Bin The Bomb

Peter Hitchens writes:

Long ago, before I grew up, I was a great enthusiast for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. I had lots of badges. I was once in trouble for trying to get into a secret government nuclear fallout shelter (Regional Seat of Government) in Cambridge.  I went on CND marches – I remember in particular one in Easter 1966, one of the last of the old Aldermaston marches, though by then they started in the Berkshire village where our deterrent is made, and finished in Trafalgar Square, rather than the original plan  when they did it the other way round. I think there was a big puppet show, featuring figures drawn by Gerald Scarfe, and shouted, inaudible speeches in the March wind and we all sang a song, to the tune of ‘Jerusalem’ , the only line of which I recall is ‘…. And that the bland shall lead the bland’.

It was all a bit like a church outing, including sleeping on the floors of church halls, proclaiming our faith  and a sharing a feeling of uplift. I think it was later the same year that I went on a  much smaller march to the Polaris warhead factory in Burghfield, near Reading. I have never got so wet in my life, but we glowed with righteousness as we trailed past the fenced-off hummocks, amid the piney heathland, where the engines of mass death were made. Soon after that came Vietnam which took our minds off the Bomb, and then the thrills of Bolshevism in the International Socialists.

I can’t recall exactly when I realised that it was all drivel. Some time in my post-university years, I think when, beneath the leaden skies of chilly Swindon, I confronted reality for the first time in many years. It came to me that deterrence actually worked, was working, protected me personally and that I really ought to support it. I suspect my Bolshevik training helped me along. There were many disputes among the comrades about the Soviet bomb, with the orthodox Communists torn on the issue, as they had tagged along with CND in the hope of picking up members (and because British nuclear disarmament suited Soviet foreign policy). But it was of course ludicrous, as the Soviet fatherland had its own engines of mass death, pointed at us, and – as I would personally discover years later in the secret H-Bomb town of Kurchatovsk –did a handy line in pro-Bomb propaganda for home consumption.

For us Trotskyists, who evaded any kind of Soviet loyalty it was easier (well, mostly, there was a deep difficulty about this for some of us, who insisted that the Soviet state, though corrupt, was a ‘degenerated’ or ‘deformed’ worker’s state, and so ultimately to be defended against capitalism).  I remember a mocking chant, to the tune of ‘The Red Flag’ which ran (I think) ‘The Workers’ Bomb is deepest green, it’s not as black as it might seem, degenerated though it be, it’s still the People’s Property, so raise the Workers’ Bomb on high, beneath its shade we’ll live and die, and though our comrades all shout ‘b***s’ , we’ll stand beneath it when it falls’. As indeed we would have done. It all faded away until, back in the early 1980s, the cruise and Pershing Missile controversy erupted. It was important.  The USSR had begun to position ‘Pioneer’ or (as we called them) SS-20 medium range nuclear missiles in European Russia, capable of reaching Western European targets. So what?

Well, so quite a lot. NATO, in those days a real alliance designed to deter a Soviet advance into Western Europe, was conventionally feeble. Its troops were poorly co-ordinated (the only standard equipment across all armies was the official NATO sickbag), hugely outnumbered by the mighty GSFG (the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, so vast that East Germany all but sank under their weight. You could hardly move in the GDR without meeting them). Our forces were also  in the wrong places, for insoluble political reasons. US troops, for instance, the biggest and best-equipped, were in the US zone of West Germany. But the main Soviet thrust, had it come, would have gone across the North German plain where the smaller, less powerful British and German armies were mainly to be found.

In any case. We relied on the following calculation. If the GSFG ever did advance, we would be bound to counter with tactical nuclear weapons. The USSR would then either have to give up, or respond by going Ballistic, and launching a strategic attack against the USA, so inviting Mutual Assured Destruction (the famous, and misnamed MAD, which stopped even the silliest of politicians from contemplating war in those days, because it would obviously be insane to start a war. Look at them now. They can’t stop starting wars). Well, if Chicago were incinerated, the USA would be bound to retaliate, and the theory worked. But what if the Soviet response to battlefield nukes was instead to fry Frankfurt, Munich, Lyon and Manchester, using the SS-20s? Would the USA risk Chicago, or Kansas City, for Europe then? Doubtful.

The SS-20s broke the chain of MAD.  Destruction wasn’t mutually-assured any more.  In which case it wasn’t as mad to start a war in Europe as it had been. And who was going to do that?  Well, guess. A Soviet conventional advance across Europe had become thinkable for the first time in decades. In that case, the countries of Western Europe, fearing this possibility and (having no realistic defence against it which didn’t involve a European nuclear war) would be under pressure to accommodate themselves to the Soviet will in a way that had been unknown since the founding of NATO. Hence the decision to deploy American-controlled, but European-based weapons which could retaliate against Soviet cities if Western European cities were attacked by SS-20s. This, by the way, was the context for the now-famous argument I had with my brother in 1984 or thereabouts, during which he said that he didn’t care if the Red Army watered its horses at Hendon. It was, in my view, the defeat of the SS-20 ploy that led to the end of the USSR.

At that time, I had a pro-NATO sticker on my car , mainly to annoy my Oxford neighbours, who all had CND stickers on theirs, opposing what they called ‘cruise’. This was the time of Greenham Common and the Greenham Common Women, and also for a revival of CND, which had almost vanished in the 1970s. This time it even had membership cards, which it never had the first time round. There were special showings of Peter Watkins’s gritty propaganda film ‘The War Game’, stupidly refused a showing by the BBC when it was first made in the 1960s. This shows, in the style of a documentary, the effects of a nuclear attack on parts of Southern England. And the panic infecting the country in the days before. It’s rather a charming period-piece now, with its pre-metric measurements, helmeted bobbies, phone boxes, vicars and BBC accents.

But like all such films (think also of the slicker American film ‘The Day After’) its scenario for the outbreak of war is unbelievably feeble and incredible.  The truth was that, after the Cuba standoff had ended in compromise, it was hard to see what could actually bring about a superpower nuclear exchange. ‘Dr Strangelove’, with its (credible but false) suggestion that most of those involved were unhinged, probably persuaded more people. All I needed to do, when ‘The War Game’ was shown near me, was to get up during the post-film discussion and point out the obvious but neglected fact that the nuclear explosions we had all just watched were the explosions of Soviet weapons, aimed at us.  From then on, the CNDers didn’t really recover. I recall (after one such showing in Hampstead), infuriating my defeated opponents by cheerily helping them stack the chairs after the confused audience had gone.

Well, all that’s over now. The GSFG, the Soviet Army, the Warsaw Pact armies, are just so much scrap and reminiscence. The USSR is gone, the last SS-20 is in the Air and Space Museum in Washington, Greenham Common has gone back to the land,  and Russia has about as much interest in invading Western Europe as I have in developing an enthusiasm for Glam Rock. So why do we continue to main this vast apparatus for destroying Moscow, called Trident? I have no idea.  The ideologies, the rivalries, the ideas that caused it to be built are now so much yellowing paper in an archive. The conflict it was designed to prevent never took place and never will. Our significance in the world has shrunk in spite of our missiles . Ernest Bevin wanted a British bomb so that the USA wouldn’t order us about. Perhaps he was right in those days, but it seems to me that we would be better able to resist American pressure if we’d spent the money on building an economy instead.

So why not get rid of it? Because Labour is still afraid that if it bans the bomb, people will realise just how radical it is. And because the Tories have long relied on a noisy fake patriotism to cover up the fact that they have sold the country to the European Union, the greatest British diplomatic defeat of modern times. Did Trident preserve us from that? Will it help us get out? Will it keep us warm when we can’t afford the imported gas anymore?