Yes, mentioned flexible response twice, in so far, what's your critique of it as a doctrine. I mean how would you sum it up as a doctrine?

I think it's applying 1930s concepts to a weapons system that isn't a weapon. I mean, George Kennan said you can never use a nuclear weapon. Mountbatten said the idea that you can have a limited nuclear war is ridiculous. Olof Palme, and all the people on the Palme Commission, including David Owen, said exactly the same thing. With right through to now, Rob-, Robert McNamara said the same thing. We're not talking about an artillery shell, ponk, you're talking about a cruise missile with a warhead fifteen times the size of the Hiroshima bomb. And the idea that there's a rational response at the other end, and a graduated series of steps, I know this is what they wanted to introduce in the '60s, to get away from the reality of MAD. That, uh, ultimately we're going to bash each other's society to pieces. They want to get away from that, and they invented flexible reponse, and nobody actually believes in it. And I think that, uh, it's looking thinner and thinner. But it's quite a different, uh, strategy, than MAD, i.e., to have nuclear weapons to prevent nuclear attack. That's supposed to be the idea. It's actually using them as field pieces. Uh, well that assumes a limited nuclear war, and I think that's ridiculous. But we're not, we, we, in CND are trying that people like the Labor Party and, and other groups aren't really hammering this one in a way I think they should.

Clearly when you started to become leader of the CND, leader of the general sector and become deeply involved in the movement, you had to some extent probably educate yourself in that whole body of nuclear doctrine and war fighting strategy and deterrence theory, there's an enormous industry of now. What was your impression as you started to get into the literature and into the minds of the deterrent theorists? How do you perceive that? What was your view of that whole infrastructure of thought?

I thought it was extremely clever. But it was a kind of lunatic cleverness. And it assumes certain ground rules, and within that, you could play their kind of chess. But if you didn't accept the ground rules to begin with, there was no game. And uh, I didn't accept the ground rules. What I found was odd. It was that so many, uh, informed people on the sort of qualities of weaponry and all that, didn't seem to me to have read quite basic documents, like the United Nations '78 report on, on disarmament, in their special session, or the '83, uh, '2 one for that matter. Or the Palme Commission report. They haven't really read the theorists of the whole thing from the other side. And people who are not lightweights, I mean, serious people, eh, even Mountbatten was never taken seriously. I mean we had to, we had to publish his speech in this country, it was never published in any newspaper, uh, his, his Strassberg speech of '79. So I felt really like a kind of, um, like someone watching a game, um, uh, which I couldn't share because I wasn't going on that pitch. Well, once you've gone on that pitch, okay, you've got to, you can't touch the ball with your hand and you can't do this and not the other, but I'm not playing that game at all, uh, because it has no end, no purpose, and that's how I felt about it.

Now, the growth of CND in 1980 and 1979 was marked by something that was to some extent different from the other period in the sixties, and it was clearly a European response to the decisions to deploy cruise and pershing. How would you sum up, or sort of how would you describe the relationships that you had with the other peace movements in Europe?

Very friendly. Uh, a bit structured. Uh, an organization was developing which meant and still means regular meetings between them. Uh, was very much a family affair. I mean, if Petra Kelly was coming over here, you know, you knew Petra, you were all friends, or General Bastian or whoever happened to be, you knew who they were, when Bartles from the I.K.V., or Peter Pergallon from Belgium, they were all mates, they'd come and stay with you and so on, so it was a very much a kind of common team affair of people who were feeling very much the same way. It was very European, in fact, very Western European. It didn't really look out to the Pacific, or India, or Africa or whatever. It was this gang in Europe that had been affected by cruise missiles. But it was a great partnership. And to some extent it still exists. I mean, there have been various ruptures, but on the whole it still does exist.

Was there any problems about a very different sort of perspective between, say, the German peace movement and the British peace movement.

We were unusual in Britain because we were monolithic, in their terms, the CND, because of the '60s, they had this, we had this structure which swelled up to take the new CND, so, and we were annual conference, and memberships and all those things. Now that's unique in Europe, nobody else has got something like that. I'm not saying it's to be envied. It's just what we've got. Um, I think the, the points of, of principle, of difference came over issues like attitudes to dissidents in the Eastern Bloc. Um, attitudes to German nationalists, which was behind some of the, uh, the German reactions. Uh, attitudes to conscientious objection, and, uh, pure pacifism, which many people in the CND don't share, some do. I mean, I would, I'm one of them, but uh, many people aren't so concerned about those things. Um, uh, so, uh, membership for instance, in Ire-, in Ireland, where the whole issue of NATO is much more real than us, their issues are quite different from ours in the Republic of Ireland. So there were definite emphasis all the time. In Italy, where, uh, you found, in effect, the communist party was in, in effect taking NATO but giving, uh, Cruise missiles. And so, uh, uh, we found it difficult to be in relationship even with radical parties in Italy. Uh, there were, ev-, every country had its own kind of agenda. ...Departed. You have to reduce me to the lay state, I'm afraid I'm no longer monsignor, but still here we are -

There's two other questions that I want to ask you now. We can discuss what we might have missed out. Somebody has put to us, in fact it's E.P. Thompson's put to us, that there is only, that it's only unilateralism that makes any sense, that the alternative is to immediately become engaged if you like, in the football pitch of the two power blocs. I mean, would you agree with that? How would you sum that up? Is there a dilemma there?

I don't know the context in which he said that. I mean, my position has always been that individuals, groups, countries, can and should take independent steps without waiting for permission, as part of the process of moving towards verifiable treaties which will be honored and respected and so on. And that's what, that's the U.N. position on the thing, and that, I think, is a sensible one. Um, I've never maintained, and most of CND hasn't, that America should suddenly get rid of all of its nuclear weapons tomorrow. Or the Soviet Union. I mean, our national unilateral step is to get rid of British independent nuclear weapons. I mean, there's lots of other things we could do independently as well. So I'm not quite sure in what context he said that. Um, I said, I think I invented once the expression that, um, a unilateralist is a multilateralist who means it. And, and I think that's coming out now. Because what we're getting post the '87 election, is clearly Mrs. Thatcher and David Owen don't actually intend to get rid of British nuclear weapons at all, full stop, as long as anybody else has got any. But the idea that there should be some kind of, uh, opposition between the two, two ideas, unilateralism and multilateralism, I've never accepted. And I think Edward Thompson, uh, is probably, I, I hope he's saying that he wants unilateralism to trigger off, uh, a, genuine changes in international attitudes and arrangements.

Finally, I mean, by the time this program goes out, there will probably have been an INF treaty signed and, probably be a few token missiles already have been destroyed as part of the long-term process of their eradication. Now, obviously, everybody's saying, look, it works, you see, we did it. We put them, we had the cruise and pershing, and then we got rid of everything, and you see our strategy is absolutely correct, you're mad, it doesn't work. What would be your response?

I think that's very boring, not what you're saying, but I think the actually argument is very boring. And if people can swallow that kind of propaganda. What actually is amazing, what actually happened? We had the SS-20s, the threats of Cruise and Pershing, the deployment of Cruise and Pershing and what did the Russians do, what they exactly said they would do in '83 and '84, they produced a lot of other nuclear weapons and put them in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, so the nuclear arms race went up ratchet by ratchet as it always has. Strength is a childish way of approaching human relationships. What has actually happened is that ideas have changed, most manifestly in Gorbachev, who's now said that this balance doesn't matter. Sufficiency's all. That you can't win nuclear wars. You can take independent steps. And uh, a whole series of other socially useful things he's said and done. On the Western side, you've got other ideas changing. I don't, I've never understood how President Reagan has changed, but clearly Reagan's position on weapons is now quite different, say, from Weinberger's. Weinberger was talking about being able to win nuclear wars on land and in space. Reagan now says you can't win a war of that sort, they must never be fought. Uh, the best convert on the West, I think, is Robert McNamara, the old Secretary of State, Defense under Kennedy and Johnson. He now says that, um, nuclear policies are bankrupt. Now that's what's happened. New thinking has come in. And I don't think that we should say in CND, it's all us, but I do think that we've contributed to some serious rethinking of the basics of the whole business. And so when I say it's boring, I mean I do find it boring when these old gentlemen who've got power will find any explanation to cobble together a, a position that justifies them. It's not intellectually intelligent, um, and uh, and I think they ought to accept the fact that ideas about these things are changing and internationalism as it, as it were is now on the way up, and nationalism has to be on the way down. And we see that in many areas. The North Sea dumping conference going on now, environmental issues, acid rain, all those those things are pushing an internationalist perspective and that of common security. And that's new, new thinking, and that's really useful.

All right. Yes, a lot of people now would argue that the strategy has been proved correct, of deploying cruise and pershing. What would you say to oppose that?

Well I just think that's a very ahm, dishonest way of looking at recent history, because what actually happened with threatening Cruise missiles is the Russians produced a lot more missiles in '83 and '84, so up went the arms race in its usual fashion. I think what our contribution has been to help the changing of ideas and now people are negotiating on a different basis, because they're saying, Gorbachev first of all, but Reagan as well, that balance doesn't matter, which is what we said a long time ago. They're saying that everybody can take independent steps, which we've been saying. That you can't fight nuclear wars, which we've been saying, that independent steps are possible. So I think it's the change of framework, both in Gorbachev, in Robert McNamara, in many people in the world in positions of power that is important and I think we've played some part in bringing that about. I think--I wouldn't say it's all us; of course not. But some part of the--in that.

Okay. And this other one was--as you say, it really grew enormously in 1980 and continued to grow throughout that period, up until -- I can remember a demonstration in October 1983 that was still exceptionally large. How difficult is it for you sustain, as a movement, that sort of momentum?

Wh-when I started as General Secretary, I actually said in the Times, I think, that I thought demonstrations were about three per cent of our activity. Our activity is public education, change people's minds. You can't sustain outdoor demonstrations of great numbers. Ahm, you come to a peak and you can't go on and it gets boring. Actually, I never want to go back to Hyde Park, I think that's all over. We've got to do something imaginative rather than just repeat the old thing. But the important thing for us is to remember is not the size on the streets; it's the numbers of individuals or groups on doorsteps, talking to people, and that is the way I think CND is now directing itself. So whether our national membership is going up or down--and it's marginally going down, at the moment--wh-whatever is happening there, I think more people are beginning to see the common sense, in general, of what we've been saying, and that's our work, our best work.

Do you want to speculate about the future at all?

Yes, fine.

We're on the threshold of an INF deal, which will remove three per cent of the weapons or the warheads- currently in existence. There's talk of fifty per cent reductions. Do you think we are on the threshold of some sort of historic change in attitudes to nuclear weapons?

I think this is a really a high-water mark and I think of--cynics are very wrong to be cynical, because here is an opportunity which hasn't existed er, since the war. Not just the destruction, but the change of ideas and moving on. There is a spirit of internationalism and I think that er, if the two superpowers are talking fifty percent cuts, we should be right behind them. We should be supporting the United Nations with its connection now between development and disarmament. There's a, there's a flood moving in a different kind of direction and I think our particular problem in Britain, the political problem, is going to be the British independent nuclear weapon, and that is beginning to look more and more out-of-place in the world today. We're now seen to be obstructing the superpowers and a, as in a way, Chancellor Kohl was in Germany, with his Pershing I's. And I--w-we, who depend entirely on the Americans for this independent nuclear weapon, have got to ourselves what in the hell is it for? Are we actually helping world peace, or obstructing it? And I think that is the main thrust for CND in the next five years.