CND 2.0

Remember the good old days when we had an ideological enemy that was fun to fear, in the form of the Soviet Union - Bondishly stylised with its own jargon, as clearly delineated as the baddie in black at the end of the dusty street in a High Noon stand-off? A ready-made replacement for the Nazis, in other words, and with the added tonality of also being a tyrant to knock down, liberating the plaintive masses toiling under its yoke. There was a clear sense of right and wrong, and even the most likely method of our looming destruction; swift, terrible and photogenic, over in the tidy figure of four minutes, had a sense of order. Popular fiction had a field day with the aftermath of armageddon as a topic, peaking in the instability of the 1982-4 period, when the Soviets had three changes of leader - The Day After, Threads, When the Wind Blows and Whoops Apocalypse all came out in the same span. This environment gave a tangible, situational focus for feelings of personal existential dread and effectively gave Goth so much coherence as a youth mode that it flashed briefly in the musical mainstream.
Not so now. Our graded and nebulous ecocatastrophe is difficult enough to capture in the imagination. And as it always will, the West has also found a human enemy, but it hides in masses and it has no figurehead bar God, no matter how hard Western leaders will try to give it a face, a Hitler. And since we cannot delineate our enemy clearly and so it merges into the culture it sprang from, when the Muslim population grows faster than ours, there's a danger of ending up not a million miles away from Goebbels, depicting the Jewish population of Berlin as an exponential multiplication of rats. We see our governments raid selected Muslim countries for political capital and find no-one standing there at the end of the street, waiting for us, and no terrified family to liberate. Our enemy's ideology is built on something less rational than greed or economics and so will grow another head for each one that we cut. And the enemy does not march in stoic Waterlooesque ranks towards us.

Detonation of
Hiroshima-size (15 KT)
nuclear weapon in Trafalgar Square, London, on a working day.
Estimated Fatalities:115,000
Estimated Casualties: 149,000

Source: ICNND

We've had nuclear weapons for 65 years, and the untestable argument that a major war has been avoided in that period due to their very existence continues to be bandied about. But, if we're now to consider, for all that is unstable about Russia or institutionally repugnant about China, that our enemy is not one that turns up at disarmament talks and sits in plain view and uniforms within specific borders, but instead drives a white van into a square, then the raison d'etre of our arsenals is rendered outdated. Not only do we not need them, but their continued retention adds fuel to the fervour of the enemy.

The CND, now much faded from the public eye in the last 25 years, has always sought to do away with nuclear arms on primarily humanistic and strategic grounds: they are mankind's collective suicide weapon, and a nuclear war would in any case leave no winner. But the change of enemy has created a quite new reason for their elimination: political. The most effective use that a nuclear weapon will ever prove to have is when it is dismantled, with a yield of moral superiority that no human or mental shield can block. Hence, it's time to renew pressure for disarmament. The Global Zero initiative is a good place to start.