Peace Through Protest?

Abstract

Reviews 187 c:\users\kenneth\documents\type3302\rj 33,2 113 red.docx 2014-01-15 10:04 PEACE THROUGH PROTEST? Andrew G. Bone Russell Research Centre / McMaster U. Hamilton, on, Canada l8s 4l6 bone@mcmaster.ca Lawrence S. Wittner. Confronting the Bomb: a Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement. (Stanford Nuclear Age Series.) Stanford, ca: Stanford U. P., 2009. Pp. xv, 256. isbn: 9780804756310. us$55.00 (hb); us$22.95 (pb). awrence Wittner thinks that the global nuclear disarmament movement has never been properly credited for its contribution to the avoidance of full-scale superpower conflict for almost 50 years of Cold War. To ignore this worldwide struggle against the bomb in explaining why a third world war was averted during this dangerous half century “makes about as much sense as omitting the us civil rights movement from explanations for the collapse of racial segregation and discrimination” (p. xii). This does not appear to be an extravagant claim, and Wittner is far too astute an historian completely to bypass the state-level actors and the high politics and diplomacy of disarmament and détente—both of which feature prominently in the last few chapters especially of this short study. He has not produced a simple “pacifist” corrective to the “triumphalist” versions of how the Cold War ended. Indeed, Wittner saw few signs of peace movement influence before he embarked on the huge research undertaking of which this book stands as an elegant and accessible synopsis. Engaged at the grass roots of campaigns which he has now chronicled,1 Wittner was inclined to believe that such efforts had been “ineffectual . After all, I thought, the Bomb has not been banned” (p. xii). Only after immersing himself in archival records from the period, especially government documents, did he begin to see the outlines of a quite different picture —of Western states always fretful about, and periodically amenable to, anti-nuclear pressures, and of Communist reformers who eventually embraced the “new thinking” urged by Bertrand Russell from the mid-1950s as the most fundamental prerequisite of civilization’s survival. However nuanced and rounded, Wittner’s treatment of his important subject definitely clashes with the dominant (and for him, deeply distorted) counter -narrative in which military muscle and political resolve alone are seen as the key ingredients of the West’s security during the Cold War and, 1 See his autobiography, Working for Peace and Justice: Memoirs of an Activist Intellectual (Knoxville: U. of Tennessee P., 2012). i= 188 Reviews c:\users\kenneth\documents\type3302\rj 33,2 113 red.docx 2014-01-15 10:04 ultimately, of its “victory” over a morally, politically and financially bankrupt Soviet system. Wittner also disputes the related if less swaggering contention that the deterrent effect exerted by the threat of mutually assured destruction actually “worked”. The deterrence thesis fails to take account of how nuclear restraint was consistently observed in theatres of conflict in which only one superpower was engaged. The United States, for example, never seriously contemplated the deployment of nuclear weapons in Vietnam, but not because of the prospect of Soviet or Chinese retaliation. The nuclear option remained unthinkable, as President Nixon complained, because “the resulting domestic and international uproar would have damaged our foreign policy on all fronts” (quoted on p. 111). Peace movement scholars are heavily in Wittner’s debt already for his epic, three-volume study of the nuclear disarmament movement since 1945.2 Confronting the Bomb is an abridgement of that scholarly triptych; shorn of the scholarly apparatus, it is probably intended more for a student or lay readership . Although the coverage of certain episodes and national organizations is necessarily compressed, Wittner retains the impressive breadth of focus from the earlier works—and rightly so in the history of a global phenomenon. Russell first enters Wittner’s account as a champion of world government after the Second World War—not of the flawed system built by the United Nations charter, but of an international authority in which the great powers would be compelled to relinquish far more sovereignty. The author overlooks the belligerent anti-Communism that was conjoined to Russell’s “one...