British Nuclear Mobilisation Since 1945

Social and Cultural Histories

Jonathan Hogg, Kate Brown, Jonathan Hogg, Kate Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000395167
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: History

This book explores aspects of the social and cultural history of nuclear Britain in the Cold War era (1945–1991) and contributes to a more multivalent exploration of the consequences of nuclear choices which are too often left unacknowledged by historians of post-war Britain.

In the years after 1945, the British government mobilised money, scientific knowledge, people and military–industrial capacity to create both an independent nuclear deterrent and the generation of electricity through nuclear reactors. This expensive and vast 'technopolitical' project, mostly top-secret and run by small sub-committees within government, was central to broader Cold War strategy and policy. Recent attempts to map the resulting social and cultural history of these military–industrial policy decisions suggest that nuclear mobilisation had far-reaching consequences for British life.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Contemporary British History.

Weaponising peace: the Greater London Council, cultural policy and ‘GLC peace year 1983’

Hazel A. Atashroo

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how the Greater London Council (1981–1986) deployed community focused cultural policy initiatives to disseminate cultural forms of nuclear scepticism during its ‘GLC Peace Year 1983’ campaign. Drawing upon archival sources and interviews, this paper will present an overview of Peace Year’s cultural programme, which promoted London’s ‘nuclear-free zone’ through arts commissions, poster campaigns, pop concerts, murals, documentary films and photography exhibitions. Focusing on two GLC funded projects aimed at promoting positive representations of women’s peace activism, this paper will reflect upon the emotional and political impacts of the GLC’s radical cultural strategy.

Introduction

Between 1981 and its abolition in April 1986, the final administration of the Greater London Council positioned itself as a vocal critic of the Thatcher government and its ‘official narratives’ about the British nuclear state.¹ The GLC’s anti-nuclear campaign is exemplary of its defiant form of ‘local socialism’, in which the GLC acted in its ‘official’ capacity as an institution of the state to convey ‘alternative’ and ‘unofficial’ narratives about London’s nuclear civil defence, actively contradicting central government.² There has been little recognition, however, of how the cultural policies of the GLC’s Arts and Recreations Committee contributed to this anti-nuclear campaign through a year of arts sponsorship on the theme of ‘Peace’. This paper will therefore present examples of the cultural production sponsored during ‘GLC Peace Year 1983’ as a facet of the GLC’s broader radical cultural policy objectives. It will interrogate how the GLC’s Arts Committees participated in a publicity war that sought to engage on the cultural front, deploying anti-nuclear artworks, festivals and community projects in London’s public spaces to reach beyond peace activist networks. While this paper will consider how sponsored projects aimed to provoke emotional responses in rejection of central government’s ‘official’ nuclear narratives, its case studies also evidence how those appeals to Londoners’ nuclear anxieties were often contested and easily recuperated by those who opposed the GLC and its anti-nuclear stance.

London’s nuclear-free zone: GLC peace year 1983 and cultural policy

The Labour GLC took office in April 1981 during a period described by Daniel Cordle as one in which ‘people’s sense of vulnerability’ to nuclear dangers had significantly intensified. The announcement in 1979 that US nuclear missiles were to be stationed in the UK and Europe raised fears that growing international tensions between the US and the USSR could manifest themselves in a nuclear war on European territory.³ As Cordle and Hogg have argued, this anxiety was magnified in March 1980 with the disclosure of the government’s official nuclear strike response pamphlet, Protect and Survive—its emphasis on civilian self-reliance in the event of an attack inadvertently heightening the population’s perceived vulnerability.⁴ Unsurprisingly, this period saw a reinvigoration of peace activism and an increased attendance at CND’s rallies, their renewed popularity presenting a threat to official narratives of deterrence that did not escape the notice of Thatcher’s cabinet.⁵ A civil defence rebellion in regional local government followed, with Manchester City Council the first to declare itself a ‘Nuclear-Free Zone’ and refuse to cooperate with civil defence exercises in November 1980, with 140 local councils, including the GLC, following suit in the coming years.⁶

With the arrival of the new GLC administration, officers in its secretive Civil Defence unit were unwilling to respond to enquiries about London’s nuclear civil defence strategy posed by protagonists who were suspected to be CND sympathisers.⁷ Such was the reticence to discuss matters of nuclear civil defence with incoming GLC officials that investigative journalist Duncan Campbell was employed by the Council to extract information and report back on current civil defence plans, culminating in his 1982 exposé, War Plan UK.⁸ Campbell’s revelations rendered the official advice of Protect and Survive farcical and propagandistic with the realisation that the government could not and would not protect the lives of Londoners in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. Defenceless urban populations were instructed to simply ‘stay at home’ and therefore wait to die passively in their millions.⁹ Citing Campbell’s findings that official response plans involved ring-fencing London with troops after the blast to prevent anyone from escaping, Ken Livingstone recounted government projections that ‘within twelve weeks six million Londoners would be dead from blast, radiation and disease’.¹⁰ Senior officials were, however, to be evacuated to safety in the event of a nuclear strike and yet as Livingstone wryly recounted,

The thought of spending my last days locked in a bunker with Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet while all my friends died held little appeal [. . .] so we started working with CND and switched the government funds we received for war preparations into the campaign for unilateral nuclear disarmament. [. . .] we declared 1983 to be ‘Peace Year’ and organised a series of cultural events and posters throughout the city to reveal to Londoners the Government’s secret plans for their sacrifice in the event of war.¹¹

Following E. P. Thompson’s call to Protest and Survive, the GLC refused to cooperate with the government’s nuclear defence strategy and declared London a ‘Nuclear-Free Zone’ on 4 June 1982, reportedly finding new cultural uses for its considerable civil defence budget.¹² ‘Nuclear-Free’ London was inaugurated at an ‘anti-nuclear weekend’ with a reception for ‘500 peace representatives’ at County Hall and an opening ceremony broadcast on LBC.¹³ This began a sequence of cultural and community events that channelled resources into public activities centred upon raising anti-nuclear consciousness and publicising the GLC’s rejection of central government strategy. Rather than comply with the government’s planned ‘Hard Rock’ civil defence exercises scheduled that July, the Council opened three of London’s ‘wartime group control centres’, communications bunkers reserved for officials in the event of an attack, inviting the public to ‘judge for itself if London could survive the bomb’.¹⁴ By the GLC’s estimate, 4800 people visited these ‘secret’ control centres in six days.¹⁵

A fortnight after activists gathered to ‘embrace the base’ at RAF Greenham Common in December 1982, the GLC announced by press release that 1983 would be ‘GLC Peace Year’. This would coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary of CND and a General Election, in which Prime Minister Thatcher would be opposed by CND founding Labour leader Michael Foot. Inviting Londoners to participate in peace-themed activities, Chair of the GLC Arts and Recreation Committee Tony Banks announced that ‘There can be no better way to convey this message through the length and breadth of London than through the arts’.¹⁶ ‘Peace Year’ was an early indication of the Arts and Recreation Committee’s recognition of the role cultural policy could play as vehicle for conveying a political message. This was by no means the first instance in which a State body in Britain sought to deploy artists and cultural producers in the service of the visual communication of nuclear narratives, as illustrated in Catherine Jolivette’s account of the 1951 Festival of Britain and its exhibits on theme of atomic science.¹⁷ However, Peace Year was more overtly focused on communicating anti-nuclear narratives that would contest central government’s public reassurances regarding London’s civil defence and official narratives promoting its strategy of nuclear deterrence.

Tony Banks’s advisor Alan Tomkins was approached to organise the arts programme and invited artist and activist Peter Kennard to muster a group of activists and cultural producers to County Hall to draft proposals.¹⁸ These were to be sponsored alongside the existing programme of public festivals, which were themselves to be incorporated into the overarching ‘peace’ theme. Arts commissions and cultural events would be complemented by an explosive public information campaign designed to communicate the dangers of nuclear war or accident in London and the inadequacy of Westminster’s civil defence plans.¹⁹ The GLC also recognised the importance of urban spaces for the delivery of its nuclear-free zone message, which were to become the sites of an ideological conflict regarding London’s nuclear civil defence, through a series of billboard posters, promotional materials and public art projects that would play upon what Daniel Cordle has described as a ‘politics of vulnerability’.²⁰ Focused on the unimaginable horrors that it was predicted nuclear war might unleash on the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: social and cultural histories of British nuclear mobilisation since 1945
• 1 Weaponising peace: the Greater London Council, cultural policy and ‘GLC peace year 1983’
• 2 ‘. . . what in the hell’s this?’ Rehearsing nuclear war in Britain’s Civil Defence Corps
• 3 Mass observing the atom bomb: the emotional politics of August 1945
• 4 Resist and survive: Welsh protests and the British nuclear state in the 1980s
• 5 ‘Nuclear prospects’: the siting and construction of Sizewell A power station 1957–1966
• 6 Britain, West Africa and ‘The new nuclear imperialism’: decolonisation and development during French tests
• Index