Ban The Bomb Pacifism And The Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament

The final volume in the trilogy "The Struggle Against the Bomb", this book presents the inspiring and dramatic story of how citizen activists helped curb the arms race and prevent nuclear war.

Confronting the Bomb tells the dramatic, inspiring story of how citizen activism helped curb the nuclear arms race and prevent nuclear war. This abbreviated version of Lawrence Wittner's award-winning trilogy, The Struggle Against the Bomb, shows how a worldwide, grassroots campaign—the largest social movement of modern times—challenged the nuclear priorities of the great powers and, ultimately, thwarted their nuclear ambitions. Based on massive research in the files of peace and disarmament organizations and in formerly top secret government records, extensive interviews with antinuclear activists and government officials, and memoirs and other published materials, Confronting the Bomb opens a unique window on one of the most important issues of the modern era: survival in the nuclear age. It covers the entire period of significant opposition to the bomb, from the final stages of the Second World War up to the present. Along the way, it provides fascinating glimpses of the interaction of key nuclear disarmament activists and policymakers, including Albert Einstein, Harry Truman, Albert Schweitzer, Norman Cousins, Nikita Khrushchev, Bertrand Russell, Andrei Sakharov, Linus Pauling, Dwight Eisenhower, Harold Macmillan, John F. Kennedy, Randy Forsberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, Helen Caldicott, E.P. Thompson, and Ronald Reagan. Overall, however, it is a story of popular mobilization and its effectiveness.

Banning the Bomb, Smashing the Patriarchy offers a look inside the antinuclear movement and its recent successful campaign to ban the bomb. From scrappy organizing to winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 and achieving a landmark UN treaty banning nuclear weapons, this book narrates the journey of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and developments in feminist disarmament activism. Acheson explains the process through which diplomats, activists, and nuclear survivors worked together to elevate the horrific humanitarian and environmental impacts of nuclear weapons, develop new international law categorically prohibiting the bomb, challenge the nuclear orthodoxy, and strengthen norms for disarmament and peace. Told from the perspective of a queer feminist antimilitarist organizer who was involved from the start of the process through to the treaty’s adoption, the book utilizes interviews with dozens of participants, as well as critical theoretical perspectives about transnational advocacy networks, discourse change, and intersectional feminist action. It is meant to provide useful insights for anyone trying to make change amidst structures of power and politics.

During the 1950s, Michael Randle helped pioneer a new form of direct action against nuclear war, based on the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. At the forefront of the British campaign, he worked closely with Peace News editor Hugh Brock (1914–1985) and other distinguished ‘anti-nuclear pacifists’ such as Pat Arrowsmith, April Carter, and Ian Dixon, serving as chairman of the Direct Action Committee against Nuclear War (1958-1961) and secretary of the Committee of 100 (1960-1961). In 1966, he helped ‘spring’ the Russian spy George Blake from Wormwood Scrubs Prison. Thereafter, he campaigned vigorously on behalf of the Greek democratic opposition, conscientious objectors, and Soviet dissidents. He has always been a man of rare candor and singular energy and principles, even enduring imprisonment for his beliefs. Nowadays, Michael lives in Shipley near Bradford, where he continues to write as a respected expert on ‘people power’. Martin Levy’s interviews with Michael Randle introduce the reader to a tumultuous life that is nothing short of extraordinary.

In 1957, a number of leading American liberals and pacifists formed SANE as the stimulus for an ad hoc citizens campaign to prohibit atmospheric nuclear testing and promote international disarmament. Six years later, following the conclusion of the partial Test-Ban Treaty, SANE was reorganized as a permanent operation. It quickly became the basepoint for liberal opposition to the Vietnam War, and a mainstay of the American peace movement. Now Katz has written the definitive account of SANE. He skillfully traces the organization from its fight for the test-ban treaty through its post-Vietnam struggle for arms control and a strengthened world order. He sensitively documents the bitter infighting that has wracked SANE, and he persuasively indicates its limited but real effect on U.S. foreign policy makers. Well-researched, clearly written, and highly recommended. Charles DeBenedetti, History Dept., Univ. of Toledo -Library Journal.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) began in 1957 with a small group of public figures and grew into a mass movement. Martin Shaw details CND's rise, the activists involved, the tensions around direct action, and the culture and social groups that the campaign mobilized to "ban the bomb".

This volume examines the possibility of a world without nuclear weapons. It starts from the observation that, although nuclear deterrence has long been dominant in debates about war and peace, recent events show that ridicule and stigmatization of nuclear weapons and their possessors is on the rise. The idea of non-nuclear peace has been around since the beginning of the nuclear revolution, but it may be staging a return. The first part reconstructs the criticism of nuclear peace, both past and present, with a particular emphasis on technology. The second part focuses on the most revolutionary change since the beginning of the nuclear revolution, namely the Humanitarian Initiative and the resulting Nuclear Ban Treaty (2017), which allows imagining non-nuclear peace anew. The third and last part explores the practical and institutional prospects of a peace order without nuclear weapons. If non-nuclear peace advocates want to convince skeptics, they have to come up with practical solutions in the realm of global governance or world government.