Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

• 1. Introduction

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  The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, known as CND, is a British organisation pressing the United Kingdom to give up nuclear weapons unilaterally. In November 1957, the writer J. B. Priestley made that case in the New Statesman magazine, in an article called "Britain and the Nuclear Bombs". "In plain words," he wrote, "now that Britain has told the world she has the H-bomb she should announce as early as possible that she has done with it, that she proposes to reject, in all circumstances, nuclear warfare." The article drew many letters of support, and within weeks a small group met to turn that argument into an organisation.

  In the decades since, the campaign's membership has swung from a few thousand supporters to hundreds of thousands and back again. Intelligence services on both sides of the Cold War took an interest in who ran it. Its symbol became recognised worldwide as a mark of peace protest.

  How did a magazine article grow into a movement that shaped a Labour Party conference vote? Why did its own leaders come to distrust one another over tactics? And did spies really sit inside its offices?

• 2. Founding A Movement

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  In November 1957, a small committee gathered in the rooms of Canon John Collins in Amen Court to plan an organisation. Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman, chaired that first meeting. The group named Collins as chairman, Bertrand Russell as president and Peggy Duff as organising secretary. Its executive committee also included Martin himself, Priestley, Ritchie Calder, the journalist James Cameron, Howard Davies, Michael Foot, Arthur Goss and the physicist Joseph Rotblat.

  On the 17th of February 1958, the campaign held its first public meeting at Central Hall in Westminster. Collins chaired the event; Foot, Stephen King-Hall, Priestley, Russell and A. J. P. Taylor addressed the crowd. Five thousand people attended, and a few hundred of them marched on to Downing Street afterward to demonstrate.

  The broadcaster John Arlott, the actress Peggy Ashcroft and the composer Benjamin Britten were among the many sponsors who lent their names to the new campaign. The novelist Doris Lessing, the writer E. M. Forster, the sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, and the composer Michael Tippett joined them. Scientists, clergy, academics and journalists filled out the list further still.

  The same year, John de Courcy Ireland and his wife Beatrice set up a branch of the campaign in the Republic of Ireland. Peadar O'Donnell, Owen Sheehy-Skeffington and Hubert Butler were among its supporters there, and the branch pushed for Ireland to stay free of nuclear power and to back international disarmament efforts.

  For a decade before that, the peace movement in Britain had been dominated by the Soviet-directed World Peace Council. The new campaign's founders wanted distance from it and from communist politics generally. What they had not yet decided was how their supporters, once organised, would actually get to Aldermaston.

• 3. The Aldermaston March And Its Symbol

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  At Easter in 1958, a small pacifist group called the Direct Action Committee had already organised a march from London to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, a distance of 52 miles. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament backed it only after some hesitation, then took over organising the march every Easter afterward.

  Sixty thousand people joined the Aldermaston march in 1959, and the number reached 150,000 in both 1961 and 1962. Filmmaker Lindsay Anderson turned the very first march, in 1958, into a documentary called March to Aldermaston.

  Gerald Holtom designed the campaign's symbol in 1958. It combines the semaphore signals for the letters N and D, for Nuclear Disarmament, inside a circle: two flags angled down for N, one flag up and one down for D. Holtom later said it also stood for "an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya's peasant before the firing squad," though in that actual painting, The Third of May 1808, the peasant's hands are raised, not lowered.

  The symbol, the march and the slogan "Ban the Bomb" became fixtures of 1960s youth culture. About three-quarters of the campaign's supporters voted Labour, and much of its early executive committee belonged to the party. One description at the time called its outlook "essentially that of middle-class radicalism."

  In 1958, the campaign had cautiously accepted direct action as one possible method of protest. Two years later, that same question, how far protest should go, would split the movement in two.

• 4. Rise And Fracture

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  In 1960, the Labour Party's annual conference voted to adopt unilateral nuclear disarmament as official policy. It was the high point of the campaign's influence, achieved against the wishes of the party's own leaders. Party leader Hugh Gaitskell responded by promising to "fight, fight, and fight again" against the decision, and a new group, the Campaign for Democratic Socialism, formed to get it overturned. It succeeded at the next conference.

  Bertrand Russell resigned from the campaign in 1960 to form a new body, the Committee of 100. He argued that the press was losing interest in the cause and that the danger of nuclear war left no time to wait. Canon Collins and the rest of the campaign's leadership opposed unlawful protest, and personal friction between Collins and Russell hardened the split. The Committee of 100 staged large sit-down demonstrations in London and at military bases before dissolving in 1968.

  The campaign gave its supporters no formal vote until a national council was created in 1961, and it had no registered membership at all until 1966. Canon Collins, unpopular with many supporters for his strictly constitutional approach, resigned as chairman in 1964 and turned his energy toward the International Confederation for Disarmament and Peace.

  In the autumn of 1962, the United States blockaded a Soviet attempt to place nuclear missiles on Cuba. The Cuban Missile Crisis brought widespread public fear of imminent nuclear war, and the campaign staged demonstrations over it. Six months later, a Gallup poll found public concern about nuclear weapons had fallen to its lowest point since 1957.

  On the 1963 Aldermaston march, a clandestine group calling itself Spies for Peace handed out leaflets exposing a secret government bunker, RSG 6, that the route happened to pass. Nicolas Walter, a leading Committee of 100 member, was later named as one of the people behind the leaflets. A large group broke away from the march, against the wishes of campaign leaders, to demonstrate at the site.

  The march itself grew so large by 1963 that organising it had exhausted its own volunteers, and only a one-day event went ahead the following year. A Test Ban Treaty arrived that same year, one of the very things the campaign had spent years pressing for.

• 5. The 1980s Revival

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  In 1980, NATO decided to place cruise and Pershing II missiles in five European countries, including Britain. The campaign launched a new international body, European Nuclear Disarmament, that same year, and local anti-missile groups sprang up around the country. Historian Martin Shaw has argued that only after this launch did the older campaign itself begin to revive.

  The Soviet bloc's deployment of SS-20 missiles ratcheted up tension between the superpowers. The United States answered with Pershing missiles in Western Europe, while Britain began replacing its Polaris submarine fleet with Trident. NATO's exercise Able Archer 83 added further strain that same decade.

  By the early 1980s, the campaign claimed 90,000 national members plus a further 250,000 through local branches, making it, by one account, the largest peace movement in the world outside the Soviet bloc's state-run organisations. In October 1981, 250,000 people joined an anti-nuclear demonstration in London.

  October 1983 brought one of the largest demonstrations in British history, timed to the eve of Cruise missile deployment: 300,000 marched in London while three million protested across Europe. Glastonbury Festival became a partner in this period too, hosting a CND festival from June 1981 and raising roughly £1 million for the campaign across the decade, with its logo displayed on the festival's pyramid stage.

  New branches multiplied: Ex-services CND, Green CND, Student CND, Trade Union CND, Youth CND, and a group of Conservative-leaning members called Tories Against Cruise and Trident. Women outnumbered men among supporters, many drawn through the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp and, later, Molesworth People's Peace Camp. A government booklet on civil defence, Protect and Survive, was mocked in a popular pamphlet by the historian E. P. Thompson titled Protest and Survive.

  A network calling itself Cruise Watch tracked the missile convoys on public roads and harassed them whenever they moved. Within a short time, the missiles travelled only at night, and only under police escort.

• 6. Suspicion And Surveillance

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  In 1981, the Foreign Affairs Research Institute, run by Geoffrey Stewart-Smith, shared office space with a group called the Coalition for Peace through Security. The campaign's own newspaper, Sanity, reported that the Institute had published a booklet alleging Russian money was funding the campaign. Lord Chalfont went further, claiming the Soviet Union gave the European peace movement £100 million a year. Bruce Kent, the campaign's general secretary, replied that if so, "it was certainly not getting to our grotty little office in Finsbury Park."

  The Coalition for Peace through Security, founded in 1981 by Julian Lewis, Edward Leigh and Francis Holihan, commissioned Gallup polls on public support for British nuclear weapons and mounted counter-demonstrations. Its members heckled marchers from the roof of its Whitehall office and once flew a banner over a campaign festival reading, "Help the Soviets, Support CND!" The group refused to disclose its own funding, which came in part from a private intelligence body called The 61 and reportedly from the Heritage Foundation.

  Bruce Kent, also a Catholic priest, was accused by the Coalition of supporting IRA terrorism. Kent wrote in his autobiography that Francis Holihan had spied on the campaign, entering its offices under false pretences and joining to gain access to its 1982 annual conference; when Kent later went on a speaking tour of America, Holihan followed him.

  MI5, the security service, watched campaign members it viewed as subversive. From the late 1960s until the mid-1970s it formally classified the campaign as "communist-controlled", a label later softened to "communist-penetrated." John Cox, the campaign's chairman from 1971 to 1977, was in fact a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

  In 1985, Cathy Massiter, the MI5 officer who had overseen surveillance of the campaign from 1981 to 1983, resigned and spoke to a Channel 4 programme called MI5's Official Secrets. She said her work was driven by the campaign's political weight rather than any real security threat. MI5 had also placed an informer, Harry Newton, inside the campaign's office; Massiter said he suspected general secretary Bruce Kent of being a secret communist, but she found no evidence for it.

  Joan Ruddock, who became chair in 1983, came under MI5 suspicion after she gave an interview to a Soviet journalist believed to be a KGB officer. In 1990, papers surfaced in the archive of the former East German secret police, the Stasi, showing that a member of the campaign's governing council, Vic Allen, had passed them information. Ruddock, responding to the discovery, said Allen "certainly had no influence on national CND" and that the campaign "was as opposed to Soviet nuclear weapons as Western ones."

  The journalist Charles Moore later reported that the former Labour leader Michael Foot, a longtime supporter of the campaign, had received money from KGB agents posing as diplomats while he edited the newspaper Tribune, passing on what he knew of nuclear weapons debates in return for drafts he could publish as his own. Foot had won libel damages over a similar claim while he was still alive.

• 7. Campaigns Today

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  Cancelling the Trident missile programme tops the campaign's current list of objectives, alongside eliminating Britain's nuclear arsenal entirely and pushing for global nuclear abolition. Its other targets include chemical and biological weapons, and a ban on the manufacture, testing and use of depleted uranium weapons.

  The campaign also backs a nuclear-free, less militarised Europe, supporting the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe while opposing US military bases on the continent and Britain's membership of NATO. It calls for the closure of Britain's nuclear power industry as well.

  That opposition to nuclear power dates to a campaign launched in 2006, after Prime Minister Tony Blair committed to nuclear energy. Membership, which had fallen from a peak of 110,000 in 1983 to 32,000 by 2006, tripled in response.

  Under the slogan "Don't Attack Iraq," the campaign joined the Stop the War Coalition and the Muslim Association of Britain for marches against war in the Middle East, including protests on the 28th of September 2002 and the 15th of February 2003. It also held a vigil for the victims of the 2005 London bombings.

  In March 2007, it organised a rally in Parliament Square timed to a House of Commons motion on renewing Trident. More than 1,000 people attended, addressed by Labour MPs Jon Trickett, Emily Thornberry, John McDonnell, Michael Meacher, Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn, all of whom voted against renewal, alongside Elfyn Llwyd of Plaid Cymru and Angus MacNeil of the Scottish National Party. In the Commons vote itself, 161 MPs, 88 of them Labour, voted against renewal, and the government motion passed only with Conservative support.

  The organisation is based in London, with national groups in Wales, Ireland and Scotland and regional groups spread from Cumbria to Sussex. Two of its five specialist sections, Christian CND and Labour CND, hold seats on its governing council alongside dedicated parliamentary, youth and student groups. How many people actually back that structure has never stayed still for long.

• 8. Numbers And Influence

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  Before 1967, the campaign had no national membership at all; supporters simply joined local branches. Once records began, membership stood at 1,500 in 1967 and crept only slowly upward through the 1970s, reaching 4,287 by 1979. It then jumped to 9,000 in 1980-20,000 in 1981 and 50,000 in 1982.

  Under Joan Ruddock's chairmanship between 1981 and 1985, the campaign said its own membership rose from 20,000 to 460,000, a far larger jump than other contemporary estimates for the same period. The organisation reported another rapid rise in membership after Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party in 2015.

  Between 1955 and 1962, between 19 and 33 percent of Britons told pollsters they disapproved of nuclear weapons manufacturing. Support for unilateral disarmament has since held at roughly one in four of the population, holding steady even after the end of the Cold War.

  A 2005 poll by MORI found that 44 percent would replace the Trident missile system and 46 percent would not, when respondents were not told the cost. Once told the cost, support for replacement fell to 33 percent and opposition rose to 54 percent. The same poll found 53 percent would approve using nuclear weapons against a country that had already used them against Britain, against 37 percent who would not.

  On three occasions, a Labour Party in opposition has moved toward the campaign's position while out of government, and each time the party's official policy proved short-lived, except in 2015, when Jeremy Corbyn's election as leader was not matched by any change in Labour's official policy at all.

  Much of the campaign's own paper trail now sits at the London School of Economics and at the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick, while records from its smaller regional and local branches remain scattered across public and private collections around the country.