Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament Research Articles

Science and Apocalypse in Bertrand Russell: A Cultural Sociology by Javier Pérez-Jara and Lino Camprubí

Reviewed by: Science and Apocalypse in Bertrand Russell: A Cultural Sociology by Javier Pérez-Jara and Lino Camprubí Carl Mitcham (bio) Science and Apocalypse in Bertrand Russell: A Cultural Sociology By Javier Pérez-Jara and Lino Camprubí. Washington, DC: Lexington Books, 2022. Pp. x + 245. This book is an analytic biography, from the perspective of cultural sociology, of Bertrand Russell as a public intellectual engaged with the promises and perils of science and technology. Russell was one of the great figures of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century analytic British philosophy, but he stepped away from academic life to become a public intellectual in response to the Great War. Whereas previously he had seen science and the scientization of philosophy as a promising fulfillment of the Enlightenment vision for a rational society, after the war he increasingly viewed science and technology as a civilizational peril. Javier Pérez-Jara and Lino Camprubí interpret Russell's trajectory as exhibiting the power of cultural binaries (good-pure-sacred versus evil-polluted-profane) to capture the mind of a philosopher and to illustrate the structural character of meaning in a techno-scientific society. Chapter 1 reviews Russell's initial faith in the power of logic, mathematics, and science to provide a realistic picture of the world. What he described as a subsequent "retreat from Pythagoras" was influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Great War. Wittgenstein brought about changes in philosophy, from mathematics to language. But chapter 2 focuses especially on Russell's response to the war and the role it played in his turn from imperialist to pacifist and his shift from university to public life. Chapter 3 considers Russell's effort to formulate a realist, empirical epistemology, and his growing pessimism about politics. As the authors summarize it, he concluded that cognitive beliefs about the external world provide no more than partial and tentative knowledge and that beliefs are less powerful than wishes in politics. They write that political behavior is "often dominated by unconscious processes and impulses. Human nature is overwhelmingly irrational, contradictory, whimsical, and easily manipulable" (p. 116). Chapters 4 and 5 cover Russell's performances as a public intellectual dramatizing the evils of nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War, respectively. [End Page 634] From having once advocated surrender to Nazi Germany in order to avoid a second world war and then promoting all-out war against Germany—and even a postwar preventive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union in order to establish an American-dominated world state—Russell wound up lending his prestige to the campaign for nuclear disarmament and convened a war crimes tribunal to pass judgment on America's role in Vietnam. To interpret the repeated twists and turns during his long life—from pure philosopher to public intellectual, from optimistic proponent of science to pessimistic critic of technology, from idealizer of American power to anathematizer of the United States as evil—the authors draw on the cultural sociology developed by Jeffrey Alexander. Through all his contradictory proclamations, how was Russell able to continue to command attention? Although "Russell's positionings could be surprisingly simplistic and Manichean[, the] oversimplifications often had powerful symbolic effects" (p. 190). Radical cultural binaries are on their own powerful social forces in competition with and influencing the cognitive and physical aspects of science and technology. A concluding chapter summarizes the analysis, drawing together diverse strands and pointing toward implications. The case of Russell's multiple public intellectual engagements with modern science and technology, primarily in relation to warfare, has obvious implications for the proliferations of binary coding in current debates about global climate change, pandemic infections, environmental pollution, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and more. It also has implications for thinking about the often-repeated criticisms of all binary coding in postmodern culture. Is the nonbinary versus binary itself just another instance of good-pure-sacred versus evil-polluted-profane? I personally learned a good deal from this volume. I was aware of the broad trajectory of Russell's intellectual life, but his Manichean tendencies had escaped me. And before reading this book, I would not have been able to distinguish cultural sociology (using culture to explain social phenomena) from sociology...

Peter Weiss and Others

Peter Weiss and Others

It’s your world too, you can do what you want”: the role of subcultural activism in Stop The City protests (1983-1984) and its implications for political protest in Britain’

ABSTRACT This article explores the role of subcultural activism in the Stop the City Protests (STC), 1983-1984. It shows how protestors broke with the consensual approach of overarching political organisations, chiefly the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), using direct action tactics to shut down the City of London, which was emerging as a strategic centre for globalised capitalism. STC is shown to be on a continuum with the radicalism of the preceding decades, with bands, including Crass and Poison Girls bridging the gap to anarcho-punk. This article innovates by combining official evidence, in the form of police briefing notes, with ‘ground-up’ activist materials and fanzines, to evaluate the approach and ideology of the protestors and the police, thereby tracing the increasingly intolerant policing methods that were adopted during key political battles of the 1980s, including The Miners’ Strike and The Battle of the Beanfield. Questioning the extent to which Thatcherism was the hegemonic project of the 1980s, it demonstrates how STC was at odds with the contemporaneous corporatisation of political activism, and thereby provided a model for the road protests and Reclaim the Streets movement of the 1990s, and fed into the anti-globalisation and environmental movements of the 21st century.

Julian Leff: innovator in the treatment of schizophrenia

If anyone was born to be a radical, it was the polymath Julian Leff, one of the most creative psychiatrists of his generation, and a pioneer in the treatment of...

Nuclear war, climate change, and medical activism

Nuclear war, climate change, and medical activism

“They’ve Got a Bomb”: Sounding Anti-nuclearism in the Anarcho-punk Movement in Britain, 1978–84

ABSTRACTThis article explores the links and tensions in Britain between a musical subculture at its height of creative energy – anarcho-punk – and the anti-nuclear movement, including the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. It identifies and interrogates the anti-nuclear elements of anarcho-punk, looking at its leading band, Crass. At the center is an exploration of the sounds of Crass’ music and singing voices – termed Crassonics – in the context of anti-nuclearism: if the bomb changed music and art, what did the new music sound like?

John William Powles

It is with great sadness that we write of the recent passing of a brilliant academic and a devoted public health educator, our colleague John William Powles. Born in 1943,...

Michael O’Donnell: medical journalist, author, broadcaster, and GMC reformer

As editor of World Medicine , Michael O’Donnell was an outstanding radical journalist. Stephen Lock, a former editor of The BMJ , ranked him alongside William Cobbett (1763-1835), Thomas Wakley...

The Security Apparatus and the British Left, 1950s–2000s (Part II)

In the years from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, the discontent of the British political Left found its expression in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), a nonviolent organization forme...

David Delvin: GMC rebel and bestselling author

Every doctor writing for the media today owes a great debt to David Delvin—one of the few doctors who has been both the subject of a complaint to the General...

‘Peace with a Capital P’: The Spectre of Communism and Competing Notions of ‘Peace’ in Britain, 1949–1960

This article is concerned with different factions within the British peace movement during the 1950s and early 1960s, each of which gave the word ‘peace’ a different meaning. We argue that the movement was made up of several, often contradictory sections, and despite attempts by groups like the Peace Pledge Union to distance themselves from the communistcontrolled British Peace Committee, popular perceptions were tainted by association with communism until the mid-1950s. Following the onset of the H-bomb era, this taint lessened as people began to fear the destructiveness of hydrogen weapons. When the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament formed in 1958 it became the predominant British organization opposed to nuclear weapons and achieved popularity because it limited its objective to nuclear disarmament whereas the Peace Pledge Union demanded the condemnation of all war.

Answering the “International Call”: Contextualising Sydney Anti-Nuclear and Anti-War Activism in the 1960s

ABSTRACTAlthough recent work on protest in the 1960s has placed organised opposition to the war in Vietnam in a transnational context, there is as yet no history of the Australian anti-nuclear campaigns of the early years of the decade. By examining anti-nuclear activism in 1961 and 1962 in relation to anti-war protest in 1965 and 1966, this paper argues that Sydney activists understood themselves as part of a transnational protest movement well before they began to agitate against military involvement in Vietnam. Lessons learnt while mounting solidarity protests with the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament informed the repertoire of practice that Australian anti-war activists used to mount their protests against the conflict in Indochina.

Nations of Peace: Nuclear Disarmament and the Making of National Identity in Scotland and Wales

This article uses the Scottish and Welsh Councils for Nuclear Disarmament as windows into the relationship between peace and nationalism in Scotland and Wales in the late 1950s and early 1960s. From one perspective, it challenges histories of peace movements in Britain, which have laboured under approaches and assumptions centred on London. From another, it demonstrates the role of movements for nuclear disarmament in the emergence of a 'left of centre' nationalism in Scotland and Wales. Although these movements were constituents of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, their nationalism evolved as the threat from nuclear weapons to Scotland and Wales came to be seen as distinctive and was interpreted through lenses of local culture and tradition. The movements contributed to 'the making of national identity' by providing a channel through which activists could 'nationalize' and galvanize Scottish and Welsh Christianity, folk and socialism in particular. It was through the movements that activists articulated and promoted Scotland and Wales as sovereign nations of peace, with an international outlook separate from that of Britain. © The Author [2015]. Published by Oxford University Press.

The Struggle of the Male Self: A New Left Activist and His 1961 Diary

AbstractThis article examines the 1961 diary of a new left young activist to explore his fractured sense of personal and political self. At the height of the Cold War, John Hoyland was an undergraduate at London's University College, living with his Communist Party family and active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). His intensely political world notwithstanding, Hoyland's diary reveals that interior life troubled his every day and shaped much of his thinking. Hoyland's self-conscious narrative illuminates self-making, male heterosexuality, generation, and relationships and cultures in the early 1960s British Left. He experienced himself as fragmented and struggled to negotiate his conflicting identities. He felt torn between older models of socialist identity and morality, his hedonism associated with the beatnik metropolitan scene, and his project of personal self-improvement. His diary offers rare insight into the intimate thoughts and feelings of one New Left young man at a time when political, social, and sexual codes and cultures were in transition before the emergence of feminist sexual politics. The article examines the identities Hoyland held as a socialist, sexual, and domestic male subject; it considers how his emotional world and relationships were shaped by his metropolitan landscapes, consisting of CND marches, Communist Party meetings, urban youth spaces, and the parental home; and it discusses Hoyland as a writer and the sense of selfhood the diary helped to make possible.

Intellectuals of the Left and the Atomic Dilemma in the Age of the US Atomic Monopoly, 1945–1949

Given its close association with the formation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, it is tempting to assume that the response of Left intellectuals to the advent of atomic weapons was rooted in consistent opposition. This article demonstrates that the reality was much more complex. During the period of the US atomic monopoly (1945–1949), British Left intellectuals wrestled with the implications of this new destructive force and arrived at widely different understandings and prognoses. However, many shared a pessimism rooted in the belief that the atomic monopoly could not be maintained for long, that beyond this point the atomic future was unmanageable and that it would result in future war and annihilation. Drawing on a range of British left-wing responses, and focusing in particular on those of Bertrand Russell and George Orwell, this article emphasises the shifting nature and complexity of Left responses to the advent of the US atomic monopoly and analyses the circumstances in which these were arrived at. It shows that it is inaccurate to think in terms of a single or coherent left-wing position on atomic weapons at a time when many on the left believed further war to be inevitable and some believed that the only way to prevent it might lie in launching, or threatening, a preventive atomic attack on the Soviet Union.

REVIEW: Insider's view of nuclear-free NZ's 'people power'

Book review of: Peace, Power & Politics: How New Zealand Became Nuclear Free, by Maire Leadbeater. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2013, 344pp. , ISBN 9781877578588Journalism's focus on major political figures and high level negotiations leaves the more diffuse activities of grassroots politics in the shadows. So it is refreshing to see a well-researched book unapologetically placing civic groups at centre-stage. Marie Leadbeater’s thorough chronology of the last 40 years of New Zealand’s peace movement and the fight for a nuclear-free country fills some gaps in our knowledge about the mechanics of ‘people power’. It’s an insider’s view. Leadbeater, daughter of feminist and peace campaigner Elsie Locke, says activism is in her genes. She was secretary and then spokeperson for Auckland’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, closely involved with the nuclear free protests of the 1970s and 1980s and still demonstrating at Waihopai’s satellite communication monitoring station in 2013.

Obituary for Stuart Hall

There have been many obituaries for Stuart Hall—the great cultural theorist and public intellectual, who died in February—all remarking on the wider significance of his work and life, especially his unrelenting commitment to social justice and his wonderful humanity. He was successful not only in extending the borders of social science, and cultural studies in particular, but in doing so in such brilliant and accessible ways as to make him possibly the leading public intellectual of the left for some decades. I had the great good fortune to work with him after he joined the Open University in 1979 and to become aware at first hand of the nature and wider significance of his work and life, and of the breadth of his impact. Stuart was in many ways both an iconic and an exemplary figure in social science, especially—but far from exclusively—in the UK, where he worked all his adult life, having arrived as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford from Jamaica in the early 1950s. His contribution stretched over 50 years and he was still going strong until shortly before his death, with the publication of ‘After Neoliberalism: the Kilburn manifesto’, which he wrote with Doreen Massey and Mike Rustin and published last April (available online at www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/manifesto.html); typically, this was a stringent and original analysis combined with possibilities of alternatives. It is interesting that this work emerged in the aftermath of a massive and qualitative shift in the nature of capitalism that outstrips the boundaries of current theorizing in fundamental respects, for in some ways it mirrors the political earthquakes that emerged at the beginning of his stay in England, brought about by the quasi-simultaneous eruptions of the Suez crisis and the Hungarian revolution—the one with its dramatic signalling of the end of the imperial world and the other with the devastation of the only realistic alternative to capitalism. They changed not just the focus of politics, but that of existing ways of thinking about politics. These crises forced redefinitions of both the foci and nature of left politics in Britain, and it was in this context that new forms and organs of left theorizing quickly emerged—in particular, perhaps, in the form of the New Left Review, whose first 10 issues Stuart edited (often after days of supply teaching). The whole political landscape was transformed, not just with the search for new understandings of politics, but new practices, for instance in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, of which Stuart was a prominent member, and increasingly of feminist movements. There was a pervasive but unarticulated sense that programmes based on the idea of ‘redistribution’ were no longer sufficient in what were seen—and

A Passion play at Ally Pally

On Easter Sunday, 22 April 1971, actors and stage crew associated with the Royal Court Theatre performed Edward Bond’s play, Passion, at Alexandra Park racecourse in Haringey, North London for the second annual Festival of Life, organized by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. This article places that performance in historical and theatrical context, and is based on a sequence of mainly monochrome photographs, to date the only ones to have been traced, taken by the author.

Images of Survival, Stories of Destruction: Nuclear War on British Screens from 1945 to the Early 1960s

This article discusses a range of depictions and discussions of nuclear war, which appeared on British screens in the first half of the Cold War, in order to understand the changing way nuclear weapons were viewed within British culture. Using such screened images to understand how nuclear war was constructed and represented within British culture, the article argues that the hydrogen bomb, not the atomic bomb, was the true harbinger of the nuclear revolution that transformed cultural understandings of warfare and destruction. Although the atomic bomb created a great deal of anxiety within British popular culture, representations of atomic attack elided atomic destruction with that experienced in 1939–45, emphasising the ‘survivability’ of atomic war. In the thermonuclear era, the Second World War could not undertake the same symbolic work. The image of the city-destroying bomb was an imaginative as well as technological step-change. Screened representations stressed that a thermonuclear war would literally end the world. As such, they preceded, and indeed provided the cultural climate for, the rise of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). The Campaign exploited and further popularised this idea of the apocalyptic nuclear war as a key aspect of its political and moral standpoint. The article concludes, however, that the cultural hegemony of this vision of nuclear war equally helped underpin notions of nuclear deterrence. The basic assumptions about the nature of nuclear war constructed and circulated on British screens therefore formed part of CND's ‘cultural’ victory but the article also explains why this did not translate into the political realm.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and changing attitudes towards the Earth in the nuclear age

AbstractThe nuclear age had a profound impact on politics and international affairs. More fundamentally, it altered the way people saw the planet and their relationship with it. These attitudes changed gradually in the post-war period, with the 1960s a key transitional moment. This article explores these changing attitudes towards the environment within the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). At the beginning of the 1960s CND's concerns about nuclear testing and fallout fit easily into the dominant anthropocentric view of the environment. However, by the end of the decade they espoused a much more holistic, even ecocentric, attitude. This article examines how attitudes towards the environment were changing in the 1960s through a close examination of attitudes within CND, and argues that the modern environmental movement was a product of the nuclear age.