POLITICS
CND's rose-tinted spectacles: or, seeing through a glasnost darkly
NOEL MALCOLM
0 n Tuesday evening, the initials CND acquired a new meaning: Champagne for Nuclear Disarmament. This was not the creation of another 'peace group' by socially-aware wine merchants, but a good- humoured stunt involving the clinking of glasses outside the Russian and American Embassies in London. Celebration does not necessarily imply self-congratulation. But CND (the real CND, I mean) is determined to extract as much credit as it can from the INF treaty.
At the annual CND conference last month, the backdrop to the speakers on stage was the slogan 'We've Started Some- thing'; and in case you couldn't work out what this might refer to, the words were surmounted by a picture of Reagan and Gorbachev in suitably conciliatory posture. Some of this month's 'peace movement' magazines are full of claims that the treaty is a direct result of their campaigning. Peace Courier, the organ of the World Peace Council, pronounces that 'for the first time, the peace movements have scored a tangible success'. Only Bruce Kent, the CND chairman, has gone so far as to say that the disarmament campaign- ers should respond to the treaty with `modesty' and refrain from taking all the credit. There is a name, perhaps, for this kind of modesty: disarming.
For those who inhabit the mental world of CND, the champagne may already have turned into a yin triste as they think about the difficulty of keeping up the momentum of success: the faster the band-waggon is rolling, the harder it is to convince passers- by that you still need their help in pushing it along. And for those who do not share CND's assumptions, the prospects for `peace' campaigners' credibility are bleak- er still. The deployment of cruise and Pershing missiles seems to have been vindi- cated, and the first genuine arms reduction treaty seems to have been negotiated, as Mrs Thatcher and Mr Reagan always said it would, from positions of strength. No matter how responsibility for the treaty is apportioned, the plain fact is that disarma- ment movements thrive in periods of fear and hostility and grow pale in times of hope. The nadir of CND's national mem- bership figures came in the early 1970s, with the partial test-ban treaty and the growth of détente. After the enormous revival of interest in the early 1980s, the last few years have seen a steady decline, from 91,000 members in 1985-6 to 75,000 now. When Stalin cried, the little children died in the streets; each time Mr Gor- bachev smiles, it seems, a hundred CND members decide that they needn't renew their subscriptions.
On the other hand, 'hawks' in Washing- ton, and their London equivalents (`har- riers', perhaps) are already arguing that all the razzmatazz of the INF treaty is in- sidiously conceding ground to the disarma- ment campaigners. The US government's adoption of the slogan, 'A First Step to Peace', is one sign of this: almost without anyone noticing, the White House has gone over to the use of the word 'peace' as a synonym for `disarmament'. But more important than verbal equivalence is the issue of moral equivalence, which seems to be a natural by-product of summits and treaties. Summitry implies symmetry; and to think of East and West as mere equiva- lents (the argument runs) is to concede a basic assumption to CND.
This argument is salutary and well- intentioned, but it is also over-simple. And on one important point it seems to be empirically false. It is oversimple because it lumps together under a single term, `moral equivalence', several different kinds of position. The most obvious version of moral equivalence is the liberal, pluralistic doctrine which says that different people have different systems of values and we must simply respect the values which we do not share. This is the position Mrs Thatch- er sometimes takes when she is justifying her desire to do business with communism. A rather different doctrine of moral equivalence is the Powellite view, which says that loyalty to one's country is a vital moral value, a value which can therefore be adhered to by Russians as much as by Englishmen. And there is also the doctrine of realpolitik, which comes naturally to military strategists everywhere, and which might better be described as the theory of amoral equivalence.
`Peace' campaigners may have adopted any or all of these positions from time to time; but my honest impression, after sitting through most of the proceedings of the CND conference, is that CND suppor- ters do not on the whole believe that East and West are morally equivalent. They believe that the East is morally better. This is not simply a matter of post-glasnost euphoria, though there is certainly a lot of it about. For CND, celebrating the fact that things are getting better in Russia is something which ought really to be fraught with ambiguity, rather like celebrating the fact that someone has stopped beating his wife; but all ambiguities were lost on the CND delegates. Although the visiting spokesperson from Moscow was treated like royalty, there were times when he seemed like the most pro-Western person in the building. At one point he ventured to observe that Russia should take some of the blame for the Cold War. 'How can you say that', complained a delegate, 'when in fact Gromyko proposed a complete ban on nuclear weapons even before the Soviet Union possessed any of its own?' (Con- noisseurs will relish the use of the word `even' here.) Some of the members of CND are indeed communists; but I am not making the cheap gibe that the whole lot of them are stooges of Moscow. Rather, they are victims of the logic of their own argument, which says that to acknowledge any ele- ment of threat or hostility on the Russian side is to play into the hands of the pro-nuclear lobby. When the solitary dele- gate declared, 'there is a Soviet threat: their weapons are pointing at us right now', she was shouted down with boos and cries of 'rubbish!'
There is also a further reason for CND's drift away from the doctrine of moral equivalence. It may be easy to found a single-issue movement, but in practice it is impossible to stop it, once under way, from ramifying across a whole range of political argument. The anti-nuclear movement has already diversified into campaigns against militarism, male chauvinism, pollution and apartheid; and the specialists who deal in these various commodities have estab- lished, to the satisfaction of radicals every- where, that all these evils are fruits of capitalism, things which by definition could not exist on the other side of the Elbe.
At the conference, Bruce Kent dealt firmly enough with a woman from Greenham Common who called, absurdly, for 'the integration of anti-racism, anti- sexism and anti-poverty into the main- stream of CND'; but her time will come. `We will bury you' is another slogan which the disarmers have managed to live down. `We will bore you' comes closer, perhaps, to expressing the real threat to their future in the post-INF era.
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