Al-Qaida's attacks on New York and Washington, DC on 11 September 2001 (9/11) shocked peace campaigners as much as anyone. As President George W. Bush declared a “global war on terror”, which Blair supported, it was soon obvious that activists would continue to be concerned as much with wars as with weapons, and that the wars could be larger and even more consequential than the interventions in former Yugoslavia. In the first years of the new century, while the campaign against nuclear weapons remained politically marginal, an enormous antiwar movement rapidly developed.

In Britain, this movement drew in all shades of antinuclear activists in the build-up to the great demonstration against the Iraq War on 15 February 2003. However, when it subsided, it left effects that persisted during the following two decades. First, it created a lasting alliance of CND with the main antiwar organization, the Stop the War Coalition (StWC). Second, it also consolidated, after considerable turbulence in 2003–4, CND's own internal coalition of Christians and pacifists with the far left that had been reconfigured in the 1990s.

This chapter therefore begins by discussing the roles of antinuclear campaigners in the post-9/11 movement, before turning to the continuing campaign against nuclear weapons by both CND and direct action groups. Further wars often galvanized campaigners more than nuclear developments, but political turbulence within Britain created significant openings to challenge the Trident nuclear system, which remained the main focus of antinuclear campaigning throughout the first quarter of the century.

CND and the new antiwar movement

CND held its annual conference five days after 9/11. The organization was already fielding thousands of calls from people looking for it to take a lead, as Britain's main peace campaign, in opposing Bush's threatened intervention in Afghanistan. Under a newly elected chair, Carol Naughton, and vice-chair, Kate Hudson, it immediately called a “No retaliation, no war” vigil outside Downing Street. Using email, which most activists had by 2001, this mobilized thousands (Sinclair 2011: 105–6).

Others were also organizing. The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) called a public meeting to “stop the war before it starts” on 21 September 2001, which attracted 2,000 people representing a range of left opinion. With their representative Lindsey German in the chair, speakers included Jeremy Corbyn MP and the environmentalist George Monbiot as well as far-left spokespeople.

As the new Network for East–West Dialogue hosted further seminars in Warsaw and Budapest in 1987 and Prague in 1988, a historic upheaval was beginning in Eastern Europe. Barely within a year, the Communist regimes, losing confidence as Gorbachev's withdrawal of support became clear, fell one by one in the face of largely nonviolent revolutions emboldened by the same token. On 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall was opened. The end of the Cold War, for which the peace movement had fought, was unfolding in front of its eyes. It was a momentous change, with huge ramifications for its future as well as that of Europe and the world.

Western leaders claimed that their 1979 decision had led to this outcome, but they had been forced to abandon it by Gorbachev's bold choices, which reflected the movement's pressure as well as his recognition of the USSR's fundamental weaknesses. After the Cold War ended, researchers discovered that the USSR, despite its monolithic façade, “was rife with debates about foreign policy” (Evangelista 1999: 6). The official peace committees had been listening to END and other Western activists, and much of Gorbachev's new international thinking, one Soviet insider argued, was “simply borrowed” from them (Burke 2017: 243).

In Eastern Europe, a “Helsinki effect” resulting from the 1975 Final Act, which made human rights part of a European settlement, meant that the Soviet leadership had to accept both international and domestic monitoring. But it had taken the activist “Helsinki network” across the bloc, with support from the Western peace movement, to ultimately force the pace, helping generate the mass democracy movements (Thomas 2001; Snyder 2011). NATO would later acknowledge the centrality to the change of the openings for civil society created by Helsinki (Shea 2009).

E. P. Thompson was therefore justified in claiming that END had “prefigured time and time again the events of 1989” (1991: 23). However, in many ways the denouement was unanticipated. He had argued that the Cold War was a self-perpetuating exterminist system that could only be broken from below, but the cycle of military competition had been interrupted from above. Thompson had presented Cold War rivalry as symmetrical, but asymmetry contributed greatly to how it ended.

By 1964 the antinuclear movement was waning. Its influence had been, Stuart Hall later claimed, “ENORMOUS … politically it was very, very influential”, but paradoxically, the bomb was “the one thing [it] couldn't do anything about” (Taylor & Pritchard 1980: 109, emphases in original). It had major international impacts, especially by stimulating “CNDs” in other countries, from Ireland to Australia. But its principal effects, which form the main focus of this chapter, were to pave the way for other campaigns and movements, which in turn would lead nuclear disarmers to embrace opposition to wars and nuclear power and other goals. The shifts in radical politics that the movement helped produce, which accelerated rapidly towards the revolutionary year of 1968, would in turn challenge some of its core beliefs, particularly its commitment to nonviolence.

CND and the Wilson government's nuclear policies

Diluted effects of the movement could be seen in the British political mainstream in 1964. CND contributed to the climate that helped a new Labour leader, Harold Wilson, narrowly win that October's election. The party's manifesto criticized Polaris in CND's terms: “It will not be independent and it will not be British and it will not deter”, and many CND members campaigned for it (Parker 2021: 68–9). The Liberal revival, a mild form of middle-class radicalism, largely accounted for Labour's victory – since its share of the national vote barely increased while the Liberals’ rose markedly at the Conservatives’ expense – and as we saw at Orpington, disarmament had played a part in this. Yet defence was not prominent in the election. The Tory leader, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, tried to make it an issue – a poster showed a lolling protestor holding a CND sign, with the strapline: “meanwhile the Conservatives have signed the Test Ban Treaty” – but with little success (Butler & King 1965: 129–30).

In office, Wilson appointed the first minister for disarmament, the Times journalist Alun Gwynne Jones, who as Lord Chalfont appeared twice in Sanity in 1965. Wilson also cut back civil defence in 1966 and 1968. However, from CND's point of view, Labour offered no real change. Wilson advocated alliance control over NATO's nuclear weapons, but CND opposed what would have been a multilateral nuclear force. With its activism in decline, there was little to prevent civil servants and military chiefs from convincing Wilson that cancelling Polaris would be a mistake: he accepted the system, although reducing the number of submarines from five to four.

The danger of nuclear war, which almost disappeared from public consciousness at the end of the twentieth century, has returned in the third decade of the twenty-first. In the 1980s, when the threat came from a new stage in the nuclear arms race, mass movements protested across the Western world. Yet when a threat of actual use arose during a major war in Europe in 2022, public concern was muted. It was as though the protests of earlier decades had been forgotten. This book, which tells the story of the antinuclear campaign in Britain – one of the first places where it developed and was influential – offers a reminder that since nuclear weapons were invented, people have acted to prevent the catastrophe they could cause.

The world first became aware of this danger on 6 and 9 August 1945, when the United States of America destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs, instantly killing tens of thousands and irradiating many more. Millions had already died during the Second World War, but most recognized the “atom bomb” as a radically new threat. Alarm grew much further as the Cold War sharpened and both the USA and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) developed thermonuclear hydrogen weapons or “H-bombs” – a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb – as well as intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) to deliver them to each other's countries, opening up the prospect of a new age of warfare that could destroy human society.

In Britain, Clement Attlee's Labour government decided secretly in 1947 to develop its own atomic bomb, making it the third nuclear-armed state; the UK and Canada had helped the USA in the wartime Manhattan Project that developed the bomb, but the US McMahon Act of 1946 barred further nuclear collaboration. By the time Britain tested its first bomb in 1952, under the Conservative government of Winston Churchill, antinuclear activism was beginning. In 1958 the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was founded and quickly generated a new type of mass protest movement, famously centred around marches from the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, Berkshire, to London's Trafalgar Square. Its slogan, “Ban the Bomb”, and its new symbol soon spread around the world.

On 17 February 1958, 5,000 people crammed into Central Hall, Westminster, and three overflow halls for the launch of CND; a thousand were turned away. The following day several hundred supporters sat down in Downing Street. From its first public moment, CND became a mass movement rather than the elite pressure group that most of its founders envisaged. That Easter saw the first Aldermaston march from central London to the atomic weapon research establishment – from the following year, the direction would be reversed. Public meetings were held in many cities and towns, so that by the end of the year there were over 200 local groups, as well as women’s, scientists’, artists’, regional and youth sections. In 1959, CND expanded much further and by 1960 there were 459 groups. In August that year, the conference of the opposition Labour Party adopted unilateral nuclear disarmament as its policy. In two and a half tumultuous years, the new movement had brought nuclear weapons to the forefront in Britain, changing the face of its politics and culture, in some ways for ever.

The crisis of the late 1950s

This outbreak of antinuclear politics was, in retrospect, well prepared. The years after the bombing of Japan saw frightening new international tensions in which Britain was heavily involved, from the 1948–9 Berlin Blockade to the 1950–3 Korean War. The possibility of nuclear war became a part of British life, and in this pre-H-bomb phase, the government actively prepared the public for it: annual publicity campaigns brought half a million people into the Civil Defence Corps by 1955 (Grant 2009: 4–5, 2016: 92–4). Although concern about atomic weapons was expressed by the Peace Pledge Union in 1945 and gradually grew in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the focus of pacifist, liberal and left-wing circles was mostly on other repercussions of the Cold War, such as the reintroduction of conscription in 1948, Britain's involvement in Korea and German rearmament in 1954. Quite a few of those who would warn of nuclear dangers in the late 1950s were content to accept them in the 1940s (Sedgwick 1959: 7).

In Britain, the alarm about the NATO decision was sounded by E. P. Thompson (1979), fittingly in the New Statesman and elsewhere, 21 years after J. B. Priestley's essay that launched CND. He expressed the core argument that would be made across Western Europe in the next four years: “why, since there is already terror enough, ten times over, ballistically poised at both end of Power's great divide, do we need this intermediate additive of terror at all? Ah, it is a safeguard to prevent the ultimate horror of a Soviet/US nuclear war! It is to ‘localize’ nuclear war: that is, to keep nuclear war local to us, and to West and East Europe, and away from America” (emphases in original). Attacking the secrecy and lack of democratic accountability, as well as a reported British decision a month earlier to replace Polaris by Trident, Thompson returned to the case for active neutrality that the New Left had advanced 20 years earlier.

He followed this clarion call with private overtures to prominent left-wing Labour MPs Tony Benn and Eric Heffer. However, it was after Ken Coates of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation rang him that the first steps were taken towards a pan-European campaign against the cruise and Pershing missiles. Coates had worked with East European and Soviet dissidents over the previous decade and had been calling for a new European initiative: NATO's decision and Thompson's outcry gave him the target that he had been lacking. With input from Coates, Mary Kaldor and Dan Smith, Thompson then drafted an Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament, which was widely discussed and circulated for signatures in Britain and elsewhere before being publicly launched in London, Oslo, Paris, Berlin and Lisbon on 28 April 1980 (Coates 1987: 11–14; Burke 2004: 39–52).

The Appeal (European Nuclear Disarmament 1980) provided a political framework that would inspire much of the campaigning across the continent throughout the 1980s, and endorsing it was the basis for being involved in the END process. Unlike CND's constitution, which framed the nuclear problem as one that should be solved first by national action, it developed a European approach and addressed the political underpinning of the nuclear arms race, the Cold War.

This has been a short history of a long campaign. Yet after many decades of protest, no end to nuclear weapons is in sight. Most states have signed a treaty against nuclear proliferation and many have signed one to abolish nuclear weapons, but proliferation continues, both horizontally to new states and vertically in the enhanced weaponry of both recognized and unrecognized nuclear powers. In 2023, nine states had over 12,500 nuclear warheads between them, over 11,000 of which belonged to the USA and Russia, and the UK and France remained the only other states to actually deploy the weapons (SIPRI 2023: 248).

Over this time, states have evolved ways of managing war without using nuclear weapons and society has lived with the threat of nuclear annihilation. Although the danger never disappeared – it needs only one sequence of misjudged reactions to cause a global catastrophe – at times even antinuclear activists ceased to believe in it. Bruce Kent, whose campaigning spanned almost the entire period of this book, commented nine years before he died that in the old days, CND used The War Game to arouse fear of nuclear weapons, but “nobody believes there's going to be a nuclear war today, so there's no point in playing the fear card” (Kirby 2013: 22).

It is increasingly difficult to remain so sanguine. The idea of a pervasive “nuclear taboo” does not entirely convince (Freedman 2013), and nearly 40 years after the peace movement helped end the Cold War, NATO and Russia have come closer than ever to a hot war in Europe, while something like a cold war is developing between the USA and China. In 2022–3, Russia engaged in nuclear blackmail, and although NATO limited its military support for Ukraine so as not to provoke Russian nuclear use, it was not only CND that said that the danger was greater than for decades.

Weapons technology and strategic thinking are also changing, with some analysts raising the spectre of a “third nuclear age” (Futter & Zala 2021; Crilley 2023). If the first centred on the prospect of mutually assured destruction by the superpowers and the second saw the West countering the proliferation of WMD to hostile regimes, in the third, it is argued, “strategic non-nuclear weapons” will blur the line between conventional and nuclear war.