ANTI-POLARIS DEMONSTRATION IN JUNE by Len Nicholas*
C.N.D. Labour Committee Chairman, Walter Wolfgang, met Labour Party members and trade union representatives in Glasgow recently when i% was agreed to hold an Anti-Polaris demonstration this summer. Scottish Region C.N.D., Y.C.N.D., and the Scottish Committee of 100 have now agreed that the demonstration will be at Faslane, on Garloch, during the week-end of June 27/28. The United States Polaris depot ship has sailed from Holy Loch for Cadiz, in Spain, but British Polaris submarines are nearing completion ~---one of them at Faslane.
The Labour C.N.D. Committee will shortly publish a pamphlet by Terence Heelas, especially written for Labour Party members, called the Disintegrating Alliance. Comrade Heelas was a Labour candidate at the last general election and is a member of the Institute of Strategic Studies and a founder member of the C.N.D. Disarmament and Strategy Group. The author thinks that Labour Party and C.N.D. policy has run so close together that NATO remains the only point where major differences exist... In a close logical argument he outlines how the NATO alliance is fast breaking up. The main reason is the ever growing reluctance by America to commit nuclear suicide for her European allies. This snail-like withdrawal by America into her own shell will, he thinks, cause disintegration of the alliance ---probsbly before the 1969 expiry date.
With the danger of Russian/ American war receding a new danger of nuclear weapon proliferation ---- the spread of nuclear know-how to an ever increasing number of nations ---- grows. The Labour Party's proposals to promulgate some sort of shared control of nuclear weapons in NATO countries must be opposed, and loyalty to the United Nations made the keystone of its policy. John Strachey in one of his last speeches said, "mankind has only an even-money chance of avoiding the horrors of nuclear war."
With a relaxing of the cold war tensions resulting from the Moscow Test Ban Treaty, the Washington-Moscow "hot line" and some small armaments reductions by the two major powers the odds against war have no doubt lengthened. Terence Heelas' pamphlet dissects the dangers and throws light forward to guide a Labour Government. We hope it will be widely read in the Labour and Trade union movemente * Len Nicholas is the secretary of the Labour C.N.D. Committee.