The
cash crisis at the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has prompted several premature obituaries in the right-wing press. They
are premature not just because CND members have responded generously to its
appeal for money (although more is needed) but because the campaign still has a
crucially important role to play.
Despite the end of the cold war and the collapse of
Soviet communism, despite the seemingly rosy prospects for far-reaching arms
control agreements, the political and military establishments of the nuclear
powers (with the apparent exception of what was the Soviet Union) remain as
committed as ever to the insane idea that threatening the use of weapons of
mass destruction is essential to maintain credible defences.
Even as the Soviet Union ceases to be capable of
threatening the security of Western Europe and the United States, the Western
military and its political friends raise the spectre of nuclear-armed Third
World dictatorships as the justification for maintaining their nuclear
arsenals. Even as obsolete weapons systems are negotiated away, new weapons
systems are being developed. The American and French nuclear weapons
programmes are still racing ahead.
All this is absurd and obscene. Yet without CND
there would be barely a squeak of criticism in British political life. Labour
in particular has spent most of the past four years running away from a
critical stance on nuclear weapons. Unilateral nuclear disarmament was
jettisoned in 1989. In the past few months Labour's leaders have gone further.
Instead of remaining vague about how they propose to negotiate away British
nuclear arms, first Gerald Kaufman (ambiguously) and now Neil Kinnock
(unambiguously) have promised that a Labour government would keep British
nuclear weapons for as long as anyone else was nuclear-armed. Meanwhile a
Labour government would do its best to get British nuclear arms included in the
second round of the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, and would press hard for
rapid progress towards massive cuts in the world's nuclear arsenals.
Looking on the bright side, this position is still
better than the Tories', which remains unambiguously pro-deterrence, opposed
even to British involvement in START 2. So far, Labour's leadership has not
gone so far as to embrace the notion that nuclear arms really do constitute a
deterrent: they remain, at least in the small print of party policy, merely
bargaining chips to secure reductions all round. A Labour Prime Minister would
not, one can safely surmise, press the button.
But by promising to keep British nuclear
arms as long as anyone else has them, the Labour leadership has come perilously
close to making a mockery of its criticisms of deterrence and, in the process,
has made any future Labour government a hostage to the willingness of the other
nuclear powers to negotiate total elimination of nuclear weapons.
A nuclear-weapons-free world is certainly
desirable, and a Labour government should attempt to facilitate it in any way
it can. But it is easy to construct scenarios in which British insistence on
retaining nuclear weapons as long as anyone else has them scuppers a
far-reaching nuclear disarmament deal which nevertheless falls short of total
elimination of all nuclear weapons in the world – for example, an agreement to
eliminate all submarine-launched ballistic nuclear missiles. It will be
essential to put pressure on a Labour government, from inside and outside
parliament, on nuclear arms. Without CND, that task will be infinitely more
difficult. The campaign deserves our support in its hour of need.
