Ra. Notes The following article is a comment on the Labour CND Committeets statemont from Robert Gray of Aberdeen.
The initiative of tho Labour CND Committee is to be welcomed. Its job will be to carry on sustained agitation and political education among the rank-and-file of the labour movement, domonstrating how the cold war, the danger of incineration and the widening gap between 'richt and tpoor! nations interact,. and aggravate each other.
Peter Price's criticism of the committec's statement sounds dangorously like the view that imperialism — even when nuclcar armed —is atpapor tiger', and that the 'pcople's bomb! will kill us more painlessly than tho West's bomb. Comrade Price doos, however, get at an important point. It is precisely the nuclear stalemate, and the two world alliances in which it finds expression, which is making the solu= tion of our oxplosive problems of world poverty and inequality such a dangerous process. Of course Cuba's 'logitimate aspirations' are to be respocteds they frighten the USA because of that country's cold war situation; equipping Cuba with nuclear missiles increases fear, tension and the danger of war, diminishes the hope that Cuba will be allowed to work out her own salvation in poace. Likowise with other countrios likely to adopt 'Cuban' solutions. The positive response cannot but be one of noutralism and international co-operation through UNO,
Lecause of the cold war alliance-structure we live on our nerves, in a world in which every local conflict may be the boginning of the ends the Cyprus crisis, involving as it did a threat of NATO, and ths Warsaw Pact intorference is a good example. In this respect tho immediate danger of war arises from localised upheavals which escalate, to drag in the nucloar supor—powers. s for UNO, the activities of the new dominant Afro-Asian bloc are tending to transform it,into a positive instrument of international social justice. The immediate task remains the prevention of nuclear war. If we are to move towards a world socialist commonwealth,support for both tasks is essential; it can bo fully provided only by breaking the military chains of the coldwar alliances, and the ideological one of the Stalinist and anti- Communist cold war dogmas. The very cxistence of CND has gone some way towards porforming these essential taskse .