KATE HUDSON, who has led the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) for 21 years, retired yesterday.

Yet its mobilisation today in protest at the return of US nuclear weapons to the Lakenheath air base in Suffolk has echoes of her earliest days in peace activism, when she and so many others mobilised against the deployment of US cruise missiles in the early 1980s.

“With hundreds of thousands of others, I became involved in the demonstrations at that time, as well as the women’s mobilisations at Greenham Common,” she tells the Morning Star. The power of protest worked: “Eventually, the cruise missiles were kicked out.

“And then, like others, I thought, ‘OK, the cold war’s over, those weapons have gone’.”

But the much-anticipated “peace dividend” of the 1990s was illusory. “From the mid to late ’90s it became clear that though the Warsaw Pact had dissolved itself, Nato wasn’t going to.

“Nato was actually in the process of expansion, and I realised that a unipolar world was not going to be a peaceful world. With the Wolfowitz Doctrine [arguing for the pre-emptive use of force by the United States to suppress potential rivals] the US was going to do everything to remain the single superpower — and that still determines US foreign policy.”

Hudson was elected in 2003: the US and its allies, Britain foremost among them, had attacked Yugoslavia, begun the long, bloody occupation of Afghanistan and were in the process of invading Iraq.

We’ve been at war ever since. Today, two wars have the horrifying potential to go nuclear: an increasingly direct Russia-Nato conflict in Ukraine and Israel’s ever-expanding aggression in the Middle East.

Hudson sees continuity between all these wars.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were about securing US domination of the Middle East and approaches to India and central Asia — “that incredibly important strategic political crossroads. There were resource elements to it as well.” Today’s tensions are at the root about US domination of the world too.

“Twenty years ago the US talked of the ‘axis of evil,’ which was Iran, Iraq and North Korea. States it viewed as non-compliant politically and economically.

“These were at most regional powers. Today they talk about an ‘axis of authoritarian states’ — a recent defence secretary [Ben Wallace] even said we might be at war with some or all of them within five years — which includes Russia and China, big global powers.”

For a lifelong campaigner for nuclear disarmament, the implications are alarming. “We’ve moved from a phase of horrific but limited wars to one where I’d say the sky’s the limit — except it isn’t as the weaponisation extends into space!”

These are very different countries — while Russia is a huge nuclear power, China’s nuclear arsenal is relatively small “and the military isn’t really its thing, in terms of how it projects power, sees its role in the world and so on,” but is vastly more formidable economically. But conflict with either or both would mean world war.

That the US is the more aggressive is clear: “A simple comparison is that the US has 800 military bases overseas, Russia has six and China has one.

“Nevertheless the US is going down the road towards war and building those alliances around those states — Nato expansion in Europe, regional groups like Aukus and the Quad in the Indo-Pacific.” So we now feel closer to nuclear war than for decades, with the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists having set the Doomsday Clock, representing the risk of such a conflict, at 90 seconds to midnight for the last two years.

Hudson has always placed CND at the heart of a wider peace and social justice movement, from its work with the Stop the War Coalition and the Muslim Association of Britain to build the huge movement against the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to its recent The World We Want conference, in which nuclear disarmament’s links to environmental, anti-poverty and anti-racist struggles were drawn out.

I’d heard when she took office she had to overcome critics who felt that CND should focus solely on nuclear disarmament, and this didn’t require it to take a stance on specific non-nuclear wars. Was it a hard battle to win?

“No. Throughout its history, CND has always taken positions on more than just nuclear weapons.

“We played a significant role in opposition to the Vietnam war. I think we first had  conference policy opposed to Nato from 1960 and have opposed nuclear power since the early 1970s.

“Of course nuclear disarmament is our key focus. But nuclear weapons are weapons. If they’re going to be used, it will be in the context of war and escalating global tensions: you can’t just box them off, and CND never has.

“Twenty years ago, there was a body of opinion in a section of the leadership that felt we shouldn’t get involved in the big anti-war campaigns, but actually, that would have been the break with our history, if we hadn’t played a role.”

Just as it was at the heart of the movement against the Iraq war, CND is today with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Palestinian Forum in Britain, the Muslim Association of Britain, Stop the War and Friends of al-Aqsa among the most prominent organisers of the enormous, ongoing mobilisation for peace and justice for the Palestinians.

Hudson’s been involved in both, just as she was in “the largest ever demonstrations prior to Iraq — the big anti-cruise missile demonstrations of the 1980s.

“It says something about the British people. Our largest demonstrations ever have been against nuclear weapons, against the war on Iraq and against the genocide in Gaza.”

Yet despite that, our ruling class remains among the most bellicose in the world. The peace movement of the early 2000s did have a political impact — “it ended the political career of Tony Blair, it had an impact on what British parliaments were willing to do — as with the 2013 vote against bombing Syria.”

Some say it contributed to the Jeremy Corbyn movement that swept Labour from 2015. But more than one observer has noted the irony that Corbyn, whose career had previously prioritised internationalism and peace above all else, managed to change Labour foreign and military policy less than in any other field, with the party remaining committed to renewing the hugely costly Trident nuclear arsenal despite its leader remaining a vice-president of CND.

Among the many character attacks on Corbyn, one of the more surreal was the furore over whether he would “push the button” in a nuclear war, as if readiness to commit genocide is an essential qualification for high office in this country.

Hudson doesn’t think that reflects public opinion. “We built huge demonstrations against Trident replacement. In 2007, the 95 Labour MPs voting against were the biggest back-bench rebellion the party had ever seen on a domestic issue. And actually, Blair later admitted Trident had no military utility, but that he felt ceasing to be a nuclear power would be seen as a loss of status.”

It was that status question she believes motivated the hysteria over Corbyn pressing the button — it was a shorthand for wider concerns in the political and media elite that he wasn’t committed to Britain as a global military power.

You’d be unlikely to get 95 Labour MPs voting against Trident today. Hudson believes the peace movement has come under intense pressure — with the political right emboldened, in her view, by Brexit, and a ruling-class reaction to Corbynism making disarmament less politically acceptable.

“The climate in Britain now is less amenable to protest, less open to political contestation of controversial issues.”

Even the labour movement has gone backwards on peace, with TUC policy, once opposed to Trident replacement, now in support of it.

“Even opportunities to voice different views in the media have been much reduced, where previously we might have been asked to put our cases on Newsnight or Question Time or so on, that doesn’t really happen now, as you’ve seen yourself,” she smiles, recalling the brief window during the Corbyn years when Morning Star journalists got invited onto prime-time political shows.

The lurch towards a hard-right authoritarianism is international, and Hudson is alarmed at the prospect of a second Donald Trump presidency.

“God help us if he gets back in.” Trump, she points out, commissioned and deployed so-called “usable” smaller-yield nuclear weapons to the US submarine fleet, tore up the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty which had removed nuclear missiles from most of Europe, shredded the Iran nuclear deal, moved the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. “Recently he said the whole of the West Bank should be incorporated into Israel.”

Some believe Trump may be a less warlike president than a Democrat, but Hudson holds this is “a massive mistake.”

“I haven’t got any truck with the current presidency. It is facilitating a genocide. What the American administration is doing is absolutely terrible.

“And under Trump, it would be worse. We should have no illusions about that.”

The danger of nuclear war looms larger all the time. Much depends, in Hudson’s view, on ordinary people’s ability to mobilise to stop it — as it always has.

“Nuclear weapons have not been used since 1945. We have maintained that taboo.

“It is not because governments have not wanted to use them. The US wanted to use them in Korea, and in Vietnam, but presidents were advised that the public wouldn’t wear it.

“CND is very much part of a global anti-nuclear and peace movement. There are indications the taboo against using nuclear weapons is breaking down: so we fight hard to defend it.” CND is part of the global majority, after all, with 122 countries having supported the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

She is proud it is at the forefront of that fight today at Lakenheath, where the US plans to deploy nuclear bombs, as it is at the forefront of campaigning for a ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon, and a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine.

Leadership of the organisation now passes to her successor Sophie Bolt, a veteran peace campaigner and, like Hudson, a familiar speaker at Morning Star events.

Does she have a message to the next generation of campaigners?

“Never make concessions on the principles. Remember that CND has always been and must always be an alliance-based organisation. Our links to other campaigns, in civil society, to faith communities are very important.

“So are our links in the labour movement, and the fight to restore a pro-peace and defence diversification policy to the TUC is one of the most important for today’s activists.

“Embrace diversity. We are part of an international movement, we are part of the global majority. It is fundamental to remember that.”