Duncan Bowie on 70 years of the peace movement
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament by Martin Shaw published by Agenda
Books on CND tend to be written by activists. Martin Shaw was an activist but is also a respected historian, and his study is sound and sympathetic without being polemical. For a relatively short history, though quite expensive for a paperback, it is surprisingly comprehensive. It covers the whole period from the early 1950s, with the campaign against Britain developing its own hydrogen bomb to the recent campaigns against the war in Iraq and the proposals to bomb Syria. This examines the continuities and discontinuities, which is welcome as previous studies and memoirs tend to focus on single phases of the anti-nuclear movement.
Shaw was involved in both CND and European Nuclear Disarmament (END) and set the various campaigns within the wider geo-political context. After studying the postwar campaigns and the origins of CND, he gives attention to the more militant Committee of 100 and the development of the direct action movement which returned in the 1980s with the camps and occupations at Upper Heyford, Greenham Common, Lakenheath, Molesworth and Faslane. He examines the components of the movement – the Labour Left, the religious input such as the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the role of the Communist Party, the revolutionary socialist left and links with the wider women’s movement, the ecology movement and the campaign against civil nuclear power.
The last sections of the book follow the trajectory of the wider movement after its mid 1980’s heyday, with CND  being reduced to a much smaller organization, dominated by the hard left, and allying itself with more radical but perhaps more narrow causes such as the Stop the War movement, which can be accused of being selectively partisan as to its selection of which wars it wants to stop. More recent tendencies on the left no longer distinguish between methods of war – nuclear, biological or conventional weapons, but tend to be militant in their non-pacifism and advocacy of greater military intervention in some cases. Much of the Labour Left is no longer opposing military alliances and British participation of NATO, but is instead arguing for greater military spending and the expansion of NATO, while other elements seem to justify Russian nationalistic imperialism on the basis that it is countering a Western alliance.  Your imperialism is OK while ours is not! Oh, how the world has changed – and not for the better. Reading the book brought back memories of a more idealistic youth – for some reason, I ended up chairing the first CND rally at Upper Heyford in 1980, at which Edward Thompson and Bruce Kent spoke amongst campaigners from the Oxford CND group, known as Campaign ATOM, including Meg Beresford, who later became CND general secretary. Where are our ideals now? Naïve we may have been, but sometimes we do need to at least try to keep our values and principles.