ABSTRACT
The question of the Party’s attitude towards issues of war and peace in this
period is inextricably bound up with wider questions about its perceptions of
both the US and the Soviet Union, and the related question of its attitude
towards atomic and then nuclear weapons. The Labour Party was always a
broad church, but these issues exposed a fault line that was to wrack the
Party from the 1950s to the 1980s. By the time Harold Wilson took office in
1964 this fault line had developed into a chasm that Wilson had to somehow
bridge in order to hold the Party, and with it the government, together. For Wilson, as for Attlee before him, the issues at its core not only affected foreign
policy; in the choices they imposed they also dictated the limits of the possible
in domestic policy.
