Nuclear Weapons: The Global and Popular Context of Policy

Abstract

With Toward Nuclear Abolition, Lawrence S. Wittner completes his ground-breaking trilogy, The Struggle against the Bomb. The first volume, One World or None (1993), carried the story through 1953 and the early Cold War. The second, Resisting the Bomb (1997), continued it through the Test Ban campaigns to 1970. One wishes that the story might have reached its conclusion in the third volume, which encompasses the peaking and then initial reversal of the arms race in the 1980s. However, the threat of nuclear warfare remains today, even though it is shorn of superpower conflict. That fact underlies Wittner's conclusion, drawn after well over a decade of research. Nuclear weapons still pose a “momentous choice” for humankind, he insists, a choice between a “national security paradigm” and nuclear insecurity on the one hand, and arms control and disarmament under a transformed international system on the other (p. 491). Ironically, that is just how the problem was formulated fifty years ago at the outset of a global struggle against nuclear weapons. Has nothing changed?