ABSTRACT
The main question about the antinuclear movement, which cannot be answered in terms of a rigidly liberal theory (ignorant of, or impervious to, the structural crisis of the West) and concerning which the movement itself is not willing to attain lucid self-awareness, is this: Why has the movement emerged at this time, in so many countries and in such a concerted way? The antinuclear theorist will simply answer that the increased danger of a confrontation has heightened (due to the Reagan administration, the technological propensities of the new missiles, and, more balanced observers would say, the escalation of the armaments race on both sides); therefore, global nuclear war is imminent. We have rejected this prediction and therefore cannot accept the latter explanation as an adequate account of the recent growth of the movement. * There is no evolutionist answer either. Without being historians of the antinuclear movement, we can state the following fundamental facts. Up until the end of the 1950s, the only international organization with an antinuclear profile was the World Peace Council, a Soviet front organization that still exists but which has lost its importance, 107even for Soviet leaders, with the emergence of autonomous antinuclear movements. Its position was very simple: Western nuclear weapons are a threat, Soviet nuclear armaments are a guarantee of world peace. This simple logic is still upheld in the official peace organizations of the Eastern bloc. In Great Britain the Campaign for the Nuclear Disarmament (CND) has held to a unilateralist position from its inception. As we all know, the accusations by the liberal and the Rightist press that Labour was unilateralist had been vehemently denied by Labour Party spokesmen and militants up until roughly 1978. Somewhat later the party accepted the CND program and has retained it, with interesting stubbornness, despite the fact that unilateralism, according to almost all observers, was the main reason for Labour’s landslide defeat in the 1983 elections. In spite of our ignorance of antinuclear history, we are not entirely convinced by Chalfont’s interpretation of CND as simply a communist Trojan horse. He may be more familiar with the facts than we are, and therefore he could be right: a then totally Stalinist British communism backed the movement in the 1950s without reservation. But even so, an additional explanation is needed to understand why it was only in Great Britain that a movement emerged in the fifties. Our hypothesis is that Bertrand Russell’s personality and political transition from a cold warrior to an ardent enemy of the United States holds the key to this phenomenon. One must not necessarily accept I. L. Horowitz’s marked aversion to the whole of Russell’s work to share his view that it was an anti-American resentment and not a Leftist, or even consistently pacifist, conviction that led Russell in many of his public gestures. This resentment against “American perfidy” widely shared in Great Britain, and certainly not only on the Left, could have contributed to the CND becoming a movement, not just an insignificant front organization like many other “national councils” of the World Peace Council. At any rate, now we see an international network of groups, organizations, ideological and propaganda activities, a network of communication between them, indeed, almost an antinuclear culture. In addition, the fever has spread over countries that are either neutral (Sweden and, to a lesser extent, Austria and Switzerland) and are therefore not exposed to any alleged or real dangers related to nuclear armaments, or that are far removed from the European scene (Australia, New Zealand) and therefore do not directly confront the problems stemming from the deployment of missiles in Europe. This phenomenon is not explained by any theory, and it needs to be accounted for.
