Eleventh Hour for Europe by Ken Coates, Peggy Duff, Dan Smith, Mary Kaldor, E P Thompson and Roy Medvedev, Spokesman £2.75 paperback.
Eleventh Hour for Europe is a collection of six essays by prominent figures in the European Disarmament Campaign. Virtually all of them have been published elsewhere - for example, Mary Kaldor's contribution has appeared in the New Statesman while Ken Coates' opening chapter is available as a pamphlet. Their primary interest is not as new work but more as a vantage point from which to locate where some of the disarmament movement's better known public figures now stand.
This review will examine four issues which they raise, implicitly or explicitly, in the collection. These are:—
1) What position should be taken on British membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)?
2) How to achieve the goal of winning support within the working class?
3) Should the disarmament movement take a stand on the issue of nuclear energy?
4) What is to be gained through the Soviet Union developing nuclear weapons — 'the workers' bomb'?
While the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) has made its opposition to NATO clear, the authors of Eleventh Hour seem strangely ambiguous. Ken Coates writes: 'A European nuclear-free zone does not necessarily imply reduction of conventional weapons, nor does it presuppose the demolition of the two major alliances.' While later Dan Smith comments: 'This would tend in the direction of military disengagement from NATO and perhaps towards abrogation of the North Atlantic Treaty. That ultimate step need not be taken, however, a long term option though it would remain.'
These formulations are surprisingly vague. Rather the campaign needs to state fundamentally [illegible] NATO [illegible] States. It is an extension of American foreign policy. As is generally recognised it is the US which has led the spiralling upward drift in weapons procurement and development. The 15-member states of NATO account for 45 per cent of total world military expenditure; they control 66 per cent of the international arms trade; they supply 45 per cent of weapons to the poorer countries; and they deploy five million troops.
Within that context Britain's contribution is relatively minor. Of NATO's 9000 strategic nuclear warheads there are 192 in the four British Polaris submarines. These missiles are dependent on the US for targeting information. Britain's independent nuclear deterrent is neither independent nor very impressive. The US considers Polaris not as a strategic weapon but as a tactical force which would be limited to a European war which is the contrary of how the British military establishment like to view their prize possession.
But that should not mean that the campaign argues along a line of least resistance which says that Britain's contribution is insignificant and thus if Polaris, Trident, Tornado, etc are scrapped it will not hamper the 'West's' defence. There is little point winning a unilateralist position if the countryside is still packed with over 100 American, NATO, bases. They must be removed if unilateralism is to have any significance and that entails Britain leaving NATO.
Working class support
By all accounts one of the failures of CND in the late 1950s and early 1960s was its inability to consolidate its support in the trade unions and the working class, especially at the rank and file level. Other than a token stoppage in Stevenage no section of the labour movement would take industrial action against the bomb. The problem was how to link up the daily concerns of workers with the question of the bomb. International Socialism tried to do this by raising the slogan — 'The fight against the bomb is a fight against the boss'. But given the political period with much lower working class militancy this was difficult to bring to fruition. Today the situation is markedly different. The days of 'You've never had it so good' are long forgotten. The unions are better organised and more militant, while Thatcherite austerity brings issues like unemployment to the fore. The slogan of 'Jobs not Bombs' makes the connection between nuclear weapons and everyday life more accessible.
The other significant change that has occurred is within the Labour Party. It should not be forgotten that the Labour governments of the past forty years have been instrumental in developing nuclear weapons. It was the Attlee Labour government, in January 1947, which gave the go-ahead for the first British atomic bomb. This was kept a closely guarded secret from parliament and the Labour Party. The expenditure was hidden under an item called Public Buildings in Great Britain. It was the 1964 Labour government which bought Polaris against the conference mandate. And finally the last Labour government undertook the secret, Chevaline, Polaris modernisation programme which cost £1000 million.
A Labour government elected at the next general election will be in office when the important decisions will be due to be taken on the purchase of Trident or perhaps when the first Cruise missiles are due in 1983. It is essential that an incoming Labour government is in no position to follow the footsteps of its predecessors and further extend Britain's nuclear capability.
However in rejecting Britain's nuclear weapons' programme the campaign does have to recognise that hundreds of thousands of workers and trade unionists find employment in those sectors of the economy. Dan Smith touches on this point when his essay calls for a new defence policy. For him that means: 'Reduced concentration on the costly and prestigious procurement programmes might then make resources available for proper provision for the services' pay and infrastructure, inadequate attention to which has both impaired efficiency and created major problems of morale in the last few years.'
Later Mary Kaldor suggests a similar line of reasoning: 'The alternative is a policy of territorial defence ... to make it clear to the potential enemy of any European country that invasion would be more difficult than Afghanistan and occupation as difficult as Vietnam.' One assumes that Kaldor chooses the examples with care to highlight where she sees the threats coming from.
The clear problem with both these solutions is that they accept the framework of the bourgeois state and wish to retain its armed forces but without the nuclear component. Here we are down to the fundamental debate over the state and reform or revolution. One would have hoped that the experience of Chile under Allende would have taught us that no reliance can be placed in the armed forces. What needs to be broadcast are the work and views of groups like the Vickers or Lucas combines who have developed alternative plans for the use of armaments' factories. Their plans entail the conversion of these plants to produce socially useful products, which not only benefit working people and society generally but also come to terms with the problems of unemployment if defence expenditure is to be scrapped.
Nuclear energy
The disarmament movement has a tendency to see the question of nuclear energy only as of importance because weapons can be built from energy programmes. India has built an atomic bomb as a consequence of the technology sold to it by Canada, while recently Brazil purchased a nuclear energy package from West Germany which contains all the component parts to make crude weapons. While international, diplomatic efforts are made to halt the sale of expertise the market forces pushing the owners of expensive nuclear technology are such that the purchasing state is in a strong bargaining position.
The disarmament campaign has not come out strongly against nuclear energy. This is partly due to the fact that the unions are split openly on this question and the Communist Party has no clear position. Peggy Duff, in Eleventh Hour, has a different view: 'One cannot equate the results of accidents, such as that at Harrisburg, with the mass deaths and destructions caused by two "tiny" atomic bombs ...' and thus our issue is more important. Clearly she is correct if it is a matter of counting the dead but it is important that the campaign makes it clear that our view of the future is not one dominated either by nuclear weapons or nuclear power stations.
If Thatcher has her way in the 1990s Britain will be the home not just for four Trident submarines but also 15 Pressurised Water Reactors of the Harrisburg sort. Nuclear reactors constitute a major threat to the environment and a health hazard for the installation's workforce. But as Britain, via weapons and energy, becomes further committed to becoming a nuclear state so do democratic rights and civil liberties diminish. Within nuclear power plants many basic union rights do not apply: security checks are rigorous; and an armed police force has considerable powers. With the movement of radioactive waste and nuclear weapons around the country the open presence of the state will increase. Finally at a more tactical level it has to be recognised that within western Europe it is the question of nuclear energy, rather than weapons, that is to the fore. Britain is exceptional in this respect. In the major European countries the mass demonstrations and protests have been against the building of new nuclear reactors. Links need to be built and both wings of the anti-nuclear campaign recognise the intimate inter-relationship between them.
The Soviet nuclear capacity
The controversial question as to whether the Soviet Union should have the bomb and whether it would ever use it still haunts the movement. During the 1950s and 1960s it was the centre of many heated exchanges involving such people as Ken Coates.
The Soviet ruling elite cannot be absolved of all responsibility for the present nuclear build-up. The quantity and level of weapons they possess is way beyond that necessary to act as a deterrent to the USA. Their international policy of detente sacrifices the extension of the world revolution, which is the best defence of the gains of the Russian masses, for the maintenance of the status quo. The Soviet Union has a massive 'overkill' potential. Huge resources are devoted to the further development of nuclear weapons — resources which could be more productively employed in the interests of the Soviet workers. There is also massive investment in nuclear energy on the one hand and biological and chemical warfare on the other, neither of which can be justified as in the interests of the Soviet masses.
In 1979 the Soviet military budget was $106,000 million. They have 6,000 strategic nuclear warheads, which while they may be less accurate than their American counterparts, pack a heavier explosive yield. The Warsaw Pact contributes 25 per cent of world military spending and in 1979 the Soviet Union made the highest number of nuclear test explosions.
But such criticisms are not made to equate the role of the USA and the USSR in the arms race. At every stage it has been the US imperialists who have taken the lead — from being the first to build the atomic bomb to developing the first submarine-launched nuclear missile. Criticisms of the Soviet bureaucrats' approach to nuclear weapons can and should be made but until the imperialist war-mongers have been disarmed the continued existence of the Soviet bomb cannot be opposed.
Nuclear weapons, by their very nature, are built to create mass and indiscriminate destruction. The major casualties will be the working people of either side. If there was a full-scale confrontation between the USA and the USSR, it is estimated that around 200 million people would perish. Given that civil defence precautions only really exist for the ruling classes and elites it will be the population at large which will pay with their lives.