British nukes are back – and so are CND's middle-class campaigners

Telegraph

08-07-2025

'Gather round everybody, we're going to do some chanting. And the first one we're going to do is: 'We want the nukes out now.''
It's a scorching hot day in Norfolk, and outside RAF Marham, Sophie Bolt, the general secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat and a vivid floral dress, megaphone in hand, is getting things underway.
The 30 or 40 people gather in front of the base's entrance sign, partially obscured by a banner so it now reads: 'Royal Air Force: Welfare not Warfare', while the handful of photographers covering the event take their positions. ' We want the nukes out now, we want the nukes out now, we want the nukes out NOW!'
It's a few days after the Nato summit in the Hague, where Keir Starmer had announced that Britain was to purchase 12 American F-35A jets, which are capable of carrying conventional munitions and also the US B61-12 gravity bomb. US nuclear weapons have not been stored in the UK since the last left RAF Lakenheath in 2008 – while Britain has not had its own air-launched nuclear weapons since 1998. Now the planes and the bombs are coming back, to be stationed at RAF Marham.
So it was that the word had gone out from the CND to groups, as far flung as Lewisham and Norwich, to assemble at the gates.
'We want the nukes out now, we want the nukes out NOW!'
'I think that's very good on the chanting front,' Sophie says, 'so give yourself a big cheer.'
Now the group assembles for a photograph, behind another banner – 'Remember Hiroshima'. The B61-12 gravity bomb, that will be stored perhaps a few hundred yards from where we are standing, has the explosive power of more than three times the weapon dropped on the Japanese city in 1945. A man wearing a Starmer mask holds up two model bombs. Others hold up placards bearing the symbol of the CND, which in the 1960s and beyond became the universally recognised peace sign.
Founded in 1958, the CND claims to be Europe's largest single issue campaign, and the longest running.
A year earlier, in 1957, Britain had tested atomic and hydrogen bombs for the first time, becoming the third atomic power after the US and the USSR, and spurring rising public anxiety about the dangers of nuclear weapons and proliferation.
'The case is quite simple,' Bertrand Russell, the philosopher and pacifist who was the CND's first president, wrote. 'We think that the policy which is being pursued by the western powers is one which is almost bound to end in the extermination of the human race. Some of us think that might be rather a pity.'
Other prominent members included the Rev John Collins, founder of Christian Action and one of the four founders of the charity War on Want, and Donald, Lord Soper, the Methodist minister and pacifist, who was known as 'Dr Soapbox', and who preached at Speakers' Corner and Tower Hill, against war, poverty, drink, gambling, slave labour, racial inequality and capital punishment.
Its unofficial headquarters was in a Soho cafe, 'filled with bearded men playing chess', the writer Barry Miles once recalled, but the cause energised a constituency far beyond the Left, students and the clergy.
Its annual marches at Easter from London to the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, Berkshire, which began in 1958, with music provided by a trad jazz band and a skiffle group, drew tens of thousands of people.
'The marchers were mainly middle class and professional people,' The Daily Mail wrote of the first march. 'They were the sort of people who would normally spend Easter listening to a Beethoven concert on the Home Service, pouring dry sherry from a decanter for the neighbours, painting Picasso designs on hard-boiled eggs, attempting the literary competition in the weekly papers, or going to church with the children. Instead, they were walking through the streets in their old clothes. They were behaving entirely against the normal tradition of their class, their neighbourhood, and their upbringing.'
It is difficult to conceive, perhaps, how real and present the fear of nuclear annihilation was at the time.
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had happened a mere 13 years earlier, and the Cold War was at its height, the threat of nuclear apocalypse looming in everyone's minds.
As an 11-year-old grammar school boy at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, I can vividly remember reading the newspaper accounts of Kennedy's ultimatum to Khrushchev to turn round the ships steaming towards Cuba, and going to bed wondering if I would wake up next morning. Or what I would wake up to, if I did.
The fear receded, if never going away, and the interest in the CND with it. But now Sophie says, the organisation is seeing an upsurge in membership, driven by a higher level of awareness of the nuclear threat, and events in Ukraine and the Middle East.
The spectre of nuclear warfare seems to be permeating public consciousness, with the film Oppenheimer and video games like Fallout and Atomfall. Last October, the BBC screened Threads, the apocalyptic war drama first shown in 1984, depicting the horrifying effects of a nuclear apocalypse on Sheffield. A new contemporary adaptation for TV is being produced by Warp films, the company that made the critically-acclaimed Adolescence.
Unrest is in the air. Everyone has something to protest about nowadays, and most demonstrations have the appearance of a vortex drawing in all manner of causes from Extinction Rebellion to Stand Up to Racism.
But the protest at RAF Marham has a single-mindedness of purpose that makes it seem all the more virtuous.
There are no Free Palestine flags or SWP placards. Nobody storms the gates. Nobody glues themselves to the road. Nobody shouts or throws anything. Nobody is arrested.
Most are veterans of anti-nuclear protests going back more than 40 years who, one imagines, if not as in an earlier era, pouring sherry from a decanter for their neighbours or painting Picasso designs on hard-boiled eggs, would otherwise be spending a quiet Saturday afternoon on their allotment, or volunteering at their local charity shop.
People shelter under a tree for shade, spreading themselves on the grass, or sitting in picnic chairs. There are sandwiches, flasks and sun cream.
A small group of shirt-sleeved police stand on the other side of the road, watching incuriously and talking among themselves. Off-duty airmen and women stroll through the gate in their shorts and T-shirts with nary a word being said.
A car drives by, sounding its horn in support.
Now Sophie hands the microphone to anyone who wants to come up and say a few words.
Glen Borrill, 57, has driven the 85 miles from Mansfield to join the protest, after his wife had read about it on social media. He's never been involved with the CND before, he says, 'but with everything that's going on in the news, I thought if I don't get involved now, when that big bang comes around, I'll have only got myself to blame because I've not done anything to stand against it.
'I've not felt so anxious about what could happen since back in the 1980s when everything was kicking off then.'
He's watched Threads recently, he says. 'It's based in a city not that far from Mansfield, and it was in a similar situation in the Middle East to what's happening now. That's how frightening it's become. It's like déjà vu. That was just a film, but the actual reality seems to be playing out as that film did.'
He points to the guard standing on the other side of the fence. 'Even these lads here, when the bombs come, they're not going to let them in the bunkers.'
A woman from Norwich says that people living around RAF Lakenheath are being given iodine to guard against radiation fallout from the base. I have no idea if this is true or not. She has her own chant – 'Starmer, Starmer is an evil re-armer'.
A man who worked for the BBC at the time of the Iraq war accuses the corporation of telling lies, and says the mainstream media cannot be trusted. Several people say that.
David Pybus is 75, a tall, rangy man with gentle eyes peering out from beneath a bush hat. He's come from Peterborough, an hour and a half by bus.
'Generally speaking,' he says, 'the media just give you what the Government is saying. You only get that narrative, and they roll out some former generals and people with military ties, and that's what you get in the mainstream media.'
He has been a member of the CND since 1980 when Margaret Thatcher first announced that ground-launched nuclear weapons would be based at RAF Greenham Common and RAF Molesworth.
'Being a person of Christian faith, I felt I was faced with something very evil that was contrary to that, and it was very important to try and do something if you could to oppose that.'
The bombs at Lakenheath and Molesworth had gone, he says, '[and] there was a sense that things were becoming more peaceful. But now they're coming back and the threat has increased again, so here I am.'
In the small copse of trees, children from the service housing across the road have been playing hide and seek and watching the gathering with curiosity. The protest has lasted for two hours, but now the steam has run out of it and the heat is taking its toll.
People begin to take down the signs on the gate, carefully unpicking the last of the gaffer tape and putting it in a refuse sack. They are packing up their banners and belongings, folding their picnic chairs, and swapping telephone numbers and handshakes.
I ask Sue Wright how many protests she had attended over the years. 'Lost count,' she says with a laugh. She is 75, a retired primary school teacher, wearing a CND cap and a T-shirt with the CND symbol made of interlocking flowers.
She first became involved with the CND in 1968 when she was student and, when she retired at the age of 60, became more actively involved with Norwich CND. 'It was quite small, all older than me – I was the youngster. And eventually they asked me to be the chair.' The oldest member is 84, 'but he's protesting somewhere else today'.
All afternoon, the quiet voice of fatalism and doubt has been whispering in my ear. After more than 60 years of protest, the world still has nuclear weapons, the threat of annihilation is closer than ever, and the future lies in the hands of those far more powerful than the small hardy band gathered at the gates.
In the absence of multilateral disarmament, it is Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD, that has kept the peace – such as it is. 'MADness, I call it,' Sue says. 'Total madness. But it's not assured at all. Just one use can set off a chain reaction.'
Does she ever feel as if she's banging her head against a brick wall? 'Sometimes. Especially when it doesn't get reported in newspapers and on the TV, and it doesn't get a mention unless someone breaks the law, and we're committed to not breaking the law.' But that, she says, does not mean she was going to stop.
She joined the CND when she was 18, she says, 'because I was terrified. I thought that nuclear weapons are so destructive that they should not exist. And I'm terrified now.
'I have a new grandson who will be two weeks old at about 10 o'clock tonight, and I fear for his future. I have seven other grandchildren and I want them to grow up in a peaceful world. I want them to grow up and to have a world to live in. I will do all I can to make people see the madness of it.'
David comes up and quietly slips a postcard printed with the World Peace Prayer into my jacket pocket: 'Let peace fill our hearts. Our world, our universe'. His lift to King's Lynn seems to have left without him. We drop him off at the station, he sits down in the shade of the bus shelter, waiting for the bus, and the hour and a half journey back to Peterborough.