by Andrew Brown
The head of the Soviet Peace Committee, Yuri Zhukov, urged the Committee of 100 to call it off, saying it would put the embassies at risk, that pamphlets affronted the Soviet authorities and would play into the hands of hard-liners. It was agreed to stay within Red Square and not to hand out more pamphlets. In the event twenty-five brave souls marched, and there were twenty-five foreign press in front of Lenin’s tomb who took photographs. Within one minute of the banners being unfurled, they were confiscated by three Soviet citizens (who were probably from the secret police).57 The following week, Pravda carried a vigorous denunciation of the small protest by Zhukov, accusing a ‘handful’ of foreigners of going out of their way to be arrested or beaten up so that ‘they could write in the papers that peace champions were maltreated in the Soviet Union’.58
Russell was convinced by the events in Moscow that for the time being ‘any fruitful cooperation between the peace movements of East and West is unlikely’.59 By contrast, Sage in his closing address to the Congress took a much more sanguine view: ‘This Congress has been unique for the free expression that has been given everywhere to all views, both by word of mouth and in writing. I hope we shall stick to that principle and develop it further.’ He thought the major political lesson was that the wind of disarmament and the wind of national independence have got to blow together.60
In his opening address, Bernal had referred several times to Cuba, and the threat to its independence evinced by the abortive CIA-backed invasion at the Bay of Pigs the previous year. While the Congress was going on in Moscow, the first ship left the USSR carrying the vanguard of what was planned to be 50,000 troops to Cuba. Their task on arrival would be to construct concrete launching pads for dozens of ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads that were to follow in October. The perilous scheme had been hatched by Khrushchev that spring, in part as a response to Kennedy’s placing of Jupiter missiles with nuclear warheads in Turkey, in part to deter any future American attempt to unseat Castro, and to force the USA, by throwing ‘a hedgehog down Uncle Sam’s pants’, to come to terms over Berlin. He also wanted to demonstrate to the world that the USSR, not China, was still the communist top dog.61 On the morning of 16th October, Kennedy was shown photographs taken by a U-2 reconnaissance plane over Cuba two days before that revealed conclusive evidence of the missile launch pads, as well as crated Soviet bombers capable of delivering nuclear bombs. The world seemed poised on the brink of nuclear war. The American public did not learn of the crisis until Kennedy made a sombre television address to the nation on 22nd October, in which he condemned the Soviets for lying about their installation of offensive weapons in Cuba, demanded that they should be removed and announced that the US Navy would quarantine Cuba to prevent any more weapons from arriving.62
The WPC responded immediately with a message to the UN Security Council, claiming that ‘the orders given to the US Navy to stop and search all shipping to Cuba are completely illegal’.63 Bernal pointed out that the USSR and other socialist countries had been ringed for years with nuclear bases without producing the ‘hysterical military reaction which the US government is now exhibiting’. He urged the Security Council not to back US but to condemn it. The message closed by predicting a US invasion of Cuba.
With the Soviets racing ahead with missile-site construction and the assembly of their bombers, while still denying they had any missiles in Cuba, the UN Secretary, U Thant, suggested a two- to three-week delay in both the quarantine of Cuba and the Soviet arms shipments.64 Kennedy had no intention of being ‘impaled on a long, negotiating hook’65 and did not flinch. Khrushchev, believing a US invasion of Cuba to be imminent, began to pull back from the abyss. He eventually agreed to remove all Soviet weapons, following Kennedy’s secret offer to take the Jupiter missiles out of Turkey within months.
Two nights after Khrushchev announced his decision to retreat from Cuba to save the world from nuclear catastrophe, Bernal spoke about the crisis at a WPC committee meeting.
Everybody has been so frightened of nuclear war that ten times as many people as before are aware of its danger and the resources of the peace movements in the world demanding disarmament will be increased… The foiling of this attack on Cuba alone shows the importance of defending national independence. It was the national independence of Cuba at stake, successfully defended not only by the people of Cuba themselves, but by the diplomatic and military help they received from the Soviet Union. This example will encourage other countries who wish to assert independence to do so successfully.66
Sage was apparently unable to see or to admit that it was Khrushchev’s recklessness that had provoked the Cuban crisis. Philip Morrison, an American physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and subsequently became a leading critic of nuclear weapons, complained about an article that the WPC president had written on the confrontation over Cuba. Saying the piece was incomplete and dishonest and ‘too tendentious to be sober politics’, Morrison asked ‘Are you sure that WPC is not more left than the Kremlin?’67 Morrison said he expected a rapprochement soon between the US and the USSR, and ‘would hope the WPC could play a role, not necessarily more neutral, but at least more objective’.
One of the outcomes of the big World Congress on General Disarmament and Peace in Moscow was that the non-aligned groups from various countries discussed the prospect of forming their own world federation. A meeting was convened to explore this development at Oxford University in early January 1963. Forty non-aligned peace groups from eighteen countries sent delegates, who pledged to oppose ‘the testing, manufacture, and possession of nuclear arms by all nations’.68 Canon Collins, without consulting the conference organizers, invited Bernal to bring ten WPC observers to the meeting.69 When news of this arrangement reached various national groups, they were furious. Some of the US delegates had been granted visas on the express grounds that they were attending a non-communist conference, and they objected strongly before the meeting started. This raised the left’s reflex cry of ‘McCarthyism’, but when a vote on the issue was taken the Australians, Belgians, French, Italians, New Zealanders, West Germans and Yugoslavs all said they wanted nothing to do with an organization that participated in the Cold War, and the WPC observers were excluded. Sage’s friend, Ilya Ehrenburg, who was waiting with other would-be observers at the Russell Hotel in London, threatened the hapless Collins that ‘the attitude shown to the WPC representatives would make it impossible for the Soviet Peace Committee to cooperate further with the organizations represented at Oxford’.70 Attempting to mollify the WPC, another invitation was issued for them to come to Oxford after the main meeting was over, which Bernal in an open letter called ‘a deliberate rejection’. Fleet Street enjoyed the spat and the Daily Telegraph ran the headline ‘Canon Collins Stops Russian Gatecrashers’, oblivious to the point that the poor Canon had invited them.
The peace groups at Oxford coalesced into the International Confederation for Disarmament and Peace (ICDP), and their first task was to come to the Russell Hotel to bury the hatchet with the WPC. Homer Jack read out a letter of apology to Ehrenburg, who refused to accept it because he said it should have been addressed to Bernal.71 Although Bernal issued a press statement that the meeting between the two groups had been cordial and friendly, the atmosphere was rancorous; Bernal said he did not trust Jack and did not want any further discussions with the new group. Over the next few months, the WPC’s constituents lost no opportunity to attack the ICDP, and Bernal warned Khrushchev in August that such non-aligned groups ‘are really anti-Soviet’.72
The WPC soon found itself under attack on a second front. The Chinese had been unimpressed by what they saw as Khrushchev’s ‘adventurism’ followed by his ‘capitulationism’ over Cuba.73 One small way for the Chinese to show their contempt for the USSR was to attack the WPC. In May 1963, Bernal received a telegram from the China Peace Committee criticizing the evasive way that the WPC was run and threatening to discontinue financial support because the WPC was not doing enough t
o counter American imperialism. Through its actions, it had ‘become increasingly detrimental to [the] defence of world peace’.74 Sage must have felt that his truest friend for world peace was Pope John XXIII, whom he congratulated warmly for his encyclical ‘Pacem in Terris’. After reading it, Bernal sent the following message to the Vatican.
Peace workers the world over welcome with great joy your historic encyclical Pacem in Terris. It gives them immense encouragement and renewed heart to pursue the great humanitarian goals you enumerate… immediate ending of nuclear tests, banning of nuclear weapons, halting of the arms race, progress towards complete and controlled world disarmament, and an end to racial discrimination and the denial of human equality.75
The machinations of the various peace groups became irrelevant after the Cuban missile crisis because both Kennedy and Khrushchev recognized the advantages of reaching an agreement to end nuclear testing. This message was carried to Moscow in December 1962 by Norman Cousins, the editor of the Saturday Review who had been one of the founders of SANE with Homer Jack. Khrushchev freely admitted to Cousins that the Cuban crisis had scared him – ‘Of course I was scared. It would have been insane not to be scared.’76 Yet despite hopes on both sides that a test ban treaty could forestall global proliferation of nuclear weapons (especially in China), serious negotiations did not start until the early summer, when they were given life by Kennedy’s speeches at home and on his European tour. The Partial Test Ban Treaty was signed by the Americans, British and Russians in the Kremlin on 25th July 1963. The French refused to take part. Khrushchev had seen no reason to include China, on the verge of possessing nuclear weapons, and his refusal to allow international inspections meant that underground testing was still permissible. While much of the world breathed a sigh of relief, the Chinese denounced it as a ‘dirty treaty’. Liao Cheng-chih, the vice-chairman of the China Peace Committee, called it ‘a big conspiracy in which the imperialists and their hangers-on join hands against the socialist countries, against China and against the forces of peace of the whole world’.77 Bernal sent a message of congratulations to the three world leaders that he thought reflected the overwhelming feelings of the WPC membership.
Limited test ban agreement is welcomed by millions of peace supporters as halting poisoning of the environment and as a vital step towards the abolition of all nuclear weapons and towards general disarmament.78
He was outraged when the Americans immediately started underground testing again, in what he viewed as a direct blow against the spirit if not the letter of the Treaty. He stated simply that ‘The resumption of underground nuclear testing by the US government within a few hours of the conclusion of the Moscow partial test ban agreement is an affront to humanity.’79 The American action was bound to inflame the Chinese further, and Bernal was already concerned that their open hostility towards the Treaty might cause the WPC to break up. He wrote to Khrushchev asking him for his advice on how to handle the Chinese, saying that above all he wanted to follow Joliot-Curie’s principle of promoting peace all over the world.80 Khrushchev answered that while the WPC should not align itself with the policy of any government or party, Bernal must ‘know what a dangerous position the Chinese leaders are taking in problems of war and peace. Their statements against peaceful coexistence of states with different social systems, against the banning of thermonuclear tests, against disarmament, against other important problems concerning the relaxation of international tension undermine in effect the foundation of the world peace movement, the unity of its ranks. The world public opinion will not understand it, if the WPC in such a situation failed to express its attitude to the stand taken by Peking, which is inconsistent with the basic principles of the movement. It seems to me that one should not resort to their style and form of polemics, but what is necessary is to explain profoundly and seriously to all the forces of peace, the Chinese public opinion included, the great harm that this position is inflicting to peace.’81
In general, Khrushchev was optimistic after the signing of the ‘Moscow Treaty’. He told Bernal he would be sending two comrades, ‘K. and V.’ to London to discuss its implications with him. Khrushchev was aware that Sage had been ill: he was very complimentary about the achievements of the WPC under Bernal’s presidency, and sent his ‘wholehearted wishes for the speediest and complete recovery’.
In fact Sage was not well enough to attend the next WPC presidential committee meeting later in September, but did send a message to his colleagues. He referred to the Partial Test Ban Treaty as something that ‘in itself may not be very much, but as a sign for the future it can be made a turning point from which we may never have to regress… We cannot be, logically, for or against a treaty on the grounds that it may or may not be followed up. It is our business to see that it is followed up.’82 In an attempt to placate those who saw the Treaty as fixing the lead that the US already held in the arms race, a lead that they might extend through underground testing, Bernal said that he had ‘gone very carefully into its technical and military implications, and can find no basis for the view that it will give the US a one-sided military advantage’. Referring to China, he warned that ‘No disarmament policy can be fully effective unless negotiated with and unless participated in by the government of the People’s Republic of China.’ He encouraged the WPC to bring maximum pressure to bear on the UN and its member states so that China could take its rightful place in the UN and in the disarmament talks. In his opinion, ‘the participation of this great nation, comprising a quarter of the human race, is indispensable for the solution of world problems’.
At a subsequent WPC conference in November, Liao Cheng-chih angrily attacked the WPC for telling ‘the oppressed nations and peoples to disarm… [as] a fraud with no other aim than to make the world peace movement abandon its task of fighting against imperialism’.83 Liao was barracked by the Soviets during his speech, which earned them a rebuke from Bernal, but there was no way to straddle the widening split in communist ideologies. The following summer at the World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen bombs, the Chinese poured scorn on the idea that ‘nuclear weapons rather than imperialism headed by the United States’84 was going to cause a nuclear war. In October 1964, China exploded its first atomic bomb and was roundly condemned by the WPC, with its built-in Soviet majority, for adding ‘to the radioactive contamination of the atmosphere’85 and to the risk of nuclear proliferation.
Sage thought, above all, ‘the partial test ban agreement gives great encouragement to the peace forces, and to people generally, for it shows them that their consistent action over many years can achieve results. Thus, it heartens them for further struggle.’86 While the first part of this statement was almost certainly true – the popular peace movements did have a significant influence on the behaviour of their governments – the second part was not. The period of the late fifties and early sixties was the high-water mark for the world peace movement. One reason surely was the Partial Test Ban Treaty reduced the environmental and public health risks and therefore the general level of fear. Only the truly committed kept up the campaign against nuclear weapons.
During the early 1960s, Bernal made frequent references to the escalating war in Indochina. He first wrote to President Johnson in 1964 to express his ‘bewildered disappointment’ at the decision to increase greatly the number of US troops in Vietnam, while recognizing that the new President had inherited this problem from his ‘predecessor’. He urged him instead to start negotiations based on the 1954 Geneva agreement in order to alleviate the great suffering of the Vietnamese people and the mounting losses.87 A year later, Bernal was no longer bewildered, but angry:
All who cherish peace and humanity must condemn the brutal abominations of President Johnson’s war in Vietnam. Gas and napalm are used against combatants and non-combatants alike in South Vietnam… Savage air attacks, mounting in weight and range, are carried out on the flimsiest of pretexts, against the Democratic Republic of [North] Vietnam, a country with which
America is nominally at peace… The world looks on in horror at the US Government’s violation of all canons of international law.88
At the eighth WPC conference, in Helsinki in July 1965, on ‘Independence and general disarmament’, the Vietnam War was Sage’s primary concern. In his opening address to the 1,500 delegates, he characterized the conflict as ‘a particularly brutal war of aggression… being waged by American forces against the people of both South and North Vietnam, one which threatens to escalate into a nuclear world war’.89 He went on to lambaste US foreign policy.
The US government, and those who support it, would do well to remember that no solution will be acceptable to world opinion which does not secure, as well as peace, the full independence of the people of Vietnam; and that the people of South Vietnam are in no way represented by the series of military puppets, paid for and armed by the US, but by the National Liberation Front which has united, in spite of the most terrible sufferings, the heroic people of South Vietnam and is in fact already the effective government of four-fifths of the country… As the conflict develops, its ultimate purpose is becoming clearer. Taken in conjunction with official statements and other actions of the US government, particularly its interference in Latin America… we have to face the application of a conscious doctrine which is bound to lead to war and tyranny. This, now exercised by President Johnson, follows that of Presidents Truman and Kennedy – and it is that the US has the right to intervene, at any time, in any part of the world which the President thinks is being endangered by communism; that communism represents any type of government displeasing to the head of the US and… by definition, communism is always produced by subversion from China or Russia, or both. In other words, the US is asserting the right, backed by force and money, to establish in every part of the world only governments of which it approves. It is an assertion by the US government of absolute world domination, of the domination of US capital, which characterizes the so-called ‘free world’.90