Pacifism by the Numbers

Somewhere in the States they've got a button painted red,

If anybody sits on it, we'll all of us be dead.

--C.N.D. Marching Song

The annual rite of spring in Britain is fast becoming the Aldermaston march. For the fourth Easter in a row, thousands of Britons turned out to hike 54 miles from the site of Britain's nuclear weapons research headquarters to rally in London's Trafalgar Square, though many cut in only for the last few miles. Parents pushing baby carriages, barefoot teenagers, businessmen and clergymen, there were more marchers than ever before--some 14,000--and this year another batch began its assault on London from another direction, outside the gates at Wethersfield, site of a U.S. Air Force base. In kilts and quilts, tights and jeans, marching to bagpipes and jazz, they ranged from beatniks to such U-types as socialite Penelope Gilliatt, Sunday Observer film critic and wife of Antony Armstrong-Jones's best man and five Eton schoolboys carrying a suitably supercilious banner: "Even Eton Says Ban the Bomb." The common purpose of all the marchers: to make publicity for the unilateral nuclear disarmament of Britain and an end to NATO bases on British soil.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament made militarylike preparations for the pacifist pilgrimage. Marchers got nine pages of advance instructions (e.g., "Don't bring very young children or dogs," "Don't wear anything that will distract the attention of the would from our great issues"). Delegations from towns and foreign countries were issued varicolored identifying arm bands. Trucks carried baggage. An ambulance corps was on hand to minister to blisters on the fourday hike. Mobile canteens provided tea and cakes at cost. Overnight the demonstrators slept in rented schoolrooms, man and maid often bedded down side by side on bare floors.

The Damp Crocodile. Rain was falling as the marchers entered London, and the Daily Telegraph's Peter Simple acidly described the march as "a damp crocodile, four-fifths of them teen-agers living on sausages, posing for photographs." But many were sincere pacifists and idealists. Inevitably, too,,some Communists joined the march, and Moscow and Peking radios gave the demonstrations a big play as symbolizing British sentiment.

Other samplers of British opinion guess that only some 8-10% of Britons are fundamentally unilateralist, and warn against misjudging even the temper of those who march as Hitler once misjudged the fighting temper of British youth. They recall that only seven years after students in the Oxford Union overwhelmingly voted in 1933 that they would never fight for king and country, many were dying in the Battle of Britain. Some articulate Britons guide C.N.D. Among them: Angry Old Philosopher Bertrand Russell, 88; fiery Socialist M.P. Michael Foot; Transport and General Workers' Union Boss Frank Cousins; and C.N.D. Chairman Canon Lewis John Collins, 56, the politicking precentor of St. Paul's who has proclaimed as the C.N.D.'s goal "converting the Labor Party effectively and then seeing to it that it gets into power with a non-nuclear foreign and defense policy."

The New Blimps. The C.N.D. has not so much converted the Labor Party as splintered it. At the party's annual conference in Scarborough last fall, led by Cousins' huge union (1,224,000 members) bloc vote, the unions' delegates rammed through a unilateral disarmament resolution. Labor Party Leader Hugh Gaitskell refused to be bound by the resolution.

Some ban-the-bombers hope that by giving up the bomb, Britain would be spared in case of war. Others argue that even surrender is preferable to extinction ("I would rather be Red than dead"). The Manchester Guardian's David Marquand has called the ban-the-bombers "the new blimps." "The nationalism of Aldermaston," wrote Marquand, "is uncannily like that of Colonel Blimp. One of the main unilateralist arguments is that if Britain ceased to rely on nuclear weapons, other countries would be obliged to follow suit. That argument could only take root in a country which has not yet realized it is no longer a great power, and has forgotten that moral influence is a euphemism for power not actually used."

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