Great Britain: Aldermaston's Amen?

Since 1958, when the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament staged the first Aldermaston March, its 52-mile Easter parade has turned into Britain's biggest lunatic fringe benefit. Beardies and weirdies soon stole the spotlight from the pacifist parsons and left-wing Laborites who started the ban-the-bomb movement.

It also became evident that the four-day shuffle was being manipulated by such highly motivated "pilgrims" as Communist agitators, anarchists, and a few thugs to boot. Last week, after the sixth annual spectacular ended in blisters and bombast in Hyde Park, most responsible Britons—including several C.N.D. co-founders—were more eager to ban the march than the bomb.

Their disillusionment was the result of a stratagem that struck even the tolerant British as a disloyal act. Even before the marchers left Aldermaston, there appeared copies of a crudely mimeographed, twelve-page document headed: DANGER! OFFICIAL SECRET. Inside, its anonymous authors declared: "We are Spies for Peace. We have decided to publish an Official Secret. There are thousands more secrets in captivity. This is not the only one we shall release." The information it contained was, in fact, highly classified: the locations, code names and telephone numbers of twelve Regional Seats of Government from which British authorities would at tempt to restore order in the event of nuclear attack. "This," exclaimed Home Secretary Henry Brooke, "is the work of a traitor."

By no coincidence, the only emergency headquarters described in detail was R.S.G. 6, an underground bunker in the Berkshire woods along the marchers' route from Reading to London. Ignoring C.N.D. officials' pleas to stay on the main road, 1,000 of some 15,000 marchers left the procession and poured down the country lane marked on the "peace" spies' map. After a scuffle with police, the shouting demonstrators staged a mass squat around the bunker for more than an hour, until one of their leaders announced: "We have achieved our object."

Whatever their real object, the "spies for peace" triggered a full-scale Scotland Yard investigation and brought Prime Minister Harold Macmillan scurrying back from his country home to London for consultation with his Cabinet. Nevertheless, Canon John Collins, C.N.D. chairman and preceptor of St. Paul's Cathedral, simpered on TV that most marchers "treated it rather as a joke." His merriment was not shared by James Cameron, a crusading journalist who has been a prominent figure in C.N.D. since its inception. Cameron conceded sadly that the ban-the-bomb marches had "become a vehicle for too many secondary and dubious intentions." Admitting belatedly that C.N.D. had been taken for a ride, Cameron cried: "God save us from our friends."