THE controversy over army chief General Sir Patrick Sanders’s kite-flying suggestion that the British people should prepare themselves for conscription has slipped from the headlines amid an Establishment perception that public opinion needs a further softening up and that, perhaps, the immediate pre-election period is not the best time to introduce a generation to the idea that they may die.
 
As the generation that experienced the second world war passes away direct knowledge of what conventional war means for both civilians and combatants becomes subject to the myth-making tendencies of the mass media.
 
At the same time an understanding has grown up among a section of the population that nuclear war is a possibility, even a likelihood and with this comes less understanding that any nuclear war poses an existential threat to the whole of humanity.
 
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists reports: “A large-scale nuclear war involving countries with strategic nuclear forces could cause huge numbers of fatalities and injuries in addition to the losses produced by climactic impacts.”
 
The bulletin quotes an estimate in the authoritative journal Nature that more than two billion people could die from a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, and more than five billion could die from a war between the US and Russia.
 
Mid-20th century estimates, kept necessarily secret from the US people, were that 50 million of them would die, with nine million sick or injured, out of a pre-attack population of 179 million. And the deranged US military conclusion was that while a US attack would virtually eliminate the USSR as a world power, the “balance of strength would be on the side of the US.”
 
In the end, Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin between them saw off the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — but the threat of nuclear annihilation remains.
 
Among the ridiculously rich, the idea has gained ground that a bolthole in remote New Zealand might provide a refuge. When, in 2016, news that Silicon Valley tech billionaire Peter Thiel (his fortune is built on your Paypal transactions) had secured New Zealand nationality emerged, the country’s Department of Internal Affairs reported a 14-fold increase in citizenship enquiries.
 
Even if New Zealand manages to avoid the worst fallout from a nuclear war the rest of us won’t.
 
And since 2016 New Zealand has been, with Britain, the US and Australia, involved in the “new cold war” Aukus pact that Western powers have devised to put pressure on China — and thus the antipodes are a target.
 
Britain is a vulnerable US nuclear war-fighting platform, but alarmingly nearly a third of people in Britain think nuclear war is either fairly likely or very likely in their lifetime with only a quarter claiming not to know and the rest thinking it unlikely. Whether this represents a fatalistic attitude or indicates that some people think they might survive a nuclear war is difficult to divine but equally disturbing.
 
Short of nuclear annihilation conventional war between developed industrial states is brutal enough. The Ukraine war — which has seen nearly 400,000 Ukrainian men killed and wounded while more than 20,000 have fled the country to avoid “mobilisation” — may have slipped from the headlines while, by contrast, Israel’s pitiless war on the Palestinians falls into the category of colonial war in which the technological inequality between the two sides demonstrates the fragility of civilian life in combat zones.
 
By December 18 2022, the UN Office of Human Rights had recorded 17,595 civilian casualties in Ukraine since February 24 2022: 6,826 killed and 10,769 injured. This included 9,620 (4,036 killed and 5,584 injured) in the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Lugansk.
 
At the root of the Ukraine war is the threat to Russia’s security that the Nato advance eastwards represents. In a sense, this reprises the 1980s missile crisis when Nato prepared to situate US Cruise and Pershing II missiles in Britain, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium, while the USSR and its socialist allies readied their intermediate-range nuclear SS-20 missiles.
 
It is a measure of the transformed situation in the Labour Party that back then, following the government decisions to deploy these Cruise missiles at Greenham Common and Molesworth and replace the Polaris nuclear submarine force with the new US Trident missile system, Labour played an active part in the ensuing demonstrations.
 
People in Europe were understandably reluctant to allow the US to fight a nuclear war on their continent and a massive International co-ordination of peace movements saw simultaneous demonstrations in European capitals while a parallel “nuclear freeze” movement emerged in the US.
 
In the 1983 general election, under Michael Foot’s leadership, Labour took an anti-nuclear stance, proposed the cancellation of the Trident nuclear programme, shutting US nuclear bases, and dropping the deployment of US cruise missiles.
 
Defence played a key part in the Tory election victory. Labour’s unity was also weakened by opposition from the Labour right — the breakaway SDP won 23 seats and compromised the Labour vote elsewhere.
 
Thatcher benefited from a Falklands war bounce that Foot’s endorsement of the military expedition did nothing to minimise while the party failed to give coherence to its conventional forces defence policy that itself represented a compromise with the right and a military-industrial complex that entangles even otherwise progressive trade unionists.
 
As it is clear that defence policy will be an active factor in the coming general election, it is worth looking at public opinion in the 1983 election.
 
Despite the great growth of the CND-led anti-nuclear opposition and the popular mobilisation, a Guardian poll showed that on defence and nuclear issues the Tories enjoyed 45 per cent support buttressed by another 10 per cent for the SDP with Labour on 23 per cent.
 
Labour was unable to exploit the contradiction between this generalised support for a ruling-class policy with popular majority opinion that opposed the deployment of cruise missiles.
 
With Westminster Labour now fully onside with the Nato war party, the opportunity to develop a coherent defence policy without challenging the imperialist character of Britain’s foreign policy stance is limited.
 
However, it is necessary for the left, or at least that part of it that conceives of a socialist transformation of Britain as a necessity, to think what kind of military this entails.
 
It is clear that one based on overseas force projection in alliance with the US is essentially imperialist and that any alternative can only come about as a reflection of the foreign policy of state power exercised by the working class.
 
The basic principles of such a policy would be unilateral nuclear disarmament on the model pioneered by South Africa, withdrawal from Nato, Aukus, the Nato-EU defence “partnership” and active diplomacy to achieve comprehensive collective security agreements that go beyond the 1970s detente model that was sabotaged by the 1980s deployment of intermediate-range missiles and only rescued by the strategic arms limitation agreement — which Donald Trump dumped during his presidency.
 
The mid-1980s movement was grounded in the firm understanding by decisive millions that positioning these missiles made the countries that accepted them a target. This argument still stands.
 
Devising a military strategy that shifted from foreign war fighting to effective territorial defence must entail public ownership of the defence industry complex and an end to the integration of the British and US private monopolies that dominate this sector.
 
Covid corruption, privatisation and the Post Office scandal are themes to be mobilised to show that a patriotic defence policy in the service of our nation’s independence and sovereignty should not be left to profiteers.
 
Pious nonsense is talked about the duty owed to veterans, but Britain’s privatised military recruitment is hopelessly incompetent, pay and conditions are appalling and the care and welfare of former forces personnel is a scandal. The labour movement must become the tribune of servicemen and women while they serve and after.
 
Recruitment to the officer corps privileges bourgeois families and existing upper-class military dynasties while it is unemployment and poor job prospects that drive too many working-class people to enlist.
 
A democratic military must reflect the British people as it actually exists — in great diversity and overwhelmingly working class in composition and this means a democratic destruction of the class system.
 
The argument that the military and the state cannot be fundamentally reformed without a profound change in the direction society is going is yet another argument for working-class political power and socialism.

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.