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The left and CND – the history

SEPTEMBER 1, 2025

Ahead of a talk to the Socialist History Society later this month, Martin Shaw introduces some themes from his new book.

As nuclear weapons rise even further up the global agenda – the Israeli-US attack on Iran’s nuclear programme is the latest reminder – it is important to revisit the history of antinuclear activism. My new book, The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, is the first to re-examine this history for some time, and brings it up to date. A Socialist History Society (SHS) online session on the book, ‘The Left and CND’, on 16th September at 7 pm, is an opportunity to discuss both the past and present of this important campaign in the UK.

Antinuclear activism has not only been important in its own right. It has also been at the forefront of left-wing politics in Britain since the 1950s; its tactics, especially nonviolent direct action (NVDA), have been seminal for other campaigns. The different emphases within the movement against the Gaza Genocide, which has seen both mass protest and direct action – both of them targeted by the government and the police – recall the debates within the antinuclear movement which I discuss in the book. These will be part of my SHS talk.

Here I give some background. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), Britain’s best-known antinuclear organisation, was established in 1958, after the UK shifted its defence policy to rely on the so-called ‘independent nuclear deterrent’ the previous year. Britain had already tested its own bomb and hosted American nuclear-armed bombers over the previous decade.

To me, one of the most interesting stories I uncovered was that of the US’s Thor missiles, which the Tory government agreed to host in 1957. There were 60 missiles, and unlike the better-known cruise missiles of the 1980s (which were concentrated at Greenham Common and Molesworth), they were installed at no fewer than 20 bases across eastern England. Targeted at the Soviet Union, these put Britain right at the forefront of any American nuclear war, at a time before the US could strike Russia with intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Although the H-bomb aroused most public horror and CND became known for the slogan, ‘Ban the Bomb’, the Thor missiles provoked important protests in 1958, the year the first of the famous Aldermaston marches was held. The Cambridge Labour party and trades council marched to a base at Mepal, Cambridgeshire, after the Ministry of Defence tried to stop them because, under the Official Secrets Act, the base ‘did not exist’! Meanwhile, the Gandhian pacifists of the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War (DAC) attempted to block the construction of a Thor base at North Pickenham, Norfolk.

These different styles of action set the scene for conflict within the antinuclear movement and the left. Even the sympathetic Labour MP Stephen Swingler, a veteran of Keep Left (a forerunner of the Socialist Campaign Group), criticised “pacifists making martyrs of themselves” and “adopting IRA tactics” at Pickenham. Canon John Collins, CND’s chairman, for whom Labour was the route to the campaign’s success, also denounced them. In return, the DAC tried to stand independent candidates against Labour candidates who failed to support unilateral nuclear disarmament (this wasn’t successful in the conditions of the 1950s).

Meanwhile, the major unions swung in favour of CND, and Labour famously adopted a unilateralist policy at its 1960 conference. However, the unions soon swung back to the ferociously anti-unilateralist Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell, and conference reversed its decision in 1961. This took the momentum away from the CND executive and towards a new direct action organisation, the Committee of 100. After it tried to block the RAF/USAF base at Wethersfield – today, notorious for housing asylum seekers – its leaders were arrested and charged under the Official Secrets Act. At their 1962 trial, most received 18-month sentences, considered shocking at the time.

Neither CND nor the Committee of 100 was able to stop Britain’s nuclear weapons policy in the 1960s. Although Labour’s 1964 manifesto criticised the proposed Polaris submarine missile system in CND’s terms – “It will not be independent and it will not be British and it will not deter” – the new Labour leader, Harold Wilson, went ahead anyway with its purchase from the USA. His successor, James Callaghan, started the process of replacing Polaris by the Trident system, also from the USA.

It was only in 1979, after NATO decided to install nuclear-armed cruise missiles in five European countries including the UK, as well as Pershing II missiles in West Germany (these could destroy Moscow in minutes), that the antinuclear movement started to revive. The historian E.P. Thompson and the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation’s Ken Coates launched the Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament in 1980, local peace groups spread rapidly, and eventually CND – which incoming general secretary Bruce Kent had found almost moribund – became a powerful national organisation again.

This time, the British antinuclear movement had a target, a deadline – the expected installation of the missiles in 1983 – and powerful allies in every West European country. Women activists began the most important direct action in modern British history, at Greenham Common in 1981; the Special Branch would write in 1983 that NVDA was “without doubt the most influential force within the peace movement.”

However, the movement still needed Labour: with Michael Foot as leader, the Party’s chances in the 1983 election were crucial to a realistic prospect of blocking cruise missiles. It was not to be, and although nuclear policy is widely cited as the reason for Labour’s defeat, that judgment was (I show) too simplistic. Margaret Thatcher’s government installed the cruise missiles in late 1983, but by 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev had persuaded Ronald Reagan to get rid of them. I argue that the peace movement played a crucial role in this turnaround, but you’ll have to read the book to understand why!

I also take the story into the twenty-first century. CND has been a crucial part of coalitions against the Iraq War and the Gaza genocide as well as continuing to campaign against nuclear weapons, and direct-actionists struck at military hardware long before Palestine Action was formed. As for Labour, after the hopes raised by Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership were dashed, David Lammy and John Healey published an article in 2023 proclaiming nuclear weapons part of ‘Labour’s heritage’. Yet nuclear disarmament is still the cause of many in the party, as I’m sure readers of Labour Hub will agree.

Martin Shaw is emeritus professor of International Relations at Sussex University and research professor at IBEI, Barcelona. As well as The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, he has written widely on Gaza, including The New Age of Genocide which comes out next month. Both these books can be ordered from Agenda Publishing with a 30 per cent discount, using the code AGENDA30 at checkout. You can also follow Martin on his website and on Twitter.

Image: c/o the author.