-INTRODUCTION- I forget which great male thinker once said the only party worth living for was "the party of humanity". Or was it "dying for"? Something like that anyway. I'm better at "Remember your humanity and forget the rest". That was Bertrand Russell - unless of course it was Albert Einstein. But never mind who said those things. This essay is about why, when it comes to nuclear disarmament, they are true. It is a vile fact about the power struggles between the USA and the USSR that they are not confined to exchanges of military threats, or nuclear ravings, or other manoeuvres, between the two super-states and their allied subordinates. In fact, these conflicts have their essential home inside ordinary, largely powerless and "unimportant" people everywhere. Far from being neglected bystanders, you and I, reader, are at once their battlefield, their main potential forces, and the coveted spoils of any short-lived or permanent "victories" they may achieve. Many people see the dangerous times humanity is now barely living through, and often not even that, as a renewed or second "Cold War". What we choose to call it doesn't matter much. But in the anti-nuclear peace movements of the world it matters a great deal if too many people assume that the brutal clash of superpower ideologies will leave us alone, just because we would like it to do so. In this essay I shall discuss the influence of the East-West conflict on one such movement, Britain's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, in which I have been active both in its early days and for the past five years of its greatest effectiveness. By writing it I have not "brought the Cold War into the peace movement", as some may want to charge. That would have been impossible, since it was already there. I merely think that all peace movement supporters need to take a hard look at it, and think through what we want to do about it. I shall argue that we must come to grips with the Cold War in our midst, and consciously reject its fatal influence. Otherwise, the conflict between the superpowers will first dominate, then disempower and marginalise the very movements which have set ourselves the massive task of rescuing not just our own societies, but humanity as a whole, from its clutches. ( 1 ) Within the peace movements of the West, as distinct from wider public opinion, it is usual for people not to be deceived by United States manoeuvres, such as the "zero option" offer over medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe at the end of 1981, or the so-called "Star Wars" scheme today. The same cannot always be said, unfortunately, about our capacity for resisting comparable Soviet moves. But there are such moves, and we need to be aware of them and to respond to them with cool heads and independent judgements. Hence this essay will have to concentrate most of the time on the reasons why Western peace movements should not align themselves with the nuclear power-politics of the Soviet Union. Had it been written in, say, Czech, the balance of its contents would have been rather different. Like their Western counterparts, the rulers of the Soviet Union view the world from deep inside several layers of myth about the "deterrent" value of "balanced" nuclear deployments. Because of this, they are bound to see Western, and especially West European peace movements - such as CND - as a potential source of geopolitical advantage to themselves, provided always that our awkward tendency to denounce Soviet missile deployments as well as NATO ones can be either curbed or ignored. In recent years, they will have found our concentration of efforts against the latest, "modernisation" round of the nuclear arms race in Europe to be something of a nuisance, whenever it added opposition to SS-20s to its central thrust against Cruise and Pershing 2 missiles. But they will have been gratified whenever we focussed on opposing the qualitative shift in the arms race, away from mutual second-strike deterrence towards the pursuit of war-fighting nuclear "superiority". For this opposition to war-fighting strategies has sometimes seemed to lead us into a tacit approval of deterrence. Which might in turn lend credence, inside Western societies, to apologies for allegedly "defensive" Soviet nuclear weapons (provided no-one ever mentioned their obscene numbers, often known as "over-kill"). But the corrupt and stupid suppositions of nuclear power politics are common to Washington and Whitehall, as well as the Kremlin. It will therefore really seem to Western governments that their local peace movements have aims in common with those of Soviet foreign policy. When ( 2 ) they denounce us in those familiar terms, they are usually telling only what they see as truth by their debased and guttering lights. And indeed, since Soviet rulers see things the same way, it is bound to be not just apparently but actually the case that their agents and supporters will seek to intervene inside Western peace movements, hoping to block those policies and campaigns which do not suit Moscow's book, and to steer our energies into activities and demands which best and only reflect the latest model of the Soviet "programme for peace". Indeed, it is probably sensible to see the Soviet need for support from and within the peace movements of Western Europe as far more intense and persistent than any felt by the Reagan administration. After all, the US government has many powerful friends and allies in our societies. The Soviet Union has relatively few, and must work harder to find and cultivate any potential recruits, however unpromising. Debates about "Soviet missiles" within our movements are therefore really about much more than that. They are about our entire orientation and methods and programme. Above all, they are about whether or not the new peace movements can and should replace the old, authoritarian type of politics, in the midst of which we have come into being, with something else. It is of the very nature of this new movement that people use different expressions to refer to that "something else". But they will know what I mean well enough. For the benefit of other readers, I would describe it as the recognition, in a thousand practical ways, that nuclear weapons cannot be decisively abolished without an overhaul of society that takes it beyond the established frameworks of exploitation or confrontation between East and West, North and South, labour and capital, women and men, blacks and whites, youth and adults, gays and straights, and many other divided groups. Another way to put this is to say that the oppressed groups in such dimensions of conflict have to find out paths to freedom that do not make victims in turn of those whose domination they are throwing off. But there is no way to know in advance whether this comprehensive "peace revolution" can ever succeed. That will only become clear through our efforts to make it do so. ( 3 ) Those who share the sort of orientation I have clumsily described are concerned to support and to achieve our apparently negative demands for disarmament - "No Cruise!" "No Trident!" etc - with an increasingly positive picture of the sort of Britain, or whichever other place we live in, that would achieve its security through constructive and peaceful relations with the rest of humanity. The sort of Britain, in short, for which disarmament would -make sense-, and nuclear weapons none. This approach is not universally shared or even understood within the peace movement, perhaps because it often still gets dressed up in the language and style of this or that competitive ideology on this or that group's bookstall. In 1985, there are several reasons to hope it can be better understood and more widely and consciously accepted. Our years of intensive campaigning against NATO's new nuclear weapons in Western Europe have both made their mark and taken their toll. They have achieved an unprecedented degree of popular concern about the issue, and massive support for the peace movements. But not only have we failed to stop any actual deployments so far; we have sometimes aggravated our situation with self-inflicted wounds from the old-style authoritarianism which lingers on in many forms amongst us. Over the past two years the combination of external and internal difficulties has resulted in occasional outbreaks of hesitation, fatigue, and confusion. And even in those amongst us with a partial understanding of the need to fuse radical democratic ideals with a non-aligned perspective on the future of a disarmed Europe, there has been perhaps a certain degree of complacency, a certain over-confidence that all these questions were settled once and for all in 1980 and 1981, when the new movement sprang into exciting existence. But in fact, just because we are getting closer than ever to political changes which will involve at least some nuclear disarmament, those dubious allies, who with some justice see our non-alignment as a threat to their sort of politics, are likely to work harder than ever to undermine it. This should not surprise or shock any peace campaigner with her wits about her. The important question, to be discussed in this pamphlet, is what we should do about it. ( 4 ) My short answer, to be expanded on below, is that we need to do two things, one fairly easy but the other not easy at all. The first is to go on taking care that the very small minority of "aligned" sympathisers with the complete Soviet position on everything to do with peace and disarmament - and we shall see below that most British Communist Party members do -not- answer to that description - do not have any influence in our movement. The second, harder part of my recommendation will be that we deepen and renew our basic struggle, which is partly always a struggle with ourselves, to replace the murderous and outworn old politics which gave us the Bomb and many many other evils, with a radically democratic, transnational and liberating politics of global solidarity and shared responsibility between all human beings. us1: NON-ALIGNMENT IN CND TODAY- I shall now try to sketch the essence of mainstream CND policy, as I understand it, and then explain why that position is so closely linked to an independent and often critical stance over Soviet nuclear weapons and the policy goals they are intended to serve. In the next section, all this will be examined from another angle, by looking at objections that are sometimes made to it. In Britain, the nuclear disarmament movement of the 1980s is a powerful combination of two sorts of argument and demand. The basic anti-nuclear insights for which CND has campaigned for over 25 years are as important as ever, and have never been more widely accepted. To them has been added a libertarian and transnationalist political awareness, of the sort indicated above. Amongst other things, this inclines the new peace movement towards a view about the future of Europe, seen as a potentially regional, diverse but co-operative social, economic and cultural space, which cannot happen unless it frees itself from the oppression of superpower military confrontations. Turning to the older elements of CND policy first, they come down to the view that all nuclear bombs and other mass destruction devices have been, are, and always will be absolutely wrong, absolutely illegal, and -absolutely useless- -for any sane and justifiable military purposes-. This involves rejecting -all- pretensions to justify -any- nuclear deployments as "a hideous, monstrous necessity", no matter from which side of the Cold War they may be offered. Out of this basic conviction about the wrongness and stupidity of nuclear weapons at all times and in all places springs our central demand for their complete and unconditional renunciation by Britain at the earliest possible moment. We scarcely hope that the rulers of the USA and the USSR will rapidly see through their own myth-making propaganda about so-called nuclear deterrence. But we stress that there is nevertheless ample scope for them to make unconditional cuts in the nuclear stockpiles they have already acquired. Each side could and should also put a complete freeze on further technical development of nuclear devices, and on proposed deployments, with no possible loss of what they conceive to be security. Even on their own "deterrence" terms, that is, PAGE 1 they must proceed with unilateral -acts- of nuclear disarmament. Humanity will no longer tolerate the blether of threats and promises which both have tried for the last forty years to pass off on us instead of a serious, effective and peace-minded diplomacy. Though it grew up in opposition to NATO's Cruise and Pershing 2 deployments, the political essence of the new anti-nuclear peace movement in Western Europe is its steadily growing realisation that we have to tackle, not just the symptomatic hardware of our present appalling situation, but also the underlying reality of a Europe divided and occupied by the two superpowers, with different local results in each case. The abuse of our countries as a "theatre" for their geopolitical confrontation is just as grave an issue for us today, in time of so-called peace, as it could ever be if war broke out. Indeed, our -only- chance to affect the nature of such a war and the chance of its occurring is now, before it does. Thus we have come to see ourselves, alongside other related campaigns in our societies, as in a real sense movements of liberation, movements for the extension and eventual completion of democracy, by applying it to one of the most important matters that people need to control for themselves, namely the physical security of their own communities. Sometimes this aspect of the new peace movements takes on a nationalist form, with talk of regaining, or in the case of West Germany acquiring for the first time, a full local sovereignty. But that is a distortion of our thinking resulting from its contamination by older political ideas, to which it is not truly suited. More usually, today's peace activists hope for a loose association between European societies, combining a strictly defensive military posture with radically global foreign policies, above all for transformed relations between ourselves and people living in hitherto oppressed and super-exploited regions of the planet. Both the older and the more recent elements of CND policy are incompatible with excuses or outright support for the Soviet side of the nuclear arms race. As to the traditional CND case, if we reject "nuclear deterrence" as military nonsense for NATO, then we cannot turn round and accept the very same argument when it is used to justify the PAGE 2 nuclear aspects of Soviet defence policy, however reasonable we may find the Kremlin's apprehensions of a Western military threat. If all nuclear bombs are criminal offences against humanity, even before they are exploded, then those built in the Soviet Union are included in our condemnation, and Cold War excuses cannot be allowed. And if overkill capacity makes voluntary reductions both possible and sensible, then the Soviet Union has as good a basis as the USA for making such cuts tomorrow, without any need of negotiated agreements. (Nor should her rulers expect to lose politically by so doing.) The more recent wide-spread realisation in our movements, that nuclear disarmament is closely inter-connected with personal and political freedom for all Europeans, means that we must dissociate ourselves in some ways from Soviet power and its social basis. This applies to the immediate issue of "peace rights", the freedom of ordinary people to act independently for peace, without obtaining permission or programmes from their nuclear-armed or nuclear-minded governments, which we have to demand for Eastern Europeans just as much as for ourselves. It applies to the need for nuclear disarmament to be guaranteed by the commitment of local, independent and popular movements, with the power and freedom to enforce their will against any future government that might think of betraying its international commitments. It applies also to the question of whether peace and disarmament can ever be achieved in Europe, and the world, unless the East-West bloc system is dissolved from below, by the same forms of active, peace-making democracy. For if a trust-worthy nuclear disarmament is literally unattainable by governments alone, unsupported by powerful popular forces, then it is a life-and-death matter that movements committed to developing that empowerment of ourselves should be free to exist in all countries and on our own terms. Now, even if the sort of democracy it takes for nuclear disarmament does not yet exist in the West, massive, independent, and popular movements committed to reversing -both- the undemocratic rule -and- the missiles of our unwanted nuclear masters have come into being here. The different forms of social control used on the other side of Europe, however, mean that our anti-nuclear and democratic allies PAGE 3 there are still confined to handfuls of brave and cruelly harrassed people. But we urgently need the so far non-existent Soviet CND. So does the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, it does no good to shrink from saying so. It is important also to notice that CND's political independence and non-alignment is directly related to our campaigning work. It is vital for us to be honest and consistent in criticising the myths of so-called nuclear defence, whoever and wherever tries to uphold them. If once we start to hedge and fudge, to allow that some nuclear bombs are justifiable and militarily useful, we would be deservedly done for. If we were to say that Soviet missiles were somehow acceptable, we would not only be watering down our express condemnation of all such devices as totally wrong and illegal. We would also be well on the way to agreeing that Vietnam should have some, to "protect" itself against China; Angola, against South Africa; Cuba, and Nicaragua, against the United States; Argentina, against Britain; and so on and on to Armageddon. In short, we would be giving in to the Cold War in our heads, by accepting that nuclear explosives are some sort of rationally usable "weapons" after all, and by granting that some are not so bad or so dangerous as others. When the next nuclear war began, -we- would have been one of its main causes. Furthermore, the solid social consensus for nuclear disarmament, which has to be built in Britain over the next few years, will depend entirely on public confidence in the policy of independent nuclear disarmament and trust in the people who propose it. Any Cold War partiality from us towards the nuclear weapons of -either- superpower, and we can kiss that trust good-bye. Which is why the accusation that we are the unwitting dupes of Soviet power-political interests is one of the favourite charges brought against us by our pro-nuclear political opponents. However, a policy of British nuclear disarmament makes no sense, and has no chance, unless it is part and parcel of a fundamental change in our foreign policy. That change would involve making some form of constructive non-alignment possible for Britain, preferably in association with other European countries. As the -European Peace Movements'- -Declaration- of 1982 (reproduced below as an Appendix) so clearly expressed it, non-alignment means taking no sides PAGE 4 with either of the two great military blocs, but rather working actively to dissolve them. But it cannot be emphasized too strongly that non-alignment -also- means rejecting the sort of irresponsible, blanket condemnations of everything ever done or proposed by one or other side, which are so much a part of their Cold War relationship to one another. For the reasons explained above, we do take such a stand over nuclear deployments. But we must be ready to judge proposals for disarmament and other tension-reducing measures on their actual merits, regardless of their place of origin. This does not mean, of course, that we should take them at face value, closing our eyes to the many damaging ways in which they may be aimed at acquiring one-sided military or propaganda advantages. Judging them on merit means taking lack of merit into account also! PAGE 5 -2: SOME OBJECTIONS REPLIED TO- Enough has now been said, I hope, to establish my earlier claim that "the Soviet missiles question" is not a side issue for CND and similar movements elsewhere in Western Europe, but one which belongs to the very core of today's nuclear disarmament politics. If a strict non-alignment is an essential precondition for European nuclear disarmament, it may seem obvious that the movements to achieve that disarmament must neither be nor appear to be aligned on one or other side in the power struggles between the USA and the USSR. But in practice, whenever proposals are put forward for types of campaigning aimed at spelling out that CND is just as independent of the Eastern bloc as it is of its Western rival, they meet with certain standard objections from a minority of our supporters. Their arguments deserve very careful consideration. -(a) "Opposing Soviet missiles is a diversion."- There is, first, the charge that if we publicly state or demonstrate our opposition to Soviet nuclear bombs, and to the Soviet hegemony over ordinary people in large parts of the world, which those bombs are intended to sustain, we are diverting our energies from the primary task of ridding Britain of nuclear weapons. This point has already been rebutted, but to repeat, British nuclear disarmament requires an unshakeable public confidence in the wisdom of the policy and in the motives of those who propose it. That will never be forthcoming unless it has been earned by campaigning which makes the non-alignment and independence of CND as obvious, as familiar and as incontestable to everyone in Britain as is, say, our opposition to NATO's cruise missiles today. Thus it is no distraction from the central aims of CND, when we criticise Soviet nuclear deployments, or the treatment of independent peace campaigners in Eastern Europe, or such elements in Soviet disarmament proposals as may seem aimed at securing one-sided advantages for their side of the Cold War. On the contrary, these facets of our campaigning are vital to its overall success. -(b) "Non-alignment is divisive."- ( 10 ) A similar but worse-tempered response to the non-aligned perspective in CND has sometimes been that it is wilfully divisive, and damages the movement by bringing it into disrepute. This criticism is hard to discuss thoroughly without trying to throw some light on what sort of unity, between whom, forms the basis for CND and is important to preserve. That discussion will be found in the next section. At this stage, there are three points worth making. First, there can and sometimes should be major disagreements about policy within anti-nuclear peace movements. That is how new ideas can be tested, provided the discussion is not carried on in deliberately antagonistic forms or style. Boo-words like "divisive" are not much of a contribution to that open and useful process. Those who apply them to the non-aligned position, for instance, were not heard doing so during the equally intense debates over CND's opposition to NATO a couple of years ago. Secondly, no matter what the mainstream trend of CND policy, we are a movement that depends entirely on mutual tolerance and pluralism between all its supporters. Those who do not choose to join in a certain form of action - be it cutting the fence at Molesworth, leafletting a factory, writing to an MP, or sending a Christmas card to an East German school-teacher - do not thereby get the right to put down others who do. There will always be plenty of what each person does think is needed, for her to get on with. We work away on many different levels and in many different ways, and the thing we have to guard against is the improbable claim that only this one, or only that one, is -the- "way forward" for everyone else in the movement. My third, very minor point, would be to mention once again the 1982 European Peace Declaration, which is perhaps -some- sort of representative statement of the politics of our new peace movements. It is, to say the least, hard to see how anyone accepting that statement could find the non-aligned position, for which I have been arguing, to be divisive. -(c) "Soviet deterrence is genuine."- Most campaigners for British nuclear disarmament today are extremely sceptical about the proposition that nuclear bombs have somehow "defended" Western Europe for the past 40 years. Usually we argue that there are fundamental flaws in ( 11 ) the whole theory of so-called nuclear deterrence. There is, however, a variation on this position, which forms the basis of this objection to non-alignment. It is the view that there has been no menace to Western Europe whatsoever for NATO's nuclear forces to defend us against - not even from Soviet nuclear bombs. But that the reverse relationship, between Soviet nuclear armaments and NATO forces, -has- all along been a case of prudent and effective nuclear deterrence against a real threat. It should be obvious that the difference between the two positions is profound. The former has no time for any claims about the beneficial and defensive character of any nuclear forces anywhere, for fundamental reasons having to do with the very nature of nuclear devices. But the latter believes that nuclear deterrence is both possible, and has also been actually achieved by the Soviet Union to ward off the undoubted menace and ambitions of its enemies. Those making this objection to anti-nuclear non-alignment often add that the Soviet Union needs not just a retaliatory, second-strike nuclear deterrent, but also a missile for missile, technology for technology "parity" with the United States. The problem with this claim is the same as for its counterpart in the West. The arms-racing demand, for numerical and qualitative parity, flatly contradicts the -previous-, more basic assertion that the simple threat of nuclear devastation can serve as a reliable form of defence. For if this were true, or were sincerely believed, then a few hundred warheads at most would be all that was required, rather than the several thousand now deployed by Soviet forces. (But we shall meet this point again in Objection (g) below.) There is, then, a basic disagreement between people who agree with one Cold War side or other that nuclear deployments -can- make military and moral sense, and the mainstream CND rejection of all nuclear bombs as not just immoral and illegal, but also an extremely dangerous illusion which, in Mountbatten's words, "has no military purpose". It is hard to see what more can be said. Those who are selective about whose nuclear weapons they oppose - and they do of course regard them as weapons - see the whole question from within some version of Cold War ideology which is unlikely to make much sense to anyone not also converted ( 12 ) to it. Likewise, they are bound to find it difficult or impossible to understand CND's position, which is based on rejecting the very terms they use to think about the matter. The best one can say is that just as we don't give up trying to persuade people suffering from the NATO strain of the nuclear virus, so neither should we stop trying to persuade those who have caught the Soviet variety. -(d) "Non-alignment is too negative towards Soviet- -disarmament proposals."- It is sometimes argued that opposing Soviet reliance on nuclear forces means we are bound to reject each and every Soviet-endorsed idea about nuclear disarmament or arms control. This view is usually supported with claims that the USSR has a far better record of serious interest in disarmament negotiations than has the USA, and that everyone should give that record very great respect. Taking these points in order, first, there is no need whatsoever for principled opponents of all nuclear armaments not to respect and even support fair and sensible proposals for disarmament, wherever they come from. It might be easier if the ideas put forward by the peace movements had in the past more often been respected by the nuclear powers, or indeed if all proposals put before either bilateral or international conferences had to be submitted anonymously and rewritten before the meeting by the UN bureaucracy, but let that pass. Perhaps, though, there is concealed within this objection some element of the last one. The point really at issue may be that the independent peace movements make no more allowance for Soviet disarmament proposals to include hidden aspirations for greater nuclear "security" or "strength" than we do for US ones, because we do not believe in any such dangerous rubbish. So if the request to give Soviet proposals a chance is just a concealed repetition of the suggestion that we should believe in -Soviet- nuclear deterrence whilst rejecting its -Western- opposite number, our answer has to be negative. However, it cannot be stated too clearly that if there are elements in Soviet offers which do not have this sort of inbuilt nuclearism to them, then there is no reason whatsoever why they could not be treated on their merit by CND supporters as easily as by anyone else. But secondly, is the Soviet record of apparent reasonableness as convincing as the objection implies? It is usual for the same people also to argue that the USSR's peaceful intentions are demonstrated by its history of having taken most, but not all, of the main technological steps in the nuclear arms race some years later than the United States. The difficult question for any honest person to decide is whether the reasonableness and peacefulness PAGE 10 were voluntary, as part of a conscious abstention from arms-racing, or whether they were an involuntary, second-best option, a sort of temporary diplomatic compensation for economic and technical weaknesses in the USSR's military position. In other words, Soviet governments may have had a strong motive, by their own nuclear deterrence lights, for trying to use treaties and public opinion campaigns to limit so-called US advantages, whenever they were not immediately able to build as many or similar nuclear devices themselves. It is an ancient historical pattern for the professedly weaker of two rival powers to be more sincerely interested in negotiations to settle or contain their conflicts, but for the stronger to be less so. This does not mean that the former is any less power-directed, any more humanitarian, than the latter. It means only that it pursues its power-political goals, for the time being, by slightly different means, appropriate to its supposedly disadvantageous situation. Furthermore, one important function of disarmament proposals has always been to wage a struggle for public opinion, above all in Europe. Both sides do all they can to produce bargaining positions that best appeal to their natural political constituencies within our societies. Small wonder that Soviet proposals sound sensible to some peace campaigners, whose perceptions and priorities will have been expressly and carefully considered when they were being drawn up. -(e) "But Soviet disarmament proposals are often very- -sensible indeed."- There is an important misunderstanding, at least, between the mainstream "unilateralist" spirit of CND and those who would like us to concentrate on more or less adequate, sometimes even excellent, verbal propositions for disarmament, from whatever quarter. We live in a society in which most of the politics consists of words or gestures, and most of these are empty. The instinct of non-aligned disarmament campaigners is to refuse to be taken in any more by the crafted diplomacy of Geneva, even when it is allowed to proceed, and even when, very very rarely, it seems about to get somewhere. After forty years of waiting, we do not accept that we are being either impatient or unfair. At any PAGE 11 rate, it is this feeling which prompts both our own increasing use of "direct action" to put our message across, and our demand for immediate, non-negotiated disarmament -actions- from both sides. All the same, we should remember that even symbolic, verbal offers and proposals are in some sense real actions by real people, people who perhaps have enormous cultural and institutional problems with even imagining the possibility of anything else. As such, however little we may hope for from their actual contents, we do need to treat them and their authors with sensitivity and respect. The unilateralist spirit already referred to might otherwise blind us to the possibility - and I set it down for no more than that - that paper proposals -may- play a different, more substantive role in the political life of the Soviet Union than they do in our own. At the risk of some repetition, however, it should also be said that this objection cannot be accepted if it means to rule out our intention to assess Soviet disarmament offers independently and objectively. Both Soviet and US diplomacy are agreed in seeing the choice for Europe as confined to their wretched Cold War terms, and as lying between subservience to the political and military forces either of the East or of the West. Both are therefore miserably bound to perceive a radically disarmed Western Europe as a net global power gain to the Soviet side, at the expense of the USA. There is only one sane and safe way to deal with this problem for our movements, and that is to ensure that a disarmed Europe will be de-aligned and independent, neither favouring nor harming the interests of either superpower. But such a situation can only be brought about through a disarmament process in which all the peoples of Europe take part, rather than one which remains in the hands of the rulers of the USA and the USSR. Though we have perhaps made a useful beginning with this task, it would be foolish to pretend we have got very far with it in the last five years. -(f) "The USA is far more to blame for the arms race than is- -the USSR."- The most passionate objection to CND's non-aligned position is often voiced by saying that it amounts to PAGE 12 finding the Soviet Union to be equally to blame with the United States for our present fearful nuclear perils. Before replying to this point in detail, it is worth noting that we will be dealing with a rather peculiar sort of thing, called "the blame", the portioning out of which in history is felt by many people to be important. What is really going on is that contemporary debates and struggles over political choices to be made in the peace movement are being worked out under the -form- of historical arguments. To avoid confusion, one has only to ask at every stage exactly what this or that view about the historical "blame" implies for the activities of the peace movement today. Not surprisingly, there are various different sorts of non-aligned position within CND, and some of them, which I do not wholly share, do involve an "equal blame" view of the history of the nuclear arms race. One such interpretation can be labelled the "Cities of the Bomb" position. This takes up the valuable insight, that all societies which accept the use of mass destruction weapons as a way of conducting international relations have probably got something important, and wrong, in common. But to my mind, in making the possession of nuclear stockpiles and the preaching of doctrines of so-called nuclear deterrence into the -sole- criterion for their social critique, the holders of this view place more weight on a single insight than it can usefully bear. Naturally they find no real differences between the two nuclear superpowers today. Nor are they interested in discussing how the present situation came into being, since whichever side may or may not have led or provoked the arms race, both sides are fully committed to it now, despite the fact that effective parity was reached some years ago. Another libertarian current within CND, which seems very often to place more emphasis on social structures which endure through what are felt to be largely cosmetic changes, and less on "official" political or military history as such, is feminism. And many feminists see nuclear bombs as the terminal products of, and grim symbols for, societies in East and West which are essentially equivalent in their distortion of the possibilities of sane human being by the forces of male domination. This too can sometimes be presented as a sort of "equal blame" position. PAGE 13 In practice, however, neither these nor any other "equal blame" viewpoints held by CND supporters have led to any disagreement about the priorities for our campaigning in Western Europe. Regardless of what we may hope for elsewhere, or of what others may or may not achieve, we all remain committed to the removal of nuclear bombs from our own part of the world as the primary task for CND and its sister movements in nearby countries. However, most people taking the mainstream, non-aligned position in CND would probably -not- in fact say that the Soviet Union was equally to blame for the nuclear arms race with the United States. And nor would I. There will of course be minor differences about how much of the mysterious stuff to lay at the door of the White House, and how much to hang on the walls of the Kremlin. But most of us, I believe, would accept the proposition that the USA has, on the whole, been -more- to blame than has the USSR. And we base that judgement on such crucial American decisions as their refusal to negotiate restrictions on the new technology for multiple missile warheads, in which they "enjoyed" a brief monopoly at the end of the 1960s, and their failure to ratify the SALT 2 agreement, ten years later. Trouble really only starts inside the movement whenever the same body of mainstream CND opinion suggests that we should do rather more about making it abundantly and finally clear to everyone else in Britain, through public statements and other actions, that we are -not- thereby agreeing that the USA is the -only- party at fault. There is, in fact, a real problem in explaining all this to a vociferous minority within CND's ever-open ranks, who seem to want us to adopt a thoroughly aligned, pro-Soviet position, sometimes curiously self-styled "left wing" or "socialist". They perceive, or pretend to perceive, any criticism of Soviet nuclear forces and the foreign policy which employs them, which we would suppose to be no more than an obvious corollary to CND's stated aims, as an "anti-Soviet" attempt to equate the progressive and peace-loving Soviet Union with the reactionary and war-mongering United States. Whilst their conclusions are not justified, they do perhaps have -some- cause, which needs to be carefully explained. First, as we have already seen, there are a significant PAGE 14 minority of CND supporters who do express their non-aligned position on Soviet nuclear forces as a flat "equal blame" judgement. But secondly, there is another, more popular opinion within CND which might explain, though it does not excuse, the apprehensions of the "aligned" minority we are discussing. This is the judgement that, though the -historical- blame should not be apportioned equally to both nuclear superpowers, there is some justice in seeing their -present- roles as ones of similar and parallel responsibility, to put it no stronger, for the continuation of humanity's nuclear nightmare. This view is not based on some assessment of where initiatives for the continuing -arms race- come from. It is far more concerned with the appalling absence of -practical- -disarmament measures- on both sides. By which we mean, not proposals, not draft treaties or UN resolutions, but -acts- of significant, i.e. large-scale, nuclear de-arming. Such acts are now equally available to both the USSR and the USA, regardless of what the other may be up to, without any sacrifice of security. They include the scrapping of numbers of their most prized and modern missiles; or a total freeze on all further deployments; or a freeze on all research and development; or a moratorium on all tests of warheads and delivery systems - any of which measures could be carried out in the presence of UN and neutral observers, as well as the world press. With such options now equally open and equally sensible for either superpower, then in that sense and that sense alone there is probably a majority in CND which thinks that both are equally foolish, equally dangerous, and equally to blame for not taking any of them. (Which fits well, of course, with our determination to see that a British government will shortly begin to do so.) PAGE 15 -(g) "Military sense or military nonsense, Soviet nuclear- -bombs are progressive."- Perhaps the strongest argument against anti-nuclear non-alignment is that which refers to the allegedly desirable results of Soviet influence in regions of the world where US-led Western oppression and exploitation would have been even more universal and more devastating unless there had been the progressive counterpoise of Soviet or Soviet-backed forces, backed up ultimately by "nuclear parity" between the two superpowers. This argument, it is important to note, does not depend on any claim that nuclear devices are effective weapons, or that direct, mutual nuclear deterrence works, or that the technical development of nuclear systems is of any -military- value. All that matters for the argument is that these ideas are believed in Washington, or that, as the poet Cavafy once put it, "the barbarians care for such things". It is then claimed that the rulers of the Soviet Union had to have them too, in order to send messages to the rulers of the USA in the only language they seemed, often, to be capable of understanding. To assess this argument, we have to decide both whether nuclear arms racing was the only possible effective Soviet response to its US counterpart, and whether that response was applied to "progressive", which is to say, humanly desirable causes. To the first point, my reply is that matching US nuclear deployments and doctrines was -never- the only possible response for the Soviet Union. We are perhaps too conditioned by the actual course of events since World War 2 into assuming that just because nuclear deployments have in fact become the accepted currency for power-political exchanges between East and West, this was an inevitable development. But no currency can circulate unless all users give it co-operative support by regularly using it. The Soviet Union has always had a choice: either to uphold this poisonous medium of global interaction, by aping its US initiators; or to devalue it, either by refusing to join in from the start, or by withdrawing from the nuclear rat-race at some later stage, or at least by freezing their nuclear arsenal at a level sufficient merely for the assured retaliatory destruction of the USA. Setting aside the ( 19 ) philosophical tangles of the marxist version of morality, the second group of options has always been, and still remains, the course of selfish national prudence for the USSR. To give a concrete example, massive and internationally witnessed unilateral withdrawal and dismantling of Soviet theatre nuclear weapons, from their bases within range of Western Europe, would do a great deal more to undermine and disrupt NATO's deployments than any "counter-deployments" of Soviet SS-21s, -22s and -23s will ever achieve. But if such a shrewd Soviet devaluation of the nuclear arms race is still to seek, that is probably because Soviet leaders have always been convinced devotees of the nuclear superstition, rather than unbelievers, reluctantly forcing themselves to conform to it merely so as to keep up with the otherwise insufferable nuclear Joneses on the opposite side of the planet. As for the allegedly valuable and progressive uses to which the Soviet Union has been putting its nuclear superpower status, it is bound to be almost impossible to formulate acceptable criteria by which to evaluate them. No adequate assessment can be attempted here. It seems not unreasonable, though, to suggest that Soviet rulers have often pursued a national interest, based in the pursuit of global power for its own sake, which is not obviously one and the same thing as the welfare and freedom of all human beings. Unless of course one defines the two as identical from the outset, from sheer doctrinal prejudice. (This used to be done by pro-Soviet communists in the 1930s, often with pitiful and disastrous results for themselves and for the causes they espoused, many of which were decent and humanitarian enough.) One thinks today, for example, of Soviet struggles in competition with US power in such regions as north-east Africa. What progressive effects have resulted from their manoeuvres, first in Somalia and later in Ethiopia? What did their brief periods of influence in Egypt, and in Sudan, achieve for the undoubtedly oppressed peoples of those countries? It may be said that Soviet-backed policies were never given long enough to take effect in these cases, that reactionary, US-backed forces regained the upper hand all too soon. But that scarcely supports the objection to CND's ( 20 ) non-alignment we are now considering. For by this argument Soviet nuclear forces were supposed to render all such setbacks completely impossible. It is claimed that national liberation struggles would have been impossible without Soviet support, which in turn could never have been given but for the "security" against US threats which the USSR had gained through its nuclear forces. Even if we overlook the tendentious assumption that there have been no progressive liberation movements in Eastern Europe since World War 2, this part of the argument does not stand up to the historical evidence. Many of the most significant liberation struggles - India, China, Algeria, Kenya, Cuba - were successfully concluded before the Soviet Union had acquired large-scale nuclear forces capable of threatening US home territory. As for later examples, such as the Vietnam war, we might ask what Soviet "extended deterrence" ever managed to do by way of protecting the people of Cambodia from a devastation, initially by US forces, which was only one circle in Hell less terrible than would have been one of Nixon's "limited nuclear options"? It may be objected that, after all, the USA did not use nuclear weapons in Vietnam and Cambodia, and that even if Soviet nuclear weapons were unable to deter it from other forms of genocide, they were at least effective in this one respect. There is, however, a major flaw in this line of reasoning. US strategic planning and government decisions worked wholly within the framework of "nuclear deterrence" during the Vietnam War. That meant that US leaders were unable to be deterred, by Soviet nuclear weapons, from limited nuclear strikes far from Soviet territory. Indeed, US nuclear strategy of the time was all about being prepared to make such strikes. How was this possible? It was possible because US rulers were convinced that their own nuclear forces would completely deter any possible Soviet nuclear threat to the USA. In short, the USSR might have needed to -pretend- to be able to threaten the USA over Vietnam or Cambodia. But so far as US decision makers were concerned they had a completely effective -counter- to any such threats. Indeed, as believers in the efficacy of "nuclear deterrence", Soviet leaders should also have perceived that their own nuclear forces were cancelled out of the power ( 21 ) struggles in South-East Asia, by those of the United States. In short, "nuclear deterrence" either works both ways, or not at all. Those who peddle it in a pro-Soviet version should no more be allowed to get away with buying just half the loaf, than should their pro-NATO counterparts. But if Soviet nuclear weapons were not the reason for America's nuclear restraint whilst losing one of the costliest wars she had ever fought, what was? The answer is part military, part political. On the military side, US forces were less confident in fact than they were supposed to be in Pentagon theory, about how actually to use nuclear weapons to achieve the sort of military objectives they were trying to secure in Vietnam. More crucially, a second American use of nuclear weapons in Asia, thirty years after the first, would have been a major setback for US political goals elsewhere in the continent, and around the world. And in respect of US efforts at the time to secure international support for nuclear non-proliferation, such a trampling of the world's most sacred taboo would have been an immense diplomatic disaster. It is of course always possible for critics of CND's non-alignment to make their argument come out right by appealing to the abundant but unverifiable evidence of what might have been. They can and do claim that terrible as the sufferings of many peoples in many countries have indeed been, they would have been far greater were it not for the partial protection afforded to them by the allegedly progressive Soviet nuclear shield. Such claims are easier to make, however, than to support, and they hardly deserve much serious consideration. But it should at least be recalled that the inhabitants of areas over which Soviet influence has succeeded in resisting US encroachments for several years, such as Angola or Ethiopia, do not appear strikingly better off, either materially or politically, than their fellow human beings under capitalist domination in adjacent territories, such as Zaire and Sudan. Indeed, the Sudanese have recently shown the world they have not forgotten how to conduct their own non-violent liberation struggle, in ways and for goals which made any kind of US intervention perfectly impossible, whether or not the Soviet Union had even existed. -3: WHO DISAGREES WITH CND'S NON-ALIGNMENT?- I have tried to explain why CND's non-aligned position is so vital to its primary goal of nuclear disarmament in Britain and elsewhere. What it comes down to is a view that only movements which -are- nuclear-free, meaning politically independent of all nuclear states, have any hope of creating a nuclear-free world. And I have replied to several objections to this position, which in Western Europe are mainly concerned to argue that we should make some sort of distinction between Soviet and US nuclear bombs, in favour of the former. Now I come to a brief discussion of those who put such objections forward, in and around CND. They fall into two broad categories. The first group contains those who are not basically opposed to the non-aligned anti-nuclear position, but who either misunderstand it in some ways, or feel uncomfortable with some of its practical consequences. The second consists of people whose political rejection of non-alignment in the campaign against nuclear bombs and everywhere else is more or less fundamental and "non-negotiable". The contributions of the former to CND's evolving political awareness have been considerable; those of the latter have not. I shall refer to the former as -critics- of non-alignment, but to the latter as its -opponents-. -(a) The Critics- There are some committed CND supporters who accept that the Soviet Union is not blameless in respect of the nuclear arms race, that its disarmament proposals are seldom purely disinterested, and that such an assessment is not a hindrance but an asset to anti-nuclear politics in Britain, but who nevertheless find it hard to enthuse about including it in our practical campaigning. Partly, this seems to be the usual difficulty people with diverse politics can have about working together in a single broad movement. As we have seen, there are various "flavours" of non-alignment around in CND. They include people holding a stern "equal blame" view of the Soviet Union; people with a "some blame, but far less than the USA" position; and people with an intermediate, "considerable blame, but not as much as the USA", opinion. Such different strands can work perfectly PAGE 19 well together -until- we need to agree on the exact wording of a leaflet, or format of a demonstration, in which the question of "the Soviet missiles" is to be taken up. Then, those at the more conciliatory end of this spectrum will be more likely than those at the uncompromising end to be content for the matter to be dropped, or for it to be dealt with in only a superficial way. The problem is that real people's opinions and still more importantly their feelings do not come in cut-and-dried distinct and consistent varieties, as I have just been pretending. Many who have a certain regard for some of the aims or achievements of the Soviet Union will in one mood or in one context be prepared to assert that criticism of and opposition to the Soviet Union's nuclear deployments is a vital part of CND's public education work. But they will quickly draw back from that position, if they hear it expressed in too "anti-Soviet" a manner by others who do not share their overall viewpoint. This is particularly true at present of the majority or "Eurocommunist" wing of the British Communist Party, some of whose best known anti-nuclear campaigners have been waging a long and largely successful struggle to establish their version of a non-aligned position on nuclear disarmament within their organisation, and have often been quite ready to "go public" while doing so. In their view, "equal blame" positions are dangerously liable to appear sympathetic towards the sort of Cold War attitudes appealed to by Western governments to bolster -their- side of the nuclear arms race. I think they are mistaken about this. One has only to remember that most nuclear disarmers of the various "equal blame" persuasions do not think nuclear bombs are any military use, to realise that the conclusion is not even possible, let alone factually grounded. That is, even if the "equal blame" people -were- inclined to some sort of sympathy for the Western side in the Cold War - which hardly sounds like "equal blame" anyway - they would not think nuclear bombs an asset for the cause they allegedly supported. Some of the Eurocommunists, however, do seem much less sure than the rest of us about the utter uselessness of nuclear devices for any military or "deterrent" purposes. Their suspicion of the "equal blame" position is probably a result of assuming that their own, reluctantly positive military PAGE 20 assessment of nuclear bombs is shared by the people they are criticising, when in fact it is not. -(b) The Opponents- The principal irreconcilable opponents of any sort of non-alignment in CND can be crudely divided into two sorts. There are members of the minority "old guard" or "old believers" either still inside the British Communist Party, or in groups which have broken away from it in recent years over the question of "loyalty" to the Soviet state. And there are certain leftist groupings, often based more or less precariously inside the Labour Party. The political identities of the latter are nominally supposed to be defined in terms of their various -repudiations- of the Soviet state version of communism. However, when it comes to Soviet nuclear weapons, they tend to find common cause with their "Stalinist" rivals in advocating some version of a "Workers' Bomb" position, for reasons most readers would probably not find it all that rewarding to get into. By comparison with the tens of thousands of people taking an active part in CND, the numbers involved in both these rough categories are disarmingly small. Some operate merely as external spoilers, latching onto public CND activities rather than helping to plan or carry out our campaigning work. A very few establish or take over CND branches, whose growth their selfish sectarian presence then effectively prevents. But whichever way they choose to intervene, they are very well able to make an impact. Older people in the first group may have been in the Communist Party when CND was formed 27 years ago, on a unilateralist platform which the CP condemned at the time as "divisive". Only three years later were Party members officially allowed to support CND, though many of the rank and file had already begun doing so enthusiastically. (For as long thereafter as the Party still felt bound by ties of apologetic sympathy to the Soviet perspective on world politics, it had a difficulty with wholehearted endorsements for unilateralism, which has usually been frowned on by Soviet rulers because of its subversive implications for junior members of nuclear "alliances" everywhere. Last year's modestly productive meeting between the late Soviet Chairman Chernenko and Labour leader Neil Kinnock, however, PAGE 21 suggests that this policy may at last be starting to change.) Such hard-line, conservative communists are most likely to employ the arguments labelled (a) to (c) in the previous section, though they are partial to (d), (e) and (f) as well. Their conception of "unity" for Western peace movements is that everyone opposed to NATO's nuclear deployments should join together to stop them, whether or not they also condemn the other, Soviet side of the nuclear arms race. If we question this basis for "unity", we are accused of being "divisive" and "diversionary". In reality, we are lifting the lid on a would-be unprincipled and politically fatal compromise, which has never in fact been the basis on which the British anti-nuclear movement was formed, but over which these opponents of non-alignment would greatly prefer not to be challenged. Unfortunately, their wishes have little to do with improving the chances for British nuclear disarmament, far more to do with their own need for access to larger numbers of politically concerned, open-minded, but sometimes inexperienced people than they could ever hope to address elsewhere. They do have a national organisation to promote the pro-Soviet line on disarmament, the British Peace Assembly. Readers who have never heard of it will be as well placed to judge the extent of its influence as those who have. The motive of access to potential converts is shared to some extent by the other, slightly more sophisticated sort of opponents of CND's non-alignment. But for the most part they have useful contacts with other mass audiences, in and around the labour movement, and less of a stake in their "work" in the peace movement for that reason. The main organisation of this type which seeks to affect CND policy by taking an active part in our work is the Socialist League, formerly the International Marxist Group. Based inside the Labour Party and other labour movement bodies, this group is primarily concerned to influence CND's work in those parts of British society. Of the arguments discussed in the previous section, it is especially partial to versions of (g). Several other leftist groupings opposed to CND's non-alignment, such as the Militant organisation or the "Spartacist" groupings, have never wanted anything at all to PAGE 22 do with us. But in 1984 there were signs that those which could be bothered with our "petty bourgeois" organisation were ready to take advantage of our temporary loss of pace and morale, following the 1983 Tory election victory and the arrival of cruise missiles at Greenham, to attempt a major intervention. The resulting political confrontation at CND's annual conference had few positive results apart from exposing some of the fundamental disagreements sketched above. Rather than conduct a detailed post-mortem, I would just say that the non-aligned case, for the presentation of which I was partly responsible, was badly handled. This led to a temporary split within CND's non-aligned majority, of the sort this essay should have shown to be quite possible, unless proper care is taken. Luckily this had no serious effect on CND's existing position, since all that happened was that a particular re-wording of it was never put to the vote. CND conferences, however, are far less important for the safeguarding of our non-aligned position than is the everyday campaigning life of our local groups. For most of our supporters, meetings, elections, affiliations and the appointment of delegates are not the work they have joined to carry out. Political "entry" into an average CND group, which is not the same thing as taking it over outright, is therefore fairly easy. People anxious to play down or weaken the non-aligned aspect of our anti-nuclear position can often volunteer themselves into bureaucratic positions from which to do so, provided they are discreet about their own political views as they go about it. They can make good use of the lack of open and thorough grass-roots discussion of this and other basic policy questions, which is quite a common feature of CND groups which put their public campaigning first and foremost. And they are skilled at using sudden massed attendance at a general meeting, a highly unattractive activity to many of our supporters, where major issues can be settled by a "democratic" show of hands. These unpleasant things, and this pamphlet as a whole, have been written to help all those who share the mainstream, non-aligned CND position to see why it is so important to defend it against such manoeuvres, and what it will sometimes be necessary to endure in order to do so. PAGE 23 -4: CONCLUSIONS- To paraphrase Martin Luther King, there is no way to nuclear disarmament; nuclear disarmament, the freeing of our heads and our lives and our campaigning from domination by any nuclear-armed state, is the way. Under the darkening shadow of nuclear death, the valley path of non-alignment is seldom plain to see or easy to follow. But it is the only path there is. In other words, preserving our political independence as opponents of the nuclear arms race now, and laying the foundations for a nuclear-free, thoroughly democratic, and globally responsible Europe in the future, are one and the same thing. We need to keep our political wits about us, and to do in an open and patient and gentle spirit whatever we can to uphold the core principles of the modern nuclear disarmament movement. Let our pro-Soviet rivals in the British Peace Assembly, and in comparable bodies elsewhere, compete with us honestly and publicly, and let everyone in any part of the movement freely decide which approach they would rather support. Two final points. First, I repeat that nothing about the non-aligned CND position implies that our campaign should stop taking the removal of British and US nuclear missiles as our absolute priority. Indeed, it still feels utterly absurd even to have to say that; but the charge of "diversion" has to be decisively squashed. And second, I return to what was said above about the tendency for non-aligned CND supporters to be too sweepingly negative towards all disarmament proposals and negotiations between the superpowers. In 1985 we need to do better than that. We need to pay closer attention to the arms control talks, and to give loud and public credit to any even halfway sensible ideas that may come forward there, from whichever side. That sort of comment should be closely joined, of course, to our repeated urgings that the most constructive contribution either side could make to the negotiating process would be some independent act of significant nuclear disarmament. For this would not only give the talks a more hopeful climate in themselves. It would also do the greatest possible service to "the party of humanity", by starting to ( 29 ) devalue the stupid and deadly currency of nuclear threats and nuclear status symbols, through which the superpowers have been conducting their antagonistic relationship for far too long. ____________________________ ( 30 ) -APPENDIX- -JOINT DECLARATION OF THE EUROPEAN PEACE MOVEMENTS- -Launched at a 250,000 CND rally, London, June 6th 1982- Considering that we, of this present generation, hold in trust the survival of civilisation, the prospects of future generations, and the fate of the earth itself. We accept our trusteeship. We dedicate our lives to the cause of peace. We reject altogether the use or preparation of nuclear weapons or of any weapons of mass extermination. We reject also the arguments of "deterrence" or of "balance" which justify these weapons and which delay disarmament. We have lost count of the weapons poised above our heads and we have lost interest in counting. We refuse them. We call upon our friends throughout the world, in East or West, to refuse them also. We call upon governments to refuse them by actions. Let any nation initiate this action, by a full or partial refusal of any nuclear weapons system, or by refusing the deployment of any system upon its territory, and then let us muster world-wide support: let refusals proliferate! We refuse also every measure which seeks to marshal humankind into two opposed blocs. We refuse the Cold War and we disown allegiance to its ideologies and to its opposed security systems. We affirm our citizenships of a healed human world. Let us place loyalty to each other above loyalty to the armourers! Do not allow anyone to divide us! We are already, in our movements, creating a new kind of politics, an international fellowship of resistance and of friendship, which refuses to acknowledge any "side" except that of our common future: a future which will never come unless we in this living generation honour our trust. ( 31 ) -About the author- Rip Bulkeley is a peace researcher at Kings College London, and lives with his wife and two children in Oxford. He is a member of Campaign ATOM (Oxford CND), Treasurer of CND's Southern Region, and a member of its National Council and National Executive. ( 32 ) !< -THE- -VALLEY- -PATH- !ECND AND THE COLD WAR RIP BULKELEY !< -THE VALLEY PATH- !E CND and the Cold War RIP BULKELEY -The path through the Valley of the Shadow of Death- "I saw then in my dream that so far as this valley stretched, there was on the right hand a very deep ditch. That ditch is it into which the blind have led the blind in all ages, and have both there miserably perished. Again, behold on the left hand there was a very dangerous quag, into which if even a good person falls she finds no bottom for her foot to stand on... The pathway was here also exceedingly narrow, and therefore good Christian was the more put to it. For when he sought in the dark to shun the ditch on the one hand, he was ready to tip over into the mire, on the other. Also, when he sought to escape the mire, unless he took very great care he would be ready to fall into the ditch." John Bunyan -The Pilgrim's Progress- (slightly adapted) Fox and Lantern Press Oxford 1985 -ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS- I am grateful to the many people who have encouraged and helped in the writing of this pamphlet, often with substantial criticisms and suggestions. However much good advice is on offer, though, one is still left with all the tricky decisions about how to take it. But I hope that several of these friends will be able to recognise "their bits", whether in their own words or not: David Barnsdale, Jon Bloomfield, Jane Bulkeley, John Cox, Margaret Godden, Julian Harber, James Hinton, Lynne Jones, John Marjoram, Laurens Otter, Michael Richards, Martin Ryle, Dan Smith, Tony Smythe, Edward Thompson, Annie Tunnicliffe, Polly Woolley. R.B. The Valley Path Rip Bulkeley 1985 All rights reserved ISBN 0 9509561 1 2 Fox and Lantern Press 31 Cavendish Rd Oxford OX2 7TN Typeset by Parchment (Oxford) Ltd, 93 Islip St, Oxford, OX2 7SP Printed in England by Dot Press, 389 Cowley Rd, Oxford, OX4 2BS -Also from Fox and Lantern Press:- Jeremy Naydler: ETHICS AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS This essay provides a lucid and succinct appraisal of the moral arguments used in the nuclear weapons debate, and clearly states the reasons why neither the use nor the possession of nuclear weapons are justifiable on moral grounds. ISBN 0 9509561 0 4 #1.00 4Those who value CND's even-handedness will welcome this uncompromising examination of the few but vocal Soviet apologists around the Campaign, and of the damage their arguments can do. Margaret Godden This timely and concise statement of the non-aligned position is straightforward and unequivocal, without indulging in unnecessary polemic. Martin Ryle -The Valley Path- deals with important, complex issues in a remarkably lucid way. It should be read by all disarmament activists. Dan Smith Rip Bulkeley has taken a firm grasp of nettles which used to infest the peace movement in the 1950s and which still reappear in patches, in its growing seasons. Tony Smythe -The Valley Path- clarifies and emphasises nuclear disarmers' essential role as political tight-rope walkers - maintaining a delicate balance, aware of the dangers of their campaign being exploited by one side or deliberately weakened by the other. This is a well-timed and valuable contribution. Annie Tunnicliffe This account of the vital need for CND to maintain its unilateral, non-aligned stance is especially useful as ordinary people are becoming more and more involved in direct opposition to the weapons based within our shores. Polly Woolley5 ISBN 0 9509561 1 2 #1.25