Nuclear Pacifism as Collective Action

Abstract

Nuclear pacifism as a social movement has received inadequate attention from North American sociolo gists. The author analyzes the growth and crisis phases of contemporary nuclear pacifism using the social disorganization and resource mobilization paradigms of collective behavior theory. He identifies certain growth stimuli ranging from particular precipitating, dramatizing, and encounter events to the dis appearance of major non-nuclear events that were competing with nuclear war for the attention and energy of the politically conscious segment of the US population. The author examines the conducive- ness and social control factors in US society that have stimulated and restrained nuclear protest in the 1975-1985 period. The ideological diversity within nuclear pacifism is seen as both a strength, in that it indicates imagination and widespread initiative, and a weakness in its vagueness and lack of goal clarity. The movement's low capacity for sustained resource mobilization is judged by the author to be its most serious shortcoming, which can be traced primarily to its underdeveloped organizational structures of leadership and decentralized decision making. The author concludes that indirect institutionalization and social invention hold the greatest promise of survival and policy impact for nuclear pacifism. While he found both the social disorganization and resource mobilization theories useful, the metamovement character, and size and heterogeneity of nuclear pacifism suggest that prescription for its increased ef fectiveness might better be approached through analysis of individual and small group protest.