Confronting the Bomb

"This is an abbreviated version of Lawrence Wittner’s major work of scholarship in three volumes, Struggle Against the Bomb , from the 1940s to the present day. It is both a work of record, describing the anti-nuclear movement in countries around the world, and an argument that governments were compelled to listen to the voice of public opinion even when they pretended not to. In the 1950s, for instance, President Eisenhower said that thermonuclear weapons were not as strong as public opinion. And there was a real apprehension on the part of Western leaders that public opinion would have to be appeased and satisfied with measures to lessen tension during the Cold War. In the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, one of the reasons why President Kennedy didn’t take the advice of his chief of staff to bomb Cuba or the Soviet Union was awareness of public opinion. We are in a very bad place. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1971, which itself to some extent arose out of public pressure in the 1960s, compelled governments to make more effort than they might otherwise have done. That treaty contained an implicit bargain that the vast majority of countries in the world would refrain from acquiring nuclear weapons, while the nuclear powers that did have them would over time move towards their elimination. At the end of the Cold War that bargain was reasserted, but the nuclear powers have not delivered on it. In the meantime, a number of other countries have acquired nuclear weapons, having seen the utility of having them for insurance purposes. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Nuclear weapons have both a deterrent and a proliferatory function. The more nuclear weapons there are, and the more powers that hold them, the higher the day-to-day risk of the bomb going off. Indeed the lesson of the Cuban missile crisis, in retrospect as we look at the evidence which has since emerged, was that we came much nearer to the nuclear brink than most people believed at the time. I think in the near future there is a real risk of war over Iran, which would I suppose follow on from Iraq and Afghanistan. In the longer term, in 20 years’ time when I shall no longer be around, I think the chances of nuclear war between major powers will grow to a point where one will not sleep easy in one’s bed."