NATO's hirelings attack unilateralist policy

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'One can say that NATO could never have been established without the support of the organised labour movements . . . Without this early labour support, which existed in spite of tremendous efforts of the Communists to block it, there might never have been a successful Marshall Plan, EEC or a NATO AS support grows within the trade union rank and file for the policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament, a handful of top union bureaucrats have ganged up with James Callaghan and Labour right wingers in a bid to stem the tide.

Their initiative is funded by NATO. It takes the form of a 4,000-word pamphlet Published Commit sealed "Labour Committer TOT Transatlantic Understanding" • - which admits to being totally funded by NATO.

The Committee's trade union supporters include its treasurer Frank Chapple, Terry Duffy and NUR leader Sid Weighell. The new statement is also supported by Roy Grantham of APEX and steel union leaders Bill Sirs and Hector Smith.

Support

But the Committee has been forced to scrape the barrel in search of sponsors from the Parliamentary Callaghan had to be wheeled out of semi-retirement, along with faded has-beens Lord Stewart Lord Harold Wilson and Peart.

Significantly neither Foot nor Denis Healey -NATO'S candidate for Deputy Leader - could be enticed into an initiative which offers no prospect of securing popular support.

Callaghan was obviously joking when he told a press conference on Monday that he hoped the statement would be "on sale" at the Party conference: with Labour's leading Cold Warriors having already defected in numbers to the SDP, sales are scarcely likely to be brisk. ' Holocaust Against unilateralism, the NATO statement argues that it would increase anxiety in Europe; that it would add to US disillusionment with European defence; and that it would encourage individua. countries to make separate deals with Moscow.

But amongst working class people, most anxiety in Europe revolves around the fact that NATO's strategy against the Soviet Union involves transforming the European continent into a "theatre" of nuclear holocaust.

Any steps through disarmament towards minimising that risk can only ease the worries of the working class.

But of course such steps would also weaken the military threat which the US administration wishes to level at the deformed and degenerated workers' states of Eastern Europe and the USSR.

Pentagon

In this sense uld certainly "add to the dis- disillusionment" of the Reagan warmongers.

But that can only be a positive advance tor mankind, under conditions where even without encouragement, the Pentagon chiefs are foisting cruise missiles and neutron bombs onto their European "allies"

In fact the real concerns alliance ... of the statement's American sponsors emerge in the final argument: that a neutralised Britain would encourage individual countries to make separate deals with Moscow.

Neither Reagan nor Thatcher wants the countries of Western Europe to move towards separate deals. They want to retain NATO as a

John Lister examines the right wing's arguments for NATO and the Bomb

Irving Brown, writing in - The Next Thirty Years' solid, anti-communist, aggressive firmly tied tonieasan's arms, race and his sabre-rattling foreign policies.

As if it were the final nail in the coffin of the unilateralist policy, Callaghan and his cronies argue that the rejection of nuclear weapons by Britain would make it impossible to remain in NATO alliance.

The argument is of COurse inconsistent: the NATO alliance comprises 12 European countries, of which Britain is the only one to have its own stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

But the whole concept also absurd and barbaric.

NATO is paraded by its supporters as a pact for mutual "defence" • Yet at the same time these suppor ters tell workers in Britain and Europe that a precondition for such "defence"

a prior agreement to participate, in the case of war, in an orgy of thermo nuclear slaughter, bringing inevitable self destruction!

There is another question to be raised in this context, of course. Just what is supposedly being "defended" at such enormous cost and risk?

The fact is that NATO is an alliance to defend capitalist governments against the working class of Europe and against the historie gains embodied in the overturn of capitalist property relations in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe after World: Wat 2.

Renouncing British nuclear weapons is not enough: to defend itself against the barbaric plans of the imperialists, the British workers' movement must demand immediate withdrawal from NATO: and must fight jointly with the working class of Europe for the overthrow of capitalist governments whose very existence demands the maintenance of armies and arma-' ments, and whose crisis continually raises the threat of violence and war.