by Andrew Brown
At the end of 1959, Khrushchev decided that the USSR had enough rockets of sufficient range that it could ‘virtually shatter the world’ and this emboldened him to make a radical cut in conventional troop strength.33 In the first few months of 1960, he was looking forward to a summit of the great powers to be held in Paris in May. He was confident that there would be an agreement over Germany and on banning nuclear tests. But his hopes and any prospect of detente with the Eisenhower administration crashed with the American U-2 spy plane shot down near Sverdlovsk on May Day. Eisenhower had reluctantly authorized the provocative, high-altitude photoreconnaissance missions over the Russian heartland to monitor progress in building and deploying inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Khrushchev, whose explosive anger often got the better of his statesman’s brain, went to Paris intent on humiliating Eisenhower, and the summit never started. The prospect of an international nuclear treaty vanished, and Khrushchev’s attempt to rekindle it at a press conference in Austria on 8th July seemed lame. He wished to ‘raise the peoples, raise the masses far struggle against those who slow down solution of the disarmament question’.34 Sage did his best to heed the WPC paymaster’s call, and the next day proposed a worldwide campaign, like the great Stockholm petition of 1950 to convene a world disarmament conference, but this time there were no signatures collected.
At the beginning of 1961, Eisenhower’s Republican administration was succeeded by the Democrat one led by J.F. Kennedy. Eisenhower’s valedictory speech warned of the dangers of the ‘military-industrial complex’, while Kennedy in his inaugural address made a plea to ‘begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction’. He held out a small olive branch to Khrushchev, when he stated ‘both sides [are] overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind’s final war’. In private, Eisenhower had become ‘entirely preoccupied by the horror of nuclear war’,35 but this did not stop him from telling Kennedy that he thought a resumption of underground tests was necessary. Kennedy at his first press conference announced that he had set up a group to work towards a new test ban treaty and his administration lost no time in questioning the prevailing doctrine of ‘massive retaliation’. Despite this he remained wary of anti-nuclear activists, especially those funded by communists, and it is doubtful whether he took any notice of the letter he received from Sage urging him to pursue disarmament and a reduction of world tension. Bernal wrote: ‘The world cannot live indefinitely under a balance of terror. The powers of destruction are already only too ample. To attempt to guard against their use by increasing them is a proved way to disaster.’36
The Western nuclear powers that entrusted their national security to nuclear weapons remained suspicious of anti-nuclear campaigners and of outspoken scientists like Blackett, Bernal and Pauling. Non-aligned nations were not threatened by them and some statesmen, for instance Nehru, became significant critics of the arms race themselves. In March 1961, Bernal made a short visit to New Delhi to attend a meeting organized by the WPC. He warned a huge crowd on the Ramlila Grounds that nuclear war in the past few months had acquired a new kind of military logic. Although there were enough bombs to kill the world population 10 times over, some in the US wanted more.
The idea is what is called the first strike must be sufficient to destroy all methods of nuclear retaliation… an excessively dangerous doctrine in itself because it puts an absolute premium on the country that is first to strike. All that is required is a moral excuse, and this moral excuse is furnished by the theory of what is called ‘the preemptive attack’, that is: if a country, let’s say the USA, claims to have found out from its intelligence agencies, from its U-2’s, or spies or in one way or another, that for instance the Soviet Union intends to attack within a matter of days, [it] attacks first in order to prevent the Soviet attack.37
Sage stated that he had read this theory in many books ‘for his own misery’, and feared that it carried a lot of weight with the new US government. At a separate meeting with the Indian Peace Council, he expressed misgivings about the new Kennedy administration. In his view, the crucial test of Kennedy would be his actions over disarmament, and ‘so far, words in favour of disarmament have been balanced by further increases and acceleration of actual and potential armaments such as Polaris and Minutemen’. President Kennedy had just increased the defence budget to include an extra two dozen Polaris submarines and double the number of Minutemen ICBMs. Bernal’s feeling was that ‘the new sophisticated and pseudoscientific military thinking which is now dominant in the Kennedy administration may contain dangers greater even than the old brutal threats of massive retaliation of the days of Dulles’.38 Kennedy was, in fact, repelled by the first-strike strategy and urged Robert McNamara, his Defense Secretary, to ‘repeat to the point of boredom’ in his speeches that the US would use nuclear weapons only in response to a direct attack or an attack on their allies, and had no intention of waging preventive war.39 Kennedy was, however, fearful that Khrushchev wanted to push the US into a nuclear conflict; he was not reassured after meeting the Soviet leader for the first time in Vienna, in June, and told a reporter from Time, ‘I never met a man like this. [I] talked about how a nuclear exchange would kill seventy million people in ten minutes and he just looked at me as if to say “So what?” My impression was that he just didn’t give a damn if it came to that.’40
Khrushchev was determinedly belligerent throughout his meeting with President Kennedy in Vienna and showed none of the thoughtful reflection that was evident when he met Bernal in China. Within weeks of the Vienna meeting, the Soviets stopped any serious negotiation at the Geneva test ban talks, and Khrushchev proposed cutting the American, British and French access to West Berlin. Khrushchev’s aims were to stop the torrent of refugees, who were leaving the communist bloc via Berlin, and to prevent the eventual reunification of Germany. Kennedy was determined to avoid the extremes of a meek withdrawal from Berlin or escalation of the crisis into a nuclear exchange. He sought to beef up US Army numbers without delay. On 13th August 1961, East German security guards began building the barbed-wire barrier between East and West Berlin that would become solidified as the Berlin Wall. In response to demands for action, Kennedy dispatched Vice-President Johnson to West Berlin and reinforced the US garrison there. The president of the WPC released a press statement referring to the ‘closing of the inter-zonal boundary’ in Berlin. He regretted the vigorous efforts ‘made by certain statesman and public figures, particularly in West Berlin, to whip up hostile feelings and to create an atmosphere in which war can become conceivable, despite the horrors that would attend it in this age of H-bomb missiles’.41 Bernal was reassured by the Soviets saying that they had ‘no intention of encroaching on the freedom of the people of West Berlin or of putting obstacles in the way of access to West Berlin’. There was, therefore, no casus belli, and the American and Soviet positions seemed ‘eminently negotiable’. In fact, both Kennedy and Khrushchev found some relief in the construction of the Wall.
Khrushchev, who at the time regarded Kennedy as a weakling, chose this moment to resume nuclear weapons’ testing. This action brought oblique criticism from Bernal and the WPC: ‘Lovers of peace throughout the world will deeply regret that the Soviet Government has however reluctantly found it necessary to resume the testing of nuclear weapons… The decision arises as a consequence of the continual attempts on one side to deal with political and negotiable proposals by threats of force.’42 Bernal laid the blame for the escalation in the nuclear stakes squarely on the NATO powers, whose preparations with respect to Polaris, multiplication of atomic bases on foreign soil and strengthening of Federal German forces all pointed to an acute danger of war. Bernal also wrote to Kennedy, Khrushchev, British Prime Minister Macmillan and General de Gaulle privately appealing to them
to stop the testing. Khrushchev replied that the Soviet Union had made multiple efforts at the UN and elsewhere to abandon testing, to which the West responded with more threats. His letter continued:
To renounce in such a situation the carrying out of measures to strengthen the defence of our country, the perfecting of the nuclear weapon and consequently its testing would mean weakening the defensive capacity of the Soviet Union and the countries of the socialist commonwealth, and I would say, weakening the position of all peoples in the world who are striving to avert war.43
Khrushchev said he was prepared to respond to the WPC call to renounce weapons testing when others did. The other leaders did not respond to Bernal’s letter. Privately, Kennedy was appalled by the prospect of resumed testing, but felt that the Russians were completely untrustworthy, since they had been actively preparing for their latest series of atmospheric tests while negotiating in bad faith in Geneva. Macmillan, who was convinced that Khrushchev wanted to avoid nuclear war, tried unsuccessfully to persuade Kennedy to keep the Geneva talks going. Kennedy’s ambivalence was plain in his indecisive instructions to the Atomic Energy Commission, but ultimately the need to signal US determination to stand up to Moscow led him to authorize a resumption in testing in the spring of 1962. At a press conference in Washington, Kennedy stated that the failure to reach an agreement on the cessation of nuclear testing that might have been an important step in easing the tension and preventing nuclear proliferation was the greatest disappointment of his first year as President.44
Although Bernal was committed to the WPC, he was well aware of the increasing popularity of international peace groups that were not aligned with any particular political system (although they all tended to have socialist or world government sympathies). Bernal’s close identification with communist-funded organizations like the WPC and the WFSW effectively precluded him from Pugwash, the most important international scientists’ group against nuclear weapons. At times differences between the communist and non-aligned groups could be sharp. When Bertrand Russell was invited to a WPC meeting in 1959, he responded scathingly: ‘Could you let me see any pronouncement of the World Council protesting against militaristic imperialism in East Germany, Hungary and Tibet? The greatest contribution that could be made towards ending the Cold War would be the abandonment of militaristic imperialism by Russia and China.’45 Whatever Bernal’s personal loyalties, his inclination was always towards inclusiveness: he tended to like people even if he did not agree with them. There was also the geopolitical reality that an overtly communist peace movement was bound to fail in North America and Western Europe.
In September 1961, a ‘Peace Pugwash’ was held in London. This was an event painstakingly arranged by Bernal, Canon Collins (the clerical head of Britain’s CND), and Homer Jack, an American Unitarian minister who was the executive director of SANE (National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy) in New York. Although the Peace Pugwash was generally considered a success, one leading American pacifist remarked to Collins that while ‘people like Professor Bernal may be looking for a “united” world peace movement’ he thought such an attempt would be ‘disastrous’.46
In an attempt to build on the spirit of the London meeting, Bernal decided that WPC should organize a World Congress on General Disarmament and Peace in Moscow in July 1962. He wrote in an appeal leaflet in January.
People everywhere are protesting more and more vigorously against the threat of nuclear annihilation. Yet that threat remains and grows. New ways must be found to unite mankind in action to banish nuclear weapons from the world. 1962 can be the year when the governments, urged forward by their peoples, reach agreement on the first genuine measures of disarmament.
Disarmament – general, complete and controlled, including the destruction of nuclear weapons – is the most urgent need of our time. It is an essential step to a world without war.
Sage chaired a preparatory meeting in Sweden in May; the WPC were expecting 2,000 delegates from 90 countries to come to the Congress. There was a list of international sponsors that included politicians (Anwar Sadat, Jomo Kenyatta and Che Guevara, the Cuban Minister of Industry), scientists (among whom Linus Pauling was the most prominent), writers (Sartre and Neruda) and artists (Picasso and Shostakovich). Albert Schweitzer agreed to be a sponsor, but wrote from Africa to say he could not come to Moscow to participate because ‘it is impossible for me to leave my hospital in July, which I regret, but my heart will be with you… Public opinion all over the world must know that this movement exists and that it goes on fighting for peace in order to create a public opinion which will make it possible to realize peace.’47 Delegates’ travel expenses were to be met by a charitable fund set up by the WPC, while the Soviet Peace Committee would provide additional money to cover living costs.
The Americans started atmospheric tests again in April, and the French continued their series of underground explosions in the Sahara. Bernal accused these two governments (but not the Soviets) of ‘riding roughshod over world public opinion’ and thereby forging ‘a new spiral in the nuclear arms race’.48 The UN Disarmament Committee was still in session in Geneva, but not making any perceptible progress. Bernal wrote to all the governments involved, inviting them to either send representatives or written reports to Moscow setting out their views. One of the few to respond was the French government, which ironically had decided to take no further part in the Geneva talks. As an explanation of their position, the French sent Bernal a copy of de Gaulle’s recent press conference, in which he said that France wanted to ban the means of delivery of atomic weapons (rockets, bombers and submarines) but saw no prospect of that happening. Until such time there was such reciprocal disarmament, France would continue to test atomic weapons. De Gaulle also seemed piqued that the UN had invited so many governments to Geneva (eighteen), and said that were the conference to be confined to the four nuclear powers, ‘France would participate in it wholeheartedly.’49
One of the governments that de Gaulle would have excluded was India’s, and Pandit Nehru found himself torn between agreeing with his old friend Bernal that ‘disarmament is not only essential but is feasible’, and not wanting to make any gesture that might compromise the Geneva talks. He thought it was clear that disarmament ‘is a matter intimately connected with the fears and apprehensions of countries and cannot be dealt with purely on the logical level. There is far too much of threats from one country or the other and boastfulness of its strength. It is this attitude that has to be changed.’ Yet Nehru dare not send a representative to the Moscow congress, because that might have political implications that could impede any actual progress in Geneva. He told Sage, ‘Any pressures exercised from other directions might well result in stiffening of attitudes.’50
The World Congress on General Disarmament and Peace convened in Moscow on Monday 9th July. Bernal had courted leaders of non-aligned peace groups with the promise that their messages would be heard in the conference hall and published in the Soviet press. As a result, independent groups from Austria, Canada, Denmark, France, Great Britain, India, Italy, Norway, Sweden and West Germany joined the communist bulk of the WPC delegates. Only one US group decided to attend, but individual leaders of the American peace movement, like the Paulings and Homer Jack, came as Bernal’s personal guests. In all there were over 2,200 people from 120 countries. Bernal gave the opening address in French, and Khrushchev spoke for two-and-a-half hours at a special session on the first afternoon. Homer Jack was bitterly disappointed by what he heard.
It was a belligerent, cold war, tour de force. Only the Soviet Union wanted peace. The West was warlike. Khrushchev was wildly applauded by most delegates. He had an opportunity to give a constructive speech to an international gathering, but he chose instead to give the kind of address he would normally give to the Supreme Soviet.51
In his own remarks to the plenary session, Jack contrasted the peace movement in the United States which ‘speaks to its government’ with the peace organizati
ons of the Soviet bloc that ‘espouse the policies of their governments, whether these governments happen to be developing greater bombs or calling for disarmament’.52 The generally sullen audience cheered when he declared that West Germany should not be allowed to rearm or to have nuclear weapons, but hissed when he challenged the WPC to match their criticism of the US with a condemnation of forthcoming Soviet tests.
Canon Collins said that he had agreed to lend his name to the conference because he believed that the WPC intended to give full scope for reasonable dialogue, and thought that Khrushchev’s claim that the USSR had a monopoly of peaceful intentions was not helpful. In his view, ‘the USSR made a grave error, whatever reasons may have been advanced by her military advisers, in resuming her testing of nuclear weapons last autumn’.53 Another CND leader, the left-wing Labour MP, Sydney Silverman, also dared to criticize Khrushchev. He said ‘It is really of no assistance for the two great nations, whose quarrel may tear the earth to pieces, merely to shout contemptuous slogans one against the other… [Khrushchev’s] speech gives little hope [because he suggests] that the Soviet Union has always been right and never made a mistake.’54 Bertrand Russell suggested that every disarmament negotiator from the West, including President Kennedy, should state that ‘I am firmly convinced that a nuclear war would be worse than the worldwide victory of communism’55 and every negotiator from the East, including Nikita Khrushchev, should say the same about the worldwide victory of capitalism. Such dissident opinions had never been heard at a WPC conference before, and Jack thought that much of the credit belonged to Bernal for being ‘scrupulous in allowing freedom of speech inside the meeting’.56
Freedom of speech outside the meeting was an entirely different matter. Pravda gave a one-sided account, concentrating on material that was in line with Soviet policy and omitting any criticism of Khrushchev, the USSR or even the WPC. Representatives of the Committee of 100, a group of luminaries set up by Russell in Britain to implement a programme of civil disobedience, decided to hold an anti-nuclear demonstration in Red Square. They handed out a few leaflets couched in unilateralist terms to astonished Muscovites, before being led away by police. The demonstration was planned for Friday 13th July, and two banners were painted, one in English one in Russian reading: ‘We condemn Anglo-American tests. We demand no further Soviet tests. Let all people act against the tests.’ The march was due to start in the lobby of the Moskva Hotel, and two hundred marchers were going to pass the US, French and British embassies before returning to Red Square.