DEMOCRACY
T the deepest level, this is what
AS has been about. It has been an assertion of public politics, by direct participation, against an increasingly bureaucratic political system and an orchestrated communications system, CND has tried to articulate, in the few simple public ways that are open to it, an idea of society which will, in the future, become at once more complex and more effective. Simply, we have tried to say that we are all responsible for the decisions taken in our name, and that we accept this responsibility, in the most direct and open way. What we are saying is relevant to the whole range of social decisions, but it is not surprising that we are saying it, first, about nuclear politics. The most obvious reason is that all our lives are at stake, in this choice between peace and war. But there is a deeper and more significant reason. The existence of nuclear weapons, and the necessary character of nuclear Strategy, are the public evidence of the real political nature of our kind of democratic society. What we are saying, ultimately, is that you can ve nuclear weapons, or you can have democracy, but you cannot, in Practice, have both. The reasons for this are commonly and _ perhaps deliberately overlooked. The rhetoric of the bomb is that it imposes, by its very character, the most centralised and arbitrary kind of politics ever seen in the modern world. The decisions about war and peace, even in the two world wars of this century, have been made, in the democratic societies, by some kind of parliamentary process, and because of their time-scale have been subject to some kind of parliamentary and public challenge and discussion. The necessary timing of nuclear war allows no such Process, At extreme Points of crisis, decisions have to be made in a matter of hours and minutes, because delay could be the invitation to annihilation. The complicated and useful Strategic arguments of the last few years represent an attempt to insert controls and delays into what, at a military level, is a process of incredibly rapid dec-
and the BOMB
by Raymond Williams ision and development. All such devices are welcome, and need further extension. In this respect, we are prepared to go step by step. But while nuclear Weapons, and above all their long-range missile-carriers continue to exist, the concentrated nature of political crisis, and the irrevocable ~ character of certain kinds of decision, exist also. Only nuclear disarmament, in the end, can regain for us even our customary space for public decision.
But the political situation is even graver than this analysis indicates. The spread of nuclear weapons, to new nations, can only be stopped by measures of disarmament. In a world moving out of colonialism, a world of new responsible nations, the reservation of nuclear weapons to the existing great powers is not only _ politically indefensible but Politically — impossible. While a strategy backed by nuclear weapons intervenes, as it is now continually doing, in precisely this vast process of the struggle for national independence, it is stupid to expect a distribution of the most powerful weapons according to the old patterns of world power to be left unchallenged. Proliferation, we all know, increases, in one Sense, the dangers of nuclear war. But the reservation of nuclear weapons to a few favoured nations is already Politically intolerable. For what seems a good and honourable reason — stop the spread of these ultimate weapons — we can find ourselves arguing that the effective centres of decision in world politics should remain where they now are: in a few favoured capitals. The extension of freedom of political decision is thus again opposed by considerations springing directly from the terrible character of the weapons themselves. We have to remind ourselves, not only that these weapons are too dangerous to be in many hands, but they are at their most dangerous when they are in too few hands, and are used as factors of Political pressure or domination. € only rational Policy, if we believe in the tights of men to make their own decisions about their own lives, is a policy of general nuclear
disarmament, Otherwise, terrified by
our own creations, we try to fix on
the world our own choices of
stability and relationship, and there-
by create the political situation in
which there is actual danger of war.
And then if we try, within these
patterns of our own nostalgia or
ideology, within this attempted
tigidity, to rationalise Matters of
political and military control and
decision, the area of actual demo-
cracy shrinks almost to vanishing
point. The ultimate decision, it is
said, must be made at the centre of
alliance. The character of the
weapons, their elements of retri-
bution and suicide, argues power-
fully for this reservation to the ulti-
mate centre of power. But then this
centre of power is beyond our
Political reach altogether: an office
in another country, within a maze
of offices and distant communi-
cations: the final expression, in its
receding complexity, of the Teal
Political character of our society:
already shaped in this way by the
prolonged attempts to control and
manage democracy, but given its
final and brutal impress by the
character of the weapons this precise
society has created.
Is it then any wonder that, com-
mitted to democracy and seeking to
extend it, we have come into the
Streets and identified the bomb as
our enemy? In its role in great-
power politics, it is the enemy of the
developing democracy of our world
society. In its centralisation and
magnification of power, it is the
enemy of the democracy we had
thought assured by our political
forms born in a different world. In
its scale and expense, leading to
rigid military alliances, it is the
enemy of national independence and
initiatives. When we say “Ban the
Bomb” we are not simplifying, we
are identifying. We are taking the
most evident fact and mark, in our
world, or all the forces that oppose
man’s aspirations to responsibility
and participation, in what could be
his own world.
So, though we shall go on study-
ing, we shall also continue to march.
We will take part, with anyone, in
/continued ‘over