My weekly comment printed in the Plymouth Herald (6.8.24) simply commemorating the dropping of nuclear bombs on human populations. It was heavily edited before publication. There was much else happening in this tense and volatile world as I wrote, but this issue must not be put to one side.

On the day of annual commemoration of the dropping of a nuclear bomb on Japan’s city of Hiroshima in 1945, the President of the United States warns of great peril today. Western countries are pulling their citizens out of the Middle East whilst sending more troops and military equipment into the Mediterranean. There are preparations for nuclear war.

Today’s remembrance of Hiroshima’s destruction by a single bomb, we remember the slow deaths of hundreds of thousands caused by nuclear radiation contaminating generations ever since and still to come. Nuclear war is not sudden death. For most it produces lingering suffering.

In 1961 the public news was full of imminent threat of nuclear war. Russia and the United States of America (USA) tensed for a nuclear stand-off, and ordinary working class families, East and West, were openly educated on the potential of nuclear war, with schools rehearsing duck & cover drills on the sound of an air raid siren. 

As USA missile bases were established ever-closer to the border of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the Soviet Union decided to put their less long-distance nuclear missiles on Cuban soil, 90 miles off the Florida coast. For 13 days in October 1962 we came ever closer to nuclear war, the brinkmanship between Kennedy and Khrushchev ramping-up the tension to an agreement minutes before midnight. The US agreed to take their nuclear missiles out of sites in Turkey, on Russia’s border, and Russia agreed to dismantle nuclear sites in Cuba, some 14 miles off the coast of the United States. 

Protests were worldwide during that period, the Labour Party amongst many mainstream political organisations leaping to adopt a “unilateral disarmament” policy, meaning each nation should disarm all nuclear weapons whatever other nations are doing. Unilateralism was the obvious political “deterrent” against nuclear use, since, if you ain’t got nukes, no-one can be so threatened by obliteration that they fire at you first. But which nuclear power would be the first to give them up?

Unilateralism did not sit well with the cold warmongers who continually organised for the chance to defeat all opposition and rule the entire world. The first period of imminent nuclear war gave way to a Cold War of continuous and immense military build-up between enemy states, the cost of such rearmament ensuring cuts to education health and welfare. But the threat of immediate nuclear war diminished enough to be sat only at the back of our minds as a distinct but distant possibility.

Between 1974 and 1980 the UK government produced TV and newspaper adverts, radio broadcasts and public information films on how to protect ourselves during a nuclear attack. The very famous pamphlet, “Protect and Survive” went through every home’s letterbox. The BBC made films of the aftermath of a nuclear exchange, the 2-part mini-series Threads still spinechilling today in its depiction of multiple mushroom clouds demolishing Birmingham, and the years of mass suffering amidst social collapse in the decades that followed.

CND produced “Protest & Survive” as a pamphlet detailing how human society collapses in nuclear war, and 250,000 of us marched in London in 1981 to stop the US siting their nuclear missiles in Britain. The historic women’s camp at Aldermaston went on to ensure US nuclear warheads left our island. 

Now, the USA is putting new nuclear warheads at US Airforce base at Lakenheath, Suffolk, with barely any notice other than a few of us CND activists. Putin has twice threatened nuclear attack on Britain as one of the foremost nuclear armed states supplying weaponry to Ukraine, including missiles that can fire deep into Russian cities. Germany is raising its army again, with words of war in Europe. 

No-one seems to be blinking an eye at all this, let alone running public education programmes on how to survive nuclear war. Will there even be a siren offering the famous “four-minute warning”. 

Russia is a brazen Capitalist, nay Gangster economy with a far-Right nationalist President wielding huge powers of repression inside the country and engaging in imperialist wars abroad. There is no “Red Menace” of the 1960’s. 

There is now global Capitalist competition for natural and Human Resources at a time of greater tension and multi-causational crisis than in the 1930’s. In many ways this is far more dangerous and volatile than the Cold War between conflicting ideologies of the post-war era. This is open global imperialist rivalry in the age of climate collapse and mass poverty.

We are now said to be in an imperialist pre-war era, although the hundreds of millions of humans currently caught-up in regional wars worldwide would disagree it is “pre” to anything other than world war that will engulf all humanity. 

To suggest that, at least by having a so-called “British Bomb” we can be mutually assured of the enemy’s destruction even if we also all die in the process, is the most bizarre and ignorant of all nationalistic nonsense. There has never been a more urgent point in history for unilateral nuclear disarmament now, before it’s too late.