LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
From : Olwen Battersby, J. G. Wood, R. .Nekosta Ayuru, John Davenport, L. G. Begg, Madeleine Ribillard, Dew Gardner, Frank Barraclough, Daphne Hereward, William Phillips, R. E. Griffin, Giles Mayfair.
A Letter to Denis Healey
SIR,—Canon Collins (Spectator, April 15), demands much of the Labour Party. Dare we ask him whether his party,' the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, has roots which lie in moral principle and 'have been applied realistically"? Is it either moral or realistic to single out one weapon only? Does not Canon Collins know that napalm, as poured on village after village in Korea, was equally cruel; that bacteriological weapons, as manufactured at Porton, are equally widespread in effect; that to be half- armed is to invite attack; that amid future war hysteria these banned atomic weapons could return (the know-how for their manufacture cannot be also banned)? By concentrating on the first emotional reaction to mass destruction has not CND put expediency before truth, kept potential pacifists aloof, and said in effect: 'Killing is OK; suicide is out'?
Britain today could lead the world to total dis- armament. The Cold War is no longer frozen. Dis- armament proposals have been made by Russia and China. To trust is less risky than to mistrust. Above all, the cry of the hungry half of the world, the population of which will have doubled by the turn of the century, can be answered only by a large-scale tanks-into-tractors operation, and the release of the 443,000,000,000 (approximately) now spent on arma- ments. Moreover—and this is important —Britain has the Prime Minister waiting and ready for the job.
That war [war on want] must be fought with the same singleness of pUrpose, the same willing- ness to sacrifice, the same mobilisation of science and production that would characterise a war between nations. For what is at stake is not destruction and death, but a fuller life in the material and spiritual sense for the whole of
mankind.
These were the words of the Rt. Hon. Harold Wilson, MP. himself a founder-member of the War on Want Movement, given in the Town Hal,I, Berne, in October, 1952, at a meeting of the Swiss Peace Council.
OLWEN BIAT1T.RSBY
5 Madelcy Road, Ealing, W5
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