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[introduction.]

When nuclear weapons became an accomplished fact mankind found itself facing the question of whether or not it would find a way to survive. The tragedy of Hiroshima and the menace of "atom diplomacy" as practised by the ruling circles of the United States were instrumental in alerting hundreds of millions all over the world. The educational campaign carried on by the Communists, Left-wing Socialists and all the various democratic organisations helped people understand the nature of the danger they faced and where it came from, and how it could be averted. In 1948 and 1949, when the cold war was going strong, the idea of a united stand for peace began increasingly to gain ground among the masses.

The Peace Movement

p In August 1948, there was convened at Wroclaw, Poland, a World Congress, which was attended by more than 500 scholars, scientists, writers and artists, representatives of the progressive intelligentsia of 45 countries. A Manifesto in defence of peace was adopted which appealed to the peoples of the world to speak out for peace, for free cultural development, for national independence, and for friendly intercourse among nations. Early in 1949, the International Cultural Contacts Committee set up by the Congress and the Women’s International Democratic Federation, acting jointly, proposed that a World Congress for Peace should be convened for the purpose of rallying the active forces of all nations in the defence of peace. The idea of convening such a congress was supported by the World Federation of Trade Unions, the World Federation of Democratic Youth and the International Federation of Former Political Prisoners.

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p It so happened that the international situation grew much worse shortly after the Wroclaw Congress. The North Atlantic military bloc created in April 1949 came to play the role of a new Holy Alliance, aimed this time not only against possible future revolutions, but against the existing socialist states as well. There was the "Berlin crisis”, which made for a tense, brink-of-war atmosphere. And it was in this political climate that the First World Congress for Peace went to work in Paris on April 20, 1949. Over 2,000 delegates from 72 countries, representing organisations whose combined membership numbered over 600,000,000 men and women, did their best to express the will of the peoples to preserve the peace and to plan ways and means of staving off the menace of war. The governments of the bourgeois countries were quick to see the serious threat to their aggressive schemes inherent in the new movement, and made every effort to prevent the Congress from meeting, refused delegates visas to leave their countries for Paris, while the French Government reduced visa quotas for the socialist countries. The Chinese delegation was simply refused admission into France. Part of the Congress therefore met in Prague.

p The sponsors of the movement succeeded in rallying to the common cause people belonging to different parties and classes, people of various religious faiths and political convictions. Frederic Joliot-Curie told the opening sitting that declarations of support of the Movement for Peace had been sent in by the representatives of many national trade union, peasant, youth, women’s and churchmen’s organisations.

p Other speakers revealed that the preparations for war were linked with the colonial policies of the “great” bourgeois powers and at the same time they showed the connection between the growing democratic, anti-war movement in these countries and the national liberation struggle of the colonial peoples. The Congress came out against the criminal war then waged by the French colonialists in Vietnam and the armed aggression of the Dutch Government in Indonesia.

p The Congress set up a Permanent Committee and a Permanent Committee Bureau, whose membership included prominent public figures from many lands. The Congress Manifesto called upon all peoples to unite to safeguard the peace. "We stand for the prohibition of atomic weapons and all other means of mass destruction of human life,” said the Manifesto, in part. "We demand restriction of the armed forces of the great powers and the establishment of effective international control to ensure that atomic energy would be used exclusively for peaceful purposes for the benefit of mankind.. . . We shall fight for national independence and the peaceful co-existence of peoples. . .. We condemn the war 478 hysteria as breeding racial hatred and enmity among peoples.. . . The World Congress for Peace proclaims that the defence of peace shall henceforth be the concern of all peoples.”

p The Congress stimulated a widespread movement in scores of countries. National committees for the defence of peace sprang up everywhere. In bourgeois countries the governments were practically unanimous in adopting a hostile attitude toward those who took an active interest in the movement. The Government of the United States even barred a delegation of the Permanent Committee from setting foot on American soil, and the British parliament followed suit. In Holland, Permanent Committee members were arrested and deported after a day’s detention by the police. Active peace campaigners, in some instances men and women of conservative or liberal-bourgeois views, were often declared to be “Communists” by the authorities and their demand of preserving peace qualified as “subversive” and traitorous in regard to the national interests.

p In March 1950, the Permanent Committee of the World Congress for Peace, meeting at Stockholm, adopted an appeal that was destined to play a most important part in rallying the forces of peace. It read, in part, as follows: "We demand the unconditional prohibition of atomic weapons as a weapon of intimidation and mass destruction of human life.

p “We demand the establishment of strict international control to ensure the observance of this decision.

p “We consider that any government that first employs atomic weapons against any country shall be guilty of a crime against humanity and shall be treated as a war criminal.

p “We call upon all men of goodwill the world over to put their names to this appeal.”

p First to sign the Stockholm Appeal were over a hundred internationally prominent statesmen, scholars and scientists. The signature-collecting campaign developed into a gigantic international referendum on the atom bomb issue. Some 150,000 committees in defence of peace were established in the towns and villages of 75 countries. The aims of the movement were explained at public meetings and in house-to-house canvassing.

p While the collection of signatures to the Stockholm Appeal went on, the working class intensified its activities directed against the armaments race, the purchase and shipment of American arms to European countries, and the transportation of troops and equipment to areas where colonial wars were being fought. In the beginning of 1950 two thousand workers at Nice, France, broke through police lines and dumped into the sea military materiel prepared for shipment to Indo-China. In March, the dockers of Naples refused to unload an American ship that had arrived 479 with a cargo of arms for the Italian army. A month later 16,000 workers at the port of Antwerp struck in protest against discharging a shipment’ of American military equipment. About that same time, in Japan, 106 prominent scientists signed an Appeal to Scientists in which they declared that "Peace is the soil on which life and scientific’research can develop.... We have therefore resolved to oppose war, whatever happens”. Not a few cases were recorded in Western Europe when scores of men lay on the railway tracks to keep troop trains and shipments of arms from moving. The Stockholm Appeal signature campaign was a great success, in fact, it became the greatest international mass undertaking in history. Over 500,000,000 people signed the demand to outlaw the atom bomb.

p In the summer of 1950 the United States imperialists, hand in hand with the South Korean reactionaries, unleashed civil war in Korea; and at the same time American troops occupied the Chinese island of Taiwan. To stop the American intervention and re-establish peace in Korea became henceforward one of the main aims of the Movement for Peace. The Second Congress for Peace, held in November 1950 in Warsaw, appealed to the United Nations to stop the war in Korea, withdraw the foreign troops, end the American intervention in Taiwan, and also the military operations against the republic of Vietnam. A resolution condemning the remilitarisation of Germany and Japan was adopted. Over 1,750 delegates representing 81 countries elected a World Peace Council, which was to be the organisational centre of the movement. At its first session in February 1951 the Council adopted an Appeal to the governments of the five great powers, the USSR, USA, China, Great Britain and France, calling upon them to conclude a Peace Pact. 600,000,000 men and women, or nearly one-half of the adult population of the world, backed the Appeal with their signatures.

p Late in 1952 an International Congress for the Defence of Peace was convened in Vienna. This was a highly representative meeting, attended by more than 1,500 delegates from all walks of life: parliamentarians, trade union and peasant leaders, writers, artists, churchmen, etc.

The World Peace Council acted to rally international public opinion, to arouse the consciousness of millions and summon them to action in the various dangerous crises that followed each other in the 1950s and early 1960s as a result of the political gambles of the imperialist powers. Thanks to the purposeful and energetic activity of its members the Movement for Peace was able to create a moral and political climate which was unfavourable for the proponents of "the positions of strength policy”, diplomacy of intimidation and atomic blackmail. And still Western politicians and 480 propagandists continued to claim that war was unavoidable, and that true statesmanship lay in the ability to balance "on the brink of war”. A war of a new type, it will be recalled, in which the population of entire countries and even continents could be wiped off the face of the earth. A certain fatalism was widespread in regard to war as a calamity which was inevitably visited upon mankind from time to time.

Is a World War Inevitable?

p The Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (February. 1956) subjected the new situation obtaining in the world in the mid-1950s to an exhaustive analysis. The Soviet Union had, by that time, not only healed the wounds it had suffered in the course of a war of unparalleled savagery, but had made great strides in the development of its industry, science and technology. The other countries of the socialist system, too, were going through a process of rapid development. The United States atom bomb monopoly had been ended as early as 1949, when atom bomb tests were carried out in the USSR. The imperialist camp, on the other hand, suffered a set-back, politically and economically, as a result of the rapidly growing scope of the liberation movement in the colonies and dependencies. Class warfare was on the increase, meanwhile, in the bourgeois countries. In addition to demands for better working conditions the proletariat, urban and rural, now insisted more and more forcefully on a policy of peace and prevention of a new world war. The world power relationship had shifted sharply in favour of socialism.

p The conclusion arrived at by the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU was this: a new world war is not an inevitable certainty, there is a real possibility of averting it. This conclusion is of prime theoretical and practical significance. The champions of peace the world over had now a definite programme to go by, for it was now no longer a question of achieving a more or less prolonged breathing-spell but of eliminating world wars in general. The theses worked out by the Congress received the unanimous approval of the Meetings of Communist and Workers’ Parties held in Moscow in 1957, 1960 and 1969, as well as the subsequent congresses of the CPSU.

p By the time the CPSU Programme was adopted, in October 1961, the world power balance had shifted still more in favour of the socialist countries, whose share in the global industrial output now amounted roughly to 37 per cent, as against 27 per cent in 1955. The world’s first space flights of Yuri Gagarin and German Titov gave convincing proof of the remarkable advances achieved 481 by the Soviet Union in the realm of science and technology. The Soviet Army had been completely re-equipped with rocket and nuclear weapons. The revolutionary movement of the colonial peoples was rapidly gathering momentum. In the spring of 1961 Cuba defeated an attempt at direct armed intervention undertaken by counter-revolutionary mercenaries. Just as the invading force was being beaten back the Cuban Government announced that the Cuban people were passing on to the construction of socialism. Thus it came about that the socialist revolution won a victory on American soil.

p In the advanced capitalist countries, moreover, the workers’ movement and the movement against war had scored notable success.

p Such were the factors that made it possible for the TwentySecond Congress of the CPSU to confirm and stress in the Party Programme the proposition that humanity can be delivered from the danger of a new world war. The forces of imperialism and reaction are intent, of course, and will continue to be intent, on unleashing a war, and it would be a grave mistake to underestimate the danger. But there is no fatal inevitability of war and it is here that the peoples can make themselves heard. Of paramount importance in this respect is the stand of the socialist community, especially the Soviet Union, which is viewed by the people throughout the world as the bulwark of world peace.

p The Twenty-Third Congress of the CPSU, held in March and April of 1966, gave a great deal of attention to the problems of safeguarding peace. The Congress emphasised that if peace is to be safeguarded it will be necessary for the forces of peace all over the world to incessantly multiply their efforts and for the movement for peace, trade unions, women’s and youth associations, and other mass democratic organisations to increase the vigour and scope of their activities.

Of prime importance to the maintenance of peace in the world are: unity among the socialist countries and constant preparedness of their defence system, and an alliance of the international workers’ movement and the national liberation movement in a stand against war. The Twenty-Third Congress of the CPSU instructed the Soviet Government to continue its efforts to safeguard world peace.

General and Complete Disarmament

p The central problem of the contemporary times is that of disarmament. In the sixties more than 100,000,000 people either served in the armed forces or were employed in the production of 482 armaments. In the early 1960s military expenditures amounted yearly to over $120,000 million. This amount would be enough to finance a fundamental economic and technological reconstruction of the entire African continent; roughly half that amount would pay for the construction of 100 or more metallurgical plants like the Bhilai complex in India. The price paid for a modern bomber would pay for two large power plants. The armaments race means an unparalleled waste of human effort and material resources.

p Nor is that all. The more atom and hydrogen bombs are stockpiled, the more rockets and supersonic bombers are built to deliver them, the greater becomes the direct threat of war. And it should be kept in mind that the war might break out either as a calculated act of the militarist circles of some bourgeois country or as a result of chance circumstances, of a miscalculation, a mechanical error, or even simply of mental derangement on the part of a pilot or rocketeer. If the arms race is not halted nuclear weapons will proliferate, more and more countries will come to possess them. And the danger of war will become even greater.

p There is only one way to ward off the danger that threatens humanity, and that is disarmament, complete and general. This was precisely the substance of the proposal tabled by the Soviet Government at the Fourteenth Session of the UN General Assembly of 1959.

p An important contribution to the consolidation of all the forces of peace was made by the World Congress for General Disarmament and Peace, which met in Moscow in June 1962.

p Further efforts in behalf of an agreement on disarmament were made by the Soviet delegation at the Eighteenth Session of the UN General Assembly, held in September 1963.

p Since 1956, the Soviet Government had been urging that nuclear weapons tests should be discontinued, but no headway could be made because the representatives of the United States and Great Britain at the negotiations kept insisting on the introduction of a system of control which would be, essentially, but a lightly camouflaged form of espionage. Modern technology had reached a level where any tests could be detected by instruments and the use of observation posts, which existed in all countries. The Western countries, however, insisted on numerous on-the-spot inspections, especially in connection with the discovery of underground tests.

p Early in July 1962, the Soviet Government made it known that it would be prepared to conclude an agreement on the discontinuance of nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in outer space and under water. On August 5, 1963, an agreement on the cessation of tests in the three environments was signed, in Moscow, by the Soviet 483 Union, the United States and Great Britain. Within a short time over 100 states had officially adhered to this agreement.

The Soviet Union regarded the signing of the agreement on partial discontinuance of nuclear arms tests as but the first step, the ultimate aim being to achieve complete and general disarmament in the interests of world peace. The Soviet Government also suggested coming to an agreement on the conclusion of a non-aggression pact between the NATO countries, on the one hand, and the member-states of the Warsaw Pact, on the other, and on a freezing or reduction of military budgets.