SOPHIE BOLT has big ambitions for her first year at the head of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

The cause of peace and disarmament faces huge challenges. Two major wars involving nuclear-armed states continue to rage in Ukraine and Palestine, with Britain entangled in both.

Donald Trump, who in his first term dismantled treaties aimed at reducing the risk of nuclear conflict such as the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces ban and the Iran nuclear deal, while equipping US nuclear submarines with smaller-yield “tactical” nuclear weapons, returns to the US presidency next month.

And an extreme crackdown on anti-war voices as part of the post-Corbyn Labour Party’s broader assault on the left has discouraged serious debate about the risks of war in Parliament — when Britain gave Ukraine permission to fire Storm Shadow missiles at Russian territory, for example, the government didn’t even bother to announce its change of policy in the Commons.

Bolt, who succeeded CND’s longstanding general secretary Kate Hudson at the end of last month, says Parliament’s apparent indifference to the growing threat of nuclear war is not mirrored by the public.

“There’s a democratic deficit between what you have in Parliament and what ordinary people think. You can tell that just from Keir Starmer’s ratings,” she tells me as we meet in CND’s soon-to-be-former offices on the Holloway Road (they are relocating to east London).

“Parliament isn’t really very representative of people’s concerns about nuclear weapons, though we do have an active Parliamentary CND group.

“We’ve seen a big increase in interest in CND over the last year. In September we ran adverts on the Tube and a social media campaign on a petition warning the threat of nuclear war has never been higher, and calling on the government to take steps to avert it and disarm — and we got thousands and thousands of people signing that.

“Talk to friends, family, people you know, and you see that people totally get that nuclear war is on the horizon.”

If that’s the view of ordinary people, though, the determination at the top is to shut people’s eyes to the danger.

Last month at the UN, Britain was one of just three states (the others were France and Russia) to vote against setting up a scientific panel to assess the effects of nuclear war. The United States and other Nato states abstained, also the position taken by most other nuclear powers, though one, China, voted with the majority of non-nuclear states in favour.

“Even the US abstained!” Bolt exclaims. “Yet Britain really doubled down on this … there was real shock from some other countries, who asked why would you not want to understand the consequences?

“The argument was ‘we already know,’ but this would be the first study of its kind in 40 years. The climactic modelling has totally changed, and there’s new evidence to consider suggesting the ‘regional’ nuclear wars being talked up by Nato and Russian strategists — as opposed to the global mutually assured destruction assumed during the first cold war — would still lead to devastating nuclear winters.”

Bolt reasons that the British government must have been trying to signal to the United States how totally committed it is to nuclear weapons and the Nato military doctrine that permits first use.

This is part of positioning aimed at showing willing to an incoming Trump presidency. Bolt is unconvinced by arguments that Trump will pursue an isolationist policy.

“Trump argues for a massive increase in military spending by Nato states,” she points out. “There has been no suggestion he will reverse the decision to station US nuclear weapons on European bases, including Lakenheath in Suffolk.

“He’s likely to try to push more of the financial burden of projecting US power onto European states.

“And it’s horrifying when you hear Trump advisers like Robert O’Brien talking about the need to ‘do a Soviet Union’ on China, to force it into a nuclear arms race to destroy it.

“I fear the America First policy will turn out to be a continued ratcheting up of US aggression.”

Bolt says the rhetoric deployed against not just Russia, but other states including China, North Korea and Iran “feels very much like we’re in another cold war, and increasingly we see it talked about explicitly, preparation for a third world war.

“Political leaders can’t ignore it any more. By trying to, they are simply alienating themselves further from the public.”

And CND is determined to make them sit up and notice. Bolt outlines plans for a “bases tour” in 2025, which will feature actions at Barrow-in-Furness, where nuclear submarines are built, the Devonport naval base and Aldermaston, and supporting, as part of Lakenheath Alliance for Peace, a two-week “peace camp” in April at Lakenheath, including an international conference with speakers from Japan, South Korea and the United States, and ending with a blockade of the base.

She’s delighted the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Japanese nuclear bomb survivors’ campaign Nihon Hidankyo, saying it will help raise awareness of the human costs of nuclear war — and pleased its co-chair Toshiyuki Mimaki immediately compared the destruction visited on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, since the merciless mass killing of civilians is itself a warning of what modern states and politicians are capable of. She sees next year’s 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings as an opportunity to take that message across the country.

Raising awareness is a huge part of CND’s job, and one she’s been conscious of since first being involved in setting up Youth and Student CND toward the end of the 1990s.

She remembers as a student waking up to the US missile defence projects of that decade, the “unipolar moment” when following the collapse of the Soviet Union US power was unchallenged worldwide. “It was about the US being able to attack other countries with impunity. To create the same sort of circumstances as when it was able to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki without fear of retaliation.”

As with me, the first war she was involved in campaigning against was the 1999 Nato attack on Yugoslavia, and like so many new to left activism it was an eye-opener as to how the system closes ranks to enforce its approved narrative about the world.

“You know that phrase that truth is the first casualty of war? I remember being so shocked at the way the BBC would run what amounted to Ministry of Defence press releases.”

CND does not try to separate campaigning against nuclear war from the wider struggle for peace, and has worked with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and peace and Muslim organisations as a key organiser of the gigantic Gaza ceasefire demonstrations over the past year.

“We have to oppose wars where there’s a threat of nuclear war, and increasingly there is,” she says. “We want to make sure nuclear weapons never get used again. Clearly, escalating war in the Middle East and in Ukraine makes it more likely they will be used again.”

So does the threat to resume nuclear testing by both Russia and the United States. This means campaigning to defend the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty will be another priority for CND over the next 12 months.

All these developments give the lie to claims that possession of nuclear weapons somehow makes the world safer by preventing wars. “It’s not worked, has it? It’s obscene.

“It was always racist, as it conflated the absence of direct war in Europe with world peace while wars of a horrific nature were fought in Korea, Vietnam, Latin America, Afghanistan or Iraq.”

Joining the dots between international crises, bringing the cause of nuclear disarmament together with campaigns for environmental and social justice, was a theme of CND’s conference last October.

“We’ve been doing this for decades: showing the relevance of all these campaigns to the whole of society, showing what the endless militarism costs us, socially and ecologically. We’re going to be doing a lot more of this: exposing the links between militarism and climate change, the impact of inflated arms budgets on the rest of the public sector.”

CND might date back to the 1950s, but in a darkening world it seems more relevant than ever. It seems a safe bet that Morning Star readers will be working to make its 2025 campaigns as big and influential as possible.