1 Opposing anti-nuclear activism

In many countries, particularly under non-democratic regimes, mounting anti-nuclear activism was incredibly difficult, if not impossible. In Session 3 you saw how the obstacles to opposing nuclear weapons within South Africa under the apartheid regime led Abdul Minty and his collaborators to mobilise internationally by mounting the World Campaign.

In the Soviet Union, the ruling Communist Party established the Soviet Peace Committee, which was an official organisation directed by the Party. Genuine grassroots activism by Soviet citizens, however, was actively curtailed by the state. In 1982, an important group of Russian activists created the Moscow Trust Group, which called for immediate steps towards nuclear disarmament and greater dialogue between East and West. The government was quick to shut down this group. Its members were subject to intimidation and arrest by the state authorities, while several were confined in asylums.

While public protests critical of state policy were not feasible in countries such as the Soviet Union, they thrived in liberal democracies such as the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, the government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990) resorted to a range of means to counter the anti-nuclear movement in Britain, whose anti-nuclear demonstrations regularly attracted crowds in the hundreds of thousands.

Activity 1

Watch this video, which features activists, policymakers and historians reflecting on how the British government and the ruling Conservative Party responded to anti-nuclear activism in the UK in the 1980s. After you’ve watched the video, answer the question below.

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Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

RICHARD MOTTRAM

The government faced quite an interesting challenge in relation both to CND and to, for example, the Greenham Common Peace women, because CND was led by people who were actually rather effective leaders, had considerable personal charm, were clever. I’m thinking here of Joan Ruddock and Bruce Kent, these sorts of people. And they represented a serious challenge, therefore, to government if it was going to deal with the arguments they were putting forward. And in relation to the Greenham Common Peace camp and so on, here you had a group of women who were naturally the sort of people most people would sympathise with. They were genuine sort of citizen protesters. And the government had the challenge, how could it deal with the intellectual arguments as well as the visual arguments? And that occupied a lot of government time because this was also a political-- this was both a strategic issue and also a political issue. And it came together because in 1983, there was going to be a general election, and there was partisan differences between the Conservatives and the Labour Party over these key issues. So for the government, this became a very, very big priority. And in fact, in the 1983 election, I think defence was the third most salient issue, which is a very unusual situation.

LUC-ANDRE BRUNET

By the early 1980s, however, it had become clear that the CND’s message was resonating with millions of citizens across the UK. And so the UK government and actually more specifically, the Conservative Party, resorted to other means to try and challenge the CND’s arguments. So the there was an organisation called the Coalition for Peace through Security, which was set up in the early 1980s and had strong ties with the Conservative government. The young Conservatives also set up a group called Youth for Multilateral Disarmament. And both of these groups issued a series of publications, posters, pamphlets, and so on, which engaged with the CND’s arguments to differing degrees. But really, they sought to discredit what the CND and the UK Peace Movement more broadly was arguing for. So they tended to depict the CND, typically, as a communist front, as really a front of the Soviet Union. And that if the UK were to back the CND’s position, it would actually be serving the Soviet interests rather than the British interests. And in some of their publications, they also likened the peace movement of the early 1980s to the pacifist movement in the inter-war period, particularly the policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany. So I think all of these cumulatively did play a role in starting to discredit some of the CND’s arguments, at least in the eyes of some voters in the UK. And this was particularly crucial in the lead up to the 1983 general election.

BRUCE KENT

The UK government with CND was discreetly and politely hostile. If they could say anything unpleasant about us, they would do that, anything to marginalise us. In fact, they picked on one phrase, one word in many UN documents, ‘unilateral and multilateral’. Now if you look up the UN documents, the different steps towards disarmament, multilateral, unilateral, bilateral, general, and so on. But they were made as contrasting enemies. So if you were a multilateralist, believed in treaties, you didn’t believe in independent action. Nevertheless, the arms race went up by independent action, but it was a government split. So people would say to me, I’m a multilateralist, I’m not one of yours. That was the most effective bit. But that was sheer propaganda. There were also some very filthy things that went on as well, really disgusting abuse. I remember one right-wing think tank who put out documents saying that we were CND, Communists, Neutralists and Defeatists. That was a that was their slogan. And the people who authored that are now in Westminster parliament now today.

MARY KALDOR

Well, it was extremely critical. I mean, I think I had my passport disappeared and reappeared in a brown envelope. My address book disappeared. Both Edward and Thompson and me had big investigations into our tax affairs, which we both thought was because of silly mistakes. You always make silly mistakes. I forgot to declare something, but actually, the odd thing was it happened at exactly the same time.

KATE HUDSON

The government overall, but presumably the MOD had the most direct impact. I think it was noticed really that their initial approach towards CND in around in 1980 where the big demos first started after the announcement in 79 to kind of try and sideline CND and starve it of media coverage and attention, thinking that that was the way to do it. And that didn’t work. Because if something is so big and kind of popular, so to speak, from the people, then you can’t just silence it in that way. So after that, into the early 1980s, there was a concerted effort to kind of smear CND. And the main way in which that was done was by trying to suggest that it had funding from the Soviet Union. And then they produced materials at the time where CND meant Communist, Neutralists and Defeatists, and all this kind of things. So it was very much to try and suggest that we weren’t British, we didn’t love our country, we weren’t patriotic. We were agents of a foreign power, leaving Britain wide open to attack and all that kind of stuff. None of which, of course, was true at all.

MATTHEW JONES

The government’s view of CND is essentially that they are almost stooges of the Soviet Union, that they are naive followers of a line which will only give advantages to the Soviet Union in the Cold War and would lead to measures for disarmament, unilateral disarmament in the UK, which will give the Soviet Union very, very decisive advantages in the Cold War, in the second Cold War, which is emerging in the early 1980s. And that’s seen in government attempts to brand CND activists as essentially stooges of the Soviet Union rather than people who are genuine idealists or committed to a particular view of the way that they would see a safer world emerging, a safer, more peaceful and secure world emerging.

End transcript

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1. How did the ruling Conservative Party try to discredit anti-nuclear activists in the 1980s?

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Discussion

1. The UK government as well as groups set up by the Conservative Party attacked anti-nuclear activists as being controlled by Communists and the Soviet Union, being anti-British, and compared nuclear disarmament to the ill-fated appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. The ruling Conservative Party aimed to tarnish anti-nuclear activists and thereby maintain the government’s existing policies on nuclear weapons.

Figure 1 This poster was among the many produced by groups set up by the Conservative Party to discredit the anti-nuclear movement ahead of the 1983 general election in the UK. Depicting former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin (who died in 1953) holding a mask, the implication is that anti-nuclear activists were in fact Communists or were at least being manipulated by the Soviet Union to serve that country’s interests rather than Britain’s.

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A poster with the following text: Who’s behind the so-called peace movements?

Figure 1 This poster was among the many produced by groups set up by the Conservative Party to discredit the anti-nuclear movement ahead ...

While this example shows the lengths to which the UK government and the Conservative Party went to try to bring anti-nuclear activism into disrepute, this engagement was spurred by the wide popularity of calls for nuclear disarmament, with opinion polls in the early 1980s suggesting that a majority of Britons opposed the deployment of Cruise missiles in the UK. This also highlights the challenges faced by anti-nuclear activists, particularly in nuclear-armed states with governments who did not want to revisit their existing policies on nuclear weapons.