CND on sidelines in nuclear protest

By Helen Smith

LONDON (Reuter): Amid the devastation wreaked by the two atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima at the end of World War II an awful truth dawned -- that man had produced the means to destroy the planet.

Around the world thousands of people joined anti-nuclear pressure groups to try to prevent this happening.

One of the most high profile and successful of those groups was Britain's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).

In the early 1980s, when East and West were vying with each other to build ever more deadly nuclear weapons, CND had more than 100,000 members, enough to stand hand-in-hand across the breadth of Scotland in one 1986 protest.

"At that time nuclear disarmament was the most polarizing issue. You simply could not sit on the fence," said CND vice- chairman Martin Jones.

CND's membership has fallen by more than half since the Berlin Wall collapsed. Its rallies are poorly attended and they rarely win press coverage.

France's announcement in June that it planned nuclear weapons tests in the South Pacific provoked outrage around the world and earned Paris the public ire of several governments.

It ought to have been the ideal opportunity for CND to relaunch itself on the world stage.

But it is the giant environmental campaign group Greenpeace that has commanded the publicity war, steaming two of its Rainbow Warrior campaign ships with their cargo of publicists and hi-tech communications into the region.

In the concern about the plight of the environment around the tropical coral islands where the tests will be carried out, the arms race seems to have been forgotten.

CND believes other nuclear powers, including Britain, are queuing up to carry out similar tests if France succeeds in defying public opprobrium. But CND's limited resources mean its voice has barely been heard.

When hundreds of CND members staged a mock "die-in" in London's Trafalgar Square on July 16 to commemorate the first atomic bomb test 50 years earlier, the group couldn't afford the full-page newspaper advertisements it wanted to publicize the event.

The environmentalist group Greenpeace helped finance the "die- in" and advertised it in its own publications. Only one national newspaper reported the event.

CND faced a cash crisis in the early 1990s after membership fees, its main source of income, shriveled away. It survived by drastic cost-cutting and, after foundering for direction in the post-Cold War world, it has found new purpose, said Jones.

"We believe that circumstances have never been better for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons, with the main nuclear states -- the United States, France, Britain, China and Russia -- quite friendly with each other.

"They may never be as good again," he said.

Over the years CND has won respect from the media and in political circles. Its campaigns helped to get U.S. Cruise missiles removed from British soil and it played a small part in forming the 1970 Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the START nuclear arms reduction treaties between the United States and the Soviet Union.

It counts former top military figures among its senior campaigners and its press office can provide authoritative information on any nuclear matter.

But it has an image problem.

In the British public mind CND supporters fall into two categories -- the aging hippy or the idealistic youth in combat gear and dreadlocks. In either case they are identified with the political far left.

In 1991 CND led campaigns against the Gulf War and found itself sharing demonstrations with extremist groups waving banners calling for victory for Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

It had suffered a severe blow in the mid-1980s when Britain's opposition Labor Party severed its links -- long before Labor's recent shift to the political center ground.

Labor had found that one of CND's central tenets, unilateral nuclear disarmament, was a vote-loser -- opposed by a hefty majority in opinion polls.

Jones -- a lifelong CND supporter who believes he was conceived while his parents were attending CND marches to Britain's nuclear weapons research establishment at Aldermaston in the late 1950s -- treads carefully around the issue of unilateral disarmament.

"For some people I accept that unilateralism has been a bit of a mantrap," he said.

"I don't care how we (Britain) get rid of our nuclear weapons as long as we do. If we got rid of our nuclear weapons and that was all it would have been a complete waste of time."

He believes CND's fall in fortunes is temporary, blaming it on Britons' inability to focus on more than one cause at a time.

"Any single-issue pressure group has to develop a long-term strategy to cope with these relative troughs," he said.

CND's new strategy centers on a campaign for the NPT to be renewed for only 10 years and to be followed up with an outright global ban on nuclear weapons.

The NPT was renewed indefinitely earlier this year by its 178 signatory countries, but just four days later China carried out an underground nuclear test.

The French nuclear tests carry a conundrum for CND. The group firmly believes they should be canceled, but it needs the public outrage they would provoke if carried out to win new members and survive.

Window: CND believes other nuclear powers, including Britain, are queuing up to carry out similar tests if France succeeds in defying public opprobrium.