CND rally in 1963. Photo: Photo courtesy the Friends House Library.
The nuclear threat
John Anderson urges Friends to again take action
Like many others, I have been protesting against nuclear weapons on and off for most of my adult life and, during the 1980s, was an enthusiastic member of the Medical Campaign against Nuclear Weapons. Then came the implosion of international communism and, somehow, things seemed less immediately threatening: so, along with the reduced anxiety, out went our steam. For me, and I think for many others, there was a ten-year period when we hardly gave the matter a sidelong thought.
But the elephant was still in the room and, as we were looking the other way, slowly bloating and multiplying! Consequently, several years ago, again like many others, I renewed the struggle in opposing Trident replacement. The protests of recent years, however, have seen a steadily declining number of participants.
In the 1950s and 1960s CND marches attracted tens of thousands of idealists – numbers now matched by the, perhaps, more self-interested protests against government cuts and university tuition fees
Sadly, this decline of concern is also very noticeable among Quakers, who of late have transferred their corporate enthusiasm to other laudable (if sometimes controversial) causes such as same-sex marriage and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Yet, I doubt if there is any Quaker who is in favour of renewing a weapon with a kill capability of some 200,000,000 persons at a cost of £105,000,000,000 (the latest figure in our ever escalating ‘guesstimate’).
Perhaps Quakers, as individuals and corporately, find this malignity in our midst too overwhelming, and inevitable, to be comfortably held in the head. Indeed, it is just that and that is all the more reason for doing something about it – even if that something appears to be an inadequate response to what seems possessed of an inexorable momentum.
Now this is not quite my last will and testament. I have attended to what love requires of me and realize that, what with age, deafness and a whole murmuration of medical complaints, I am no longer capable of great busyness. The days of lying down on the road and being carted off by the police for an afternoon in the cells are over and done. But I do not intend to take Advice number twenty-eight as an excuse for doing less than I am capable of and resolve, as a minimal gesture, to [if the Lord permits] support the minimal monthly Quaker Vigil at Aldermaston for the next few months. I would encourage readers of the Friend to do likewise or similar.
The wickedness being hatched at Aldermaston is a crime of ungraspable enormity. Doing something about it, even an apparently inadequate something, is still infinitely better than doing nothing.
A Quaker vigil is held outside the ‘home office’ gate at AWE Aldermaston from 4 to 5 pm on the second Monday in the month.
