Description
Many people have heard of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), but what about organisations such as Tories Against Cruise and Trident (TACT) or the Young Conservatives’ Youth for Multilateral Disarmament? Nuclear disarmament is associated with left-wing politics, yet anti-nuclear politics on the right remains overlooked. This paper analyses ‘Conservative anti-nuclearism’ from WW2 up to 2024, revealing a 79-year anti-nuclear stance among elite and grassroot Conservatives, uncovering perhaps the shyest of Tories – those opposed to nuclear weapons.
Not only will this paper present a fascinating, untold and counter-intuitive narrative of opposition to nuclear weapons from within the Conservative Party, it also opens an entirely new research field: Conservative anti-nuclearism. Amid rising nuclear tensions in Europe over Ukraine – driven by the actions of right-wing governments associated with the so-called ‘nationalist international’, from Putin’s Russia to the second Trump presidency, a possible National Rally victory in France and a potential Reform government in the UK – alongside the Conservative Party’s current period out of office – exploring the counter-narrative of conservative anti-nuclearism offers a fresh perspective on nuclear disarmament in a way that may appeal to conservatives more than anti-nuclearist policies emanating from their traditional unilateralist associations on the left.