Conservation, preservation and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

Thinking about the planet, nature and the environment in the modern period has been dominated by the idea that nature is separate from humanity. A dichotomy has existed between the man-made world and the ‘natural world’. Tony Watling argues that modernity, while initially wanting to ‘expand human knowledge and liberate individuals from dependence on nature’, developed into ‘a self-centred desire to dominate nature and manipulate it to humanity's needs’.Footnote ⁸ This world view prioritized human reason and technology over nature and set out to dominate, tame and subjugate the natural world for human interests.Footnote ⁹ Macnaghten and Urry argue that while this was the dominant view in the nineteenth century, a second attitude, that of ‘romanticism’, also came to the fore.Footnote ¹⁰ The romantic view sought to protect the natural world from human interference.Footnote ¹¹ This was the impetus behind the many conservationist or preservationist organizations which emerged in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote ¹² Organizations created to conserve or preserve the natural environment were based on a modern view of nature – that it was ‘out there’, divorced from, but threatened by, humanity. This view of nature remained dominant within Britain well into the post-war period. In its early years CND was part of this legacy of ‘romantic’ protest and adhered to modern conservationist ideas of the planet and humanity's relationship with it.Footnote ¹³

CND was officially founded on 15 February 1958 at a meeting at the Guildhall in London.Footnote ¹⁴ From this first meeting it was clear that CND was not going to be simply the respectable pressure group that its founders, particularly its first chairman, Canon Collins, had intended. CND's supporters and members were never one homogeneous group and, especially in this early period, it is nearly impossible to accurately gauge their number as there was no official membership of the organization until 1967.Footnote ¹⁵ We do know, however, that by 1960, 450 local CND groups had been formed and that the attendance at the yearly Aldermaston march attracted a growing number of people, culminating in an estimated 150,000 in 1961.Footnote ¹⁶ CND was the largest extra-parliamentary organization since the war and showed that British people were willing to come on to the streets to protest against nuclear weapons.Footnote ¹⁷ While CND often spoke of their work as being in the interests of humanity, the organization was clearly British and put forward a view of the world and of Britain that was firmly founded in their specific geographical and historical context.Footnote ¹⁸

CND was part of a long legacy of peace groups in Britain and was not the first organization to protest against nuclear weapons. The Peace Pledge Union was the largest peace organization in Britain after the Second World War and was the basis of the first organization in Britain to explicitly oppose nuclear weapons.Footnote ¹⁹ They demonstrated at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in April 1952, something which, six years later, would become a central aspect of CND identity.Footnote ²⁰ Before the creation of CND, anti-nuclear groups were relatively small and politically insignificant. The reason for this has been much discussed and most often attributed to the general silence about nuclear weapons, and issues related to them, in the 1950s.Footnote ²¹ The government explicitly set out to limit the amount and type of information which entered the media about nuclear weapons and the effects of their testing. As Matthew Grant argues, the British government hoped, at least in the early 1950s, that their plans for civil defence would dispel any real concerns about nuclear weapons.Footnote ²² Although it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to determine public knowledge, it has been shown that coverage of nuclear weapons was almost non-existent within the mainstream British press in this period.Footnote ²³ There were, however, a large number of science fiction films and a large amount of literature, especially in the United States but also in Britain, which discussed the peril of nuclear weapons either directly or obliquely.Footnote ²⁴

In the mid-1950s a number of new anti-nuclear groups were created.Footnote ²⁵ This was the result of a change in the amount and type of information in the public domain about nuclear weapons in 1954–1955, which Grant has described as the ‘thermonuclear moment’.Footnote ²⁶ With the successful testing of hydrogen bombs by the United States and the Soviet Union, governments and the general public alike were becoming aware of exactly the level of destruction that nuclear weapons could generate.Footnote ²⁷ In 1957 the British government announced that they were going to test their own hydrogen bomb, spurring the creation of two new organizations. The National Council for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons Tests (NCANWT), the precursor to CND, and the Direct Action Committee against Nuclear Weapons Tests (DAC).Footnote ²⁸ The NCANWT organized a march from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square to protest against the British tests at Christmas Island, while Sheila and Harold Steele, supported by the DAC, attempted to sail their boat into the test area.Footnote ²⁹ Although neither group was successful in achieving its specific aims, these different approaches clearly show the two facets of the British anti-nuclear movement – those who hoped to pressure government and those who attempted to take ‘direct action’ – which persisted throughout the 1960s.Footnote ³⁰

In the late 1950s and early 1960s CND's concerns about the effect of nuclear weapons on the environment focused on two things – fallout and its harmful impact on human health and the planet, and the impact of nuclear infrastructure, such as bases, on the beauty of natural areas. The fallout from nuclear testing had first galvanized many people to join groups such as the NCANWT and this concern remained a central aspect of CND's work. CND's first chairman, Canon Collins, shared what he described as the ‘growing and deep concern on the part of many in Britain about the dangers of radio-active fall-out from the testing of nuclear weapons’.Footnote ³¹ The impact of fallout was a growing public concern in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Potentially fatal effects had been demonstrated in February 1954 when the US test on Bikini atoll showered local inhabitants and a passing Japanese fishing boat with radioactive fallout.Footnote ³² Over the following years concerns about fallout and nuclear contamination and its impact on human health and the food supply increasingly became the subject of press coverage.Footnote ³³ In Britain this was largely seen as a concern for other parts of the world, at least until the Soviet Union tested their largest hydrogen bomb in 1961, which threatened to send radioactive clouds towards Western Europe and Britain.Footnote ³⁴ Regardless of the amount of general press coverage, fallout and the risk of nuclear contamination that it created were a perpetual concern within CND. This concern showed an early and growing awareness of the global impact of nuclear weapons on the environment and it was discussed in traditionally conservationist terms. Fallout was treated by CND as another, although much more dangerous, form of pollution. This clearly fit into long-standing anthropocentric attitudes about the environment and the view that threats to the environment are only really important if they also threaten humanity or human health.

CND's understanding of nuclear fallout is reflected in the most popular depiction of the impact of nuclear war in this period, Stanley Kramer's 1959 film On the Beach. This film, based on the book by Nevil Shute, depicts the citizens of Australia and the crew of one American submarine coming to terms with a world after a nuclear war has wiped out the population of the northern hemisphere. The film very clearly shows the prevalent fear of contamination and nuclear fallout. Nuclear war itself is not shown in the film. Instead, all of the main characters are shown dealing with the knowledge that fallout, the silent killer, is coming to get them – it is only a matter of time.Footnote ³⁵ CND took up the message of the film and the images it created to help fuel their education campaigns. Four years after its release, CND's youth group carried out an ‘On the Beach’ campaign expecting that their audience had seen the film and understood the reference.Footnote ³⁶ This film was one of the few popular depictions of the potential impact of fallout, if at the extreme end. The film had an important impact on popular understandings of nuclear war in this era and shows the anthropocentric nature of these concerns, which concentrate only on impacts to humanity and see the Earth itself as an inert non-actor.

The partial test ban treaty of 1963 did not dispel these concerns about the lingering impact of nuclear fallout.Footnote ³⁷ In 1964 CND reminded the readers of its newspaper Sanity that people continued to die in Hiroshima and Nagasaki due to the lingering effects of radiation.Footnote ³⁸ Two years later, the effects of fallout once again came to the fore as China tested their third nuclear bomb. CND discussed the ‘radio active dust clouds [that] were still floating across the world’ and the threat that this would encourage other states to resume testing.Footnote ³⁹ As in all of its campaigns, CND brought this threat of fallout back to Britain by paying particular attention to the impact of faraway tests on the UK. In 1967 CND held a demonstration outside the office of the Chinese chargé d'affaires in London when it was announced that the radioactive fallout from China's H-bomb had reached Britain.Footnote ⁴⁰Sanity asked its readers, ‘What should be Britain's attitude as she receives from the other side of the world her latest dose of radioactivity?’Footnote ⁴¹ This statement shows the continued dominance of concern about the impact of nuclear weapons on humanity rather on the Earth, but does begin to show a change in scale when thinking about the planet which saw pollution as a global rather than a strictly local issue. We will return to the importance of this issue in the next section.

Another aspect of CND's concern about nature in this period was the typically conservationist concern with the ‘beauty’ of the natural world. Macnaghten and Urry argue that the anthropocentric attitude underpinning preservationism, which accurately describes CND in this period, was nostalgic, ‘rejected aspirations for industrial progress and technological development and … looked to the English countryside and the past for a more harmonious order’.Footnote ⁴² There clearly was an aspect of nostalgia to CND's early work. As Holger Nehring has pointed out, the creators of CND were looking to ‘recreate a community in the face of widespread apathy and mass consumption’.Footnote ⁴³ Meredith Veldman, too, finds that CND shared with the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and the early Green movement ‘a suspicion of technology and technocracy’.Footnote ⁴⁴ This concern, however, was not strictly limited to the despoiling nature of nuclear weapons, as in the early 1960s the CND Constructive Service worked to help clear bomb sites and other vestiges of the last war in order to make places ‘beautiful’ and ‘useful’ once again.Footnote ⁴⁵ Fallout was also seen as a threat to the natural beauty of the landscape as it was feared that it ‘could transform our globe into an irradiated desert’.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the spring of 1969 the siting of a radio base in East Anglia became the focus for concern because it would destroy the beauty of the natural environment. The sub-heading of the article on this issue in Sanity was ‘Beauty despoiled’, and it highlighted a number of problems with the siting of the base in the village of Orfordness, including the ‘heavy traffic [which] disorganises life’, the ‘intrusion into a coastal stretch’ which had been designated ‘an area of outstanding natural beauty’, and the potential threat it caused to wildlife.Footnote ⁴⁷ These concerns employ the nostalgia for Britain as a green and pleasant land and glorification of rural Britain which were distinct cultural aspects of the post-war period. These tropes were used by CND to highlight a growing concern about the impact of nuclear weapons themselves, as well as the infrastructure associated with them, on the environment and the landscape.Footnote ⁴⁸

From its creation at the end of the 1950s and into the mid-1960s, CND was dominated by a traditional conservationist attitude towards nature and the environment. CND sought to curb the pollution of fallout which was seen as having a detrimental impact on people by polluting the natural world. It also wanted to limit the physical impact of the infrastructure of nuclear weapons because they were seen to take away from the natural beauty of particular locations. These efforts were very much in line with the romantic tradition, which sustained the modern view of the separation of the human sphere from the natural sphere and sought to protect the environment from the ravages of modern industrial society.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, it did begin to reflect new thinking about the planet as it was seen as smaller, more vulnerable and more deeply connected than had previously been thought. This shift came to be more fully realized in the later part of the decade. CND reflected the wide-ranging move away from conservationist views of the environment towards a more holistic or ecocentric understanding. We will now move on to explore how these changes took place, what precipitated them and how they were played out within CND.

CND and changing attitudes to the environment

In the early 1960s, as Macnaghten and Urry note, ‘concerns about the impacts of modernization upon nature were seen to be backward, nostalgic, reactionary and irrelevant to public policy’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Yet these concerns provided the basis upon which the deeper concerns of the more ecocentric environment movement were built.Footnote ⁵¹ Clapp argues that the new more ecocentric environmental anxiety ‘came about rather suddenly’ in 1969.Footnote ⁵² It is widely agreed that something happened in the late 1960s that enabled the shift from the dominant anthropocentric environmental groups towards those who took a more ecocentric view. What exactly did happen, however, is seldom discussed and even less frequently agreed. The qualitative change in environmental movements in the 1960s feeds into larger debates about the decade. The 1960s in Britain are generally seen as the decade of ‘permissiveness’, when social and cultural mores were in flux and ultimately underwent radical transformations.Footnote ⁵³ This was also the period of affluence when increasing numbers of working-class people could, and did, move out to the suburbs, or indeed the countryside, and there were increasing calls to limit this encroachment into ‘natural’ Britain.Footnote ⁵⁴ Some scholars draw a link between the 1960s counterculture and the transformation of environmental attitudes.Footnote ⁵⁵ Lanthier and Olivier argue that the counterculture was crucial in developing a challenge to ‘the general anthropocentric conception of mankind as exploiter of nature’ which was so characteristic of the new environmental movement.Footnote ⁵⁶ This section will examine some of the competing explanations for this change in dominant attitude from anthropocentric to ecocentric during the 1960s before looking at how this shift manifested itself within CND. CND was on the front line of this shift as it was one of the first groups to clearly see and articulate the impact of nuclear weapons; however, internal divisions about what type of organization they should be meant that while CND had helped pave the way for a new type of environmental movement, they were quickly outstripped by these new organizations.

In trying to identify why the 1960s witnessed this shift in environmental thinking, some scholars have pointed to specific events as catalysts in changing the hegemonic view of planet Earth and humanity's relationship with it. Macnaghten and Urry pinpoint 1962 as the date when the ‘perception of the emergent “environmental threat” as being of global proportions’ began to emerge.Footnote ⁵⁷ Two key events during this year are often highlighted. The first is the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. This book was undoubtedly crucial for the emergence of the environmental movement in the United States, but its direct impact on Britain is harder to determine. Also, as de Steiguer has argued, ‘Rachel Carson's book simply confirmed public suspicions and caused pent-up anxieties to be unleashed’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Where these concerns came from, however, is not discussed. The year of the publication of Carson's book also saw the world come as close as it ever would to nuclear war with the Cuban missile crisis.Footnote ⁵⁹ This crisis showed how fragile the world really was, yet it is often overlooked in discussions about changing perceptions of the environment. In Britain, Meredith Veldman cites the publication of Barbara Ward's book Spaceship Earth in 1966 as initiating the shift to ‘an eco-activist rather than conservationist perspective’.Footnote ⁶⁰ There were also a series of environmental disasters in the late 1960s, including the Torrey Canyon disaster, the worst oil spill in Britain to that point, off the coast of Cornwall in 1967.Footnote ⁶¹ Lanthier and Olivier are critical of this sort of explanation as it supposes ‘that humans have, a priori, a consciousness that needs only to be awakened’.Footnote ⁶² Threats to the environment and environmental degradation were not new in the 1960s, nor were concerns about them.Footnote ⁶³ It was not the destruction of the environment itself that was changing in the 1960s. Therefore other, perhaps deeper, reasons are needed to understand this shift.

Two main arguments have been put forward which, it is argued, enabled these specific events to precipitate the shift in environmentalism towards a more ecocentric view. The first of these sees post-war technological advancements, or modernization, as leading to changing attitudes towards the environment. Anna Bramwell points to the post-war ‘mood’ of reconstruction and growth which prioritized ‘capitalist industrialization, modernization and technological progress’ as fundamental to this shift in attitudes towards the environment.Footnote ⁶⁴ For Christopher Rootes one of the key reasons for this shift was the post-war growth in communications technology. Television and film made it easier for people to see the effects of pollution and deterioration of the natural environment more generally.Footnote ⁶⁵ The media also, arguably, made it easier to conceive of faraway people and places as closer, more easily accessible and, therefore, more important. The ease of access to communication technology and travel made the world seem smaller, which, as noted above, was quite important in changing attitudes towards, and views of, the planet.

The second reason given for the changing attitude towards the environment has been the ability to visualize the planet as a single entity. NASA photography was instrumental in showing people the Earth in a new way. Macnaghten and Urry point to a photograph taken by the Apollo 17 crew in 1972 called Blue Planet as cementing the ‘idea of the fragile and vulnerable one earth’.Footnote ⁶⁶ A more in-depth analysis of the importance of the Apollo missions in changing views of the planet is provided by Robert Poole. He argues that a photograph, named Earthrise, taken by the astronauts in Apollo 8 at Christmas 1968 was ‘the tipping point, the moment when the sense of the space age flipped from what it meant for space to what it meant for the Earth’.Footnote ⁶⁷ He argues that the ‘idea that the Earth was a finite system which needed to be carefully managed … only really took off when the sight of the whole Earth gave humanity a picture to think with’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Benjamin Lazier, too, argues that these photographs of the Earth prompted a crucial re-examination of the relationship of humanity with the planet. He talks about the ‘Earthrise era’ as providing an ‘earthly vision’ which allowed people to imagine the Earth as a whole and says that ‘our ideas and institutions about inhabiting the world are now mediated through images’ of the Earth as a whole.Footnote ⁶⁹

All of these events and shifting ideas certainly shaped the way that people in the West viewed the planet – locally, nationally and internationally. They helped to galvanize people to action and encouraged them to join activist or campaigning organizations. However, all of these events and ideas built on a shift that was the result of the nuclear age. It was the nuclear age which created the fertile ground within which these events triggered the growth of a new kind of environmental concern. Nuclear weapons altered the power dynamics between humans and nature, which precipitated this view of the Earth as a single organism of which humanity was a part rather than being separate from it. While nuclear weapons were used for the first, and only, time in 1945, it took a number of years for their implications to permeate society and begin to fundamentally alter people's beliefs about the world around them, and their place within it. As we saw in the previous section, knowledge about the impact of nuclear weapons testing and nuclear fallout was only beginning to permeate popular culture and the media in the late 1950s and was increased by the activity of CND in the late 1950s and early 1960s.Footnote ⁷⁰ Changes in public attitudes often take many years, sometimes even a generation, to be fully realized, and it was the changes precipitated by the nuclear age which laid the foundation upon which singular events in the 1960s galvanized people to create environmental activist organizations using a more ecocentric view.

CND was on the front line of this change. Its members were much more clearly informed than the general public about nuclear weapons and their effects. But there was also a limit to how much CND could or would get involved in issues that were seen to be ‘beyond the bomb’.Footnote ⁷¹ After Canon Collins resigned as chairman in 1964 there was more room for CND to take up issues other than the bomb, although the boundaries of the organization, what issues they would take up and what were seen to be ‘beyond their remit’ continued to be the subject of heated debate into the 1970s. The division within CND, which had always existed, has been attributed to a variety of factors, including an urban/rural divide and a clash of generations.Footnote ⁷² While it is true that both an older generation and a more surburban one often argued that CND should stay single-issue and focus solely on the bomb, the division which emerged in the late 1960s is a manifestation of the changing mindset or world view that was the result of the nuclear age. Those who argued that CND should stay single-issue saw the world as one in which there could be discrete actions in particular locations which did not necessarily affect the whole world. While these members of CND were deeply embroiled in an activity – opposing the bomb – which was clearly a product of the nuclear age, their world view was not. Those who held a more holistic world view and plan for CND could not separate out issues as they saw the interconnectedness of all issues within a single world system which included the planet itself. Despite these organizational limitations, CND was an important space within which new ideas about the planet and humanity's relationship with it could be articulated and discussed.Footnote ⁷³ In January 1964 it was argued within the pages of Sanity that ‘nuclear age politics’ necessitated the isolation of the nuclear issue from all others. Yet increasingly over the course of the 1960s a strain of argument within CND claimed that the ‘nuclear age’ had fundamentally changed the world and under this new paradigm all things were connected.Footnote ⁷⁴

The full realization of this shift in views was seen under the leadership of Malcolm Caldwell, who took over as chairman of CND in 1968. Caldwell was a lecturer in Asian studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and an expert on South East Asia. He was of a different generation than Collins and had lived his most formative teenage years in a world with the nuclear bomb. He was one of the first, and certainly one of the most vocal, advocates within CND for the organization to take seriously the nuclear threat to the planet, not just to humanity or to Western civilization. He forcefully and continually voiced the opinion that the world was fragile, that it was one single entity that was under threat from human technology. From the mid-1960s he argued that the ideological disputes of the Cold War paled in significance compared to the threats that were posed to the environment. He warned that on the current course of ‘irrational use of land and forest … disaster is inevitable’, and reminded readers of CND's newspaper Sanity that ‘the world is all we have’.Footnote ⁷⁵ In 1969 Malcolm Caldwell called the bomb ‘the very symbol of everything that is wrong and sick in modern technological society’, and saw it as the archetype of the ‘squandering of nature's wealth’.Footnote ⁷⁶

Caldwell clearly articulated the new ecocentric view of the environment. He argued that the bomb should not be isolated from the ‘other manifestations … of our contemporary crisis’. Instead, he saw the bomb as a threat to civilization and survival alongside many other ‘material threats’, including ‘the private motorcar, supersonic aircraft, DDT, oil slicks, hastily-marketed drugs, pesticides, [and] atmospheric pollution’. Seeing the bomb in this light, he argued, meant that opposing it was ‘part of the broader campaign against all the technological tyrants that increasingly warp our lives and blight our human-ness’. He advocated a retreat to ‘voluntary simplicity’, in response to the ‘emptiness, anxiety and terror of affluence’.Footnote ⁷⁷ This critique of technology, according to Lanthier and Olivier, was fundamental to the new environmental movement.Footnote ⁷⁸ For Caldwell, the ‘nuclear age’ had shown the ‘true precariousness of [humanity's] tenure on earth’, and he argued that the most significant development of the 1960s was the ‘revolt against science’, which he thought could be seen in the fewer number of university students entering scientific or technological courses. Even the ‘politically apathetic’, he asserted, had ‘stood up in their thousands to reject supersonic bangs, new airports, [and] inhuman motorways’.Footnote ⁷⁹ In his assessment of what CND needed to do at the beginning of the 1970s, Caldwell saw one of the key problems of international relations in the previous decade as the ‘accelerated depletion of global resources’, along with the hardening of nuclear alliances and ongoing militarization throughout the world.Footnote ⁸⁰

Others within CND agreed with Caldwell's views about the link between nuclear weapons and the environment, although they did not necessarily agree that CND should take up the issue. Sheila Oakes, who was chairman of CND in 1967–1968, argued that nuclear weapons were related to a raft of other problems, which she identified in the autumn of 1969 as ‘the population explosion, environmental destruction/contamination/pollution … [the] irresponsible use of irreplaceable natural resources … [the] abuse of technology … poverty … [and] race hatreds’.Footnote ⁸¹ Yet Oakes saw these as issues that individuals should take up outside CND. Many people agreed with her on this point. Some of them continued to focus on the work of CND, seeing it as fundamental to all other issues, while others joined new groups committed to protecting the environment because they saw this – the whole Earth as one system to which people belonged – as the most fundamental issue. The debate within CND was not about the importance of or connection between issues, but about whether the organization could be effective if its scope was widened beyond the bomb.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s the argument within CND about where the boundaries of the organization lay was won in favour of taking a more global attitude – both in geographic terms and in terms of seeing the interconnections between issues. This change reflected the realization of the nuclear age, and the coming to terms with its implications. In 1971 Nigel Young, a CND supporter, found the fact that ‘very many CND activists have turned to wider concerns with the whole ecology – not merely with the nuclear threat, or C[hemical and] B[iological] W[eapons], but the whole range of crises in the human environment’ – to be an advantage rather than a disadvantage to the organization.Footnote ⁸² By getting involved with these people and organizations, ‘CND could play a critical role in placing the nuclear threat where it should be – at the top’ of all of these groups. He wanted CND to ‘make our presence felt’ rather than withdraw to pressuring members of government only about the bomb.Footnote ⁸³ Despite the fact that this more ecocentric view was coming to dominate within CND there were still those who took a more anthropocentric view, seeing that it was important to protect the planet from nuclear weapons, but mainly because this would benefit people.Footnote ⁸⁴

In the early 1970s CND's activities were most easily being broadened beyond nuclear issues in the direction of widespread environmental concern. Nuclear testing was still seen as a cause for concern in 1971 when CND reported that fallout from before the 1963 partial test ban treaty was still affecting British crops.Footnote ⁸⁵ But it was not just nuclear weapons that were an environmental threat. An article in Sanity in July 1971 found that ‘the greatest cause of pollution is war and the preparation for war’ of all kinds.Footnote ⁸⁶ This, therefore, encouraged CND to be more than just an anti-nuclear group, but an anti-war group and an ecologically minded one at that. In the summer of 1971 CND was even considering ‘affiliation to environmental groups’.Footnote ⁸⁷ More wide-ranging environmental concern was being now being voiced throughout CND.Footnote ⁸⁸ Even those who argued that CND should stay focused on the bomb were now talking about the planet as a single entity in need of protection. In August 1971, CND was even promoting ‘“contraception” to cut down on the number of unwanted babies and the environmental impact of too many people’.Footnote ⁸⁹ It was now the planet which needed protecting from people rather than people who needed to be protected from the activities of other people. Within CND there had been a shift in dominance to a more ecocentric attitude which saw the Earth as worthy of protection in its own right regardless of the impact on people.