Now the first thing I'd like to lead off with, the last time we spoke you said that CND suddenly started to grow again at the same time you became its general secretary in 1980. What would you say were the reasons for that quite remarkable growth in that year?

I think about four or five things came together at once, er, one of them was certainly the cruise missile deployment, or the announcement of it in December of '79. Then there was the Chevaline program; it was announced that we spent all this money on Chevaline. Then, I think, Trident that we were going to spend five billion on Trident. I think that was January of '80. I think about January or February of '80, came out the

Protect and Survive,

the civil defense nonsense. And I, I think, actually, that did as much as the Cruise missiles to get things going. And, finally, there were a series of accidents, I think -- American bombers were on full alert because of computer chips failing and so on. All those things came together very suddenly and I-- actually one individual probably, probably Edward Thompson, did more with a little pamphlet called Protest and Survive, to focus all these together and, and take it off.

Roughly, during that period, you and E.P. Thompson went on a speaking tour of England. Can you describe for us the atmosphere and the mood of those meetings? What were they like?

Well, they were electric, actually, they really were. Ahm, we still have meetings, and they're good, but I--not--I don't think we've got the atmosphere that we had in those '80-'81 days. Ah, I remember going to St. George's Hall, Liverpool, that enormous place opposite Lime Street Station, that was packed, a thousand people down the stairs and probably as many upstairs, and it was just like that. People were really determined that this was their chance to stop this nonsense and they were not going to let Mrs. Thatcher get away with it and ah, that they knew the cruise missiles were pointless and dangerous, and it was a very, very, ahm, crusading, uplifting sort of spirit to be in those meetings.

What were the sort of people that were going to them?

Well, I think, all sorts, really. I mean, ah, people often ask me what the typical CND supporter would be and I'd say, probably more middle-class than working class; probably a Guardian reader rather than a Mirror reader and probably about thirty-five, married, with a couple of kids. That's, that's the sort of average. But we've got everything; we've got Pensioners for Peace, like No--Philip Nobaker was--he's dead now--and Fenner Brockway, age ninety-nine, and right the way through to--at one stage we had an organization called Babies Against the Bomb, which ah, actually consisted of their mothers rather than the babies. It went through all ages.

All right. Now, the first major rally of that year was incredibly large. Can you describe the build-up to that rally and did you expect it to be so large, at the time?

That, that--if you're talking about October, 1980, it was something that I will never forget. S'more im--impressive to me than anything subsequently. Ah, we had a debate in about March or April of '80 and I remember I said, don't let's have an outdoor rally, because we won't get enough people. The year before, in '79, we had six hundred people. In 1980, I stood out there on the plinth of er, Nelson's Column in, in Trafalgar Square and people were still coming into the square from Hyde Park, three or--and a half or four hours after it'd begun. As the dusk was settling, these great banners were still coming down. And that was about eighty thousand people and the atmosphere was marvelous. There was, er, almost no trouble at all and ah, so vast that people couldn't have imagined it. Bigger than the early days of CND in the sixties, actually, and all this in twelve months was an extraordinary thing for us.

Being up there and seeing eighty thousand people congregated in the center of London, at that time, casting your mind back to that actual event, what did you think? What horizons lay before you?

Well, anything was possible. I expected, er, short-term results and ah, that we would actually--I certainly did not think that the '83 election would go to the Tories, any more than I thought the '87 election would go to the Tories. I thought, you know, a year or two more of this and we're going to change this 'round. And you must remember that it wasn't just in London that we were getting sympathetic messages back. I think in '81, rather than '80, but in many other European capitols this was happening. In Holland, an enormous one in, in Amsterdam. And so, there was a great kind of across the world interest in the whole thing. It was in our terms, I don't think it actually faced the problem that we have here and that is the basic issue of a British independent nuclear weapon. The new interest was founded on other issues and when it came down to voting patterns, you still had this basic nationalism about Britain. But ahm, there was, it was a euphoric time, it was very encouraging.

Now, moving on from that period, some people have suggested that there were two major events that nobody's seriously considered how they affected the peace movement and the growth of CND. One was intimately connected with this country, which was the war over the Falklands, and the second one was in the other side, the suppression of Solidarity in Poland. How would you sum up the impact on the peace movement of those two events? The Falklands war must have had quite a major impact, for so long people had said they don't mean anything and now they were being used in all deadly earnest. Do you think that made an effect?

Funny, actually, in a way it almost passed us by. We had a, a major demonstration in June of 1982 in Hyde Park with 200,000 people present and the Falklands War was part of our focus of opposition, and yet we could get 200,000 people out. Ah, we had regular demonstrations every Sunday about the Falklands War, opposing the Falklands War, which were pathetic in terms of numbers, those people were not focusing on that. I, I think the impact of the Falklands War on us was, was not just the sense of incredulity, that we were actually sending a fleet to sort out a problem that could have been sorted out through the U.N. or whatever, ahm, but the, the damage it did for us was that it prepared the grounds for Thatcher's victory in the '83 election, that on that she strode back to power as a the strong woman and we'd really forgotten how shallow is the, is the ground above nationalism in people's minds. And this brought her back. So, that was the effect of the Falklands War on us. On the other one, I'm not sure. I mean, the, the issue of independent activity in the eastern bloc has been a constantly unresolved problem within CND and the peace movements. We, we've always championed independent peace activists in the socialist countries if they're in conflict with their Peace Committees. The Solidarnosc thing was somewhat peculiar, I mean, there were elements around Soli-Solidarnosc who were actually urging more missiles in the west, er, and of course we weren't partners with that at all. So there's always been a difficult kind of relationship ahm, which is now improving. I would have thought the eastern event that had most impact on us was actually Chernobyl, because Chernobyl, ahm, made people realize that a nuclear weapon is a gun that fires in two directions. How can you use one if you're going to get er, your lands in--affected by radiation a thousand miles away. And it gave you the idea of the im--the instability of it all; an accident can happen. Ah, and that any country with a nuclear power station is actually already a hostage to someone else's attack with even conventional weapons on the power station. So I think Chernobyl did more to change us than er, reactions to Solidarnosk and the other peace groups.

But you wouldn't have said that the very fact--it wasn't russian tanks, but there was clearly a Russian-backed almost the form of a military coup in Poland. You don't think that that strengthened the arguments of the right?

No. I think, Af-Afghanistan did, I mean, th-the-there we heard endlessly about Afghanistan. This was the reason why we broke off negotiations and so on and so on and so on, Afghanistan. That, that dominated the whole thing. You had constantly to put yourself in a position of appearing to be indulgent to the Soviet Union if you gave any kind of an explanation that was at all rational for what happened in Afghanistan. But, but I don't think that the Solidarnosc thing had the same effect on the public thinking as Afghanistan did.

Now, going on from that. You've already mentioned that perhaps the most crucial event was the election in 1983. I saw an article two years ago that was an examination of public opinion polls over the period of the '83 election, looking at the number of people who supported unilateralism or those in favor of disarmament. What was the most immediate impact on you of that election campaign? Not so much the the victory at the end, but the campaign itself as you were suddenly confronted with a serious debate. They took the battle back into your own ground.

My most memorable reaction to all that was the way in which the media saving your presence in this country can turn things around. Ahnm, there was no debate at all. There was one phrase which the Conservatives invented, very damaging and very effective, "one-sided disarmament." I counted sometimes, people would produce that phrase thirty and forty times in a, in a twenty-minute speech. This is what banged home ... argument. I mean, we're not one-sided in the world, we're a satellite of one of the superpowers. This is what was said endlessly, plus all the very damaging material which people like, like Michael Heseltine were quite improperly digging up and distorting about communist influence and so on. It's the time when Dr. Lunz said that we had received six million pounds from the Russians in one year. I mean, I, I was quite naive up to that stage and I more or less thought, well, public debate is debate and you know, the best chap wins it on good arguments. And I suddenly realized when you come up to it against power, power will squash you if it possibly can, without any argument at all, and I think that's what I learned from the '83 election. You've got to realize how unscrupulous people will be, discussing these things. I think it's changing a bit now, because, because we've, I think, kept our heads and got on with the arguments. I think the, the argument's beginning to move in our direction, but in '83, Falklands plus that kind of manipulation meant that we were off the map, as far as the election was concerned.

The Heseltine view that we had is that what he did was to change the agenda of debate, that instead of the argument being about whether cruise or pershing were a good idea, it was about whether or not the British people wanted to belong to NATO. what's your reaction to that interpretation of what happened?

I don't think that's true. Ahm, ahm, because ah, er, in CND there's always been a division, which you know I've called fundamentalists and realists. I call myself a realist and er,and Heseltine knows perfectly well that we've called for the unraveling of NATO and the Warsaw Pact in order to get the component parts out. It would clearly be illogical for us to say that we want to stay in NATO forever, but the idea of getting out of NATO tomorrow has never been serious politics in CND. Er, I think Heseltine is justifying himself afterwards, not ahm, ah, b-by the way, actually ahead of time. I mean, I w-w-do--w I remember, for instance, the famous attack that the Greenham gr--the Greenham Women were meant to have made on him. There was no attack at all on him, and he said so, the night of it, ah, at Greenham, when er, when Newbury or other things are supposed to have taken place. The next day, he allowed every single paper to suggest these barbaric women had assaulted him and so forth. It was completely untrue. No, I, I think he, he prevented the argument; we never discussed flexible respon--response, which is what cruise missiles are about, we never discussed the function of an independent British nuclear weapon. We never discussed Tory multilateralism, which doesn't exist in fact. So I think he kept away from the arguments by raising issues that were not the real issues of the time.

Something else that the critics did hurl at you a great deal, and still do, different sorts of critics now. They say that the heyday, that period prior to the deployment of the cruise missile, in '82 and '83, you never really addressed the problem of the SS-20s as much as you should have done. Do you think that's a fair criticism and do you regret that position?

No, I don't think it's fair criticism. I think it's one other example of people who actually produced propaganda and then subsequently come rapidly to actually, honestly believe their own propaganda. I remember a, a peer of the realm, whose name I won't mention, ahm, saying that 'you've never attacked the SS-20s. I took the, the, photo ahm, front of our magazine, Sanity, which was the '81 ah, demonstration, on which everybody was carrying a sign saying No Cruise, No Pershing, No SS-20. Thr--three like that. And I marked out on this thing about thirty-five references to the SS-20 and I sent him back the front of Sanity, and said, you really think we never mention the SS-20. Ahm, what we tried to do--and it never helps in these things, if you're in this sort of gut-fighting, is to tell them, a rather more detatched tale. We tried to make clear that the SS-20 was actually a replacement for something, that no weapons system matches another weapons system, ahm, after all, it takes ten years from the drawing board to the production, so there's no kind of equivalence. Ah, and that ahm, the search for parity is, anyway, a part of the fuel of the arms race. Ah, I think we were right, when people actually on both sides are now agreeing with that. Er, even Gorbachev is talking about sufficiency, not parity. But I don't think it's true we didn't mention the SS-20, but we didn't, ahm, allow the argument based on the SS-20 ah, to go ahead. We said that ah, nothing matches and therefore, this kind of a, analogy of ah, of somehow the west has got to have something else is, is a numbers game which is a dead end.

Anyway, in 1983, after the election, it became quite clear that the government was still going to be committed and had not changed one iota from the deployment that eventually took place in October or November that year. You said, in 1980 you saw 80,000 people come into Trafalgar Square, you had a perspective that everything was possible. Clearly that had shifted. How were you thinking about that particular period? You knew that the cruise missiles were going to come. Didn't this really have to seem a defeat?

Oh yes, of course a defeat. Every new deployment anywhere is a defeat. Certainly. But there's a, an enormous amount of stamina, actually. It wasn't going to fade away. I remember the Sunday Times saying,

Sunset for CND

, that was their title on the, the article after deployment, or after, after the election. But it hasn't been sunset, I mean, we've continued and, and we're a substantial force in this country, still. But I think most people in my position now would take a longer-term view of things and a more internationalist view of things. I mean, se take hope from New Zealand and we take hope from Norway, and we take hope from some of the things in Spain and certainly, we take hope from Glasnost and all that. Ah, so, our per-perspective is perhaps wider, but I think, for a lot of people, it really is the long haul. I mean, that's when we started to use the phrase,

the long haul,

after the the '83 election. And it is the long haul, and it's a, it's comparative with changing the attitudes to slavery or to rights of women in society, it's something that you can't do in a very short time.

A lot of people would argue that, in fact, a disarmament policy was never going to achieve a majority support in the United Kingdom and as long as the Labour Party, for example, has a policy of nuclear disarmament, it will never be elected, and to some extent, recent experience bears that out. What would be your view about that?

I think public attitudes on anything change; they're always changing. I mean, if you'd asked me in 1930, whether we'd have an overseas aid program, I, I would have said don't be ridiculous--what's an overseas aid program? We send them missionaries, that's all they need, ahm, we send them things. Now we have a very sophisticated overseas aid program. Things change all the time and ah, and quite rightly so, and I think that eventually, as cannibalism is now seen to be barbaric, people will actually think that making peace by threatening mass murder will be seen to be barbaric, and we will move into a more humane sort of world. I think the problem with the Labour Party's policy, which I don't think c-cost them the '87 election--it may have done in '83--but in '87 I don't think it did, when you see what happened in Scotland and Wales, and ahm, how North-Si--North-South divide was the real issue. Ahm, I think the Labour Party has got to put together a policy that is coherent and last time they didn't. They didn't do anything about the enemy--that, that perception continued. They didn't do anything about ahm, using the money from weapons and weaponry to spend on hospitals and schools and the real needs of people. They didn't do anything about pointing out how ahm, irrational is a British independent nuclear deterrent, because what does it stop the Russians from actually doing, if they wanted to do something? It didn't talk about flexible response, ah, which is at, at the Achilles heel of all the NATO business, that they, you can use nuclear weapons, and finally, it, it s-supported the NATO assumption of overwhelming ss-conventional superiority, 'cause it would have spent more money on, on tanks. So, in all sorts of ways, the NATO policy was flawed and the Tories ran around it, and quite rightly, ahm, from their point of view. I think it was honestly defended by Kinnock & Co., but it wasn't a sensible package as a whole. I believe a peace-making, an internationalist policy in this country, which diverts the products and the resources of war to peace, I think can be a winner, not a loser. I really do believe that, but we haven't had one yet.