Greenham remembered

I've received a circular from a Guardian journalist, Lindsay Poulton, about an interactive website called Your Greenham. The site is produced by GuardianFilms, and it "records the actions, memories and history of one of the most remarkable protests in modern history", viz. the women's peace camp at RAF Greenham Common in the 1980s. As the email requests recipients to pass on its message to "at least 10 people, [for] that way the spirit of protest will again reach thousands", I'm glad to relate its subject to my at least ten readers.

I don't mean to sound ungracious about this. The site is worth looking at. It's attractively designed, has much interesting contemporary material, and records a notable event in recent British social history. I would not put it any higher than that, however. I wrote a brief comment in The Times last September, on the 25th anniversary of the founding of the camp, expressing my scepticism about the political significance of the Greenham women's campaign. I will also quote myself, I'm afraid - as I can't be troubled to find alternative words for the same thought - from my book Antitotalitarianism on why the campaign was misguided (emphasis added):

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 believed at the time, and do now, that the campaigners of CND and the Greenham peace camp might have made a useful contribution to the defence debate of the 1980s. Nato's strategies and deployment were becoming increasingly complex when the essential task of nuclear deterrence had not altered. Effective deterrence required far more than a minimum capability of a few ICBMs or SLBMs. But it was almost certainly not true that, as Ambassador Paul Nitze and the Committee on the Present Danger energetically maintained, there was a "window of vulnerability" in US nuclear deployment, the closure of which required a new MX missile system with a complex and expensive basing mode. There was room for a campaigning organisation to inject that note of scepticism into public discussion of defence policy.

The Greenham peace campaigners, CND and the American nuclear freeze movement were, however, very far from being that type of influence. I consider their impact to have been severely damaging to the quality of public debate, and - more parochially, but it's an issue I care about - to the political health and electoral standing of the Left. The Greenham campaigners' initial demonstration, where 30,000 women linked hands around the Greenham base, was imaginative and gained much favourable publicity for their cause. That was their high point, however. Ever after, they stood out as an anti-intellectual force in their demonstrations and statements. You will see this if you consult Your Greenham. The first video clip (the "March to Greenham" item) opens with a statement of outrageous falsehood: "The US deployed Cruise missiles all over Europe as part of Nato strategy for fighting a limited nuclear war." For "fighting", read "avoiding".

Other contemporary film clips bear out my point: a demonstration in Parliament Square of women "keening" (their word, meaning lamenting and wailing); an elderly lady shouting at journalists covering her protest that they had undergone a "spiritual lobotomy". I recognised one of the talking heads, interviewed specially for the site, as Helen John, who declares to camera: "Being born female on this planet is like being born behind enemy lines." A campaign founded on such premises, and with those techniques of persuasion, was never going to elevate public debate or inspire respect.

There is a final oddity about the site, which I recommend despite my reservations about its partial judgement. Among the materials are contemporary articles about the protest from The Guardian. These are either supportive op-ed columns or sympathetic reporting. Yet there is no reference to the fact that the newspaper itself supported the deployment of Cruise missiles, and advanced cogent reasons for its position. I hope that Guardian journalists will locate and republish these leading articles. For all its idiosyncrasies, the newspaper has in my adult lifetime got far more things right than it has wrong, and this was one notably astute judgement.