John Clayden

It is difficult to contemplate one’s demise and even more so  that all life on this planet could cease.  Since the invention of nuclear weapons this has become a possibility. With some friends I attended a meeting in Trafalgar Square in the early 60s where Bertrand Russell warned us that if we did not take action now we would not be around next year. We took him seriously. A friend in the Communist Party Biddy Youngday who while a member of the German Communist Party had lived in Berlin through the rise of Hitler became one of the original Committee of One Hundred which advocated civil disobedience, she was jailed in Holloway on charges of conspiracy. We took part in attempts to block Ruislip Airforce Base and other sit ins as well as taking part in the Aldermaston marches. The local branch of the Yiewsley and West Drayton CP organised a local CND branch which included members from the Labour Party as well as various Christian congregations and one Tory.   They organised local and regional activities with Uxbridge, Hayes and Southall branches and there were branches throughout the country. These activities gave many people the confidence to take things into their own hands. We put on films in the local town hall like All Quiet on the Western Front and On the Beach.
With members of the local CP we defied the banning of a demonstration in Trafalgar Square and a march down Whitehall. We heard Martin Luther King speak and we  were outside Grosvenor Square American Embassy at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. Our fears were justified when the details of the crisis emerged and it was revealed that were it not for the initiative and intervention  of  Vasily Arkhipov the fleet commander of a Soviet nuclear armed Submarine fleet  which the Americans were unaware was armed with nuclear torpedoes, nuclear war would have destroyed all life on the planet.
Subsequently the Americans and Soviets took measures to maintain communication on vital issues and after the INF treaty  intermediate missiles were destroyed on both sides . Scott Ritter was a weapons inspector who was an observer of this for the US government  in Russia . 
Unfortunately since then things have got considerably more dangerous again.  The INF treaty has been revoked and nearly all communications between the Russians and the US have on the initiative of the latter have been severed.
Russian protests at the encroachment on Russian legitimate security concerns have been ignored and Putin has been demonised. The Ukrainian War has been used to try to bring Russia to the helpless condition it had been reduced to after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the sanctions have not worked and relations with China and others have become stronger.
The western sanctions have reinforced the building of the BRICS agreements and it is now representative of the most powerful economic bloc on the planet. This has finally realised the hopes the CND had placed in the Bandung Conference in the Seventies as its policy was for Britain to join the nonaligned movement of the time.
The Russian bear has been poked once too often and has finally retaliated with the Oreshnik hypersonic missile to which the west has no response. But still the West have been provoking the Russians into some form of response which would escalate the situation in Ukraine before Trump takes office. This has heightened the danger of nuclear war tenfold as has been pointed out by among others Scott Ritter, Brian Berletic, Col Douglas MacGregor and a number of former Pentagon weapons experts. Unless a third alternative can be agreed upon. A peace mass movement organised by Consortium News and others has been initiated in Washington for the beginning of December. A sister movement is urgently needed in this country.