CND: wrong again

The Guardian diarist, Jon Henley, writes:

Returning refreshed from a most agreeable week some considerable distance (for once) from the Chiswick/Acton borders, our first call of the day is from none other than legendary CND campaigner Mr Bruce Kent, who has the temerity to offer a litre of good malt to anyone who can find a Labour minister willing to debate in public the replacement of Trident before March 14 (which is, you'll recall, the date when our elected representatives should endorse St Tony's far-sighted decision to blow £75bn of the nation's cash on a brand new ballistic missile system when most experts reckon the old one has years of life left in it yet, thank you). "I've written to all 23 cabinet members and only two have even acknowledged my letter," says Bruce. And that, say we, is two more than the ungrateful old sourpuss deserves!

I agree. There is a serious point here about the role of pressure groups in a parliamentary democracy. At the height of CND's popularity in the early 1980s, newspaper editorialists and government ministers greatly overestimated the organisation's political influence. In reality there was minuscule public support for giving up Britain's nuclear capability unilaterally and withdrawing from Nato, for the good reason that those policies were intellectually disreputable. A campaigning organisation drawing attention to unnecessary complexity in nuclear strategy and military deployment might have been beneficial. The anti-nuclear movement on both sides of the Atlantic provided no such input; it was, without exception or qualification, a destructive force in political debate that succeeded only in keeping Mrs Thatcher in office throughout the 1980s.

For example, there was frequently expressed in US debate in the 1970s - and particularly associated with Paul Nitze and the Committee on the Present Danger - a fear that land-based ICBMS were vulnerable to a Soviet first strike. This "window of vulnerability" required the US, so Nitze argued, to deploy a new MX missile system whose method of deployment would defeat a first strike. The fear was probably groundless; the debate on modernising America's so-called strategic triad of ballistic missiles based on land, sea and aircraft would have benefited from a sober assessment of what the US and the Atlantic alliance needed for effective deterrence. Instead, the anti-nuclear movement claimed that MX in the US, Cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe and Trident for the UK were weapons designed to fight rather than deter a nuclear war. It charged that the US administration envisaged fighting a nuclear war in Europe. These claims were rubbish, but they had the effect of scaring a lot of people into thinking that the main threat to peace came from an aggressive Western alliance. If, a generation later, a Labour government realises that CND is neither a responsible nor an informed part of political argument and thus resolves to ignore it, I am all in favour of that decision.

I have debated with Bruce Kent, and if he really wants a discussion on the arguments for a British independent nuclear deterrent, I'd be happy to do so again, secure in the knowledge that I have much the better case. He need only ask. But even more than in the Cold War, CND has - by its absurd apologetics for Iranian nuclear deception - demonstrated its lack of good faith in the debate. The role of government ministers is in Parliament; it is not in a debating chamber nominated by a transparently disingenuous pressure group accountable to no one.

Fortuitously but fortunately - for it illustrates the type of thing I'm talking about - The Guardian also carries a letter today from the Labour MP Joan Ruddock, who served as chairman of CND in the 1980s. Mrs Ruddock does not share CND's current stance on the warmongering regime in Iran. (I asked her this question at a Chatham House conference last year, where I was presenting the case for Trident, and as the discussion was at a public event that was on the record, I'm not disclosing a private conversation.) But she retails the same falsehoods that CND popularised in the 1980s; she has learnt no history and no shame (emphasis added):

I'm delighted to see Roy Hattersley (My unilateral conversion, March 5) arguing the case against the renewal of Trident, but am puzzled by his assertion that the "the old unilateralist argument has been proved so conclusively wrong". CND never campaigned for unilateral nuclear disarmament by the US. We sought the removal of American nuclear cruise missiles from Europe precisely for the reason Roy Hattersley advances against the new Trident - they were designed to fight a nuclear war rather than deter one.

This is a gross misconception. I tried to dispose of the myth in my book Anti-Totalitarianism, and in the prerogative of the idle blogger, I quote myself:

European opposition to Nato strategy in the early 1980s reflected a curious belief – reinforced by loose talk from a new President, Ronald Reagan – that a new generation of intermediate-range missiles was being deployed in order to fight a ‘limited’ nuclear war in Europe. The notion was preposterous. The rationale of Nato’s deployment was the opposite. [German Chancellor Helmut] Schmidt himself was regarded as the begetter of this deployment, in a speech he gave to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in 1977. In it, he worried publicly about the credibility of extended deterrence in Europe when the Soviet Union was deploying its own new intermediate-range missiles, the SS-4s and SS-5s. Nato’s purpose was to tie the United States to the defence of Western Europe. If the Soviets threatened to use missiles in the European ‘theatre’, and Nato had no weapons of comparable range but only the US strategic nuclear arsenal with which to retaliate, then they might calculate that the US would be deterred from retaliating. In short, deterrence might fail because of a gap in the system of extended deterrence on which Nato strategy rested.

Cruise and Pershing II missiles were intended to resolve this problem, by providing the US with more options than just the strategic nuclear arsenal in the event of Soviet aggression. With the deployment of Nato’s euromissiles, a Soviet nuclear threat would be less credible. A so-called limited nuclear war became less likely with a strengthening of deterrence and the reaffirmation of the US commitment to Europe’s defence. But the peace movement maintained the opposite, completely misunderstanding Cruise and Pershing as a means for the US to avoid becoming embroiled in a strategic nuclear war.

Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators thus filled the streets of European capital cities in the early 1980s because of a mistake.

I stand by the position of the governing social democratic parties in Britain and Germany in the 1970s. Cruise missiles deployed against an aggressive totalitarianism were a cause of the Left. So was the independent British nuclear deterrent. So it is now.