FORTY years ago last month a nuclear blast evaporated a substantial part of Christmas Island in the Pacific, as the British detonated their first hydrogen bomb. It came only months after the American detonation at Bikini Atoll and provoked a storm of controversy. In time the CND marches from Trafalgar Square to the atomic base at Aldermaston, Berkshire, became as evocative of 1950s Britain as Teddy boys or Harold Macmillan.
Although the threat of thermonuclear destruction has retreated (but not vanished), it is still chilling to recall how, at least in the nuclear theatre, Irish neutrality counted for next to nothing given our geographical proximity to two of the five (official) nuclear powers, Britain and France.
Irish neutrality had its genesis in prewar nationalism. In 1914 the Irish Neutrality League was formed in Dublin with James Connolly as its head and a committee including the trade unionists William O'Brien and Thomas Farren, Major John MacBride and Countess Markievicz. In 1920, despite Arthur Griffith's early reservations, Eamon de Valera asserted at the AngloIrish Treaty negotiations that the Irish "could best realise their destiny as a neutral independent state"; and though the Treaty did not itself mention neutrality, the decision whether to join Britain in a war was left with the Oireachtas. Thus, shortly after joining the League of Nations in 1924, the Minister of External Affairs, Desmond Fitzgerald, referred to "the point of view of maintaining our neutrality and freedom".
Emphasis on neutrality
Irish foreign policy after September 1932, when de Valera became President of the Council of the League of Nations, was distinguished by the support given in 1934 to Soviet Russia's entry into the League, the condemnation of Italian expansion in Ethiopia and a neutral stance over war torn Spain, all in the face of both internal and external criticism. The emphasis on neutrality meant that when the 1939-45 conflict came, Ireland was one of the few nations on earth not directly affected by it.
When, in July 1946, the Dail urged the de Valera government to apply for United National membership, our application was supported by six nations but opposed by Andrei Gromyko of the Soviet Union on the grounds of alleged sympathy with the Axis powers during 1939-45.
In 1949, when Ireland was recognised as a Republic, John A. Costello rejected invitations to join the newly formed North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and his new Minister for External Affairs, Sean MacBride, claimed that it could "open the likelihood of civil conflict". Eventually Soviet objections to Ireland's UN membership were dropped, largely through the efforts of Krisha Menon the Indian ambassador and disciple of Gandhi who had received his legal education in Dublin.
Soon after admission, Ireland's foreign policy began to attain its distinct postwar character, especially after 1957, when Fianna Fail was returned to power and Liam Cosgrave was replaced at Foreign Affairs by Frank Aiken. His period of office from 1957 to 1969 defined Irish foreign policy: neutral, antinuclear, and with an emphasis on worldwide peace keeping and military disarmament in Central Europe. This was in spite of Cosgrave and Fine Gael, who had sought to add another plank: "to preserve Christian civilisation and the defence of the free world in their resistance of Communist power and influence."
Ireland persistently used its neutrality to promote the cause of disarmament at the UN. Its 1960 resolution, which called on nuclear powers to refrain from passing information on nuclear weapons technology to nonnuclear powers, was supported by the Warsaw Pact, but not encouraged by the US and NATO. In the event the resolution was passed by 68 votes to nil with 26 abstentions.
Attack Ireland?
The UN's adoption of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty in 1968 was realised partly as a result of Ireland's yearly submission to the General Assembly. And so, during the Cold War, we liked to soothe ourselves with the notion that progressive neutrality accorded us some kind of special exalted position. Attack nice, neutral, inoffensive Ireland? Who would believe the Yanks or Ruskies would do such a thing? When the four minute warning went up, our nasty warlike confederates in Britain and in the Continent might get vaporised; but when the wind blew, Ireland would live on in a brave new post holocaust world.
We know now that this was patent nonsense - and not just because the Chernobyl accident of 1986 demonstrated that the effects of nuclear radiation are far more devastating then previously believed. (Chernobyl produced barely a fraction of the radiation from the kind of nuclear detonation of which we could have expected several hundred in a conflict of any scale.) Ireland was regarded as a prime target as far back as 1957, when an RAF map used in the NATO operation "Dutch Threat" showed that the Western Allies expected at least three one megaton strikes (each worth about 80 Hiroshimas) against Dublin, Belfast and Shannon. Nuclear strategists feared that Ireland could prove to be the Achilles Heal of Europe, that Soviet Tupolev "Backfire" bombers, flying 4,500 miles from their bases on the Kola peninsula, could creep through the UK Iceland gap to a point off the west coast of this country, and hit British targets while avoiding detection by the RAE radar station at Bishopscourt, Co Down.
Soviet targets
Moreover, in March 1981, when the Sunday Tribune reported details of a joint US, NATO plan for Western Europe, it clearly showed that Cork, Bantry, Dublin, Shannon and Belfast would be Soviet targets - Shannon and Dublin airports being vital if NATO air bases on the Continent had been destroyed. The plan assumed that the Soviets believed that, in a war, NATO would take over the country with or without the government's consent.
In December 1983, two members of Northern Ireland CND, Peter Emerson and Paddy McBride, entered the nuclear bunker at Mount Eden in south Belfast. They photographed a map of Ireland showing a number of sites regarded then by the British Ministry of Defence as possible targets in a European nuclear exchange. In Northern Ireland these were Bishopscourt; the radar base at Torr Head, Co Antrim; and the base at Ballykelly, Co Derry. In the Republic there were six sites: Wicklow, Waterford, Cork, Cobb, and two points in Donegal including a seastrike at Inistrahull.
It is grim to consider how in the 1980s under Reagan, the US contemplated the use of "counter force" - i.e. the fighting of a war limited to Europe with "battlefield" weapons to avoid an all out strike against America. And, as a team of scientists led by America's premier astronomer, the late Dr Carl Sagan, demonstrated, it would require but a few dozen megatons of hydrogen bomb to touch off a "nuclear winter", even if the Soviets (or Americans) had left us unscathed. So Ireland would have been uninhabitable within days of World War III. Looking back on this, one can only give thanks for Mikhail Gorbachev.