6/9/2017 No more nukes?

Why anti-nuclear protests need an urgent revival | World news | The Guardian

an urgent revival

Before the end of the cold war, nuclear apocalypse was a frightening possibility that overshadowed
everyones lives. With tensions rising between the US and North Korea, we can learn valuable lessons from
CND and Greenham Common

by

Wednesday 6 September 2017 18.52BST

O
n Monday, I was idly interrogating my children about their anxieties, when my
nine-year-old son raised the prospect of a third world war. Given the current
tensions between the US and North Korea, I suppose this wasnt too surprising. I
explained that, were there a nuclear strike, the UK would be very unlikely to be its
target, and he replied: Its so polluted, we may as well have been nuked already.
There seemed to be the lilt of a joke in this comment somewhere, but I couldnt
swear to it. I squeaked on abit about how levels of lead have actually gone way down, and diesel
cars one of which we were actually sitting in would soon be phased out, but thought: this is
exactly how I remember life in 1982, the sense of an impending threat that everyone talked about
but nobody explained in useful terms. Then it was nuclear war; now its pollution.

When I was growing up, kids understood the broad concept of all-out nuclear war, but not what
escalation would look like, or who had what capability. I used to think every plane that ew
overhead had a nuclear capacity, and it was up to the pilot whether or not he used it. For those of
us who reached majority with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the coming of age is indivisible
from the relief of an existential threat lifted, so that worrying about nuclear annihilation is led as
part of childhood, a monster in the wardrobe. It was real, until suddenly itwasnt.

A lacuna followed, a gap that remains. Where once we had a thriving peace movement a
muscular response to nuclear weapons, articulated by ordinary people with agency and resilience
suddenly, for the most part, the arguments went quiet.

British anti-nuclear campaigns came in two waves, says David Fairhall, author of Common
Ground: The Story of Greenham. The rst big Aldermaston march took place at Easter 1958,
demonstrators walking between London and the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at
Aldermaston, in Berkshire. These were calls for disarmament, against a background of nuclear
confrontation, says Fairhall, that had frightened people into thinking there might be a nuclear
war next week. This was quintessential cold war stu, against the background of the
establishment view that Russian ambitions to take western Europe as they had the east were real,
and the US had to be kept onside at all costs. Aldermaston was eectively a bomb-making
factory, says Fairhall. Thats what people came out in duel coats to protest against. Then that
died down a bit.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/06/no-more-nukes-anti-nuclear-protests-cnd-greenham-common 1/5
6/9/2017 No more nukes? Why anti-nuclear protests need an urgent revival | World news | The Guardian

Protest and survive: women surround the periphery fence of the US

Air Force base at Greenham Common. Photograph: PA

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, CND, was born in this era, and was at the root of the
campaigns in the 80s; in that sense, this is all one peace movement. What pushed the nuclear
issue into the common consciousness, nobody can quite agree. Certainly, there was a lot of very
vivid description coming from the peace movement of what would actually happen to a person in
the event of a nuclear war. This spurred discussion, as well as a lot of creativity, from Raymond
Briggss painful graphic novel about apocalypse, When the Wind Blows, in 1982, to the gruesome
TV drama Threads, in 1984.

The governments own public-information initiative, chilling in the recollection, was called
Protect and Survive and imparted asinine advice from the early 60s until the 80s for instance,
remove your door from its hinges and lean it against a table in order to create a makeshift bomb
shelter. This eventually spawned a playful citizenly response: Protest and Survive. But if the
descriptions of nuclear war sometimes seemed lurid in a slightly gleeful way, they underpinned a
real and trenchant moral case; that weapons capable of the indiscriminate massacre of hundreds
of thousands of people were wrong in and of themselves, regardless of who was holding them and
what their intentions were. This isthe change that really shocks Mary Kaldor, professor of global
governance at the London School of Economics; that you are now not allowed to be a politician
unless you can say you would use a nuclear weapon. Theres even a problem with Jeremy Corbyn
saying he would be extremely cautious about pressing the button. Somehow, you have to be part
of the lie to be part of the establishment.

The second wave of the anti-nuclear movement, says Fairhall, centred around the build-up of
arms. We had the Americans planting these cruise missiles [abroad], the Russians putting SS20s
in eastern Europe, and we were just sucked into it. In September 1981, after a government
decision to allow cruise missiles at the US base in Berkshire, RAF Greenham Common, a protest
camp was set up there. The camp became all-women in 1982, and lasted until 2000; protests
included 30,000 women joining hands to Embrace the Base in December 1982; the following year,
70,000 protesters formed a human chain between Greenham and nearby Aldermaston.

The successes of the Greenham protesters, and the peace movement more widely, range from the
demonstrable to the nebulous, the hypothetical to the proven; the one thing the achievements all
had in common was that theywere all comprehensively denied afterwards. Kaldor, who was
heavily involved with CND and was at the centre of END the European Nuclear Disarmament
campaign has a letter from the historian EP Thompson, saying: This is our moment; if we
succeed, the politicians will take it overfrom us, and it will be as if we had never been. Indeed,
Margaret Thatcher left a small, poisonous trace of her feelings about Greenham; an anonymous
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/06/no-more-nukes-anti-nuclear-protests-cnd-greenham-common 2/5
6/9/2017 No more nukes? Why anti-nuclear protests need an urgent revival | World news | The Guardian

source from the US Air Force noted herreaction, when she was given a listof the bases they
planned to vacate at the end of the cold war. You cant withdraw from Greenham, she
reportedly said. We cant let them think theyve succeeded.

In the 90s, it became de rigueur to concede that Greenham had had an eect on the culture
while maintaining that it had had zero impact on the cold war. I think this had traction because,
from the ground, certainly if you went to Greenham as a peripheral, weekend visitor, this is how it
felt: a lot of scru ags eating muesli, wrapped infoil blankets to protect against the unremarkable
but unpleasant British weather, while completely impassive soldiers with shiny guns eyeballed
you from the perimeter.

I remember going as a child, getting the bus from the station, and another passenger wearing a
badge that said, RAGE Residents Against Greenham Extremists. This did not feel, frankly, like
a movement that made much impact on the agendas of Ronald Reagan or the Soviet leader Yuri
Andropov. It felt like a nasty British in-ght, lefties on the one hand, Daily Mail readers on the
other; like Brexit, with extra armageddon.

Yet this is wrong. The movement had distinct political impact, nationally and internationally.
First, Fairhall says, the Greenham women dragged discussion of nuclear weapons out of the dark
world of SS20s and CTBTs [comprehensive nuclear-test-ban treaties], all those acronyms and
technical details, and forced people to discuss them in plain language. And that meant they had
to be discussed in the House of Commons. There was a very important secondary issue of who
would control these weapons: up until then, the Americans had just been landing wherever they
fancied and putting up bomb sites ready to use in retaliation to a Soviet attack. We had no control,
and that was a scandal.

We shall not be moved: protesters at Greenham Common in

December 1982. Photograph: Alamy

But the impact went beyond British politics: Kaldor recalls an adviser to Reagan, Richard Burt,
saying to her explicitly that they copied their so-called zero option (winding down nuclear
capacity on both sides) straight o the womens banners. They were trying to frame themselves
as peace-seekers; they thought the suggestion would be so extreme that the Russians would have
to refuse it, and therefore look like the warmongers. So much of the USSRs control over its own
dominions relied on the cold war and the fact that Russia oered the protection of its SS20s. Duly,
Andropov did refuse the zero option; but his successor Mikhail Gorbachev had dierent pressures
and priorities economically, the arms racewas unsustainable by then and accepted the zero
option as a sincere rather than tactical demand from the US. The end of the cold war started on
the banner ofa peacenik.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/06/no-more-nukes-anti-nuclear-protests-cnd-greenham-common 3/5
6/9/2017 No more nukes? Why anti-nuclear protests need an urgent revival | World news | The Guardian

A seismic cultural shift started only tangentially with CND; in 1980, Kaldor, Thompson and Ken
Coates launched the call for European Nuclear Disarmament, partly with the aim of separating
tactically from the communists CND was calling for unilateral disarmament by the British and
was seen, with suspicion, as a fellow traveller of the Soviets. Allying with human rights groups
behind the iron curtain, END married the disarmament agenda of western Europe with the
democracy agenda of eastern Europe. We changed the discourse, Kaldor remembers now.
Previously, peace came from above, from governments and treaties. The idea that peace and
human rights were inseparable fundamentally changed things.

What worries Fairhall today is that while we used to worry about the arms race, it is now not a
race so much as a pub brawl between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un an idiot and a lunatic
threatening one another with re and fury, a reckless bravado never seen during the cold war,
or since. Fairhall uses those terms not as insults, but almost as a technical military analysis.
Nuclear capability is relatively stable, so long as its a game of deterrence and diplomacy. They
used to be a military insurance policy, or a status symbol. They have never before been in the
hands of anyone who would actually use them even with John F Kennedy, that was never the
threat. So it does feel that we have drifted across a barrier.

Fairhall says this with an understatement not typical of the peace movement, but it does
underline the message: we need a revival more than ever.

Since youre here

we have a small favour to ask. More people are reading the Guardian than ever but advertising
revenues across the media are falling fast. And unlike many news organisations, we havent put
up a paywall we want to keep our journalism as open as we can. So you can see why we need to
ask for your help. The Guardians independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time,
money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our perspective matters
because it might well be your perspective, too.

I appreciate there not being a paywall: it is more democratic for the media to be available for all
and not a commodity to be purchased by a few. Im happy to make a contribution so others with
less means still have access to information. Thomasine F-R.
If everyone who reads our reporting, who likes it, helps to support it, our future would be much
more secure.

Become a supporter
Make a contribution
Topics
Greenham Common
Protest
Cold war
North Korea
US foreign policy
features

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/06/no-more-nukes-anti-nuclear-protests-cnd-greenham-common 4/5
6/9/2017 No more nukes? Why anti-nuclear protests need an urgent revival | World news | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/06/no-more-nukes-anti-nuclear-protests-cnd-greenham-common 5/5