CND Campaign Opens (No Politics Say Sponsors)

NEXT week the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is running a special campaign with meetings, demonstrations and film shows in every area.

This campaign has been given even greater urgency and importance by the recent statement of the American chemist and Nobel prize winner, Dr Linus Pauling, that '1,540,000 people are going to die from the effects of nuclear weapons exploded in the last 14 years.'

Since its inception the CND has done a thorough job of bringing to the attention of large sections of people the dreadful dangers and horrors of nuclear war. But despite its success in creating a large climate of opinion against nuclear war plans to date the CND has been unable to mobilize that opinion into an effective force against the manufacture and testing of the H-bomb.

The adherence of CND to a policy of 'non-politics', its reliance on 'statesmen' and so-called 'leaders' prevents it from finding a road to the working class which is the only effective force capable of removing the threat of thermo-nuclear warfare.

American imperialism now has a H-bomb that is the equivalent of 15 million tons of T.N.T. De Gaulle plans to test French Bombs in the Sahara thereby unleashing poisonous radio-active dust over millions of colonial peoples. Last November, Nikita Khrushchev boasted in Moscow that Russia had 'acheived an increase in the power of our nuclear weapons.'

The same British ruling class that stock-piles H-bombs, is the one that threatens the jobs of 85,000 miners and whose policies are responsible for the rent increases in St Pancras. In America and France it is the De Gaulles and the Eisenhowers who wage war on the living standards of their own working class. Khrushchev sanctions the murder of Hungarian workers and internationally makes overtures to the imperialists.

The historic interests of the working class demand that they settle accounts with capitalism and the Soviet bureaucracy. Their fight for jobs, for genuine freedom and the struggle against war are inseparable.

The CND must recognize this and thereby be in a position where it can assist in a united movement aimed at destroying for all time the present threat to humanity's future.