For Peace!

In 1958, six years after Britain tested its first nuclear bomb, 5000 people turned up to the first CND meeting, responding to the call for unilateral nuclear disarmament. The small numbers of marchers who had been protesting the nuclear bomb factory at Aldermaston annually, would snowball to 100,000 in 1963.

Ever since, CND has been spreading information about nuclear weapons and their secretive deployment. It has fomented peaceful protest and campaigning for demilitarisation, the withdrawal of Britain from NATO and the closure of the nuclear industry. Over the decades, CND was instrumental in leading the British government to adopt the Partial Test Ban Treaty (1963), the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1970), and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (1988). The CND was also part of a global coalition which ushered in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (2017), ratified at the UN and boycotted by the nuclear weapons states and NATO member states. Since its inception, the CND has been campaigning for the abolition of the Trident nuclear weapons system, and the diverting of billions of its funding into civilian welfare. It has been a steady voice warning of the dangers of military escalation into a nuclear exchange, especially in conflicts between nuclear powers.

In this section, we include material from the Four Corners archive, The CND Picture Show, a collaboration between photographer Ed Barber and artist Peter Kennard, documenting the Peace Movement.