Editorial: Where is CND going?
When the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was launched three years ago the declared aim was to get the British Government to abandon all use of, and direct or indirect reliance on, nuclear weapons. This was to be a step to world-wide agreement to ban them and promote a reduction of armaments. They accepted the description “Unilateralists”—the British Government should be prepared to “go it alone “—in contra-distinction to the Bevan-Gaitskell “Multilateralists”, who argued that the only way to get what they wanted was to keep the bomb and continue to negotiate “from strength”.
Nuclear disarmament gained many converts, including former bomb-supporters like Lord Russell, won over the executives of many trade unions, and carried the day at the Scarborough Conference of the Labour Party in 1960. Though it is a long step from getting a small majority vote in a divided Labour Party to gaining control of the Government, they were naturally elated with success and expecting to go on to victory. Now elation is giving place to doubt.
The Rev. Donald Soper explains why, in an article “What Next for CND?”, Tribune (20.1.61). He thinks that the Campaign may by now have passed its peak and accepts the argument of another CND supporter, Mr. Wayland Young, that CND may be faced with a new situation which will rob them of their best propaganda point. He puts it in the terms that “it looks more possible than before that some kind of general all-round agreement on nuclear disarmament may be reached”. He thinks that the Government never regarded CND as more than an “embarrassing minority movement”. This “general all-round agreement” has not yet been reached by the H-Bomb governments but the mere possibility that it may be will weaken CND and help Gaitskell and the Government. Another factor in the same direction is the election of Kennedy as U.S. President and his acceptance by Mr. Crossman as well as by Mr. Gaitskell as a supposed “progressive” influence more likely to reach agreement with the Russian Government.
In this situation the Wayland Young—Soper line is for CND to escape from its blind alley by switching the emphasis of its campaign to general disarmament.
By doing this CND will take its place with the long line of humanitarian campaigns to lessen the horror of war by opposing each new and more horrible weapon as it came along; the campaigns against making war on civilians, against artillery bombardment of towns, against aerial bombing, against poison gas, the blockade, submarine warfare, napalm bombs, flame-throwers etc., etc. None of them have succeeded and each new decade has seen the accepted weapons grow more destructive. Whenever weapons have been discarded, or not used, the decision has been made by governments and their military advisers, on grounds of effectiveness and the risks of counter action, not on grounds of humanity.
Of course the campaigners of the past were able, from time to time, to point to short lived successes in the form of Hague Conventions, and other international pacts, in which the Powers solemnly swore to refrain from this or that weapon, and indeed from using war as an instrument at all. But every war produced its evidence that the signatures meant nothing. All of the hundred or so countries in the United Nations have undertaken to settle their disputes by peaceful means and refrain from the threat or use of force but no government treats this as more than a pious aspiration, and so it would be with a new declaration about the H-Bomb.
In peacetime the Powers might agree to suspend further tests and manufacture, or even promise to destroy their bombs, but if large-scale war broke out it would all begin again. It is not possible to remove from the world the knowledge and capacity to manufacture H-Bombs. In the future as in the past the question of use will be determined by the governments on military assessments; with however this difference that as wars are fought by all the Powers in this capitalist world not for abstractions like “honour and glory” but for the real concrete aims of wealth, trade, and profits, and as a massive H-Bomb war would destroy the lot, (including the lives of the propertied class) military considerations point to avoidance of the ultimate destruction, but not to the avoidance of tactical nuclear weapons.
If it switches its emphasis to general disarmament the campaign will at once come up against the varying and contradictory aims of the diverse elements that came together to ban the bomb. They can no doubt all agree on an ambiguous phrase like “stopping the armament race” since this has the attraction from the point of view of the general body of the propertied class in all countries that it holds out hopes of cutting the cost of their armaments and their tax burden. But dissension will at once appear if one group in CND presses for unilateral general disarmament, by Great Britain on its own. Any such demand will be resisted by those who hate the H-Bomb but stand by conventional arms, men like Mr. Cousins of the Transport and General Workers Union who argued that the British army got on all right in the last war without H-Bombs, and Mr. Priestley who, at the inauguration of CND was talking about fighting “with anything from shotguns …. to bombs made out of corned beef tins” (Daily Herald 5 March 1958).
None of those CND supporters who think in terms of war with “conventional weapons” in an H-Bomb world have explained how they would meet a demand from an H-Bomb enemy for immediate surrender under threat of an H-Bomb attack.
Lord Russell, however, the sometime opponent and sometime supporter of war, accepted the logic of the position and tersely declared that it was better to be “slaves” of an enemy power than to be dead.
No doubt the varying views of the different groups in CND explain the confused statements made on their behalf by their Chairman, Canon Collins, as for example in correspondence in The Times last November. Answering the charge that CND’s activities were in fact favouring Russia against America he declared that “no suggestion that America should renounce nuclear weapons while, Russia retains hers is to be found in the literature of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament”, and that CND would make exactly the same request to both Powers (Times 17 November). But he also explained that CND believes it to be immoral, risky and futile for these two Powers to have nuclear weapons though they do not realise it (Times 26 November). But if it is immoral, risky and futile, those are reasons for each and every government to give them up unilaterally, and CND logically ought to be telling them so.
Other elements in CND are the Neutralists and the Pacifists. The first group cherishes the blinkered delusion that one country can contract out of world power politics by the simple announcement that it is “neutral”, The colonies held down by foreign armies, the scores of “neutral” countries overrun in great wars are sufficient answer to this.
India is “neutralist” but finds China encroaching on allegedly Indian territory, and we see Nehru being forced to assure a cheering Parliament in New Delhi “that if India and China went to war India would fight to the end”. even if it lasted generations (Daily Herald 26 November 1960). Tibet, like Japan and China in an earlier phase, first wanted to be left alone and asked foreigners to keep out, but capitalist greed and arms dictated otherwise. Abyssinia overrun by Italy, and Hungary kept down by Russian troops, are other examples.
When we come to those who are loosely called “pacifists” we are dealing with several quite different points of view. The term is often applied indiscriminately to those who can grounds of policy want to keep out of a particular war as did Ramsay MacDonald in 1914; to those who believe that “pledges for peace” will prevent war, but who in the event of war hold themselves bound to support it; and those who believe in non-violence and non-resistance whatever the consequences.
They all came together between the wars in the “no-more war” movements. They looked back at the sickening horror and dismal aftermath of the first world war, “The War to End War”, and said never again! But the British Government and its propagandists, in the build-up for World War II, were not so foolish as to use that discredited slogan again. Instead the second war was proclaimed to be for “the defence of democracy and human liberty” against Hitlerism. So, on the plea that this was “different”, most of the no-more war army was converted, to “just one more”, including some, like Lord Russell and Mr. (now Lord) Morrison who had opposed World War I.
The fate of those who, using the term more strictly, can properly be called pacifists is different but no less tragic. They preach peace where here is no peace and advocate nonviolence in a capitalist world which has to rest on violence.
Their best-known spokesman was Gandhi, who many of them still believe to have triumphed in India. Gandhi thought otherwise. The Indian capitalist-nationalist movement was content to parade behind Gandhi and his ideas while it was seeking independence from British rule, but, as Gandhi sadly confessed, they dropped him when the objective had been gained and went in for massive armaments like all the rest of the Powers. As soon as independence was won India and Pakistan armed against each other and came to the verge of open war; which led Gandhi to declare: —
“As for myself, my way is different. I worship God which is truth and non-violence. There was a time when India listened to me. Today I am a back number. I have no place in the new order where they want an army, a navy and an air force and what not. I can never be a party to all that.”
The dilemma that faces the Gandhian pacifists and which makes nonsense of all campaigns for “total disarmament” is that the propertied class need armaments to protect their property and the functioning of their trading and profit seeking system.
If they gave up reliance on force their privileged position would vanish overnight, as Gandhi tacitly admitted when he justified the use of police against strike pickets. They likewise need armaments to protect the interests of each national capitalist group in the ceaseless struggle over markets, mineral resources, trade routes, strategic frontiers and so on. Disarmament is an abstraction that no government can treat seriously. One pacifist, the Reverend Donald Soper. has dimly seen this. He wrote: “Peace can neither be achieved nor maintained under capitalism or imperialism or even nationalism because selfishness and violence are indigenous to all three of them” (Tribune 14 March 1958).
What does anyone suppose would happen to Colonel Nasser’s Suez Canal if he disarmed? Or to the governments of Fidel Castro and Dr. Verwoerd, or to the governments of Ghana, India, China, Russia, U.S.A. or Britain, or all the others? The ones that disarmed on their own would be the immediate prey of the others. And if, as an impossible hypothesis, we are asked to conceive of them all disarming, the wealth of the propertied class (starting with the gold and currency hoards in the Fort Knoxes and bank vaults) would slip from their grasp. Donald Soper went on to say that only in a new social system is disarmament possible; but that is Soper the pacifist; as a politician he still believes in the possibility of modifying the existing capitalist system through the Labour Party and international agreement between the governments of capitalism.
They are all of them, the pacifists, unilateralists, multilateralists, supporters of United Nations and international agreements, dealing with the effects and not the cause.
There can be no secure peace while capitalism lasts, and the beginning of wisdom for the working class of all countries lies in recognising unitedly that they have no interest in their governments’ wars no matter what the professed aim and no matter what the weapons used.
The only way out is for capitalism to be replaced by a Socialist social system in which all people will cooperate to supply the needs of all, without buying and selling, profits and wages, seeking markets or defending frontiers. A difficult concept to workers who are immersed in capitalist habits of thought but one to which all must come.
Those who are oppressed by the thought of inevitable war should see our need to achieve Socialism, without which no tolerable future for the human race is conceivable.