Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (42 page)

However, while they had no political success to show for their pains, their role in helping to shape the cultural agenda of the times was far more apparent. This victory was particularly in
evidence in youth and popular culture, and was not confined to Britain. Nicole, a German teenage singer, dominated the 1982 Eurovision Song Contest with ‘A Little Peace’, a sweet and/or
trite plea for world harmony which reached number one in the British charts (in succession to ‘Ebony and Ivory’, Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s appeal for racial harmony). If
not explicitly about nuclear arms, it was hardly a request for deadlier weapons. Another German female pop singer, Nena, had even greater success in February 1984 when her ‘99 Red
Balloons’ (an English-language version of her German hit ‘
99 Luftballons
’) raced to number one in Britain and stayed there for three weeks. The
English-language version was far more explicitly an attack on militarism than the German original, with references to ‘Captain Kirk’ and ‘the president’s on
the line’ implying that the Americans’ gung-ho attitude was the main worry (the single’s release coincided with the deployment of Pershing II in West Germany). Nevertheless, both
versions had the same theme, that in the jumpy, fear-driven world of the arms race even innocent children’s balloons could inadvertently trigger a nuclear war
²³
– a point with which the Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov could doubtless have empathized.

Among British bands, Frankie Goes to Hollywood was by far the most prominent of those spinning anti-arms race messages from the turntables. Released in the summer of 1984 (though written a
couple of years earlier) the lyrics of ‘Two Tribes’ were given visual amplification by an accompanying pop video in which actors playing Reagan and the new Soviet leader, Konstantin
Chernenko, slugged it out in a boxing ring, egged on by a crowd which included other world leaders. It topped the charts for nine weeks. It was mixed with an introduction featuring an early warning
siren and the core message was repeated on the B-side of the single, the band’s cover version of the pacifist anthem ‘War, What is it Good For?’ Even a mainstream supergroup like
Queen was to be found belting out in ‘Hammer to Fall’ an anthem that appeared to suggest that surrendering would be a rather less painful means of heading off the looming menace of a
nuclear mushroom cloud. This was the most significant period for protest songs since the 1960s (the success of Band Aid’s 1984 Ethiopian famine appeal song, ‘Do They Know It’s
Christmas?’ encouraging the belief that music actually could save lives). Nothing compared with it in the quarter-century that followed.

As if the decibels of pop protest were not enough, the nuclear rearmers also had to contend with what they took to be the more formal indoctrination of youth: by 1983, a third of schools in
Labour-controlled education authorities had ‘peace studies’ on the curriculum. This was part of a process by which Labour, though unable to win power at the national level, used the
tools at its disposal to win hearts and minds at a local level where it continued to control town halls in inner-city areas. Launched in Manchester in 1980, Labour councils rushed to declare their
areas ‘nuclear-free zones’. By this, they meant that the council pledged to permit no nuclear activity – whether the passing through of weapons or waste, or even the undertaking
of civil defence exercises – on their patch. Whether residents felt they could sleep safer in their beds because an SS-20 would career instead into a neighbouring Tory-held local authority
was doubtful, even if the idea caused hilarity among those who thought nuclear-free zones tokenistic and ridiculous. In reality, these initiatives represented practical expressions of dissent since
Labour councillors were capable of mustering around the subject – and
thereby provided further reasons, as far as the Conservative government was concerned, for
clipping the wings of local government.

Whatever their views on the sense or otherwise of unilateral nuclear disarmament, the public’s concern about atomic war could not be easily assuaged. The government had unintentionally
helped fuel concern in 1980 by sending to every household a copy of an official leaflet,
Protect and Survive
, which, while striving to offer useful advice on how to barricade your home in
order to sit out a nuclear winter, succeeded only in instilling readers with a sense of the makeshift hopelessness of living off stored tins of processed food while the world outside had been
blitzed and contaminated beyond repair. In 1984, the BBC broadcast
Threads,
a harrowing drama about life in Sheffield before, during and after a nuclear attack, showing how society would
disintegrate. The scene of milk bottles melting in the heat of the explosion proved particularly stark and memorable. Emboldened, the corporation also finally screened
The War Game
, which
portrayed, as if in a series of television news reports, the descent into nuclear war and its effects on Rochester (supposedly hit by a stray Soviet missile).
The War Game
was broadcast
twenty years after it had been originally made as a Wednesday Play and then left in the can for fear of causing upset – to viewers and to the Wilson government. To the fear of nuclear war was
added the suggestion that corporate and state vested interests were actively driving Britain towards the precipice. In 1985, the BBC screened the thriller series
Edge of Darkness
. Scripted
by
The Italian Job
and
Z-Cars
writer Troy Kennedy Martin, the plot concerned a central character, played by Bob Peck, who uncovers a giant conspiracy by the nuclear power industry,
backed by the security services. Equally sinister machinations were implied in the denouement of
A Very British Coup
, a play by the Labour politician Chris Mullin, when in 1988 it was made
into a series by Channel 4. In the drama, ‘Harry Perkins’, the leader of the Labour Party, wins a general election on a promise to remove nuclear arms from Britain. The final seconds of
the last episode conclude with a BBC news voice-over on the morning after the election, calmly announcing a takeover by the military.

Fictional conspiracy theories coalesced with real-life suspicions following the murder in 1984 of Hilda Murrell. The 78-year-old peace campaigner had been due to present a paper, ‘An
Ordinary Citizen’s View of Radioactive Waste Management’, to the inquiry into the Sizewell nuclear plant when her Shropshire house was burgled by an assailant who stole some money,
sexually abused her and bundled her into her car, before leaving her for dead in a ditch with multiple stab wounds. A campaign began to prove that this horrific crime was the work of the security
services. Motives ranged from an attempt to silence a peace campaigner to the belief – propagated by the tirelessly suspicious Labour MP Tam Dalyell – that she knew something about
the sinking of the
General Belgrano
(her nephew was an intelligence officer who was wrongly assumed to have given the order for the Argentine cruiser’s sinking).
The raping and bludgeoning to death of an elderly woman would certainly have marked a new low for MI5, and it was indicative of what some anti-nuclear protesters believed was the nature of the
state they were up against that many suspected it was the sorry truth. Aside from extensive newspaper coverage, the conspiracy spawned three television documentaries, two books, two debates in
Parliament and several stage plays. To considerably less interest or publicity, in 2005 DNA evidence led to the conviction of Andrew George for the crime. Far from being an agent of the
‘secret state’, he was, at the time he murdered Murrell, a sixteen-year-old builder’s labourer.

Protect and Survive

In Ronald Reagan, CND had found a perfect, if unwitting, recruiting agent. The perception that the Republican president’s aggressive rhetoric was raising, rather than
lowering, East–West tensions was instilled in those who derided or chose to ignore the flip side of his policy – the ‘zero option’, which, had the Soviets accepted it, would
have removed all intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe. Reagan, it was certainly true, lent himself readily to crude caricature. His attention to detail was famously absent, his folksy
charm, which he had in abundance, merely confirming those not under its spell in their belief that he was a simpleton, incapable of grasping the nuances that prevented an extremely dangerous
situation from ending in catastrophe. His utterances did little to undermine Europe’s sense of intellectual superiority to a New World run by a former Hollywood actor. The puppet-based
satirical television show
Spitting Image
, which began broadcasting in 1984, regularly featured a sketch entitled ‘The President’s Brain Is Missing’. From such satire, the
colourless, unsmiling, out-of-touch, fatally ill men who wielded power in the Kremlin got off lightly. They were distant, inscrutable entities whose ruthlessness was not doubted but who were at
least given the benefit of the doubt in matters of intelligence.

With no sign that communism would lose its hold (indeed, in whole areas of the world, like Africa and Central America, it was still spreading), a broad consensus of informed Western opinion held
that the task of statesmanship was not to risk taking Moscow’s leaders to the limit of their endurance, but rather to find ways of lowering tension by recognizing the division of the world
into ‘free’ and communist as an immutable fact of life. Such assumptions, culminating in the arms limitation talks of the 1970s, had motivated earlier efforts at détente. What
appeared frightening about Reagan was that he showed scant regard for the pieties of détente, which, shortly before
running for the presidency, he had dismissed as
‘what a farmer has with his turkey – until Thanksgiving Day’.
²⁴
To his thinking, détente merely kept the Cold War alive by
freezing it at a particular moment – and, what was more, a moment that he calculated gave the optimum strategic advantage to the Soviet Union. If there was to be genuine progress, then it
would come only through breaking the deadlock – by creating a totally new strategic paradigm. Aghast at the risks implied, the president’s critics took this to mean nuclear
brinkmanship.

Thatcher’s public embrace of most things American and of Reagan in particular naturally created the impression that British and US attitudes to nuclear escalation were identical. As the
National Union of Mineworkers’ leader, Arthur Scargill, put it on a goodwill trip to Moscow in 1983, the greatest threat to world peace came from that ‘most dangerous duo, President
Ray-Gun and the plutonium blonde, Margaret Thatcher’.
²⁵
The reality was rather different. For while Thatcher saw the continued possession of
nuclear weapons as a necessity for as long as the Soviet Union posed a threat, Reagan was less sanguine about the peace-keeping propensities of mutually assured destruction. Thatcher wanted cruise
missiles on British soil because she believed having them there would make the Warsaw Pact wary about using its superiority in conventional forces to attack Western Europe. Reagan, in contrast,
genuinely saw the missiles’ deployment as a bargaining chip designed to counter the SS-20 menace – and one that could be removed on both sides if his ‘zero option’ was
accepted by Moscow. Disagreement on this fundamental point was laid bare during a meeting at Camp David in December 1984 when Thatcher, listening to Reagan’s optimistic assessment of the
prospects for a nuclear-free world, cut in with what she regarded as a necessary home truth, that it would be ‘unwise’ to ‘abandon a deterrence system that has prevented both
nuclear and conventional war. Moreover, if we ever reach the stage of abolishing all nuclear weapons, this would make conventional, biological or chemical war more likely.’
²⁶
At a White House seminar on arms control which Thatcher had attended with Reagan and the high command of the US State and Defense departments in July 1984,
she had demanded to know whether, if the nuclear arsenal was bargained away or made redundant, the NATO powers would be prepared to fund the massively increased cost of making their conventional
forces in Europe equal to those of the Warsaw Pact. Reagan had replied, somewhat vaguely, that such would be the assumption.
²⁷
Thatcher, however,
was clearly unconvinced. She had maintained James Callaghan’s commitment to increase British defence spending by 3 per cent per year each year until 1986. This was painful enough, even if it
only actually increased the defence budget’s share of GDP from 4.7 per cent to 4.9 per cent between 1980 and 1986. She certainly did not want to have to unbalance her budget in order vastly
to
expand the British armed forces when equivalent deterrence could be had from cruise, courtesy of the American taxpayer. What especially alerted Thatcher to Reagan’s
unsoundness in nuclear matters was his announcement, on 23 March 1983, of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The prime minister could be forgiven her testiness. With SDI, Reagan was proposing
a fundamental change in the West’s strategy without first consulting either her or any other NATO partner. In doing so, he was also choosing to ignore the widespread scepticism about the
feasibility of his new pet project that was felt throughout much of the Pentagon. Undaunted, Reagan pushed on. SDI – quickly dubbed ‘Star Wars’ in mocking deference to the
president’s supposed sci-fi fantasy/Hollywood world view – envisaged launching into space a network of lasers or particle-beam weapons which would zap incoming nuclear missiles, thereby
creating a defensive shield. If it worked – an almighty ‘if’ – it would make redundant all the existing stock of nuclear ballistic missiles. Reagan’s tone on the
matter resonated idealism. He even spoke of sharing the technology, once it was perfected, with the Soviet Union. Of course, the actual likelihood of the United States freely giving away its
invention in this way was largely discounted, not least in Moscow. Thatcher, however, responded to the suggestion not with suspicion but with horror, for she thought it insane for the US ‘to
throw away a hard-won lead in technology by making it internationally available’.
²⁸
If SDI succeeded, then the fear of mutually assured
destruction would cease to maintain the balance of power – or, rather, the balance of fear – between the two superpowers. That was a prospect to which Thatcher and Reagan responded
quite differently.