How can they be expected to give it up voluntarily? We know that the Africans in South Africa will never gain freedom by appealing to the better nature of Dr. Verwoerd or by ‘putting pressure’ on him. Nobody expects that, since everyone has seen what Dr. Verwoerd has done in Sharpe- ville. Why, then, expect such methods to suc- ceed with Macmillan and Eisenhower who have far bigger interests to protect—and whose pre- decessors showed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki that they were prepared to commit atrocities that make the Sharpeville massacres look like a gentle reproof? To put faith in summit talks weakens the movement against the bomb, be- cause it gives people the impression that the solu- tion is not in their own hands but amongst the ‘top’ people, and because it implies that the final solution can be found within the framework of capitalism, without any far-reaching social and political changes. This really strengthens the impression that the anti-bomb campaign is a pressure group and not a political movement. But in fact the movement is campaigning against the firm, declared policy of the government. That brings it right into the field of politics. Tt is against the Tory government. Why doesn’t the leadership of CND come out and sav so? The movement can only be held back by shilly- shallying on this question. A serious canpaign to end the nuclear terror must be a camnaign aimed at bringing down the government. That means replacing it with a Labour government. Here the question inevit- ably arises: since Labour’s policy is fundament- ally similar to that of the Tories, what good would it do to elect a Labour Government? The opposition amendment to the Government’; motion approving the White Paper on Defence LABOUR REVIEW — June-July, 1960 was concerned only to prove that Labour could get more for the money. George Brown, Labour’s shadow Minister of Defence, stated that although the government’s policy had brought ‘weakness, indecision and uncertainty’ still ‘we do not conclude that it is unnecessary and un- profitable to pay for defence’. Sounding just like the most reactionary Tory, he went on: ‘As long as the war does not break out, who is to say that we have deterred it from breaking out or ihat it would not have happened anyway? ff there is no war, it might be said that maybe there would not have been a war even if we had not spent the money. On the other hand, as the whole purpose is deterrence we might as well take credit for the result.’ Labour’s right-wing leaders are under attack from the ranks for their H-bomb policy. They are also under attack for their retreat from nationalization and for their method of trying to stifle all opposition by bans and proscriptions. Every move that strengthens the left and weakens the right is a step forward in the campaign against nuclear weapons—again even if it does not seem to be connected with the Bomb. A victory over the Right on nationalization is a victory in the fight against the bomb. Every restriction on democracy that is rejected by the rank and file is a victory in the fight against the bomb, because the right-wing, who want to move away from nationalization, and who want to ban and proscribe organizations like the Socialist Labour League, ire the same people who are keeping the British labour movement tied to nuclear weapons. How can anyone say that the fight against the H-bomb is separate from the fight for democracy in the Labour movement after the experience of the recall conference of the General and Municipal Workers’ Union in 1959? A strong campaign against, for instance, the proscription of the Socialist Labour League and the black circular on Communist Party members, would seriously weaken the ability of trade union leaders to use such bureaucratic manoeuvres against the anti- bomb campaign. The industrial struggle of the working class, the colonial revolutions in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, the fight against the Tory govern- ment, the struggle inside the Labour Party for a socialist policy (wouldn’t the nationalization cf the engineering industry, preventing the manu- facture of arms from being .« source of private profit, be a step towards peace?), an end to bans and proscriptions: these are closely bound up with the campaign against nuclear war. That is why they are all brought together in the pro- gramme of the Socialist Labour League. This

[p011] NEW IDEOLOGIST OF CAPITALISM 45 programme is not just a collection of as many points as possible designed to provide something for everybody. It is designed to mobilize the _ unified opposition ensuing from all the conflicts that break out in capitalist society. To keep these forces separate weakens each one of them. But, brought together in a political movement, they will be a force which can sweep away im- perialism and end the nuclear threat. Finally, what are we asking members of CND to do? Obviously we would like as many us possible to accept our programme and join the Socialist Labour League. But apart from that, we say that the campaign against the bomb should be brought together with other move- ments. The campaign against apartheid and racialism is an obvious example. But to unite demonstrations against rocket sites in South. Yorkshire with the demands of the miners in that area would bring a new quality into the movement. This would be a real link with the working class. Moreover, we think that indivi- dually, members of CND should be active in other movements of protest (as many of them already are). We think they should join the Labour Party and fight for a socialist policy in-. side it to get rid of the right-wing and “bomb- happy’ leadership. Above all we ask members of CND to recognise that the campaign against the H-bomb is a political movement. The issue is not between political and non-political, but what kind of politics? Only the politics of the working class and Socialism can bring the end of militarism. Tom Kemp