By 1964 the antinuclear movement was waning. Its influence had been, Stuart Hall later claimed, “ENORMOUS … politically it was very, very influential”, but paradoxically, the bomb was “the one thing [it] couldn't do anything about” (Taylor & Pritchard 1980: 109, emphases in original). It had major international impacts, especially by stimulating “CNDs” in other countries, from Ireland to Australia. But its principal effects, which form the main focus of this chapter, were to pave the way for other campaigns and movements, which in turn would lead nuclear disarmers to embrace opposition to wars and nuclear power and other goals. The shifts in radical politics that the movement helped produce, which accelerated rapidly towards the revolutionary year of 1968, would in turn challenge some of its core beliefs, particularly its commitment to nonviolence.

CND and the Wilson government's nuclear policies

Diluted effects of the movement could be seen in the British political mainstream in 1964. CND contributed to the climate that helped a new Labour leader, Harold Wilson, narrowly win that October's election. The party's manifesto criticized Polaris in CND's terms: “It will not be independent and it will not be British and it will not deter”, and many CND members campaigned for it (Parker 2021: 68–9). The Liberal revival, a mild form of middle-class radicalism, largely accounted for Labour's victory – since its share of the national vote barely increased while the Liberals’ rose markedly at the Conservatives’ expense – and as we saw at Orpington, disarmament had played a part in this. Yet defence was not prominent in the election. The Tory leader, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, tried to make it an issue – a poster showed a lolling protestor holding a CND sign, with the strapline: “meanwhile the Conservatives have signed the Test Ban Treaty” – but with little success (Butler & King 1965: 129–30).

In office, Wilson appointed the first minister for disarmament, the Times journalist Alun Gwynne Jones, who as Lord Chalfont appeared twice in Sanity in 1965. Wilson also cut back civil defence in 1966 and 1968. However, from CND's point of view, Labour offered no real change. Wilson advocated alliance control over NATO's nuclear weapons, but CND opposed what would have been a multilateral nuclear force. With its activism in decline, there was little to prevent civil servants and military chiefs from convincing Wilson that cancelling Polaris would be a mistake: he accepted the system, although reducing the number of submarines from five to four.