Unfortunately, it is not.

Today there are nine nuclear-armed nations, with over 23,000 nuclear weapons in their arsenals. Thousands of these weapons are on hairtrigger alert.

Admittedly, some nations are decreasing the size of their nuclear arsenals. The United States and Russia — which together possess about 95 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons — plan to sign a treaty this year that will cut their number of strategic weapons significantly.

But other nations are engaged in a substantial nuclear buildup. India, for example, launched the first of its nuclear submarines this July and is also developing an assortment of land-based nuclear missiles. Meanwhile, Pakistan has been busy testing ballistic missiles and cruise missiles that will carry nuclear warheads, as well as constructing two new reactors to make plutonium for its expanding nuclear arsenal. Israel, too, is producing material for new nuclear weapons, while North Korea is threatening to resume its production.

In addition, numerous nations — among them, Iran — are suspected of working to develop a nuclear weapons capability.

But surely national governments are too civilized to actually use nuclear weapons, aren’t they?

In fact, one government (that of the United States) has already used atomic bombs to annihilate the populations of two cities.

Moreover, nations have come dangerously close to full-scale nuclear war on a number of occasions. The Cuban missile crisis is the best-known example. But there are numerous others. In October 1973, during a war between Israel and Egypt that appeared to be spiraling out of control, the Soviet government sent a tough message to Washington suggesting joint — or, if necessary, Soviet — military action to bring the conflict to a halt. With President Richard Nixon reeling from the Watergate scandal and drunk in the White House, his top national security advisors responded to what they considered a menacing Soviet move by ordering an alert of U.S. nuclear forces. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed in the Kremlin, and the sudden confrontation eased short of nuclear war.

Of course, nuclear war hasn’t occurred since 1945. But this fact has largely reflected public revulsion at the prospect and popular mobilization against it. Today, however, lulled by the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, we are in a period of relative public complacency. In this respect, at least, the situation has grown more dangerous. Without countervailing pressure, governments find it difficult to resist the temptation to deploy their most powerful weapons when they go to war. And they go to war frequently.

Furthermore, while nuclear weapons exist, there is a serious danger of accidental nuclear war. In September 1983, the Soviet Union’s launch-detection satellites reported that the U.S. government had fired its Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles, and that a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union was underway. Luckily, the officer in charge of the satellites concluded that they had malfunctioned and, on his own authority, prevented a Soviet nuclear alert. The incident was so fraught with anxiety that he suffered a nervous breakdown.

Another nuclear war nearly erupted two months later, when the United States and its NATO allies conducted Able Archer 83, a nuclear training exercise that simulated a full-scale nuclear conflict, with NATO nuclear attacks upon Soviet nuclear targets. In the tense atmosphere of the time, recalled Oleg Gordievsky, a top KGB official, his agency mistakenly "concluded that American forces had been placed on alert — and might even have begun the countdown to nuclear war." Terrified that the U.S. government was using this training exercise as a cover behind which it was launching a nuclear attack upon the Soviet Union, the Soviet government alerted its own nuclear forces, readying them for action. "The world did not quite reach the edge of the nuclear abyss," Gordievsky concluded. But it came "frighteningly close."

Furthermore, today we can add the danger of nuclear terrorism. Although it is very unlikely that terrorists will be able to develop nuclear weapons on their own, the existence of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and of the materials to build them in national arsenals opens the possibility that terrorists will acquire these items through theft or black market operations.

Overall, then, the situation remains very dangerous. Dr. Martin Hellman, a Professor Emeritus of Engineering at Stanford University who has devoted many years to calculating the prospects of nuclear catastrophe, estimates that the risk of a child born today suffering an early death through nuclear war is at least 10 percent. Moreover, he cautions that this is a conservative estimate, for he has not included the danger of nuclear terrorism in his calculations.

In June 2005, Senator Richard Lugar, then the Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, produced a committee report that was even less sanguine. Asked about the prospect of a nuclear attack within the next ten years, the 76 nuclear security experts he polled came up with an average probability of 29 percent. Four respondents estimated the risk at 100 percent, while only one estimated it at zero.

Thus, Hiroshima Day events provide a useful context for considering the ongoing nuclear danger and, conversely, the necessity for a nuclear weapons-free world.

This article originally appeared on the History News Network.

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany and author of several books, including, most recently, Confronting the Bomb.

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Wednesday is the 63rd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and an appropriate time to reflect upon the persistence of nuclear danger. The world’s nine nuclear powers continue to cling to some 27,000 nuclear weapons, almost all of them more deadly than that first atomic bomb, which annihilated an estimated 140,000 Japanese men, women, and children. They do so even as most people recognized long ago that nuclear war spells doom.

Have we really learned so little from Hiroshima’s terrible fate?

For a time, it seemed that nothing at all was learned. The U.S. and Soviet governments competed with one another to build bigger and more destructive nuclear arsenals. And, soon thereafter, they were joined by Britain, France, China, and Israel.

But then something extraordinary occurred. Millions of people rose up to resist this nuclear arms race — assailing nuclear testing, nuclear weapons buildups, and other preparations for nuclear war. As a result, government officials began to temper their nuclear ambitions. They agreed upon a broad range of arms control and disarmament treaties. Others decided against building nuclear weapons, turned their countries into nuclear-free zones, or abandoned nuclear weapons altogether. Perhaps the most important of the treaties was the nuclear nonproliferation treaty of 1968, under which the non-nuclear powers agreed not to develop nuclear weapons and the nuclear powers agreed to divest themselves of their nuclear arsenals. The number of nuclear weapons declined sharply and the menace of nuclear war began to recede.

Nevertheless, starting in the late 1990s, the nuclear danger began to revive. In the U.S. Senate, Republicans blocked U.S. ratification of the comprehensive test ban treaty. Pointing to the failure of the nuclear powers to fulfill their disarmament pledges, India and Pakistan exploded their first nuclear weapons, while North Korea moved forward with its own nuclear program. Most dramatically, the new administration of George W. Bush withdrew the United States from the ABM treaty, ended U.S. participation in nuclear disarmament negotiations and pressed Congress to fund the building of new U.S. nuclear weapons.

Yes, the Bush administration launched a war over what it claimed was the possession of nuclear weapons by Iraq (although, in fact, Iraq didn’t possess any) and today is taking a very hard line toward Iran (which also does not possess them and might not even be developing them). But, in defiance of the disarmament commitment of the nuclear powers, the President seems thoroughly comfortable with his own command of some 10,000 nuclear weapons and his proposals for more.

Now there’s pressure to get back on track toward a nuclear-free world. Peace and disarmament organizations, of course, have long championed nuclear abolition, and continue to do so. But they have now been joined by an important segment of the foreign and defense policy establishment. In dramatic columns published in The Wall Street Journal in January 2007 and 2008, George Shultz (Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state), Henry Kissinger (Richard Nixon’s secretary of state), William Perry (Bill Clinton’s secretary of defense), and Sam Nunn (former chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee) argued that the time has come to press forward toward a nuclear-free world.

In addition, Barack Obama has called repeatedly for nuclear abolition. Speaking in mid-July, the Democratic presidential candidate promised to "make the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons a central element in our nuclear policy." John McCain also has announced that he shares the dream of a nuclear-free world.

These are popular positions. An opinion survey in the summer of 2007 found that the abolition of all nuclear weapons, through an enforceable agreement, was supported by 74 percent of the public in the United States, 85 percent in Britain, 87 percent in France, and 95 percent in Germany and Italy.

Indicative of this growing consensus, Ambassador Max Kampelman, a former Reagan administration official who has done much to get the nuclear abolition ball rolling among foreign and defense policy elites, spoke on July 20 at the convention of Peace Action, America’s largest peace organization. Kampelman stressed the dangers of nuclear proliferation and argued that it cannot be halted without U.S. government willingness to move at last to abolish its own nuclear arsenal.

Maybe we have learned something after all.

This article originally appeared in the TimesUnion.com.

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany and co-editor of the new book, Peace Action: Past, Present, and Future.

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Although few people are aware of it, there has been considerable progress over the past decade toward a treaty to abolish nuclear weapons.

For many years, there had been a substantial gap between the pledges to eliminate nuclear weapons made by the signatories to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968 and the reality of their behavior. To remedy this situation, in 1996 the New York-based Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy — the U.S. affiliate of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms — began to coordinate the drafting of a Model Nuclear Weapons Convention. Formulated along the lines of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which entered into force in 1997, this model nuclear convention was designed to serve as an international treaty that prohibits and eliminates nuclear weapons.

Although the late 1990s proved a difficult time for nuclear arms control and disarmament measures, the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, joined by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and the International Network of Engineers Against Proliferation, continued its efforts. Consequently, in 2007, these organizations released a new model treaty, revised to reflect changes in world conditions, as well as an explanatory book, Securing Our Survival.

In 1997, like its predecessor, this updated convention for nuclear abolition was circulated within the United Nations, this time at the request of Costa Rica and Malaysia. In addition, it was presented at a number of international conclaves, including a March 2008 meeting of non-nuclear governments in Dublin, sponsored by the Middle Powers Initiative and by the government of Ireland.

Although the Western nuclear weapons states and Russia have opposed a nuclear abolition treaty, the idea has begun to gain traction. The Wall Street Journal op-eds by George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn have once again placed nuclear abolition on the political agenda. Speaking in February 2008, the U.N. High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, Sergio Duarte, condemned the great powers’ "refusal to negotiate or discuss even the outlines of a nuclear-weapons convention" as "contrary to the cause of disarmament." Opinion surveys have reported widespread popular support for nuclear abolition in numerous nations — including the United States, where about 70 percent of respondents back the signing of an international treaty to reduce and eliminate all nuclear weapons.

Of course, it’s only fair to ask if there really exists the political will to bring such a treaty to fruition. Although Barack Obama has endorsed the goal of nuclear abolition, neither of his current opponents for the U.S. presidency has followed his example or seems likely to do so. John McCain is a thoroughgoing hawk, while Hillary Clinton — though publicly supporting some degree of nuclear weapons reduction — has recently issued the kind of "massive retaliation" threats unheard of since the days of John Foster Dulles.

Furthermore, the American public is remarkably ignorant of nuclear realities. Writing in the Foreword to a recent book, Nuclear Disorder or Cooperative Security, published by the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, the Western States Legal Foundation, and the Reaching Critical Will project of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Zia Mian, a Princeton physicist, points to a number of disturbing facts about contemporary U.S. public opinion. For example, more Americans (55%) mistakenly believe that Iran has nuclear weapons than know that Britain (52%), India (51%), Israel (48%), and France (38%) actually have these weapons.

Although the United States possesses over 5,700 operationally deployed nuclear warheads, more than half of U.S. respondents to an opinion survey thought that the number was 200 weapons or fewer. Thus, even though most Americans have displayed a healthy distaste for nuclear weapons and nuclear war, their ability to separate fact from fiction might well be questioned when it comes to nuclear issues.

Fortunately, there are many organizations working to better educate the public on nuclear dangers. In addition to the groups already mentioned, these include Peace Action, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Federation of American Scientists, Faithful Security, and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. And important knowledge can also be gleaned from that venerable source of nuclear expertise, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

But there remains a considerable distance to go before a treaty to abolish nuclear weapons becomes international law.

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany and co-editor of the new book, Peace Action: Past, Present, and Future.

This article originally appeared in the History News Network.

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Introduction

In the following opinion piece, which appeared in the March 20, 2008 issue of the Asahi Shimbun, Jayantha Dhanapala — the distinguished former Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs at the United Nations — not only makes the case for a nuclear-free world, but argues that it is a viable possibility.

In Dhanapala’s view, the campaign to abolish nuclear weapons has acquired significant momentum thanks to the initiative of four former senior U.S. government officials: George Shultz (Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state), Henry Kissinger (Richard Nixon’s secretary of state), William Perry (Bill Clinton’s secretary of defense), and Sam Nunn (former chair of the senate armed services committee). In January 2007 and, again, in January 2008, they published powerful opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal that outlined the need for a nuclear-free world, as well as steps in that direction. Since that time, Dhanapala notes, there has been important follow-up to this initiative by other former national security officials and nuclear experts.

As none of these former U.S. government officials showed much interest in the idea of abolishing nuclear weapons in the past, how should we account for their newfound zeal? Part of the answer seems to lie in their fear that terrorists will acquire and use nuclear weapons. As they stated in the first paragraph of their 2008 article: "We face a very real possibility that the deadliest weapons ever invented could fall into dangerous hands." Of course, many people believe (and have believed for decades) that nuclear weapons are already in "dangerous hands." Nevertheless, it is hard not to agree that adding terrorist bands — or additional nations — to the list of the nuclear-armed will raise the level of nuclear danger.

A second factor that might explain why portions of the U.S. national security elite are keener on nuclear abolition than in the past is that U.S. conventional military power is far superior to that of any other nation. In reality, as U.S. scientists began warning in 1945, U.S. national security can be maintained better in a non-nuclear world than in a world bristling with nuclear weapons. Even so, people of good will might still welcome the Shultz-Kissinger-Perry-Nunn initiative for, although it appears to contain an element of self-interest and to return us to the pre-nuclear era debate over the broader issue of using military force to maintain national security, it does enhance the prospects for human survival.

A more telling objection to this focus on a group of former national security managers is that they might not be sufficient for the task at hand. For one thing, there are plenty of national security officials who are not at all interested in nuclear abolition — or at least nuclear abolition for their country! And these people are in power. As Dhanapala observes, at present "there are no ongoing negotiations for nuclear weapons reductions."

Conversely, there is plenty of pro-nuclear activity by government officials. Although the Bush administration has focused on nuclear projects in Iran and North Korea, it has consistently supported the building of new nuclear weapons by the United States. Moreover, it has winked at the development of nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan. Indeed, it recently pushed through Congress a nuclear technology sharing agreement with the Indian government that will upgrade the ability of that government to churn out nuclear weapons.

The leaders of many non-nuclear nations, of course, are less enthusiastic about the ongoing nuclear arms race. Even so, there has been an erosion of their willingness to challenge the policies of nuclear-armed nations. The emergence of the nonaligned movement during the 1950s provided powerful international pressure upon the great powers for an end to the testing, development, and deployment of nuclear weapons. For decades, Third World nations played a key role in the nonaligned movement, and were particularly sharp in their condemnation of the Soviet-American nuclear confrontation. Today, however, relatively little antinuclear rhetoric seems to emanate from these nations.

Furthermore, although there was substantial nuclear disarmament in the past, that progress toward a nuclear-free world was based heavily on massive popular pressure from peace and disarmament organizations. In the United States, groups like the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), Women Strike for Peace, the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, and Physicians for Social Responsibility helped create a national uproar over the nuclear arms race. They were joined in their protest ventures by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Britain, the Congress Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs (Gensuikin) and the Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs (Gensuikyo) in Japan, Project Ploughshares in Canada, the Trust Groups in the Soviet Union, and hundreds of similar organizations around the world. This activist pressure, plus the antinuclear sentiments of the general public, led politicians in numerous nations to abandon many of their nuclear ambitions. But, although polls show that popular sentiment remains antinuclear, that previous massive campaign against nuclear weapons is largely absent today.

Thus, ironically, when portions of the national security elite have finally come around to championing a nuclear-free world, much of the popular antinuclear movement is dormant.

Can it be revived? Perhaps so. Groups like Peace Action (the successor to SANE and the Freeze), Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and Faithful Security are among those striving to spark a resurrection of the nuclear disarmament campaign in the United States. And others are at work abroad. But popular protest against nuclear weapons remains far from its peak in the mid-1980s.

At present, then, Dhanapala — and all other people committed to human survival — should certainly welcome the recent antinuclear activities of a portion of the national security elite. But, as he implies, substantial progress toward a nuclear-free world remains dependent on a revival of pressure from non-nuclear nations and from the public.

From pie in the sky toward a nuke-free world

by Jayantha Dhanapala

The vision of a nuclear weapon-free world was most famously dismissed by the former Prime Minister of Britain, Margaret Thatcher, as a "pie in the sky." Such was the derision which greeted the disarmament scenario championed by governments, especially from the Non-aligned Movement, as well as nongovernmental organizations such as Pugwash.

It is therefore a revolutionary change to see senior officials in former U.S. Administrations combine to write — not one but two — pieces in the conservative Wall Street Journal, calling for such pie in the sky.

In the past, other senior members of U.S. Administrations, like Robert McNamara, and retired military top brass, like Gen. Lee Butler, have also experienced epiphanies and recanted their views on nuclear weapons.

What distinguishes this year-long initiative by George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn and William Perry is the fact that they have been able to gather a number of distinguished U.S. individuals like Madeleine Albright, James Baker III, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Warren Christopher and Colin Powell behind them with a group of scholars in Stanford University’s Hoover Institution providing the scientific expertise.

The influence of this extraordinary initiative is beginning to percolate in the campaigns for the U.S. presidential elections and the policies of other countries like Britain. At the end of February, the Norwegian government hosted a meeting of global experts in Oslo to carry the initiative further.

A major aim of the initiative is to make the goal of a nuclear weapons-free world into "a joint enterprise."

The need for broader support is obvious. Not only do many of the nuclear weapon states (NWS) and NATO retain policies for the first use of nuclear weapons, but some also have plans for preemptive strikes and the building of new weapons with the specific intent of violating the taboo that has existed since the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that has long stood against proliferation and represented a hope for nuclear disarmament is now in grave jeopardy.

There are no ongoing negotiations for nuclear weapons reductions; negotiations about the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran are still inconclusive, and there is growing evidence of terrorist groups seeking access to nuclear weapons technology and materials.

Faced with this seemingly entrenched attitude in favor of nuclear weapons and their use, broader support for an initiative that will eventually lead to the elimination of the world’s 26,000 nuclear weapons must come primarily from the governments and peoples of the NWS, two of which, the United States and Russia — who own 95 percent of the weapons — will soon have new presidents.

At the same time the non-nuclear weapon states (NNWS) and their citizens also have a right, and indeed an obligation, to take steps that will help usher in a nuclear weapons-free world.

The NNWS do not, however, form a monolithic group. There are the NNWS who are allied to NWS and who, like Japan, enjoy the benefits of a security umbrella by belonging to a security pact or, like Canada, to a security alliance (NATO) with "nuclear sharing" arrangements.

The NATO summits in April 2008 and again on the 60th anniversary of the alliance in 2009 will enable a review of the 1999 Strategic Concept.

The involvement of some NNWS in ballistic missile defense plans clearly linked to nuclear weapons strategy is another factor compromising these NNWS.

But we do have a unique opportunity where the fulfillment of the reciprocal, albeit asymmetrical, obligations of the nuclear "haves" and "have-nots" can together help to usher in a nuclear weapons-free world. This is the "partnership" the Wall Street Journal articles call for.

A new U.S. president can take the lead. But for this United States leadership to be effective, the support for the Shultz/Kissinger/Nunn/Perry initiative must also come from other NWS and the NNWS.

Sweden sponsored the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission (WMDC), chaired by the respected Hans Blix, which proposed a world summit on disarmament, nonproliferation and terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction.

The time is right to prepare for this summit in 2009. The alternative is too awful to contemplate.

As the Blix Report noted, "So long as any state has such weapons — especially nuclear weapons — others will want them.

So long as any such weapons remain in any state’s arsenal, there is a high risk they will one day be used, by design or accident. Any such use would be catastrophic."

This article appeared in the IHT/Asahi Shimbun on March 20, 2008.

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany and co-editor of the new book, Peace Action: Past, Present, and Future. Jayantha Dhanapala is a former ambassador of Sri Lanka to the United States and a former U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs. He is currently chair of the U.N. University Council, president of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs and Simons Visiting Professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

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After nearly five years of bloody, costly war in Iraq, with no end in sight, many peace activists feel discouraged. Protest against the war and the rise of antiwar public opinion seem to have had little effect upon government policy.

But, in fact, it is too early to say. Who really knows what impact peace activism and widespread peace sentiment have had in the past five years or will have in the near future? Certainly not historians, who will spend decades pulling together such information from once secret government records and after-the-fact interviews.

What historians can do, of course, is assess the impact of popular protest on events in the more distant past. And here the record provides numerous intriguing illustrations of the power of protest.

One example along these lines occurred fifty years ago, in 1958, when the Soviet and U.S. governments stopped their nuclear explosions and commenced negotiations for a nuclear test ban treaty.

Ever since the first explosion of an atomic bomb, at Alamogordo, in July 1945, the great powers had been engaged in a deadly race to develop, test, and deploy what they considered the ultimate weapon, the final guarantee of their "national security." The United States, of course, had the lead, and used this with devastating effect upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But, in 1949, the U.S. monopoly on nuclear weapons was cracked by the Soviet Union. In 1952, the British also entered the nuclear club. As the nuclear arms race accelerated, all three powers worked on producing a hydrogen bomb — a weapon with a thousand times the destructive power of the bomb that annihilated Hiroshima. Within a short time, all of them were testing H-bombs for their rapidly-growing nuclear arsenals.

The nuclear tests — which, by late 1958, numbered at least 190 (125 by the United States, 44 by the Soviet Union, and 21 by Britain) — were conducted mostly in the atmosphere and, in these cases, were often quite dramatic. Enormous explosions rent the earth, sending vast mushroom clouds aloft that scattered radioactive debris (fallout) around the globe. The H-bomb test of March 1, 1954, for example — which the U.S. government conducted at Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands, a U.N. trust territory in the Pacific — was so powerful that it overran the danger zone of 50,000 square miles (an area roughly the size of New England). Generating vast quantities of radioactive fallout that landed on inhabited islands and fishermen outside this zone, it forced the evacuation of U.S. weather station personnel and Marshall Islanders (many of whom subsequently suffered a heavy incidence of radiation-linked illnesses, including cancer and leukemia). In addition, the Bikini test overtook a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon, which received a heavy dose of radioactive ash that sickened the crew and, eventually, killed one of its members.

Recognizing that these nuclear tests were not only paving the way for mass destruction in the future, but were already beginning to generate sickness and death, large numbers of people around the world began to resist. Prominent intellectuals, such Albert Schweitzer, Bertrand Russell, and Linus Pauling, issued public appeals to halt nuclear testing. Pacifists sailed protest vessels into nuclear test zones in an attempt to disrupt planned weapons explosions. Citizens’ antinuclear organizations sprang up, including the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (better known as SANE) in the United States, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Great Britain, and dozens of others in assorted nations. In the United States, the 1956 Democratic presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, made a halt to nuclear testing a key part of his campaign. Antinuclear pressures even developed within Communist dictatorships. In the Soviet Union, top scientists, led by Andrei Sakharov, appealed to Soviet leaders to halt nuclear tests.

Polls during 1957 and 1958 in nations around the globe reported strong public opposition to nuclear testing. In the United States, 63 percent of respondents favored a nuclear test ban; in Japan, 89 percent supported a worldwide ban on the testing and manufacture of nuclear weapons; in Britain, 76 percent backed an agreement to end nuclear tests; and in India (with the survey sample limited to New Delhi), 90 percent thought the United States should unilaterally halt its nuclear tests. In late 1957, pollsters reported that the proportion of the population viewing H-bomb testing as harmful to future generations stood at 64 percent in West Germany, 76 percent in Norway, 65 percent in Sweden, 59 percent in the Netherlands, 60 percent in Belgium, 73 percent in France, 67 percent in Austria, and 55 percent in Brazil.

Within the ranks of the U.S. government, this public aversion to nuclear testing was regarded as bad news, indeed. The Eisenhower administration was firmly committed to nuclear weapons as the central component of its national security strategy. Thus, halting nuclear testing was viewed as disastrous. In early 1956, Lewis Strauss — the chair of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and the top figure in setting the administration’s nuclear weapons policy — insisted: "This nonsense about ceasing tests (that is tantamount to saying ceasing the development) of our nuclear weapons plays into the hands of the Soviets." The United States, he told Eisenhower, should hold nuclear tests "whenever an idea has been developed which is ready for test."

And yet, other administration officials felt hard-pressed by the force of public opinion. In a memo written in June 1955, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles noted that, although the United States needed a nuclear arsenal, "the frightful destructiveness of modern weapons creates an instinctive abhorrence to them." Indeed, there existed "a popular and diplomatic pressure for limitation of armament that cannot be resisted by the United States without our forfeiting the good will of our allies and the support of a large part of our own people." Consequently, "we must . . . propose or support some plan for the limitation of armaments."

But Dulles equivocated over specific plans, and the administration increasingly felt the heat. In September 1956, with Stevenson’s call for an end to nuclear testing now part of the presidential election campaign, Eisenhower ordered an administrative study of a test ban, citing "the rising concern of people everywhere over the effect of radiation from tests, their reaction each time a test was reported, and their extreme nervousness over the prospective consequences of nuclear war." Given opposition from other officials, this study, too, went nowhere. Even so, Eisenhower remained gravely concerned about the unpopularity of nuclear testing. In a meeting with Edward Teller and other nuclear weapons enthusiasts in June 1957, the president told them that "we are . . . up against an extremely difficult world opinion situation," and "the United States could [not] permit itself to be ‘crucified on a cross of atoms.’ " There was not only "the question of world opinion . . . but an actual division of American opinion . . . as to the harmful effects of testing."

By early 1958, the outside pressures were becoming so powerful that Dulles began a campaign to halt U.S. nuclear tests unilaterally. Having learned, through the CIA, that the Soviet government was about to announce a unilateral suspension of its tests, he called together top administration officials on March 23 and 24 and proposed that Eisenhower issue a statement saying that, after the U.S. government completed its nuclear test series that year, there would be no further U.S. nuclear testing. "It would make a great diplomatic and propaganda sensation to the advantage of the United States," Dulles explained, and "I feel desperately the need for some important gesture in order to gain an effect on world opinion." But Strauss and Defense Department officials fought back ferociously, while Eisenhower, typically, remained indecisive. Testing was "not evil," the president opined, "but the fact is that people have been brought to believe that it is." What should be done in these circumstances? Nothing, it seemed. Eisenhower remained unwilling to challenge the nuclear hawks in his administration.

However, after March 31, 1958, when the Soviet government announced its unilateral testing moratorium, the U.S. hard line could no longer be sustained. With the Soviet halt to nuclear testing, recalled one U.S. arms control official, "the Russians boxed us in." On April 30, Dulles reported that an advisory committee on nuclear testing that he had convened had concluded that, if U.S. nuclear testing continued, "the slight military gains" would "be outweighed by the political losses, which may well culminate in the moral isolation of the United States." The following morning, Eisenhower telephoned Dulles and expressed his agreement.

Thereafter, the president held steady. Meeting on August 12 with Teller and other officials, he reacted skeptically to their enthusiastic reports about recent weapons tests. "The new thermonuclear weapons are tremendously powerful," he observed, but "they are not . . . as powerful as is world opinion today in obliging the United States to follow certain lines of policy." Ten days later, after a showdown with the Defense Department and the AEC, Eisenhower publicly announced that, as of October 31, the United States would suspend nuclear testing and begin negotiations for a test ban treaty.

As a result, U.S., Soviet, and British nuclear explosions came to a halt in the fall of 1958. Although the French government conducted its first nuclear tests in early 1960 and the three earlier nuclear powers resumed nuclear testing in late 1961, these actions proved to be the last gasps of the nuclear hawks before the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 — a measure resulting from years of public protest against nuclear testing. Against this backdrop, the 1958 victory for the peace movement and public opinion should be regarded as an important break in the nuclear arms race and in the Cold War.

Thus, if peace activists feel discouraged today by the continuation of the war in Iraq, they might well take heart at the example of their predecessors, who recognized that making changes in powerful institutions requires great perseverance. They might also consider the consequences of doing nothing. As the great abolitionist leader, Frederick Douglass, put it in 1857: "If there is no struggle, there is no progress."

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany and co-editor of the new book, Peace Action: Past, Present, and Future.

This article originally appeared in the History News Network.

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Advocates of a U.S. nuclear weapons buildup received a significant setback on December 16, when Congressional negotiators agreed on an omnibus spending bill that omitted funding for development of a new nuclear weapon championed by the Bush administration: the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW). Coming on the heels of Congressional action in recent years that stymied administration schemes for the nuclear "bunker buster" and the "mini-nuke," it was the third — and perhaps final — defeat of George W. Bush and his hawkish allies in their attempt to upgrade the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal.

The administration’s case for building the RRW — a newly-designed hydrogen bomb — pivoted around the contention that the current U.S. nuclear stockpile is deteriorating and needs to be replaced by new weaponry.

But studies by scientific experts revealed that this stockpile would remain reliable for at least another fifty years. In addition, critics of the RRW scheme pointed to the fact that building new nuclear weapons violates the U.S. commitment under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to pursue nuclear disarmament and that such a violation would encourage other nations to flout their NPT commitments.

Naturally, peace and disarmament organizations were among the fiercest opponents of the RRW, arguing that it was both unnecessary and provocative. Groups like the Council for a Livable World, Friends Committee on National Legislation, Peace Action, and Physicians for Social Responsibility published critiques of the administration plan, mobilized their members against it, and lobbied in Congress to secure its defeat. Activists staged anti-RRW demonstrations and, despite the nation’s focus on the war in Iraq, managed to draw headlines with protests at the University of California and elsewhere.

Members of Congress also were skeptical of the value of the RRW, particularly its utility in safeguarding U.S. security in today’s world, where the Soviet Union — once the major nuclear competitor to the United States — no longer exists. "Moving forward on a new nuclear weapon is not something this nation should do without great consideration," noted U.S. Representative Peter Visclosky (D-IN), chair of the House subcommittee handling nuclear weapons appropriations. With the end of the Cold War and the rise of terrorism, the U.S. government needed "a revised stockpile plan to guide the transformation and downsizing of the [nuclear weapons] complex . . . to reflect the new realities of the world."

But is the defeat of the RRW a momentous victory for nuclear disarmers? After all, the U.S. government still possesses some 10,000 nuclear weapons, with thousands of them on launch-ready alert. Moreover, the Bush administration is promoting a plan to rebuild the entire U.S. nuclear weapons complex. Called Complex 2030 and intended to provide for U.S. nuclear arsenals well into the future, this administration scheme is supposed to cost $150 billion, although the Government Accountability Office maintains that this figure is a significant underestimate.

Also, the RRW development plan might be revived in the future. Brooding over the Congressional decision to block funding for the new nuclear weapon, U.S. Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) — a keen supporter of the venture — remarked hopefully that he expected the RRW or something like it to re-emerge "sooner rather than later."

This situation, of course, falls short of the 1968 pledge by the United States and other nuclear powers, under article VI of the NPT, "to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to . . . nuclear disarmament." It falls even farther short of their subsequent pledge, made at the NPT review conference of 2000, to "an unequivocal undertaking . . . to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals."

Thus, this December’s Congressional decision to zero out funding for the RRW is only a small, symbolic step in the direction of honoring U.S. commitments and fostering nuclear sanity. If the United States and other nations are serious about confronting the menace of nuclear annihilation that has hung over the planet since 1945, it will require not only the scrapping of plans for new nuclear weapons, but the abolition of the 27,000 nuclear weapons that already exist in government arsenals, ready to destroy the world. Until that action occurs, we will continue to default on past promises and to live on the brink of catastrophe.

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany and co-editor of the new book, Peace Action: Past, Present, and Future.

This article originally appeared in the History News Network.

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Superficially, it seems remote that a new wave of mass activism against nuclear weapons comparable to the vast outpouring of popular protest during the early 1980s will develop anytime soon. Despite the existence of vast nuclear arsenals and the ongoing danger of nuclear war, major civil society groups that played key roles in calling for a nuclear-weapon-free world in the past — including religious, labor, environmental, and women’s organizations — seem relatively quiescent on the subject today. Furthermore, the mass media are providing the public with little useful information on nuclear arms control and disarmament issues.

Below the surface, however, a substantial ferment exists, as well as the potential for another round of public protest.

Major peace organizations, although temporarily preoccupied with Iraq, Iran, and the broader Middle East, have all placed nuclear disarmament high on their agenda. In the United States, these groups include the American Friends Service Committee, Faithful Security, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Peace Action, and Physicians for Social Responsibility; in Britain, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Moreover, Peace Action and CND, the two largest peace organizations in these countries, are growing substantially again after years of post-Cold War decline.

In addition, many other active peace organizations around the world champion nuclear disarmament. The largest network of peace organizations is the International Peace Bureau (IPB), which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1910. Consisting of 282 member organizations in 70 countries, the IPB promotes a program of Sustainable Disarmament for Sustainable Development and plays an important role in the U.N.’s Special NGO Committee for Disarmament.

Thanks, in part, to this organizational framework, a significant revival of anti-nuclear protest has occurred in recent years. Determined to spur U.N. action for nuclear disarmament, thousands of people turned out for a May 2005 demonstration in New York City, making it the largest anti-nuclear rally in the United States in decades. This year, spirited protests have taken place at U.S. nuclear weapons development sites and the University of California, where students staged hunger strikes to protest that institution’s complicity in the ongoing U.S. nuclear program. Even members of the traditional U.S. policy-making elite have issued a call for a nuclear-weapon-free world.

In Britain, the situation has been particularly tumultuous, with a fierce uprising erupting over the government’s proposal to replace London’s aging Trident nuclear weapons system with a newer model. Indeed, Britain was convulsed by the controversy, which generated numerous anti-nuclear demonstrations — the largest with 100,000 participants — and, according to polls, opposition from 59 percent of the public.

Nor is the sentiment in Britain contrary to that of other nuclear nations. According to a September 2007 survey conducted by the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies, 63 percent of Russians favor eliminating all nuclear weapons, 59 percent support removing all nuclear weapons from high alert, and 53 percent support cutting the Russian and U.S. nuclear arsenals to 400 nuclear weapons each. In the United States, 73 percent of the public favors eliminating all nuclear weapons, 64 percent support removing all nuclear weapons from high alert, and 59 percent support reducing Russian and U.S. nuclear arsenals to 400 weapons each. Eighty percent of Russians and Americans want their countries to participate in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Given the unpopularity of nuclear weapons, U.S. politicians have been wary of supporting new nuclear programs. Republican-dominated congresses have defeated the Bush administration’s plan to build so-called “bunker-busters” and “mini-nukes.” The administration’s proposal to build the “reliable replacement warhead” also seems to be in serious trouble. In fact, there’s substantial congressional support for a thorough re-examination of the U.S. nuclear program and for legislation to establish a Department of Peace, which would include an office of arms control and disarmament. On the presidential campaign trail, the candidates don’t say a word about building new nuclear weapons, and, among the Democrats, there’s talk of a nuclear-weapon-free world.

Finally, the breakdown of the arms control and disarmament regime and a slide toward nuclear war would certainly contribute to an upsurge in activism. Both remain quite possible in a world of rival, war-making nations.

So although mass anti-nuclear activism is far less prominent today than a generation ago, it stands on the verge of a comeback. At the least, many of the preconditions for its return are in place.

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany and co-editor of the new book, Peace Action: Past, Present, and Future.

This article originally appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

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Although Congress has been dealing with the Bush administration’s proposal to develop the reliable replacement warhead (RRW) for much of 2007, it’s remarkable that the new weapon, a hydrogen bomb, has attracted little public protest or even public attention.

After all, for years opinion polls have reported that an overwhelming majority of Americans favor nuclear disarmament. A July 2007 poll by the Simons Foundation of Canada found that 82.3 percent of Americans backed either the total elimination or a reduction of nuclear weapons in the world. Only 3 percent favored developing new nuclear weapons.

And yet, RRW is a new nuclear warhead, the first in two decades, and — if the Bush administration is successful in obtaining the necessary authorization from Congress — it will be used widely to upgrade the current U.S. nuclear arsenal. In this fashion, RRW won’t only contradict the U.S. government’s pledge under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to move toward nuclear disarmament, it will actually encourage other nations to jump right back into the nuclear arms race.

Of course, peace and disarmament groups — including Peace Action, the Council for a Livable World, and Physicians for Social Responsibility — have sharply criticized RRW in mailings to their supporters and on their websites. Public protests have taken place, including hunger strikes and other demonstrations at the University of California in May 2007 and a demonstration at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in August 2007.

But these protests have been small. And the general public hasn’t noticed RRW. Why?

A key reason is that peace groups and the public are preoccupied by the Iraq War and by the looming war with Iran. The actual use of weapons is always more riveting (and certainly more destructive) than their potential use. And weapons are being employed every day in Iraq, while nuclear weapons represent merely a potential danger — albeit a far deadlier one. Thus, in certain ways, the nuclear disarmament campaign faces a situation much like that during the Vietnam War, when the vast carnage in that conflict distracted activists and the public from the ongoing nuclear menace.

Another reason is that it’s hard to involve the public in a one-weapon campaign. To rouse people from their lethargy, they need to sense a crucial turning point. When atmospheric nuclear testing and the development of the hydrogen bomb riveted public attention on the danger of wholesale nuclear annihilation in the late 1950s, or when the Reagan administration escalated the nuclear arms race and threatened nuclear war in the early 1980s, people felt they had come to a crossroads. By contrast, RRW appears rather arcane and perhaps best left to the policy wonks.

Finally, the mass communications media have done a good deal to distort and/or bury nuclear issues since the end of the Cold War. Yes, at the behest of the Bush administration they trumpeted the supreme dangers of Iraqi nuclear weapons, even when those weapons didn’t exist. But they did a terrible job of educating the U.S. public about nuclear realities. A 1999 Gallup poll taken a week after the U.S. Senate rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty found that, although most Americans favored the treaty, only 26 percent were aware that it had been defeated! Similarly, a 2004 poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes found that the average American thought that the U.S. nuclear stockpile, which then numbered more than 10,000 weapons, consisted of only 200. Given the very limited knowledge that Americans have of the elementary facts about nuclear issues, it’s hardly surprising that relatively few are busy protesting against the development of RRW.

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany and co-editor of the new book, Peace Action: Past, Present, and Future.

This article originally appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

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The 62nd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima occurs today, August 6, 2007, bringing with it thousands of commemoration ceremonies in cities and towns around the world. Such events have become part and parcel of the nuclear era, and include the lighting and floating of lanterns in memory of the dead, silent vigils, religious observances, the chalking of human "shadows" on the ground, readings of John Hersey’s Hiroshima, and leafletting.

As touching as these ceremonies and activities sometimes are, have they served any practical purpose? A brief survey indicates that they have.

Fittingly, these ventures began in Hiroshima. On August 6, 1946, the local branch of the Japanese Association of Religious Organizations sponsored a Memorial Day, presided over by Buddhist, Shinto, and Christian clergy. The following August, a broader coalition of Hiroshima-based organizations sponsored a citywide peace festival. At the 1947 event, which drew 10,000 people to a public park, a message was read by the U.S. occupation commander, General Douglas MacArthur, who emphasized that the development of the atomic bomb had dramatically changed the nature of war and threatened the destruction of the human race. Speaking at the same ceremonies, Hiroshima’s new mayor, Shinzo Hamai, organized prayers against the future employment of nuclear weapons and issued a Peace Declaration, calling on the world to rid itself of war.

As demonstrations memorializing the atomic bombings became regular events in Hiroshima, they began to spread to other countries. In 1948, the Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a Methodist minister portrayed in Hersey’s Hiroshima, initiated a campaign to have nations around the world draw upon August 6 as World Peace Day. That year, citizens in twenty countries responded to his call, holding prayer meetings and other public gatherings on Hiroshima Day.

Tanimoto had a particular impact in the United States, where — sponsored by the Board of Missions of the Methodist Church — he toured during a substantial part of 1948 and 1949, garnering support from pacifist and religious groups for a Hiroshima peace center. Thanks to the efforts of Norman Cousins, Pearl Buck, Hersey, and other prominent Americans, the center was established in New York City in March 1949. In 1950, it opened in Hiroshima, where it arranged for the "moral adoption" of atomic bomb orphans by Americans and undertook welfare services for other victims of the atomic attack.

Cousins visited Japan in 1949 for the August 6 memorial ceremony, and returned to the United States with a Hiroshima Peace Petition, signed by 110,000 residents of that city. Although President Harry Truman refused to accept the petition, Tanimoto eventually presented it to Carlos Romulo, President of the U.N. General Assembly.

From the start, then, there were two themes highlighted by the Hiroshima Day ceremonies. The first was that nuclear war was such an abomination that it should never be waged again. The second was that the development of nuclear weapons brought war itself into question; or, as some have phrased it, in the nuclear age there is no alternative to peace.

Over the ensuing decades, peace groups have hammered away at these two themes — and with some success. Rather remarkably, they have created mass movements that have played a key role in curbing the nuclear arms race and in preventing the waging of nuclear war. This development is unique in human history, for when have governments — which have waged war for as long as there have been competing territories — pulled back from its most devastating forms and abandoned its most destructive implements?

Of course, peace groups have been less successful in bringing an end to war itself. And yet, there are signs here, too, that some progress has been made. A United Nations, a European Union, and other viable international organizations have become vital fixtures of the modern world. Not only has the planet not erupted into a third world war since 1945, but — as numerous scholarly studies have shown — in the last two decades the level of international violence has declined significantly. This is why the Bush administration, with its stubborn penchant for military victory, seems so out of touch with the rest of the world, and even with the American public.

Of course, for anyone concerned with building a sane and secure world, these developments, while heartening, are not sufficient.

Why have the Hiroshima-based arguments for ridding the world of nuclear war and war itself not had a greater impact? One reason is that, over the course of thousands of years, governments have had the prerogative for waging war and, in this connection, employing whatever weapons they want. The "great powers," especially, do not look forward to surrendering this prerogative. In addition, the public is occasionally lured into support for particular wars thanks to deception, nationalism, and what appear to be (and sometimes are) genuine threats to their security. Moreover, for understandable reasons, many members of the public would prefer not to think too much about nuclear war (i.e. universal doom).

In this context, Hiroshima Day events really do matter. They help break into the consciousness of rulers and ruled alike, telling them that nuclear war is really not acceptable. Such events also remind them that, in the modern world, war itself is an anachronism — a deadly habit that must be overcome.

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany and co-editor of the new book, Peace Action: Past, Present, and Future.

This article originally appeared on the History News Network.

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In a number of ways, The Atomic Bazaar is a very disturbing book. Written by William Langewiesche — who served for years as a national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, in which this material first appeared — it exposes the secret progress of nuclear weapons proliferation over the past few decades. Based on extensive investigation of licit and illicit nuclear technology ventures, it provides a dismaying portrait of how national rivalries, supplemented by human greed, are producing an ever more dangerous world.

Langewiesche begins by taking a look at the nuclear issue that most frequently grabs the attention of the communications media and of the American public: the prospect of terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons. Somewhat reassuringly, he does not think it likely that they will obtain such weapons on their own. Although he provides a frightening picture of rotting, lightly-guarded nuclear weapons facilities in Russia, surrounded by sullen, desperate local citizens, he considers a commando-style raid there by terrorists unlikely to succeed. International smuggling of highly-enriched uranium out of Russia is a better bet, he concedes, especially given the country’s porous southern borders. Nevertheless, as he remarks, "The construction of a bomb is not a casual project," and might well be discovered by snooping neighbors or the authorities, even in chaotically governed nations. Thus, he concludes, the odds are stacked against a would-be nuclear terrorist.

Terrorism, however, does not constitute the greatest nuclear danger. Washington, London, and New York, Langewiesche argues, "are unlikely anytime soon to suffer a nuclear strike — though certainly the possibility exists. More at risk for now . . . are the cities of the nuclear-armed poor, particularly on the Indian subcontinent, and in the Middle East." In the past few years, millions of Indians and Pakistanis twice came close to nuclear annihilation, and "this is the world in which increasingly we live, of societies . . . that are weak and unstable but also nuclear-armed."

Pakistan, particularly, Langewiesche notes, "is the great proliferator of our time." And this, in turn, owes much to the work of Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan. Trained as a metallurgist, Khan began his career as a nuclear proliferator in the mid-1970s, when he returned to Pakistan from employment in the Netherlands. Drawing upon stolen nuclear designs, he dramatically built up Pakistan’s nuclear facilities through the Khan Research Laboratories, which produced highly enriched uranium, the fissionable material necessary for Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, and designed the warheads and missiles to deliver them. Along the way, Khan became a sort of demigod in Pakistan, living in luxury, accepting awards of every kind (including six honorary doctoral degrees, 45 gold medals, and three gold crowns), and, as Langewiesche notes, "holding forth on diverse subjects — science, health, history, world politics, poetry, and (his favorite) the magnitude of his achievements."

In fact, Khan was not an independent operator, for his nuclear activities received the lavish support of the Pakistani government. Langewiesche observes that Khan’s budget "was apparently unlimited. Eventually he hired as many as ten thousand people," and "also launched a massive shopping spree in Europe and the United States." Given his government’s largesse, Khan could offer two or three times the going rate for nuclear-related products manufactured by corporations in more industrially advanced nations — products which they happily provided.

Khan’s importance to the Pakistani regime reached an apparent zenith in 1998, when it exploded its first atomic bombs. Shortly after a technician pushed a button and proclaimed "Allah-o-Akbar" (God is great), a fierce nuclear explosion shook the test mountain, shrouding it in dust. Pakistan had become a nuclear nation.

By this point, Khan was dealing on a much larger stage. Eager to enhance his considerable personal fortune, he sold vital nuclear information and material to the governments of Libya and Iran. During the 1990s, he also worked out a deal with the North Korean regime, in which that government provided him with missile prototypes (which were then modified and produced at the Khan Research Laboratories) and he provided that government with centrifuge prototypes and advice on uranium enrichment and procurement.

Ultimately, these arrangements led to Khan’s downfall. With Khan’s extensive nuclear sales operations revealed by the Libyan government, the U.S. government demanded that Pakistan’s dictator, General Pouvez Musharraf, take action against him. Although Musharraf and other Pakistani officials were deeply complicit in Khan’s activities, the general arranged to have Khan make a formal confession on television in which he accepted the sole blame for them. "I also wish to clarify," Khan stated on that occasion, "that there was never ever any kind of authorization for these activities by the government." As a reward for Khan’s willingness to take the heat, Musharraf pardoned him. But the general kept Khan under house arrest in one of his mansions, where he would remain out of sight, out of mischief, and out of reach of independent inquiries.

For Langewiesche, the moral of this sad story of corruption and the dispersal of nuclear weaponry is not to abandon efforts at nuclear nonproliferation, but to find "the courage in parallel to accept the equalities of a maturing world in which many countries have acquired atomic bombs, and some may use them."

But much of his evidence can also support a different conclusion — one pointing to the failure of nuclear-armed nations to live up to their responsibilities. Time after time, as Langewiesche shows, the U.S. government — despite repeated warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies — was content to ignore Khan’s operations because of the assistance Pakistan could provide to U.S. military ventures. For example, starting in 1979, the U.S. government drew upon Pakistan as a base for anti-Soviet operations in Afghanistan. Beginning in 2001, it cozied up to Pakistan to secure that nation’s cooperation in subduing Al Qaeda and the Taliban in that same country. In these circumstances, the U.S. government found it relatively easy to accommodate itself to Pakistan’s role as a nuclear nation and, for a time at least, as a nuclear Wal-Mart.

Furthermore, as Langewiesche concedes, much of motivation for building the Bomb among Third World leaders was based on their resentment at the world’s nuclear two-tier system: nuclear weapons for some nations and no nuclear weapons for them. There was, as he writes, "a moralistic rejection of the discriminatory nuclear order." For all his venality, Khan shared this sense of grievance. "I want to question the bloody holier-than-thou attitudes of the Americans and the British," he wrote in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, in 1979. "Are these bastards God-appointed guardians of the world to stockpile hundreds of thousands of nuclear warheads, and have they God-given authority to carry out explosions every month?" By contrast, if Pakistanis "start a modest programme, we are the satans, the devils." Although Khan exaggerated the numbers of nuclear warheads possessed by the U.S. and British governments, he did not exaggerate their national arrogance.

Of course, coupling the abandonment of nuclear weapons by the nuclear nations with the renunciation of nuclear weapons by non-nuclear nations is the bargain that was struck under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968. If we want nuclear safety, it is more likely to come in that form than in the form of further nuclear proliferation. But moving in the direction of this kind of equal playing field — a nuclear-free world — requires that the nuclear powers accept the responsibility to fulfill their treaty commitment to their own nuclear disarmament. Until that happens, we can expect what Langewiesche predicts: further nuclear proliferation and a heightened danger of nuclear war.

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany and co-editor of the new book, Peace Action: Past, Present, and Future.

This article originally appeared on the History News Network.

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Although the nuclear disarmament movement has been in the doldrums since the end of the Cold War, in recent years there have been signs of a modest revival.

Of course, even in the intervening period, the struggle against the Bomb never disappeared. Around the world, peace and disarmament organizations continued to assail nuclear weapons; however, such efforts failed to spark broad-based antinuclear activism.

But thanks to the recent erosion of the nuclear arms control regime and to the Bush administration’s undisguised contempt for nuclear arms control and disarmament treaties, popular participation in disarmament ventures has begun to grow.

On May 1, 2005, the day before the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference began at the United Nations, thousands of demonstrators marched through Manhattan, demanding a nuclear-weapon-free world. Drawn mostly from the United States, they were mobilized by Abolition Now (a coalition of peace and disarmament groups) and United for Peace & Justice (the largest coalition of peace groups in the United States). A New York Times article claimed that "several thousand" people participated in the event, while organizers put the number at 40,000. In either case, it was the biggest nuclear disarmament rally in the United States since the 1980s.

Less dramatically, U.S. peace groups such as Peace Action, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Women’s Action for New Directions, the Council for a Livable World, and the Friends Committee on National Legislation mobilized substantial grassroots pressure against the Bush administration’s proposals for nuclear "bunker-busters" and "mini-nukes," playing a key role in their congressional defeat. Moreover, these same groups are currently stirring up significant opposition to two new components of a U.S. nuclear buildup — the reliable replacement warhead and Complex 2030.

Student antinuclear activism also appears to be undergoing a renaissance. In May, student hunger strikes and demonstrations broke out on three campuses of the University of California in protest against the university’s involvement in U.S. nuclear weapons programs. Pressing the issue, students disrupted the university’s board of regents meeting on May 18, departing only when tied up and removed by police.

The nuclear disarmament campaign also shows impressive signs of life in other countries. Among the international organizations currently working for a nuclear-weapon-free world are International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War, with affiliates in 60 nations, and Abolition 2000, a campaign of about 2,000 groups in more than 90 countries.

In India, the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace — an umbrella organization of some 200 groups — sharply condemned the recent U.S.-India nuclear deal. In Germany, dozens of leaders of youth organizations issued a call for the withdrawal of nuclear weapons from their country. Perhaps the fiercest antinuclear uprising over the past year occurred in Britain, where the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament led a turbulent mobilization against the British government’s plan to replace its aging Trident nuclear weapons system.

Admittedly, none of this agitation is comparable to the outpouring of antinuclear protest that shook the world and shocked policy makers during the 1980s. But it does indicate the possibility for a dramatic upswing in antinuclear weapon activism, especially if there is a breakdown of the nuclear arms control and disarmament regime or a heightened prospect of nuclear war.

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany and co-editor of the new book, Peace Action: Past, Present, and Future.

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The Bush administration’s stubborn determination to prevail, whatever the costs, is evident not only in its reckless military venture in Iraq, but in its single-minded pursuit of new nuclear weapons.

The U.S. government, of course, is supposed to be divesting itself of its nuclear weapons under the provisions of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which it signed in 1968. As recently as the NPT review conference of 2000, the U.S. government joined other signers of the NPT in promising an "unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear-weapon states to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals."

Furthermore, when the Bush administration ignored these commitments and pressed Congress hard for funding to build new nuclear weapons — nuclear "bunker busters" and "mini-nukes" — Congress dug in and rejected them as totally unnecessary. With some 10,000 nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal, members of Congress, both Democrats and some Republicans, seemed to feel that enough was enough.

However, from the standpoint of the Bush administration, there are never enough nuclear weapons — at least in its arsenal.

And so, administration officials are now back with another U.S. nuclear weapons proposal: to build the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW). "They’ve been running with RRW like you wouldn’t believe," observed U.S. Representative David Hobson (Republican-Ohio). Hobson ought to know for, until this January, he chaired the House subcommittee on water and energy appropriations, which oversees spending on nuclear weapons.

The alleged reason for building this newly-designed hydrogen bomb is to maintain the reliability of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile which, according to administration proponents of the RRW, is deteriorating and needs to be replaced. But independent studies by scientific experts have shown that the stockpile will remain reliable for at least another fifty years.

Not surprisingly, the plan for the Reliable Replacement Warhead has drawn sharp criticism. "This is a solution in search of a problem," remarked Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association. "There is an urgent need to reduce these weapons, not expand them." Much the same thing has been said by members of Congress, who stress the provocative nature of the RRW. Despite the fact that the contract for the nuclear weapon is slated to go to the Lawrence Livermore lab in her home state of California, U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein is a leading critic. "What worries me," she said, "is that the minute you begin to put more sophisticated warheads on the existing fleet, you are essentially creating a new nuclear weapon. And it’s just a matter of time before other nations do the same thing."

Even more worrisome is the fact that the Reliable Replacement Warhead is just the tip of the nuclear iceberg. This nuclear weapon is merely a component of a larger Bush administration plan to rebuild the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. Called Complex 2030 (and dubbed by disarmament groups like Peace Action "Bombplex 2030"), it calls for a massive reorganization and refurbishment of the nation’s nuclear weapons program. According to Thomas D’Agostino, the deputy administrator for programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration and a keen supporter of the proposal, Complex 2030 will "restore us to a level of capability comparable to what we had during the Cold War."

Like the Iraq War, this will be a very expensive program. The Bush administration claims that Complex 2030 will cost roughly $150 billion. But the Government Accountability Office considers this estimate far too low and has urged Congress to require that the Department of Energy provide an accurate accounting of the real costs.

Naturally, arms control and disarmament groups are horrified by Complex 2030. Susan Gordon, director of the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, has remarked: "At a time when the Non-Proliferation Treaty is in danger of unraveling, it is madness to be planning to rebuild the U.S. nuclear weapons program with new warheads and new military missions."

How warmly Congress will welcome the Bush administration’s plan to upgrade and expand the U.S. nuclear arsenal is anyone’s guess, but the odds are that it will receive a chilly reception — and not only from Democrats.

In addition, the plan will certainly be seized upon by the government of Iran. Currently assailed by the Bush administration for allegedly building nuclear weapons and, thus, violating the NPT, it merely has to point to the RRW and Complex 2030 to reveal the administration’s hypocrisy.

Indeed, if the Bush administration were really serious about blocking nuclear proliferation — rather than enhancing its own nuclear weapons supremacy — it would scrupulously abide by the provisions of the NPT.

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

This article originally appeared on the History News Network.

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The shift of the Iraq War from what its early proponents claimed would be a cakewalk to what most current observers — including the small group of neocons who originally championed it — consider a disaster suggests that war’s consequences are not always predictable.

Some wars, admittedly, work out fairly well — at least for the victors. In the third of the Punic Wars (149—146 B.C.), Rome’s victory against Carthage was complete, and it obliterated that rival empire from the face of the earth. For the Carthaginians, of course, the outcome was less satisfying. Rome’s victorious legions razed the city of Carthage and sowed salt in its fields, thereby ensuring that what had been a thriving metropolis would become a wasteland.

But even the victors are not immune to some unexpected and very unpleasant consequences. World War I led to 30 million people killed or wounded and disastrous epidemics of disease, plus a multibillion-dollar debt that was never repaid to U.S. creditors and, ultimately, fed into the collapse of the international financial system in 1929. The war also facilitated the rise of Communism and Fascism, two fanatical movements that added immensely to the brutality and destructiveness of the twentieth century. Certainly, World War I didn’t live up to Woodrow Wilson’s promises of a "war to end war" and a "war to make the world safe for democracy."

Even World War II — the "good war" — was not all it is frequently cracked up to be. Yes, it led to some very satisfying developments, most notably the destruction of the fascist governments of Germany, Italy, and Japan. But people too often forget that it had some very negative consequences. These include the killing of 50 million people, as well as the crippling, blinding, and maiming of millions more. Then, of course, there was also the genocide carried out under cover of the war, the systematic destruction of cities and civilian populations, the ruin of once-vibrant economies, the massive violations of civil liberties (e.g. the internment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps), the establishment of totalitarian control in Eastern Europe, the development and use of nuclear weapons, and the onset of the nuclear arms race. This grim toll leaves out the substantial number of rapes, mental breakdowns, and postwar murders unleashed by the war.

The point here is not that World War II was "bad," but that wars are not as clean or morally pure as they are portrayed.

Curiously, pacifists have long been stereotyped as sentimental and nave. But haven’t the real romantics of the past century been the misty-eyed flag-wavers, convinced that the next war will build a brave new world? Particularly in a world harboring some 30,000 nuclear weapons, those who speak about war as if it consisted of two noble knights, jousting before cheering crowds, have lost all sense of reality.

This lack of realism about the consequences of modern war is all too pervasive. During the Cuban missile crisis, it led Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to warn top U.S. national security officials against their glib proposal to bomb the Soviet missile sites. That’s not the end, he insisted. That’s just the beginning! After the crisis, President Kennedy was delighted that war with the Soviet Union had been averted — a war that he estimated would have killed 300 million people.

How do we account for the romantic view of war that seems to overcome portions of society on a periodic basis? Certainly hawkish government officials, economic elites, and their backers in the mass media have contributed to popular feeble-mindedness when it comes to war’s consequences. And rulers of empires tend to become foolish when presented with supreme power. But it is also true that some people revel in what they assume is the romance of war as a welcome escape from their humdrum daily existence. Nor should this surprise us, for they find similar escape in romantic songs and novels, movies, spectator sports, and, sometimes, in identification with a "strong" leader.

Of course, war might just be a bad habit — one that is difficult to break after persisting for thousands of years. Even so, people will give it up only when they confront its disastrous consequences. And this clear thinking about war might prove difficult for many of them, at least as long as they prefer romance to reality.

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

This article originally appeared on the History News Network.

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The Bush administration’s current confrontation with Iran over what it claims is that nation’s nuclear weapons development program raises the question: Can the disarmament of one country occur in isolation from the disarmament of others?

That question seemed to be answered by the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968. Signed by almost all countries of the world, including the United States, it provided that the non-nuclear nations would forgo building nuclear weapons, while the nuclear nations would divest themselves of their own nuclear weapons.

But, upon taking office, the Bush administration quickly abandoned the U.S. commitment to the NPT. It withdrew the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, moved forward with the deployment of a national missile defense system (a revised version of the Reagan administration’s “Star Wars” program), and opposed ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (negotiated and signed by President Clinton). Furthermore, it dropped negotiations for nuclear arms control and disarmament and, instead, pressed Congress to authorize the building of new U.S. nuclear weapons — for example, the nuclear “bunker buster” and “mini-nukes.”

Nor are the Bush administration’s more recent actions in line with the U.S. government’s alleged commitment to nuclear disarmament.

This past March, President Bush traveled to India, where he cemented a nuclear deal with the Indian government. India, of course, recently became a nuclear weapons nation, having spurned the NPT, conducted nuclear tests in 1998, and developed its own nuclear arsenal. Yet the agreement rewards India for its defiance of international norms. By supplying U.S. nuclear fuel and technology to India, the agreement facilitates a substantial expansion of that nation’s nuclear weapons complex. At the same time, it does not require India to stop producing nuclear material for weapons or to place Indian nuclear reactors under international inspection. As this U.S.-India agreement flies in the face of U.S. legislation that bans nuclear exports to nations that have not signed the NPT, the Bush administration is now pressing Congress to revoke such legislation. The Republican-led Congress seems likely to do so.

In addition, the Bush administration is promoting legislation in Congress that will fund the development of what is called the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW), as well as a sweeping modernization of U.S. nuclear weapons labs and factories. Although the RRW is billed as an item that would merely update existing U.S. nuclear weapons and ensure their reliability, it seems more likely to serve as a means of designing new nuclear weapons. And the quest for new nuclear weapons seems likely to lead to the resumption of U.S. nuclear testing and the final breakdown of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Furthermore, the Bush administration has come out in opposition to a pathbreaking treaty to create a nuclear weapons-free zone in Central Asia. Signed earlier this month by Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, the agreement commits the signatory countries not to produce, buy, or allow the deployment of nuclear weapons on their soil. According to Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, the U.S. government’s opposition to the Central Asia treaty is based upon its reluctance “to give up the option of deploying nuclear weapons in this region.”

Another sign of the Bush administration’s double standard when it comes nuclear weapons is its unwillingness to consider the idea of a nuclear weapons-free zone for the Middle East. Israel, after all, has developed a substantial nuclear arsenal, but the Bush administration has studiously ignored it. The contrast with the administration’s reaction to Iraq’s possible development of nuclear weapons is quite striking.

In a letter published in the Washington Post on September 7, Kevin Martin, executive director of Peace Action — the largest peace organization in the United States — observed that the Bush administration’s nuclear nonproliferation policies were “incoherent and contradictory.” The administration, he charged, “is rewarding India’s nuclear weapons program with a deal to share technology; doing next to nothing about Pakistan’s veritable nuclear Wal-Mart; winking at Israel’s nuclear arsenal; unilaterally dropping out of arms control treaties . . . ; and ignoring our own obligations to pursue nuclear disarmament under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.”

Certainly, the Bush administration has been quite selective about which nations should have nuclear weapons and which should not. And most nations — including Iran — know it.

The U.S. government would be far more convincing — and perhaps more effective with respect to diplomacy for creating a nuclear-free Iran — if it recognized that nuclear disarmament is a two-way street.

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

This article originally appeared on the History News Network.

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In recent years, the conventional wisdom has been that “Peace” is a losing issue in U.S. presidential campaigns. Proponents of this view point to George McGovern’s run for the presidency in 1972, when he called for peace in Vietnam and was trounced at the polls.

But a more thoroughgoing analysis of the peace issue in presidential races supports a more nuanced conclusion. Indeed, it indicates that peace has been a winning issue numerous times.

First of all, peace is only one of many issues raised in most presidential campaigns and, therefore, its influence on the outcome is hard to disentangle from other issues. Moreover, the issue can be muted even further when the candidates of the opposing parties take roughly similar positions on it. In addition, people are not always driven by the issues. Indeed, they are often motivated by party loyalty, by the personality of the candidates, or — in recent years — by slick campaign ads.

Even so, there have been numerous times when the peace issue has been very prominent — and when the candidates raising it have won.

During the 1916 presidential race, in the midst of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson campaigned strongly as a peace candidate. With the Republicans adopting a hawkish line on the conflict, the Democrats rallied behind the slogan: “He Kept Us Out of War!” And it worked. Between 1912 (when he won only because of a split in Republican ranks) and 1916, Wilson’s share of the popular vote rose from 42 to 49.4 percent, carrying him through to victory.

Another sharp division on the question of peace occurred in 1952. When the Democratic Party was blamed for the bloody, unpopular Korean War and its presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, promised to fight the war as long as it took, Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican candidate, made a strong peace appeal. Americans “must avoid the kind of bungling that led us into Korea,” he told a campaign audience. “The young farm boys must stay on their farms; the students must stay in school.” That fall, Eisenhower proclaimed that the Democrats had given the “false answer . . . that nothing can be done to speed a secure peace.” But, if he were elected, he said, he would “concentrate on the job of ending the Korean war,” adding: “I shall go to Korea.” It was perhaps the most popular and most-quoted statement in his campaign. He surged to victory, with 55 percent of the vote.

In 1964, the Republicans nominated a bona fide hawk, Barry Goldwater, who bluntly declared that his goal was winning the Vietnam War and casually chatted about the use of “nukes” in world affairs. Addressing the Republican national convention, Goldwater assured his audience that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Not surprisingly, the Democrats seized the opportunity to paint the GOP candidate into a corner. Party ads played skillfully upon the widely shared view that Goldwater was “trigger-happy, with the best known of them showing a little girl plucking a daisy as the world exploded in nuclear war. Meanwhile, Johnson campaigned as a peace candidate. “We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves,” he told voters. “We are not going north and drop[ping] bombs.” Johnson easily won the election, securing the greatest vote, the greatest margin of victory, and the greatest percentage (61.1 percent) up to that point in American history.

By 1968, Johnson’s betrayal of his peace promises had made him and the escalating Vietnam War so unpopular that he was forced out of the Democratic primaries by two peace candidates, Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. Furthermore, even Richard Nixon, the GOP candidate, now chose to criticize the war and to claim that he had a “secret plan” to bring it to an end. Although Nixon’s credibility as a peace candidate was not high, the peace credentials of his Democratic opponent, Hubert Humphrey, seemed even lower, for Humphrey was clearly Johnson’s stand-in. In the election, Nixon eked out a narrow victory.

Finally, in 1976, Jimmy Carter, the Democratic presidential candidate, sounded many strong peace themes during his campaign. Attacking the Nixon-Ford administration’s cynicism in world affairs, he promised a new foreign policy, based on peace and human rights. In addition, he called for the scuttling of the B-1 bomber, a comprehensive nuclear test ban, and for movement toward the elimination of all nuclear weapons. So impressive was Carter’s peace position that the executive director of SANE, America’s largest peace group, resigned to work in Carter’s campaign. Carter, too, emerged victorious, with 50 percent of the vote.

Even in the case of George McGovern’s 1972 election defeat, it is worth noting that Nixon neutralized the peace issue to some extent by emphasizing his withdrawal of most U.S. troops from Vietnam, his claim that his administration had secured “peace with honor,” and his policies of détente with China and the Soviet Union.

Thus, there seems to be little basis for the assumption that “Peace” is necessarily a losing issue. Indeed, “Peace” has been (and can be) a potent force in U.S. presidential campaigns.

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

This article originally appeared on the History News Network.

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Fifty years ago, Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential candidate, injected a peace proposal into his hard-fought political campaign. Speaking before the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 21, 1956, Stevenson suggested halting H-bomb tests and challenging other nations to do the same. According to the Illinois Democrat, such actions would “reflect our determination never to plunge the world into nuclear holocaust” and “would reaffirm our purpose to act with humility and a decent concern for world opinion.”

Although sharp criticism in the press and from President Dwight Eisenhower led Stevenson to shelve the issue temporarily, he revived it on September 5. Addressing the American Legion, he warned that “there is not peace — real peace — while more than half of our federal budget goes into an armaments race . . . and the earth’s atmosphere is contaminated from week to week by exploding hydrogen bombs.” Thereafter, his proposal to halt the nuclear arms race by ending nuclear testing became a key component of his campaign. On October 15, in a nationwide TV broadcast focused entirely on the nuclear testing issue, he pledged that, as president of the United States, he would make a nuclear test ban his “first order of business.”

Why did this proposal become a central issue in Stevenson’s campaign? There is little doubt that Stevenson, a humane individual with a genuine concern for human survival, sincerely believed in it.

In addition, however, making a peace proposal could be useful politically. Having lost the 1952 presidential race to Eisenhower, Stevenson recognized that his 1956 presidential campaign provided his last practicable chance to reach the White House. In the early 1950s, millions of Americans longed for peace, and Eisenhower had won the 1952 race in large part thanks to the fact that he had promised to end the Korean War, a bloody, unpopular conflict for which the Democrats received most of the blame. After his election, Eisenhower had ended the war, and now the Republicans, gearing up for his 1956 re-election campaign, were trumpeting “Peace, Progress, and Prosperity” as their campaign themes.

Stevenson and his campaign strategists were well aware of these facts. In 1955, responding to Stevenson’s question about “how to seize the peace initiative” from the Republicans, Thomas Finletter, a top aide, suggested that he attack the Eisenhower administration for bringing the nation twice “to the brink of total atomic war” and that he strongly make “the case for disarmament.” Stevenson’s willingness to adopt this approach was reinforced by a growing number of pleas for nuclear disarmament from religious groups and leaders, distinguished scientists, and the one Democratic holdover on the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Although some campaign staffers feared that a critique of nuclear testing would damage Stevenson’s 1956 campaign, others were enthusiastic about it, in part because it generated enthusiastic applause at his campaign rallies.

In addition, there was growing criticism of nuclear testing by peace and disarmament activists. One of the most prominent of them — Norman Cousins, the editor of the Saturday Review of Literature — had warned of the dangers of nuclear weapons since their public debut in 1945, brought the “Hiroshima Maidens” to the United States for plastic and reconstructive surgery, and had recently taken up the nuclear testing issue as the key to halting the nuclear arms race. Stevenson had a close relationship with Cousins, and repeatedly drew on him for political advice and campaign speeches. According to Stevenson, Cousins was his “constant counselor and conscience.”

Not surprisingly, the Republicans — as keen proponents of nuclear weapons for their new national security policy of “massive retaliation” — lashed back furiously at Stevenson’s nuclear test ban proposal. Vice President Richard Nixon denounced it as “catastrophic nonsense.” Publicly, Eisenhower assailed Stevenson for his antinuclear stand, while privately he dismissed him contemptuously as “that monkey.” Determined to “nail” Stevenson, AEC chair Lewis Strauss lined up prominent scientists to condemn the Democratic candidate and to endorse the president’s nuclear weapons policy.

The attack on Stevenson gained momentum after October 18, 1956, when Soviet premier Nikolai Bulganin sent a letter to Eisenhower criticizing the administration’s position on nuclear testing. Strauss viewed this as “a windfall in view of the headway which Stevenson had made with the issue during the campaign,” and suggested that “if carefully handled, the note could be turned to considerable advantage.” Working with Dulles and, later, with Eisenhower and other officials, Strauss helped produce a withering public response. Delivered by Eisenhower, it attacked the Soviet Union for interfering in U.S. politics. Together with Bulganin’s letter, it certainly helped to undermine Stevenson’s campaign momentum. Meanwhile, Eisenhower continued to attack Stevenson’s nuclear arms control proposal, arguing that it was vital for the United States to maintain “the most advanced military weapons.”

The upshot seems to have been that, although Stevenson’s call for a ban on nuclear testing added new interest and energy to his campaign, it did not deliver any substantial bloc of votes to him, either. Given Eisenhower’s immense personal popularity, plus his ability to point to “Peace, Progress, and Prosperity,” the Republican president won the 1956 election handily and went on to serve another four years in the White House.

Even so, in the following years, Stevenson and the Democrats could take some satisfaction in their test ban proposal. Public opposition to nuclear testing continued to grow. In 1957, Cousins organized the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, an organization that, with Cousins at its helm, spurred popular demands for nuclear arms control and disarmament. In 1958, faced with massive public pressure, at home and abroad, the Eisenhower administration accepted a Soviet-initiated moratorium on nuclear testing and began negotiations for a test ban treaty. By 1960, every major candidate for the presidency publicly supported a nuclear test ban, including Nixon. Although Stevenson was edged out for the Democratic presidential nod that year, he was appointed by the victorious Democrat, John F. Kennedy, as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In 1963, with the help of Stevenson and Cousins, the Kennedy administration negotiated and secured the ratification of the Partial Test Ban Treaty — one of its most popular measures.

This brief story provides a lesson for contemporary Democrats, now going into the 2006 midterm congressional elections. If the Soviet government had not undermined Stevenson’s call for a test ban with its clumsy behavior and if Eisenhower had not enjoyed immense personal popularity and been able to point to his own record as a “Peace” leader, Stevenson might well have profited politically from his 1956 peace proposal. Furthermore, in the following years the test ban issue grew increasingly popular, with the Democrats using it to help them win office, continue in power, and secure a more peaceful world. Perhaps the time has come for contemporary Democrats to stake out a peace proposal of their own and to use it just as effectively.

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

This article originally appeared on the History News Network.

And, now, like malaria or perhaps merely a bad cold, they are.

The Bush administration’s latest nuclear brainchild is the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW). According to an April 6, 2006 article in the Los Angeles Times (Ralph Vartabedian, "U.S. Rolls Out Nuclear Plan"), the RRW, originally depicted as an item that would update existing nuclear weapons and ensure their reliability, "now includes the potential for new bomb designs. Weapons labs currently are engaged in design competition."

Moreover, as the Times story reported, the RRW was part of a much larger Bush administration plan, announced the previous day, "for the most sweeping realignment and modernization of the nation’s system of laboratories and factories for nuclear bombs since the end of the Cold War." The plan called for a modern U.S. nuclear complex that would design a new nuclear bomb and have it ready within four years, as well as accelerate the production of plutonium "pits," the triggers for the explosion of H-bombs.

Although administration officials justify the RRW by claiming that it will guarantee the reliability of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile and reduce the need for nuclear testing, arms control and disarmament advocates are quite critical of these claims. Citing studies by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers, they argue that U.S. nuclear weapons will be reliable for decades longer than U.S. officials contend. Furthermore, according to Hoover Institution fellow Sidney Drell and former U.S. Ambassador James Goodby: "It takes an extraordinary flight of imagination to postulate a modern new arsenal composed of such untested designs that would be more reliable, safe and effective than the current U.S. arsenal based on more than 1,000 tests since 1945." Thus, if new nuclear weapons were built, they would lead inevitably to the resumption of U.S. nuclear testing and, thereby, to the collapse of the moratorium on nuclear testing by the major nuclear powers and to the final destruction of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Most worrisome for nuclear critics, however, is the prospect that the administration will use the RRW program to develop new kinds of nuclear weapons. Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, remains convinced that the replacement process initiated by the RRW program could serve as a back door to such development. Peace Action, the nation’s largest peace and disarmament organization, maintains that "the weapons labs and the Department of Defense will be the ones to decide the real scope" of the RRW program.

Even Representative Hobson, who seems to favor the RRW, appears worried that the administration has a dangerously expansive vision of it. "This is not an opportunity to run off and develop a whole bunch of new capabilities and new weapons," he has declared. "This is a way to redo the weapons capability that we have and maybe make them more reliable." Hobson added: "I don’t want any misunderstandings . . . and sometimes within the [Energy] department, people hear only what they want to hear. . . . We’re not going out and expanding a whole new world of nuclear weapons."

Certainly, some degree of skepticism about the scope of the program seems justified when one examines the Bush administration’s overall nuclear policy. Today, despite the U.S. government’s commitment, under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968, to divest itself of nuclear weapons through negotiated nuclear disarmament, the U.S. nuclear stockpile stands at nearly 10,000 nuclear warheads, with more than half of them active or operational.

Not only does the Bush administration steer clear of any negotiations that might entail U.S. nuclear disarmament, but it has pulled out of the ABM treaty and refused to support ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (negotiated and signed by former President Bill Clinton). According to the Defense Department’s Quadrennial Defense Review Report of February 2006, "a robust nuclear deterrent . . . remains a keystone of U.S. national power."

Furthermore, there are clear signs that the Bush administration is shifting away from the traditional U.S. strategy of nuclear deterrence to a strategy of nuclear use. The nuclear Bunker Buster, for example, was not designed to deter aggression, but to destroy underground military targets. Moreover, in recent years, the U.S. Strategic Command has added new missions to its war plans, including the use of U.S. nuclear weapons for pre-emptive military action. Seymour Hersh’s much-cited article in the New Yorker on preparations for a U.S. military attack upon Iran indicates that there has already been substantial discussion of employing U.S. nuclear weapons in that capacity.

This movement by the Bush administration toward a nuclear buildup and nuclear war highlights the double standard it uses in its growing confrontation with Iran, a country whose nuclear enrichment program is in accordance with its NPT commitments. Of course, Iran might use such nuclear enrichment to develop nuclear weapons — and that would be a violation of the NPT. But Bush administration policies already violate U.S. commitments under the treaty, and this fact appears of far less concern to Washington officialdom. Logic, however, does not seem to apply to this issue — unless, of course, it is the logic of world power.

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

This article originally appeared on the History News Network.

For those familiar with the cynical gestures of government officials, it might come as no surprise that an American President would attempt to derive whatever public relations benefits he can by linking himself to one of the most revered figures in Indian and world history.

But the level of hypocrisy is heightened when one recalls that Bush is currently one of the world’s leading warmakers and that Gandhi was one of the world’s leading advocates of nonviolence. Furthermore, the American President’s major purpose for traveling to India is to clinch a deal that will provide that nation with additional nuclear technology, thus enabling it to accelerate its development of nuclear weapons.

Gandhi, it should be noted, was not only a keen supporter of substituting nonviolent resistance for war, but a sharp critic of the Bomb. In 1946, he remarked: “I regard the employment of the atom bomb for the wholesale destruction of men, women, and children as the most diabolical use of science.” When he first learned of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Gandhi recalled, he said to himself: “Unless now the world adopts non-violence, it will spell certain suicide.” In 1947, Gandhi argued that “he who invented the atom bomb has committed the gravest sin in the world of science,” concluding once more: “The only weapon that can save the world is non-violence.” The Bomb, he said, “will not be destroyed by counter-bombs.” Indeed, “hatred can be overcome only by love.”

That is certainly an interesting backdrop against which to place President Bush’s plan to provide India with nuclear technology. India is one of only four countries that have refused to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) — a treaty endorsed by 188 nations. Thumbing its nose at the world, India has conducted nuclear tests and has developed what experts believe to be 50 to 100 nuclear weapons. Under the terms of the NPT, the export of nuclear technology is banned to nations that don’t accept international inspections of their nuclear programs. In addition, U.S. law prohibits the transfer of nuclear technology to a country that rejects full international safeguards. U.S. law also bans such technology transfer to a non-NPT country that has conducted nuclear test explosions.

Thus, if the President were to give any weight to Gandhi’s ideas, international treaty obligations, or U.S. law, he would not be working to provide India with the same nuclear-capable technology that he so vigorously condemns in Iran — a country, by the way, that has signed the NPT, has undergone inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and has not conducted any nuclear weapons tests.

There are other reasons to oppose this deal, as well. Although India’s relations with Pakistan are relatively stable at the moment, they might well be very adversely affected by any perception that the Indian government was racing ahead with a buildup of its nuclear arsenal. Furthermore, Pakistan might demand the same nuclear assistance as India. Indeed, if India can simply ignore the NPT and, then, receive nuclear technology from the United States, why should other countries observe its provisions? The Iranians, certainly, will make this point.

At home, the Bush administration’s double standard has not gone unnoticed. In Congress, Representatives Ed Markey (D-MA) and Fred Upton (R-MI) have introduced a bipartisan resolution — H.Con.Res. 318 — expressing strong concern about the proposed U.S.-India nuclear deal. Although this resolution affirms humanitarian and scientific support for India, it contends that full civil nuclear cooperation between the two nations poses serious dangers. For example, it points to the possibility that the supply of nuclear fuel to India could free up India’s existing fissile material production, thereby enabling it to be used to expand India’s nuclear weapons arsenal. The resolution also opposes transfer of nuclear technology to any country that is not a party to the NPT and has not accepted full safeguards.

Whatever happens to this resolution, if the Bush administration were to implement its nuclear agreement with the Indian government, it would have to convince Congress to amend U.S. law. And arms control and disarmament groups are determined to prevent that from happening.

Thus, the Bush administration might genuflect to Gandhi in its efforts to arrange a nuclear pact with India, but it is going to have to convince a lot of very skeptical observers before it implements this agreement.

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

This article originally appeared on the History News Network.

This tension is well-illustrated by David Schalk’s excellent study, War and the Ivory Tower, an examination of intellectual engagement during France’s war in Algeria (1954 to 1962) and America’s war in Vietnam (1964 to 1975). Originally published in 1991 and reissued in 2005, this book has new prefaces by Benjamin Stora (a French historian, born in Algeria) and George Herring (a U.S. diplomatic historian), as well as a new introduction by Schalk (a specialist on European intellectual history).

Schalk defines intellectuals by what he calls "their more abstract and distantiated social role which sharply contrasts with almost all others in a modern society. Their function involves a certain kind of creativity, usually through the written word and dealing with ideas in some fashion, often applying ideas in an ethical way that may question the legitimacy of the established authorities." Thus, "a significant percentage of the professoriate and some journalists" can be classified as intellectuals, as can "a substantial portion of the artistic community . . . who theorize in print about their creativity." In his view, "there was, and perhaps remains, a symbiotic relationship between the intellectual and engagement," a French term meaning "critical dissent."

Schalk argues convincingly that there were remarkable similarities between the Algerian and Vietnam wars. These include: the use of torture; the looming precedent of the Nuremberg trials; anti-colonial revolt; the undermining of democracy; the murky style of diplomacy; the racist views of Western troops; the unjustified optimism and arrogance of military and political leaders; the forced relocation of civilian populations; and the transformation of the two nations’ countrysides into vast "free fire zones," in which the military sought to destroy everything that moved.

There were also important differences, he notes, among them the relative absence of Marxism within Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN); the large French settler population in Algeria; and the presence in France of some 300,000 Algerian workers, whose monthly remittances to the FLN and its government in exile paid a significant portion of the costs of the Algerian independence struggle.

Albert Camus has often been cited as an example of French intellectual resistance to the Algerian war. But, as Schalk reveals, Camus was conflicted about the struggle in Algeria, and at times fell silent about it. "A far more relevant model," Schalk notes, is provided by the French Catholic intelligentsia, especially the left-leaning intellectuals gathered around the monthly Esprit. From 1954 and 1962, that journal published 211 articles on the Algerian war, 42 of them by its co-director (and later director) Jean-Marie Domenach. The responsibility of intellectuals, argued Domenach, was to show that "between the frivolous word and the recourse to arms there exists a path" — the path, he eventually concluded, of nonviolent resistance and peaceful protest. The French Left, he believed, had to be awakened from its paralyzing sense of impotence so that it would no longer "cultivate a despair that is the secret weapon of tyranny."

As Schalk notes, Esprit’s prominence in resistance to the war did not mean that the French Catholic intelligentsia solidly opposed French policy. Indeed, some conservative Catholic intellectuals were keen supporters of France’s war in Algeria. Denouncing conscientious objectors, Monseigneur Jean Rodhain declared in 1960, contemptuously, that if they would not fight for France, they should "go and live in another country."

Jean-Paul Sartre and writers connected with his journal, Les Temps modernes, also played key roles in the resistance to the Algerian war. Once the full significance of that conflict became apparent to Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and their associates, they dealt with it extensively in that journal. Schalk remarks that, as "the guiding spirit" behind Les Temps modernes, "Sartre channeled much of his amazing energy and intellectual power into the struggle to end the war." His articles dealt "unsparingly with issues of collective guilt and thus the historical parallel with the Nazi years, torture, war crimes, and the danger of fascism." He also published a report on the first clandestine congress of the Young Resistance, a group of draft resisters, with the mission of helping deserters and those who refused induction to leave France and locate employment elsewhere.

In the fall of 1960, Sartre and others created a sensation by circulating what became known as the Manifesto of the 121, the "Declaration on the Right of Insubordination in the Algerian War." Banned by the government and consequently unpublished (e.g. the pages of Les Temps modernes where it was to appear remained conspicuously blank), it sharply denounced the Algerian war, noting that "French militarism . . . has managed to restore torture and to make it once again practically an institution in Europe." The signers declared that they "respect and deem justified the refusal to take up arms against the Algerian people," as well as the "conduct of Frenchmen who . . . supply aid and protection to Algerians who are oppressed in the name of the French people." They concluded that "the cause of the Algerian people, who are contributing in a decisive manner to destroying the colonial system, is the cause of all free men."

The most dramatic and controversial act of resistance by French intellectuals was organized by Francis Jeansen, a philosopher and former protégé of Sartre’s. In a powerful statement published in Esprit in May 1957, he pointed to French war crimes in Algeria, observing that "this politique is ours, these horrors are imputable to us." In Jeansen’s view, the terrible responsibility borne by the French for their disgraceful behavior in Algeria necessitated extraordinary action. Consequently, he and his students began transporting suitcases filled with money from Algerian workers in France across the border to Swiss banks. From there the money was funneled toward the purchase of weapons for the Algerian independence struggle. Although some of Jeansen’s associates were arrested and tried, he was never caught by the French secret police, despite the fact that he surfaced briefly in Paris for a clandestine press conference.

These activities, led by prominent French intellectuals, fed into accelerating displays of public resistance. A silent protest against the war took place in Paris in June 1957. Banned by the government, it nevertheless drew some 500 to 600 people, including Sartre and Francois Mauriac; 49 of them were arrested for this "crime." In December 1961, 50,000 people turned out for a march in Paris to protest OAS terrorism. This march also was banned by the government and was broken up by police, with more than a hundred participants hospitalized as a result of police brutality. In February 1962, when the authorities finally granted legal authorization for a peace demonstration, a crowd of half a million surged through Paris.

As this account suggests, resistance to the war occurred against the backdrop of significant verbal and physical assault. Addressing French veterans’ groups, Robert LaCoste, France’s Resident Minister in Algeria, accused "the exhibitionists of the heart and the intellect who have mounted the campaign against torture" of being "responsible for the resurgence of terrorism. . . . I present them to you for your scorn." Esprit’s increasingly critical stand led to arrests, fines, and seizures of issues of the journal by the government. On two occasions, the OAS bombed the headquarters of Esprit with plastic explosives. Sartre’s apartment and the offices of Les Temps modernes were also bombed with plastic explosives, and pro-war militants marched through the streets of Paris calling for his assassination.

Despite the obstacles erected by the government and colonialist fanatics, however, by the end of the war French intellectuals were in a state of revolt, with the vast majority of them denouncing France’s role in Algeria.

Similarly, notes Schalk, among American intellectuals — and particularly those affiliated with elite educational institutions and those who constituted the country’s most famous novelists, essayists, artists, and poets — opposition to the U.S. war effort in Vietnam became "overwhelming." In October 1969, for example, the Harvard faculty voted 255 to 81 against U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, and 391 to 16 in support of the upcoming Moratorium Day against the war. An endless stream of antiwar petitions appeared in the New York Times and elsewhere, signed by faculty at top universities and by other intellectual luminaries.

The most influential of these petitions — inspired by the Manifesto of the 121 — was the "Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority," which appeared in the October 12, 1967, issue of the New York Review of Books. Signed by Philip Berrigan, Noam Chomsky, Paul Goodman, Denise Levertov, Dwight Macdonald, Herbert Marcuse, Linus Pauling, Susan Sontag, and others, the "Call" argued that the kinds of actions taken by U.S. troops in Vietnam — the destruction of villages, the internment of civilian populations in concentration camps, and summary executions of civilians — were those that America and its World War II allies "declared to be crimes against humanity . . . and for which Germans were sentenced at Nuremberg." Everyone "must choose the course of resistance dictated by his conscience and circumstances," they argued, but resistance to military service in Vietnam is "courageous and justified." Addressing "all men of good will," they asked them to join "in this confrontation with immoral authority. . . . Now is the time to resist."

The New York Review, the nation’s leading intellectual journal, devoted enormous attention to the Vietnam War, publishing 262 articles on the subject between 1964 and 1975. The most famous of them, Schalk notes, was Noam Chomsky’s "The Responsibility of Intellectuals," which appeared in February 1967. In numerous ways, it set the tone for the "Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority," and represented the shift of American intellectuals from educational efforts to calls for extralegal action. "It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies," Chomsky wrote. But he contrasted this obligation with the practices of establishment intellectuals, who lied and dissembled to serve power. The moral was clear: in the circumstances of the Vietnam War, the only appropriate response was resistance.

In later writings, Chomsky admitted that he felt "uncomfortable about proposing draft refusal publicly, since it is a rather cheap proposal from someone my age." But he did advocate tax resistance, "both because it symbolizes a refusal to make a voluntary contribution to the war machine and also because it indicates a willingness . . . to take illegal measures to oppose an indecent government." In addition, Chomsky participated in antiwar demonstrations and was arrested during the October 1967 march on the Pentagon. Like almost all other American and French intellectuals, though, Chomsky consistently rejected violent protest. He wrote: "Continued mass actions, patient explanation, principled resistance can be boring, depressing. But those who program the B-52 attacks and the `pacification’ exercises are not bored, and as long as they continue in their work, so must we."

Other key U.S. intellectuals also became engagé, including Hans Morgenthau, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Joseph Heller, Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, Muriel Rukeyser, Eric Bentley, Ann Sexton, William Styron, Anais Nin, Henry Steele Commager, and Robert Penn Warren. Draft counseling, teach-ins against the war, and antiwar commencement ceremonies preoccupied some of America’s most illustrious minds. "For many intellectuals," observes Schalk, "the Vietnam episode lay in a special category. It stood outside the normal realm of debate." As Martin Bernal put it, in yet another article in the New York Review, the Vietnam War could be categorized with "Nazi concentration camps." Reflecting their bitterness, Susan Sontag wrote in 1967: "America has become a criminal, sinister country — swollen with priggishness, numbed by affluence, bemused by the monstrous conceit that she has the mandate to dispose of the destiny of the world, of life itself, in terms of her own interests and jargon."

The powerful, of course, were enraged by the engagement of the intellectuals. Officials in the Johnson and Nixon administrations denounced them, launched investigations of them, placed them on "enemies" lists, attempted to disrupt their activities, and prosecuted them. In 1968, Benjamin Spock, William Sloane Coffin Jr., Mitchell Goodman, Marcus Raskin, and Michael Ferber were indicted for counseling, aiding, and abetting draft registrants to "fail, refuse, and evade" service in the U.S. armed forces; among the "overt acts" cited in the indictment was the "Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority." Father Daniel Berrigan, after indictment for the destruction of draft records, declared himself a "fugitive from injustice" and went underground, from which he somehow granted interviews and made public appearances. Other prominent intellectual critics of the war, such as Staughton Lynd, had their academic employment challenged or terminated.

Schalk places this chronicle of escalating engagement in France and the United States within three stages: a pedagogical stage, in which intellectuals critiqued official justifications for their country’s wars; a moral stage, in which they challenged the ethical basis of their country’s behavior; and a counter-legal stage, in which they promoted civil disobedience. This model proposed by Schalk nicely fits the trend of resistance in both countries.

Indeed, Schalk has written a masterly work, which has stood up extraordinarily well in the years from its initial publication to this new edition, which appeared in late 2005. His careful style, thorough research, and judicious conclusions make this an excellent study of intellectual engagement. Its relevance goes beyond the crises of conscience in France and the United States over their governments’ brutal wars in the Third World to the role of intellectuals in modern society.

In this broader framework, Schalk speculates on whether intellectual engagement is a phenomenon solely of the past, and concludes that it probably is not. But "to elicit a profound moral reaction from its intellectual elites," he maintains, "a government in power has to do something stupid and evil enough." Furthermore, "the external historical situation . . . must not appear totally hopeless and impermeable to change."

George Herring, in his preface to the book, takes up this issue and applies it to American intellectuals and the current U.S. war in Iraq. "The insurgency that began in Iraq after the . . . spring 2003 U.S. invasion bears a marked resemblance to the wars in Algeria and Vietnam," he observes. "The Abu Ghraib scandal calls forth memories of French torture in Algeria and the notorious tiger cages at Con Son in South Vietnam. Indeed, the sometimes-bewildered looks on the faces of American soldiers in Iraqi cities are reminiscent of the expressions of those who fought earlier wars in Algeria and Vietnam." And, yet, he notes, intellectual dissent has been relatively muted. "Where is the outrage against government lies and blundering? Where is the call to resist illegitimate authority?"

There are signs, though, that a storm has been gathering, and that the intellectuals, now restive, will once again lead the way in fearlessly exposing the lies and mendacity of the powerful, as they did so effectively during the Algerian and Vietnam wars. And if they do plunge once more into public debate and resistance, they will surely build upon the exemplary stance of their predecessors, chronicled so brilliantly in War and the Ivory Tower.

Years ago, with his characteristic pessimism, Chomsky wondered gloomily what would happen to historical consciousness of the Vietnam War "as the custodians of history set to work." But, as David Schalk shows us, a sensitive and forthright historian can illuminate the darkened terrain of the past and of the present.

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

This article originally appeared on the History News Network.

The role of peace activism in ending U.S. wars has received very little attention from scholars. Despite the fact that historians and social scientists have studied U.S. peace movements extensively in recent decades, we know much more about peace movements’ organizational history than we do about their impact upon public policy. Thus, what I have to say today is a preliminary report.

Let me begin by examining the provocative comment by some observers that, rather than peace movements putting an end to wars, wars put an end to peace movements. This is sometimes the case, for — given the strength of nationalism — many people tend to rally ’round the flag of their nation once war is declared. Thus, not surprisingly, substantial U.S. peace movements largely collapsed with the entry of the United States into the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. In more recent years, polls indicate that U.S. peace sentiment declined significantly (albeit temporarily) after the entry of the United States into the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and the Iraq War. Furthermore, direct government repression in wartime — for example, during World War I — has sometimes dramatically undermined or destroyed peace movements.

Moreover, even when powerful peace movements have persisted in wartime, they have not always been very effective. The War of 1812 might well have been (as Samuel Eliot Morison claimed) the most unpopular war in U.S. history. Certainly it drew a tidal wave of criticism, especially in the Northeast. But the frequent denunciations of the war did not halt its progress. The same phenomenon can be glimpsed in the case of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century "pacification" of the Philippines. Although a powerful Anti-Imperialist League consistently challenged this war (which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos and 7,000 U.S. troops), it continued to rage right up to a U.S. military victory.

On the other hand, there are instances in which the peace movement brought an end to U.S. wars. The Mexican War of the 1840s provides us with one example. Condemned from the start as a war of aggression and as a war for slavery, the Mexican War stirred up remarkably strong opposition. Thus, although the war went very well for the United States on a military level and President Polk pressed for the annexation of all of Mexico to the United States, when Nicholas Trist, Polk’s diplomatic negotiator, disobeyed his instructions and signed a treaty providing for the annexation of only about a third of Mexico, Polk felt trapped. In the face of fierce public opposition to the conflict, he did not believe it possible to prolong the war to secure his goal of taking all of Mexico. And so Polk reluctantly backed Trist’s peace treaty, and the war came to an end.

Another example of peace movement effectiveness can be seen in its impact upon the Vietnam War. By late 1967, as Lyndon Johnson recalled, "the pressure got so great" that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara "couldn’t sleep at night. I was afraid he might have a nervous breakdown." Johnson himself seemed obsessed with the opposition his war policies had generated. Conversations with Cabinet members began: "Why aren’t you out there fighting against my enemies?" After McNamara resigned and Johnson was driven from office by a revolt within his own party, it was the Nixon administration’s turn to be caught, as Henry Kissinger complained, "between the hammer of antiwar pressure and the anvil of Hanoi." Kissinger noted: "The very fabric of government was falling apart. The Executive Branch was shell-shocked." The war and the peace protests, Kissinger concluded, "shattered the self-confidence without which Establishments flounder." In a careful and well-researched study, Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves, the historian Melvin Small concluded that "the antiwar movement and antiwar criticism in the media and Congress had a significant impact on the Vietnam policies of both Johnson and Nixon," pushing them toward de-escalation and, ultimately, withdrawal from the war.

Yet another example of the peace movement’s efficacy occurred in the context of the Reagan administration’s determined attempts to overthrow the Sandinista-led government of Nicaragua. As in Vietnam, despite the immense military advantage the U.S. government enjoyed against a small, peasant nation, it was unable to employ it effectively. Popular pressure against U.S. military intervention in Nicaragua not only blocked the dispatch of U.S. combat troops, but led to congressional action (i.e., the Boland amendment) cutting off U.S. government funding for the U.S. surrogates, the contras. Although the Reagan administration sought to circumvent the Boland amendment by selling U.S. missiles to Iran and sending the proceeds to the contras, this scheme backfired, and did more to undermine the Reaganites than it did the Sandinistas.

There is also considerable evidence that it was the peace movement that brought an end to the Cold War. The peace movement’s struggle against the nuclear arms race and its clearest manifestation, nuclear testing, led directly to Kennedy’s 1963 American University address and to the Partial Test Ban Treaty of that year, which began Soviet-American détente. The speech was partially written by Norman Cousins, founder and co-chair of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, America’s largest peace group. Cousins also brokered the treaty.

When the hawkish Reagan administration revived the Cold War and escalated the nuclear arms race, these actions triggered the greatest outburst of peace movement activism in world history. In the United States, the Nuclear Freeze campaign secured the backing of leading religious denominations, unions, professional groups, and the Democratic Party, organized the largest political demonstration up to that time in U.S. history, and drew the support of more than 70 percent of the public. In Europe, much the same thing occurred, and in the fall of 1983 some five million people turned out for demonstrations against the planned deployment of intermediate range nuclear missiles. Reagan was stunned. In October 1983, he told Secretary of State George Shultz: "If things get hotter and hotter and arms control remains an issue, maybe I should go see [Soviet Premier Yuri] Andropov and propose eliminating all nuclear weapons." Shultz was horrified by the idea, but agreed that "we could not leave matters as they stood."

Consequently, in January 1984, Reagan delivered a remarkable public address calling for peace with the Soviet Union and for a nuclear-free world. His advisors agree that this speech was designed to signal to the Russians his willingness to end the Cold War and reduce nuclear arsenals. But the Soviet leadership was not interested in following up on Reagan’s proposals until the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev in March 1985. Gorbachev, unlike his predecessors, was ready to take action, for he was a movement convert. His "New Thinking" — by which he meant the necessity for peace and disarmament in the nuclear age — was almost a carbon copy of the peace movement’s program. As Gorbachev himself declared: "The new thinking took into account and absorbed the conclusions and demands of . . . the movements of physicians, scientists, and ecologists, and of various antiwar organizations." Not surprisingly, then, Reagan and Gorbachev, spurred on by the peace movement, moved rapidly toward nuclear disarmament treaties and an end to the Cold War.

We might also give some thought to the wars that, thanks to peace movement activism, did not occur. Historians have maintained that the anti-imperialist crusade against the Philippines war blocked the occurrence of later U.S. wars of this kind and on this scale. They have also suggested that peace movement pressures helped to block war with Mexico in 1916 and helped to soften the U.S.-Mexican confrontation of the late 1920s. And how many wars, we might ask ourselves, were prevented through the implementation of many ideas and proposals that originated with the peace movement: international arbitration; international law; decolonization; a league of nations; disarmament treaties; a United Nations; and nonviolent resistance. We shall probably never know.

We do know, however, that the peace movement played a major role in preventing one kind of war since 1945: nuclear war. Given time constraints, no more than a tiny portion of the evidence for this point can be presented today. But it is laid out in great detail in my trilogy, The Struggle Against the Bomb.

In 1956, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, complained that the atomic bomb had acquired " ‘a bad name,’ and to such an extent that it seriously inhibits us from using it." Later that year, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other administration officials called for greater flexibility in the employment of nuclear weapons, President Eisenhower responded: "The use of nuclear weapons would raise serious political problems in view of the current state of world opinion." In mid-1957, brushing aside ambitious proposals for nuclear war-fighting, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told a National Security Council meeting that "world opinion was not yet ready to accept the general use of nuclear weapons."

This belief continued to haunt U.S. officials during the struggle in Vietnam when, in Dean Rusk’s words, the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations deliberately "lost the war rather than ‘win’ it with nuclear weapons." McGeorge Bundy, who served as the National Security Advisor to two of these presidents and a consultant to the third, maintained that the U.S. government’s decision not to use nuclear weapons in the war did not result from fear of nuclear retaliation by the Russians and Chinese, but from the terrible public reaction that a U.S. nuclear attack would provoke in other nations and, especially, in the United States.

The proof of the pudding came during the Reagan administration, whose top national security officials — from the President on down — entered office talking glibly of fighting and winning a nuclear war. But this position quickly changed thanks to a massive popular outcry against it. Starting in April 1982, Reagan began declaring publicly that "a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought." He added: "To those who protest against nuclear war, I can only say: `I’m with you!’"

Thus, although there is considerable room for additional research on peace movement efficacy, I think it is fair to say that, on numerous occasions, peace activism has exercised a restraining influence on U.S. foreign and military policy.

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

This article originally appeared on the History News Network.

When, in the aftermath of World War II, Stalin had the Soviet Union gobble up the nations of Eastern Europe, he christened them People’s Democracies — although they were neither democratic nor meant to be. This debasement of “democracy” and other noble terms such as “freedom” and “peace” to crude propaganda was undoubtedly what George Orwell had in mind when he wrote his powerful novel, 1984, which portrayed a nightmarish society in which words were turned inside out to justify the policies of cynical and unscrupulous rulers.

Unfortunately, however, “democracy” has also been abused throughout American history. In the nineteenth century, land-hungry politicians, slaveholders, and businessmen defended the U.S. conquest of new territory by claiming that it would extend the area of democracy and freedom. In the twentieth century, President Woodrow Wilson grandly proclaimed that U.S. participation in World War I would “make the world safe for democracy.” A few decades later, Washington officials again sanctified U.S. policy by invoking democracy, for they declared repeatedly that the U.S. role in the Cold War was designed to defend the “Free World.” Indeed, it would be hard to find a U.S. war or expansionist enterprise that was not accompanied by enthusiastic rhetoric about supporting democracy.

In fairness, it should be noted that the U.S. government has economically and militarily supported many democratic nations. After World War II, it forged alliances with a good number of them.

But it has also provided military and economic assistance to numerous nations ruled by bloody dictatorships, including Franco’s Spain, Chiang Kai-Shek’s China, the Shah’s Iran, Somoza’s Nicaragua, Batista’s Cuba, Sukarno’s Indonesia, the Saud family’s Saudi Arabia, Diem’s South Vietnam, Duvalier’s Haiti, Marcos’s Philippines, the Colonels’ Greece, and many other tyrannies. Indeed, the term “Free World” originally included Stalin’s Russia. And, not so long ago, the U.S. government had no scruples about providing military assistance to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Furthermore, on occasion the U.S. government has sought to overthrow democratic governments. Three of its success stories along these lines occurred in Mossadeq’s Iran, Arbenz’s Guatemala, and Allende’s Chile, where democratic governments were succeeded by vicious dictatorships. Based upon this record, observers might well conclude that, for U.S. officials, the defense of democracy has been less important as a motive than as a marketing device.

A good example of “democracy” as a marketing device is its employment in selling the U.S. program of military and economic aid to Greece in 1947. This program had arisen out of the U.S. government’s fear that the Soviet Union, then at loggerheads with the United States, stood on the verge of breaking through the Western defense line to the oil-rich Middle East. To plan President Truman’s address to the nation on the new policy, Francis Russell, the director of the State Department’s Office of Public Affairs, met on February 27 with the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee. The meeting records indicate that, when Russell asked if the speech should emphasize the conflict with the Soviet Union, he was told that it should avoid “specifically mentioning Russia.” Then perhaps, said Russell, the administration “should couch it in terms of [a] new policy of this government to go to the assistance of free governments everywhere.” This proposal was greeted enthusiastically, for it would be useful to “relate military aid to [the] principle of supporting democracy.” Or, as one participant put it, the “only thing that can sell [the] public” would be to emphasize the threat to democracy. Ultimately, then, the president’s March 12, 1947 address, which became known as the Truman Doctrine, did not mention the conflict between two rival nations, the United States and the Soviet Union, but instead emphasized “alternative ways of life,” in which the United States was defending the “free” one.

This approach not only misrepresented the motives of U.S. government officials, but the realities in the two nations targeted for the military and economic aid. Joseph Jones, who drafted the president’s address, recalled: “That the Greek government was corrupt, reactionary, inefficient, and indulged in extremist practices was well known and incontestable; that Turkey . . . had not achieved full democratic self-government was also patent.” According to the minutes of the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee meeting, participants agreed that the Greek government was a rotten one, though “not basically fascist.”

Thus, President Bush’s recent contention that his war in Iraq is designed to further the cause of “democracy” is not out of line with the statements of past U.S. government officials, who have not been very scrupulous about how they have packaged their policies. Nor is it out of line with the behavior of other governments, always eager to put the most attractive face on their ventures.

Even so, given the long-term abuse of the word “democracy” as a public relations device — as well as the collapse of the president’s earlier justifications for the Iraq War — we might be pardoned for viewing his sudden enthusiasm for democracy with a good deal of skepticism.

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

This article originally appeared on the History News Network.

This new weapon, formally known as the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, became the symbol of the Bush administration’s plan to build up the U.S. nuclear arsenal and wage nuclear war. The administration alleged that the bunker buster was necessary to destroy deeply buried and hardened enemy targets, and that — thanks to the fact that it would explode underground — it would produce minimal collateral damage. But critics charged that, with more than 70 times the destructive power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, a single bunker buster might kill millions of people. This contention was reinforced by an April 2005 report from a National Academy of Sciences panel, which claimed that such a device, exploded underground, would likely cause the same number of casualties as a weapon of comparable power exploded on the earth’s surface.

In addition, building the weapon symbolized the Bush administration’s flouting of the U.S. government’s commitments to nuclear arms control and disarmament. Under the terms of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968, the nuclear powers — including the United States — agreed to move toward elimination of their own nuclear arsenals. And, in fact, after much hesitation, this is what they began to do, through treaties and unilateral action, over the ensuing years. Therefore, it came as a shock to the arms control community when the Bush administration pulled out of the ABM Treaty, opposed ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and pressed Congress for funding to build new nuclear weapons, including “mini-nukes” and bunker busters.

Given the symbolic, high-profile status of the bunker buster, groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Council for a Livable World, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, and Peace Action worked hard to defeat it — mobilizing public opposition and lobbying fiercely against congressional funding. Last year, their efforts paid off, when Congress, despite its Republican majority, refused to support the weapon’s development. A key opponent was Representative David Hobson, the Republican chair of the House Energy and Water Appropriations Committee, who insisted that the U.S. government could hardly expect other nations to honor their NPT commitments if it ignored its own.

With the Bush administration determined to secure the new weapon, bunker buster funding came to the fore again this year. Debate on the proposal was intense. U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) insisted that building the bunker buster “sends the wrong signals to the rest of the world by reopening the nuclear door and beginning the testing and development of a new generation of nuclear weapons.” Ultimately, both the Senate and the House rejected the administration measure. The administration’s only remaining hope lay in pushing through a scaled-back version of its plan, for $4 million. Championed by U.S. Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM), long an avid supporter of nuclear weapons development in his home state, the bill passed the Senate but was again blocked in the House, where Representative Hobson once more led the way. In recent months, a House-Senate conference committee grappled with the legislation, but without making a decision on it.

Finally, on October 25, Senator Domenici pulled the plug on the funding proposal, announcing that it was being dropped at the request of the Energy Department. An administration official explained that a decision had been made to concentrate on a non-nuclear bunker buster. Naturally, the arms control and disarmament community was overjoyed. According to Stephen Young, a senior analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists, “this is a true victory for a more rational nuclear policy.” Although the reason for the administration’s abandonment of its new nuclear weapon program remains unclear, it does appear that it resulted from public pressure, Democratic opposition, and a division on the issue among Republicans.

Of course, much more has to be done before the world is safe from the nuclear menace. Some 30,000 nuclear weapons remain in existence, with about 10,000 of them in the hands of the U.S. government.

But the story of the bunker buster’s defeat illustrates that, even in relatively unpromising circumstances, it is possible to rein in the nuclear ambitions of government officials.

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

This article originally appeared on the History News Network.

But Rotblat’s steadfast support for nuclear disarmament and peace did not always receive such plaudits, as I discovered when I conducted two interviews with him and did extensive research in formerly secret British government records.

Born in Warsaw in 1908, Rotblat moved to Britain in 1939, where he became a promising young physicist. During World War II, when he feared that Nazi Germany might develop the atomic bomb, he came to the United States to work on the Manhattan Project, America’s own atomic bomb program that he — like many other scientists — hoped would deter Germany’s launching of a nuclear war. But, in late 1944, when Rotblat learned that the German bomb program had been a failure, he resigned from the Manhattan project and returned to London to engage in nonmilitary work. This decision, taken for humanitarian reasons, plunged him into hot water with the authorities. Shortly after telling his U.S. supervisor of his plan to leave Los Alamos, he was accused by U.S. intelligence of being a Soviet spy. The charge, totally without merit, was eventually dropped.

Back in Britain, Rotblat engaged in peaceful research and, in the postwar years, helped to organize the Atomic Scientists’ Association (ASA), which drew together some of that country’s top scientists. Much like America’s Federation of American Scientists, the ASA promoted nuclear arms control and disarmament. However, British government officials, then more interested in building nuclear weapons than in eliminating them, looked askance at its activities. In 1947—48, when the ASA organized an Atomic Train to bring the dangers of nuclear weapons (and the supposed benefits of peaceful nuclear power) to the attention of the British public, Prime Minister Clement Attlee objected strongly to plans for government cooperation with it. In March 1948, when Rotblat invited Attlee to visit the Atomic Train during its stay in London, the foreign secretary and the defense minister advised the prime minister to reject the offer, which he did.

Rotblat’s relations with the British government continued on a difficult course in the 1950s. Working closely with the philosopher Bertrand Russell, Rotblat signed the Russell-Einstein Manifesto of July 9, 1955, which warned nations that if they persisted in their plans for nuclear war, civilization would be utterly destroyed. This venture, in turn, led to the Pugwash conferences — so named because they began in 1957 at a private estate in Pugwash, Nova Scotia. Designed to bring together scientists on both sides of the “iron curtain” for serious, non-polemical discussions of the nuclear menace, these conferences were low-key operations, with little publicity outside of scientific circles. Nevertheless, British officials were deeply suspicious of the Pugwash conferences and of Rotblat, who did most of the organizational work for them and, in 1959, became Pugwash secretary-general.

Convinced that “the Communists” wanted to use the 1958 Pugwash conference “to secure support for the Soviet demand for the banning of nuclear weapons,” the British Foreign Office initially sought to promote an attitude of skepticism toward it. But, when Rotblat asked J.D. Cockcroft, a member of Britain’s Atomic Energy Authority, to suggest who might be invited to it, Cockcroft and the Foreign Office decided that a better strategy would be to go with the flow and arrange for the participation of a staunch proponent of the British government’s position in the meeting, which they did.

Although one British diplomat noted that the conference “passed off quietly enough, and not too unsuccessfully from our point of view,” the British government remained on guard. Learning of plans for another Pugwash conference, in Vienna, the Foreign Office warned of the possibility “that this will be more dangerous from our point of view than its predecessors.” Communist participants might launch “a major propaganda drive against nuclear weapons,” and “the organizing committee consists of Lord Russell and Professor Rotblat.” From the British government’s standpoint, the Pugwash conferences were little better than “Communist front gatherings.”

But British policy gradually began to shift, as the government grew more interested in nuclear arms controls. Asked by Rotblat if he would like to join the advisory body of the British Pugwash committee, Cockcroft referred the matter to the Foreign Office, which responded that he should do so, as it would help prevent Pugwash from “being exploited for propaganda purposes.” Although the Foreign Office did not think he should attend the next Pugwash conference, in Moscow, during 1960, it reversed course that summer and urged him to recruit additional politically reliable scientists to attend. Indeed, it now sought to take over the Pugwash movement for its own purposes. In response to a suggestion by Cockcroft, a Foreign Office official opined that “it would be most helpful if the Royal Society could be persuaded to sponsor British participation . . . and if this were to lead to the winding up of the present Pugwash Committee.”

But the plans for a takeover failed. When the British government suggested topics for Pugwash meetings and more government officials who should be invited to them, Rotblat resisted, much to government dismay. In October 1963, a Foreign Office official complained that “the difficulty is to get Prof. Rotblat to pay any attention to what we think. . . . He is no doubt jealous of his independence and scientific integrity.” Securing “a new organizer for the British delegation seems to be the first need, but I do not know if there is any hope of this.”

Nonetheless, despite lingering resentment at Rotblat’s independence and integrity, the British government had arrived at a positive appraisal of the Pugwash conferences. As a British defense ministry official declared in January 1962: Pugwash was “now a very respectable organization.” When the Home Office, clinging to past policy, advised that Pugwash was “a dirty word,” the Foreign Office retorted that the movement now enjoyed “official blessing.” Explaining the turnabout, a Foreign Office official stated that “the process of educating” Soviet experts is “bound to be of some use to us.” Furthermore, “we ourselves may pick up some useful ideas from our own scientists . . . and are not likely to be embarrassed by anything which they suggest.” Finally, “if there is ever to be a breakthrough, it is not inconceivable that the way might be prepared by a conference of this kind.”

In fact, there soon was a breakthrough: the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 — a nuclear arms control measure that the Pugwash conferences played a key part in generating. The British government had no doubt about the connection, and in 1964 it honored Rotblat with a CBE — Commander of the British Empire — for his organization of the Pugwash conferences.

And so it goes. Today’s dangerously peace-minded heretic is tomorrow’s hero. Abraham Lincoln — that staunch critic of the Mexican War — became America’s best-loved President. Robert LaFollette — reviled and burned in effigy for his opposition to World War I — emerged as one of this nation’s most respected senators. Martin Luther King, Jr. — condemned for his protests against the Vietnam War — is now honored as this country’s great peacemaker.

Perhaps today, when governments promise us endless military buildups and wars, opposition politicians should take note of this phenomenon.

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

This article originally appeared on the History News Network.

Fortunately, since 1945, we have managed to avert that fate. Thanks to widespread public pressure and the efforts of some far-sighted statesmen, governments around the world have exercised a surprising level of nuclear restraint. They have resisted the temptation to carry their quarrels to the level of nuclear war and have agreed to important nuclear arms control and disarmament measures.

Perhaps the most important of these measures is the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, signed by virtually all nations. Under its provisions, non-nuclear nations pledged to forgo developing nuclear weapons and nuclear nations pledged to divest themselves of their own nuclear weapons. In this fashion, nations agreed to move toward a nuclear-free world.

As a result, out of almost 200 nations, only eight — Britain, China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia and the United States — are now nuclear states, although another, North Korea, might have them, too. Furthermore, the number of nuclear weapons in existence has declined, from about 70,000 at the height of the Cold War to some 30,000 today.

Unfortunately, during the past decade, this modest progress has been reversed. The Republican-dominated U.S. Senate rejected ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, India and Pakistan became nuclear states and additional nations have shown signs of joining the nuclear line.

The policies of the Bush administration have been regressive. It has spurned the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, pulled the United States out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and abandoned negotiations for nuclear arms control and disarmament. It also has championed the development of new U.S. nuclear weapons — despite the fact that the U.S. already possesses some 10,000 of them — and affirmed its willingness to initiate nuclear war. Not surprisingly, the Bush administration’s policies helped to wreck the recent NPT review conference at the U.N., where nations condemned its double standard.

The Bush administration’s determination to preserve U.S. nuclear options seems particularly inappropriate to its "war on terror." There is no morally acceptable way to employ nuclear weapons against terrorists, for terrorists do not control fixed territory. Instead, they intermingle with the general population and cannot be bombarded with nuclear weapons without causing a Hiroshima-style massacre of civilians.

Conversely, the maintenance of nuclear stockpiles by the United States and other nations provides terrorists with the opportunity to acquire nuclear weapons through theft, bribery or purchase. Thus, the only way to ensure against a terrorist attack with nuclear weapons or materials is to eliminate them from national arsenals.

In these increasingly dangerous circumstances, many thousands of Americans — joined by concerned people around the globe — will be holding events this August to commemorate the atomic bombings and to demand that the nations of the world get back on track to nuclear disarmament. On Aug. 6, the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, these actions will be especially large and prominent at the Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Lab in New Mexico, the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab in California, the U.S. nuclear test site in Nevada and the Y-12 Nuclear Facility in Tennessee. On Aug. 9, the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, there will be candlelight vigils held at city halls across the United States.

There also is pressure for nuclear disarmament emerging in Congress, where Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., has introduced a resolution in the House (HR 373) calling for a comprehensive disarmament program. "There will be no security for America or our world," she said, "unless we take all steps necessary for nuclear disarmament."

Today, 60 years after the inception of the nuclear era, these words are all too true. Thus far, through nuclear restraint, we have managed to stave off the specter of nuclear annihilation that has haunted the world since 1945. The future remains a race between wisdom and catastrophe.

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

This article originally appeared in the Washington Examiner.

After the annihilation of Japanese cities with atomic bombs in August 1945, both Russell and Einstein had warned the world of the enormous dangers of the new weapons. Nevertheless, by the mid-1950s, the rampaging Cold War produced an even more ominous situation: a Soviet-American confrontation, in which both sides were armed with the hydrogen bomb, a thermonuclear weapon possessing a thousand times the power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The Cold War competitors displayed little hesitation about integrating the new weapons into their war plans. Nuclear weapons, President Eisenhower declared publicly, should "be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else."

Taking note of this perilous situation, Russell wrote to Einstein on February 11, 1955, suggesting that "eminent men of science ought to do something dramatic to bring home to the public and governments the disasters that may occur." It was necessary "to emphasize . . . that war may well mean the extinction of life on this planet" and, consequently, that in the nuclear age, nations must learn to live in peace. In response, Einstein said that he agreed "with every word" in Russell’s letter. Something had to be done to "make an impression on the general public as well as on political leaders." As a result, Russell drafted a statement that he circulated among a distinguished group of scientists in the hope of their joining him in signing it.

This proved a difficult task. In the Cold War context, it was not easy to get such intellectuals to ignore their political differences and to focus on the common interests of humanity. Indeed, scientists in the Soviet Union and China refused to sign the statement. Furthermore, after a short illness, Einstein died on April 13.

Nevertheless, in one of the last acts taken before his death, Einstein sent a letter to Russell saying that he had agreed to become a signatory. And, eventually, Russell lined up nine other eminent scientists: Percy Bridgman, Hermann Muller, and Linus Pauling of the United States; Cecil Powell and Joseph Rotblat of Britain; Hideki Yukawa of Japan; Frédéric Joliot-Curie of France; Max Born of West Germany; and Leopold Infeld of Poland.

On July 9, 1955, addressing a public meeting in London jammed with representatives of the mass media, Russell unveiled what became known as the Russell-Einstein Manifesto. "We are speaking on this occasion, not as members of this or that nation, continent, or creed, but as human beings . . . whose continued existence is in doubt," it declared. In the context of the Bomb, "we have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever groups we prefer, for there no longer are such steps." Instead, people must ask: "What steps can be taken to prevent a military contest" which would "be disastrous to all parties?" The question confronting the world was: "Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?" And a good "first step" along the way to ending war would be to "renounce nuclear weapons." The Manifesto concluded: "We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest."

The reaction to this bold, uncompromising statement was surprisingly positive. Initially skeptical, the press ultimately treated it favorably, in part because of the dramatic news of Einstein’s deathbed endorsement. Around the world, scientists and other intellectuals sprang into action. Among them was the Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov, who began his heroic campaign to halt the nuclear arms race and the Cold War. Around the world, citizens organized Ban-the-Bomb movements, including America’s National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

The signers of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto played important roles in the burgeoning campaign. Organized by Max Born, a group of 52 Nobel laureates in the sciences signed the Mainau Declaration, calling upon nations to "renounce force as a final resort of policy" or face the prospect of utter destruction. Together with Rotblat, Russell launched the Pugwash movement, drawing on scientists from both sides of the Iron Curtain to discuss the feasibility of nuclear arms control and disarmament. Rotblat and Pugwash went on to lay the groundwork for the Partial Test Ban Treaty (for which Rotblat was knighted by the British government). Both later received the Nobel Peace Prize. Speaking at the opening meeting of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Russell subsequently became its first president. Muller issued powerful warnings about the harmful genetic effects of radioactivity. Pauling rallied scientists in the United States and, later, the world against nuclear testing, thereby becoming a thorn in the side of the Eisenhower administration and yet another recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Russell-Einstein Manifesto also affected policymakers. In large part, its impact was indirect, for it was the antinuclear campaign and the antinuclear opinion that it generated which helped to reshape their policy. Faced with strong popular resistance to nuclear testing, Eisenhower agreed reluctantly to a nuclear testing moratorium in 1958. Besieged by protests against nuclear testing and nuclear weapons, Kennedy drew back from atmospheric testing and tapped the founder and co-chair of SANE, Norman Cousins, as his test ban emissary to Khrushchev.

But sometimes the effects were more direct. Mikhail Gorbachev clearly drew his cherished concept of "new thinking" from the Manifesto. "The nuclear era requires new thinking from everybody," he told Francois Mitterrand. Or, as he stated in his book Perestroika: "All of us face the need to learn to live at peace in this world, to work out a new mode of thinking." And "the backbone of the new way of thinking is the recognition of the priority of human values, or, to be more precise, of humankind’s survival." Gorbachev’s choice for Soviet foreign secretary, his fellow party reformer Eduard Shevardnadze, recalled that "the Russell-Einstein Manifesto offered politicians the key to the most troublesome and complex riddles of the age." According to Georgi Arbatov, another of Gorbachev’s top foreign policy advisors, major ideas for the new thinking "originated . . . outside the Soviet Union," with Einstein and Russell.

Today, fifty years after the issuance of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, it should not take the world’s greatest scientist or philosopher to see that, in a world crammed with nuclear and other devastating weapons, resorting to war is an immensely dangerous and destructive act. Nor should it be difficult to see that the world would be a safer place with fewer nuclear weapons rather than with more of them. Yet, somehow, leaders of supposedly advanced, civilized nations—including the United States — continue to go right ahead laying plans for building up their nuclear arsenals and plunging their countries into dubious battle, as if their soldiers were armed with sticks rather than with the deadliest, most destructive devices in human history. It is one of the tragedies of our time that, despite all the scientific, technological, and cultural advances over the centuries, so many nations are governed today by people with primitive values and limited intelligence.

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

This article originally appeared on the History News Network.

Originally signed in 1968 and entering into force in 1970, the NPT provides that non-nuclear nations will forgo the development of nuclear weapons and that nuclear nations will divest themselves of their nuclear weapons through disarmament measures. Review conferences, designed to secure compliance with the treaty’s provisions, occur every five years.

For decades, the NPT worked reasonably well. By 1997, no additional nations possessed nuclear weapons and, through arms control and disarmament treaties or unilateral action, the nuclear powers substantially reduced the number of nuclear weapons in their stockpiles. As late as the NPT review conference of 2000, the declared nuclear powers professed their “unequivocal” commitment to nuclear abolition.

But, since that time, the Republican-dominated U.S. Senate rejected ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (negotiated and signed by President Bill Clinton), India and Pakistan became nuclear powers, and the Bush administration withdrew the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, pressed forward with the deployment of a national missile defense system (a latter day version of “Star Wars”), dropped nuclear disarmament negotiations, and proposed the development of new U.S. nuclear weapons. Furthermore, two new nations may be acquiring a nuclear weapons capability: North Korea (which claims it is) and Iran (which claims it is not).

This unraveling of the NPT is a serious matter, and became the focal point of an acrimonious debate among the delegates of 188 nations at the NPT review conference, which opened on May 2, at the United Nations.

The non-nuclear nations hit sharply at the failure of the nuclear powers, and particularly the United States, to honor their commitments to nuclear disarmament. Furthermore, a number of countries, led by Egypt and Iran, demanded that the nuclear powers pledge never to attack non-nuclear nations and that Washington ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

The U.S. government, in turn, sought to keep the spotlight on the alleged transgressions of North Korea and Iran. In one of the conference’s opening addresses, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Andrew Semmel also accused the International Atomic Energy Agency of failing to report Iran’s non-compliance with the treaty to the U.N. Security Council. At the same time, U.S. officials argued that the United States was complying with the treaty’s requirements.

Even many of Washington’s traditional allies found the U.S. position unconvincing. Apparently referring to the Bush administration, Paul Meyer, the Canadian representative at the conference, remarked acidly: “If governments simply ignore or discard commitments whenever they prove inconvenient, we will never be able to build an edifice of international cooperation.”

U.S. credibility was further undermined by the Bush administration’s decision to send lower-echelon officials, rather than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, to represent it at the conference. According to observers, this snub represented an attempt to undercut the significance of the review conference and, thereby, mute the criticism that would emerge there of the U.S. government’s disdain for nuclear disarmament — or at least for U.S. nuclear disarmament.

Criticism of the U.S. role at the conference was particularly sharp among peace and disarmament groups. “The United States has had four weeks to demonstrate international leadership on nuclear proliferation,” remarked Susi Snyder, secretary general of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. “Clearly, the U.S. delegation never wanted to strengthen the treaty. Instead, they have spent four weeks . . . refusing to recognize agreements they made 5 and 10 years ago.” According to Alyn Ware of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, it was “impossible to prevent” nuclear proliferation “while the nuclear weapons states insist on maintaining large stockpiles of weapons themselves.” It was “like a parent telling a child not to smoke while smoking a pack of cigarettes.”

Given the obviously self-defeating nature of U.S. nuclear policy, why does the Bush administration cling to it so stubbornly? Why has it spurned the efforts not only of the world community, but of the U.S. government’s closest allies to strengthen the NPT and continue progress toward a nuclear-free world?

One possible explanation is that the Bush administration believes that it has the military capability to deter current nuclear nations and to destroy hostile nations that reach the brink of becoming nuclear powers. For example, if Iran continues to produce fissionable material, Washington will simply launch an all-out military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Therefore, the Bush administration sees no need to maintain the bargain between non-nuclear and nuclear powers that was struck decades ago through the NPT. As Bush administration officials frequently say, conditions in the world have changed, and U.S. policy will change with them.

A second possible explanation, which does not exclude the first, is that the Bush administration is getting ready to use nuclear weapons in future wars. Despite the massive advantage the U.S. government enjoys over other nations in conventional military forces, these U.S. forces are now overstretched in fighting an insurgency in a small country like Iraq. Furthermore, dispatching substantial numbers of U.S. combat troops overseas is quite expensive, and their deaths in large numbers undermines political support for a war — as it is now doing. In this context, the development and use of nuclear weapons to maintain what the Bush administration defines as U.S. “national interests” seem quite logical to U.S. national security managers. Ominously, the new nuclear weapons for which the Bush administration has requested funding from Congress are considered “usable” nuclear weapons: so-called “bunker busters” and “mini-nukes.”

As a result, the collapse of the NPT review conference of 2005 and the hard-line nuclear policies of the Bush administration that have contributed to it have seriously undermined the willingness of nations to dispense with nuclear weapons. Indeed, these factors seem to place the nations of the world back in the nuclear arms race and, perhaps, on the road to nuclear war. Of course, popular protest and wise statesmanship have turned around situations like this in the past, and they might well do so again. But, in the meantime, we should recognize that evading disarmament commitments and plunging forward with nuclear weapons development and use is a surefire recipe for disaster.

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

This article originally appeared on the History News Network.

Last year, Congress refused to fund the administration’s ambitious proposal for new nuclear weapons, largely because both Republican and Democratic lawmakers agreed that the world would be a safer place with fewer — rather than more — nuclear explosives in existence.

But, undeterred by last year’s rebuff, the Bush administration recently returned to Congress with a proposal for funding a new generation of "usable" nuclear weapons. These weapons are the so-called "bunker busters." Despite the rather benign name, the "bunker buster" is an exceptionally devastating weapon, with an explosive power of from several hundred kilotons to one megaton (i.e., a thousand kilotons). To put this in perspective, it should be recalled that the nuclear weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki had explosive yields of from 14 to 21 kilotons. "These weapons will bust more than a bunker," remarked U.S. Senator Jack Reed. "The area of destruction will encompass an area the size of a city. They are really city breakers."

In addition, the Bush administration has requested funding for the "Reliable Replacement Warhead." If continued beyond the planning stage, this program would lead to the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars on upgrading U.S. nuclear warheads and might result in the resumption of U.S. nuclear testing, which has not occurred since 1992.

Of course, it is not unusual for the leaders of nation states to crave nuclear weapons. After all, the history of the international system is one of rivalry and war and, consequently, many national leaders itch to possess the most devastating weapons available. This undoubtedly accounts for the fact that, today, there are eight nations that possess nuclear weapons, a ninth (North Korea) that might, and additional nations that might be working to develop them.

Even so, there is a widespread recognition that the nuclear arms race — indeed, the very possession of nuclear weapons — confronts the world with unprecedented dangers. And, for this reason, nations, among them the United States, have signed nuclear arms control and disarmament treaties. The most important of them is probably the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968, in which non-nuclear nations agreed to forgo the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear nations agreed to move toward nuclear disarmament. As late as the NPT review conference of 2000, the declared nuclear weapons states proclaimed their commitment to an "unequivocal undertaking . . . to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals."

Thanks to these agreements and to independent action, there has been a substantial reduction in the number of nuclear weapons around the world.

Furthermore, even if nations were to disregard these treaty obligations and cling doggedly to their nuclear weapons, how many do they need? The United States possesses more than 10,000 nuclear weapons — a number that, together with Russia’s arsenal, constitutes more than 90 percent of the world total. Does it really need more? And how are they to be used?

President Bush, of course, wraps all his military policies in the "war on terror," and his nuclear policies are no exception. But how, exactly, are nuclear weapons useful against terrorists? Terrorists do not control fixed territories that can be attacked with nuclear weapons. Instead, they are intermingled with the general population in this country and abroad. Unless one is willing to attack them by conducting a vast and terrible nuclear bombardment of civilians, dwarfing in scale any massacre that terrorists have ever implemented, nuclear weapons have no conceivable function in combating terrorism.

Indeed, adding to the stockpile of nuclear weapons only adds to the dangers of terrorism. Terrorists do not have the knowledge or materials that would enable them to build their own nuclear weapons. But, the more nuclear weapons that exist, the more likely terrorists are to obtain them from a government stockpile — through theft, or purchase, or conspiracy. Therefore, as Congress has recognized, the United States would be safer if it encouraged worldwide nuclear disarmament rather than the building of additional nuclear weapons.

In this context, Bush’s voracious appetite for new nuclear weapons is, to say the least, remarkable. In addition to his repeated attempts to get Congress to fund a U.S. nuclear buildup, he has pulled the United States out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (thereby effectively scrapping the START II Treaty, negotiated and signed by his father), opposed U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (negotiated and signed by President Clinton), pressed Congress to smooth the path toward the resumption of U.S. nuclear testing, and dropped further negotiations for nuclear disarmament.

These repeated attempts to escape from the constraints of nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements and acquire new nuclear weapons suggest that Bush has what might be called a nuclear addiction.

There are other signs of this addiction, as well. Indifferent to everything but acquiring their desired substance, addicts typically lose their appetite for the fundamentals of life, even eating. In a similar fashion, the president has proposed a budget that severely slashes funding for U.S. health, education, and welfare programs and redirects it to the military, including his pet nuclear projects. But how long can a society be starved of health, education, and welfare before it collapses? Impervious to reason or to the consistent public support for funding in these areas, Bush does not seem to consider this question. Instead, he presses forward with his demand for . . . more nukes!

When the 2005 NPT review conference opens this May at the United Nations, Bush’s lust for nuclear weapons seems likely to be criticized by many nations. It is already being assailed by numerous peace and disarmament organizations, which are planning a massive nuclear abolition march and rally in New York City on May 1, the day before the NPT review conference convenes. And popular sentiment is not far behind. A recent AP-Ipsos poll reports that two-thirds of Americans believe that no nation should possess nuclear weapons, including the United States.

Is George Bush able to accept the idea of a nuclear-free world? It’s certainly possible. But, first, it might take a decision by him to buckle down and kick his nuclear addiction.

Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

This article originally appeared on the History News Network.

Originally
proposed by the U.S. and Soviet governments, the NPT was signed
at the United Nations in 1968 and went into force in 1970. Under
its provisions, non-nuclear nations agreed to renounce the development
of nuclear weapons and nuclear-armed nations agreed to divest themselves
of their nuclear weapons through good faith negotiations for nuclear
disarmament. In this fashion, nations on both sides of the Cold
War divide signaled their intention to halt the nuclear arms race
and move toward a nuclear-free world.

For
decades, there was substantial progress along these lines. Non-nuclear
nations refrained from building nuclear weapons. And the nuclear
powers signed a series of important nuclear arms control and disarmament
treaties: the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty; two Strategic
Arms Limitation Treaties; the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty;
two Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties; and the Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty. At times, they even reduced their nuclear forces unilaterally.
As a result, by the late 1990s, no additional nations belonged to
the nuclear club, while the number of nuclear weapons deployed by
the nuclear nations or in their stockpiles declined dramatically.

Starting
in 1998, however, the nuclear arms race began to revive. Determined
to place their nations within the ranks of the nuclear powers, the
governments of India and Pakistan exploded their first nuclear weapons
that year. Since then, they have engaged in dangerous and mutually
threatening nuclear buildups. Other non-nuclear nations, including
North Korea, took the first steps toward going nuclear, though the
extent of their progress along these lines remains uncertain.

The
nuclear powers also began to abandon their NPT commitments. In 1999,
the U.S. Senate stunned much of the world, including U.S. allies,
by rejecting ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
Taking office in 2001, the administration of George W. Bush withdrew
the United States from the ABM Treaty, opposed ratification of the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, began deployment of a missile defense
system, pressed for the development of new U.S. nuclear weapons,
and abandoned negotiations for nuclear disarmament. Responding sharply
to U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and U.S. plans for missile
defense, the Russian government announced its intention to deploy
a new generation of nuclear missiles. And China might not be far
behind.

Why
has there been a reversal of earlier progress toward a nuclear-free
world?

A
key factor behind the turnabout is the decline of popular pressure
for nuclear disarmament.

Rival
nations–and before their existence, rival territories–have
always gravitated toward military buildups. This is based on the
assumption–what might be called the "old thinking"–that
national security is best achieved through military strength. Not
surprisingly, then, in a world of competing and sometimes hostile
nations, governments are tempted to develop nuclear weapons to secure
what they consider their "national interests." Thus, beginning
during World War II and continuing during the Cold War, a growing
number of rival governments commenced developing powerful nuclear
arsenals.

Fortunately,
however, the nuclear arms race of the Cold War era inspired widespread
public resistance–resistance that took the form of mass movements
for nuclear disarmament, feisty antinuclear marches and rallies,
and public critiques of nuclear weapons by religious bodies, scientists,
and cultural leaders. Polls found public opinion strongly opposed
to nuclear buildups and nuclear wars. As a result, governments were
pushed, often reluctantly, into agreements for nuclear arms control
and disarmament.

But,
since the end of the Cold War, the mass nuclear disarmament movements
of the past have declined dramatically and public concern about
nuclear weapons has dwindled. Furthermore, much of the lingering
public concern has been manipulated by cynical government officials
to bolster their own policies—as when the Bush administration
exaggerated the Iraqi government’s readiness to wage nuclear war
in order to justify its invasion of Iraq. Thus, freed of the constraint
of popular pressure for international nuclear disarmament, governments
gradually jettisoned their NPT commitments.

The
situation, however, may be changing once more. Just as the nuclear
arms race of the Cold War era inspired massive popular protest,
the reviving nuclear arms race of recent years is beginning to generate
substantial public opposition.

Much
of this public opposition is crystallizing around the May 2005 NPT
review conference at the United Nations, where nuclear and non-nuclear
nations almost certainly will condemn one another for reneging on
their treaty commitments. United for Peace and Justice (the major
peace coalition in the United States), along with Abolition 2000
(a group focused on the nuclear issue), is laying plans for a nuclear
abolition march and rally in New York City on May 1, the day before
the review conference convenes. Noting that the NPT is "in
serious disarray," the organizers of these events have called
for "a massive demonstration" to "demand global nuclear
disarmament and an end to nuclear excuses for war." Large antinuclear
meetings and other related events are taking shape in numerous American
cities, with prominent speakers drawn from political, academic,
and cultural life.

International
organizations are also focusing their efforts on the NPT review
conference. Stressing the importance of the gathering, the Nobel
Peace Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention
of Nuclear War is mobilizing for it as part
of a Campaign for a Nuclear-Weapons-Free 21st Century. Mayors for
Peace, an organization of top municipal officials from more than
600 cities around the world, has become particularly active in pressing
the case for nuclear abolition. Headed by Hiroshima’s mayor,
Tadatoshi Akiba, Mayors for Peace will be sending a substantial
delegation to the NPT review conference for this purpose.

Thus, at this time of widespread uncertainty about the future of
the NPT–and, more broadly, about the future of nuclear arms
control and disarmament–there are signs that popular pressure
is developing to put the world back on track toward nuclear disarmament.
Whether this pressure will prove powerful enough to save the NPT
remains to be seen. But there is certainly movement on this front.
Fortunately, in the most dangerous of circumstances, people have
a tendency to rise to the occasion.

March
22, 2005

Lawrence
S. Wittner [send him mail]
is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany.
His latest book is Toward
Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement,
1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press). This article
originally appeared on the History News
Network. Reprinted with permission of the author.

In
fact, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which regularly
inspects Iran’s nuclear operations, has not found any signs of nuclear
weapons. Although the IAEA has reported that Iran has produced enriched
uranium – which can be used for either civilian or military purposes – such
production has been halted thanks to a November 2004 Iranian agreement
with France, Germany, and Britain. Thus, although it is possible
that Iran might produce nuclear weapons some time in the future,
this is hardly a certainty. Nor is it clear that the Iranian government
has ever planned to produce them.

Ironically,
in the midst of this delicate situation, the Bush administration
is busy dismantling the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
This treaty, signed in 1968 by officials of the United States and
of almost all other countries, obligates non-nuclear nations to
forgo development of nuclear weapons and nuclear nations to take
steps toward nuclear disarmament. The Bush administration reveres
the first obligation and wants to scrap the second.

In
late December 2004, news accounts quoted an administration official
as saying that the final agreement at the NPT review conference
in 2000 – which commits the declared nuclear weapons states to an
"unequivocal undertaking" to abolish nuclear weapons – is
a "simply historical document," which does not reflect
the drastic changes in the world since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Thus, he said, the Bush administration "no longer supports"
all of the thirteen steps toward disarmament outlined in the 2000
agreement and does not view it as "being a road map or binding
guideline or anything like that."

For
those who have followed the Bush administration’s nuclear policy,
this position should come as no great surprise. The administration
has not only abandoned efforts toward negotiating nuclear arms control
and disarmament agreements with other nations, but has withdrawn
the United States from the ABM treaty (signed by President Nixon)
and refused to support ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty (signed by President Clinton).

It
has also championed a program of building new U.S. nuclear weapons,
including so-called "bunker busters" and "mini-nukes,"
and of facilitating the resumption of U.S. nuclear testing. Only
an unexpected revolt in Congress – led by Representatives David Hobson
and Pete Viclosky, the Republican chair and ranking Democrat of
the House Energy and Water Appropriations Committee – blocked funding
for the Bush administration’s proposed new nuclear weapons in 2004.
Political analysts expect the administration to make another effort
to secure the funding this year.

For
the Bush administration and its fans, this evasion of U.S. obligations
under the NPT makes perfect sense. The United States, they believe,
is a supremely virtuous nation, and nations with whom it has bad
relations – such as Iran – are "evil." In line with this
belief, the U.S. government has the right to build and use nuclear
weapons, while nations it places on its "enemies" list
do not.

As
might be expected, this assumption does not play nearly as well
among government officials in Iran, who seem unlikely to fulfill
their part of the NPT agreement if U.S. officials flagrantly renege
on theirs. At the very least, the Bush administration is offering
them a convenient justification for a policy of building Iranian
nuclear weapons.

Other
nations have drawn this same conclusion. In the fall of 2004, Helen
Clark, the prime minister of New Zealand, warned: "First and
foremost we need to keep before us the essential bargain that the
nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty represents. While we will willingly
contribute to non-proliferation and counter-proliferation initiatives,
those initiatives should be promoted alongside initiatives to secure
binding commitments from those who have nuclear weapons which move
us further towards the longer-term goal of nuclear disarmament."

Much
the same point was made in early January 2005 by Mohamed ElBaradei,
the director of the IAEA. Calling upon all countries to commit themselves
to forgo building facilities for uranium enrichment and nuclear
reprocessing for the next five years, ElBaradei added: "We
should not forget the commitment by the weapons states to move toward
nuclear disarmament."

In
fact, ElBaradei’s evenhanded approach to nuclear issues has angered
the Bush administration, which is now working to deny him reappointment
as IAEA director.

The
responsibility of all nations under the NPT will undoubtedly receive
a good deal of discussion at the NPT review conference that will
convene at the United Nations this May. Certainly it will be interesting
to see how the Bush administration explains the inconsistencies
in its nuclear policy.

Unfortunately,
by then we may well have another bloody military confrontation on
our hands. Like the war in Iraq, it will be sold to us on the basis
of the potential threat from a nation possessing weapons of mass
destruction. And, also like the war in Iraq, it will be unnecessary – brought
on by the arrogance and foolishness of the Bush administration.

February
8, 2005

Lawrence
S. Wittner [send him mail]
is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany.
His latest book is Toward
Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement,
1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press). This article
originally appeared on the History News
Network. Reprinted with permission of the author.

In

Edward Teller: The Real Dr. Strangelove, Peter Goodchild
– an award-winning television producer for the BBC and the
author of a biography of Robert Oppenheimer – provides a detailed,
informative biography of Teller. Drawing upon interviews he conducted,
manuscript materials, and secondary sources, Goodchild sketches
a revealing portrait of this gifted and extraordinarily influential
figure.

Although
Teller was born into a relatively privileged, comfortable, Jewish
professional family in Budapest, he underwent an unhappy childhood.
His mother was often worried and over-protective and, thus, he grew
up a very serious child, frightened of everyday situations. Indeed,
Teller himself recalled that "the consistency of numbers"
was "the first memory I have of feeling secure." And there
was much to feel insecure about. Within short order, the Teller
family life in Budapest was disrupted by World War I, a postwar
Communist revolution, and a tide of post-Communist anti-Semitism.
Though he was unusually bright, Teller recalled that, at school,
he had no friends among his classmates, was ridiculed by some of
his teachers, and "was practically a social outcast."
Not surprisingly, he "reached adolescence still a serious child
with no sense of humor."

As
Teller moved on to Germany to attend university classes and do physics
research, his social acceptance and social skills improved markedly.
Thrown together with other brilliant scientists, many of them as
maladjusted as he was, Teller developed genuine warmth, humor, and
charm. Nevertheless, his childhood difficulties deeply marked his
subsequent career. Goodchild argues, convincingly, that Teller’s
"thirst for acceptance – with the hurt and anger he felt
when it was denied" – became "a defining feature"
of his life.

With
the Nazi rise to power, Teller left Germany for Britain and, soon,
for the United States, where he settled comfortably into an academic
career. In 1939, along with two other Hungarian migr physicists,
Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner, he met with Albert Einstein and helped
convince him to warn President Franklin Roosevelt that the German
government might be developing an atomic bomb. This proved to be
the beginning of the Manhattan Project, the secret wartime atomic
bomb program. Teller worked on the project, which drew together
many of the scientists who, in later years, would clash over nuclear
weapons policy. Expecting to be appointed head of the theoretical
division at Los Alamos, Teller was bitterly disappointed when he
did not get the post.

He
was also chagrined when his plans for work on the "Super"
H-bomb were disrupted. For these setbacks, he blamed the director
of the Los Alamos lab, Robert Oppenheimer, a physicist whose influence,
popularity, and cliquish behavior he began to resent. When Szilard
asked Teller to circulate a petition at Los Alamos urging that the
bomb not be used against Japan, Teller was ready to do it, but was
dissuaded by Oppenheimer. Indeed, Teller reported back to Szilard
that, in light of the need to convince the public that "the
next war could be fatal," the "actual combat use"
of the weapon "might even be the best thing." It was the
first sign of his hawkishness and, also, of a complex relationship
with Oppenheimer, that characterized his life in the following decades.

With
the end of the war, Teller – deeply pessimistic about postwar
relations with the Soviet Union – pressed scientists to continue
their nuclear weapons work. Initially, to be sure, he supported
nuclear arms control and disarmament measures like the ill-fated
Acheson-Lilienthal Plan. But, increasingly, he championed the development
of the H-bomb – a project in which he hoped to play a leading
role. As Goodchild shows, by developing the H-bomb, Teller was responding
both to his fear that the Soviet Union might conquer the world and
to his jealousy of Oppenheimer, then widely lauded as the "father
of the atomic bomb."

The
two issues, reflecting his anxiety and his ambition, soon became
intertwined, for Oppenheimer and his circle proved to be major obstacles
to getting the U.S. government to move forward with the H-bomb project.
Gradually, however, Teller won the struggle. Particularly after
the first Soviet nuclear test in the fall of 1949, powerful political
figures, including President Harry Truman, lined up on the side
of constructing an H-bomb. All Teller had to do was to figure out
how to build it. Ironically, despite his vigorous weapons work at
the Livermore laboratory, it was a problem that confounded him for
years. Furthermore, the mathematician Stan Ulam may have been responsible
for the necessary conceptual breakthrough. Nevertheless, Teller
received the lion’s share of the credit and, ultimately, became
known as "the father of the H-bomb" – a weapon a
thousand times as powerful as the bomb that obliterated Hiroshima.

Nor
was the creation of the H-bomb Teller’s only victory over his putative
enemies. In 1954, he teamed up with other foes of Oppenheimer (and
of nuclear arms controls) to destroy his rival’s career and influence.
Oppenheimer had applied to the Atomic Energy Commission to reinstate
his security clearance, and this triggered a dramatic, highly-publicized
loyalty-security hearing. Although Teller’s friends urged him not
to testify, he rejected their advice. Thus, during the hearing,
he asserted that, based on Oppenheimer’s actions since 1945, he
thought it vital for national security to deny clearance to him.
This also turned out to be the decision of the board, which cut
off Oppenheimer from government programs he had once directed and
terminated his lingering influence upon them.

For
Teller, it proved to be a pyrrhic victory. When the AEC surprised
him by publishing the transcript of the loyalty-security hearing,
many of Teller’s scientific colleagues – shocked by what they
considered his betrayal of human decency – cut him off as well.
Teller was devastated by their response. As he recalled: "If
a person leaves his country, leaves his continent, leaves his relatives,
leaves his friends, the only people he knows are his professional
colleagues. If more than ninety per cent of them come around to
consider him an enemy, an outcast, it is bound to have an effect.
The truth is it had a profound effect."

Teller,
however, proceeded to make new friends, particularly within the
ranks of the military-industrial complex, who appreciated the positions
he had taken and recognized his utility as a champion of new nuclear
weapons programs. And he proved to be a good investment. Urging
Congress and the President to spurn the idea of a nuclear test ban
treaty, Teller argued that "it would be a crime against the
people" to stop nuclear testing when he and other weapons scientists
stood on the brink of developing a "clean" bomb. "Peaceful
nuclear explosions," he told President Dwight Eisenhower, could
be used to uncover deposits of oil, alter the course of rivers,
and "perhaps even modify the weather." Eisenhower was
greatly impressed, and suggested that it might be a good idea to
share the "clean" bombs with the Russians, an idea that
Teller, naturally, resisted. Under Teller’ direction, his colleagues
at Livermore devised ever wilder schemes to prove that nuclear testing
could be hidden and, therefore, a test ban was not possible. These
included exploding weapons in deep caves, building a gargantuan
shield to hide x-rays from earthbound observers, and planning nuclear
tests on the far side of the moon. Although much of the public was
growing concerned about the nuclear fallout from testing, Teller
assured Americans that fallout was "not worth worrying about."
Nuclear test radiation "need not necessarily be harmful,"
he declared, and "may conceivably be helpful."

One
of the zanier ventures promoted by Teller involved the use of H-bombs
to blast out a deep-water harbor in northern Alaska. In the late
1950s, the influential physicist encouraged activities that included
using nuclear explosives to create diamonds, to mine oil, and with
the assistance of 26 nuclear devices to carve out a new canal adjacent
to the Panama Canal. He even opined that it would be hard to "resist
the temptation to shoot at the moon. . . to observe what kind of
disturbance it might cause." Eventually, these grandiose ideas
took shape in Project Plowshare.

To
implement its first component, Project Chariot, Teller flew off
to Alaska to propose exciting possibilities that included using
nuclear explosions to construct dams, lakes, and canals. Ultimately,
Teller narrowed down the Alaskan venture to using nuclear weapons
to blast out a giant harbor near Cape Thompson. Although commercial
interests in Alaska liked the idea, local scientists were critical
and the local Inuit people – 32 miles from the site of the
planned nuclear explosions – were not at all eager to have
their community turned into a nuclear wasteland. Responding to the
surge of protest against Project Chariot, the Kennedy administration
scrapped it. Goodchild reveals, however, that these apparently irrational
schemes had a hidden logic, for "Chariot was intended as a
cover for military activities." Faced with the prospect of
a nuclear test ban, Teller was promoting "peaceful" nuclear
explosions as a means of continuing the testing of nuclear weapons.

Teller’s
fierce faith in nuclear weapons became ever more evident in the
1960s and 1970s. He testified before Congress against the Partial
Test Ban Treaty and also spoke out against it on television. In
addition, he championed the development of an ABM system that would
employ nuclear explosions to destroy incoming missiles, held an
underground nuclear test at Amchitka Island that set off the most
powerful underground explosion in American history, and lobbied
hard against the SALT treaties of Presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy
Carter. "He . . . was becoming so wildly hawkish," recalled
Marvin Goldberger, one of Teller’s early students, "that no
one wanted him around except the extremists in the Pentagon."

Teller’s
plunge into extremism carried over into the debate over the hazards
of nuclear power. When the near meltdown of the Three Mile Island
nuclear power plant occurred, releasing dangerous amounts of radioactivity,
Teller reassured a congressional committee that, "zero is the
number of proven cases of damage to health due to a nuclear plant
in the free world." The day after his congressional appearance,
Teller was hospitalized with a heart attack, and even this became
grist for his propaganda mill. In July 1979, under a two-page headline
in the Wall Street Journal reading "I WAS THE ONLY VICTIM
OF THREE MILE ISLAND," there appeared a large photo of Teller,
along with his explanation that the cause of his health problem
"was not the reactor. It was Jane Fonda. Reactors are not dangerous."
Goodchild then goes on to say: "An editorial in the New
York Times accused Teller of propaganda…It then pointed out
something Teller had not mentioned: that the sponsor of the advertisement,
Dresser Industries, had manufactured the valve that had stuck open
and started the emergency."

Although
Teller had substantial influence on U.S. public policy through the
1970s, fostering the H-bomb during the Truman years, purging Oppenheimer
and sabotaging a test ban treaty during the Eisenhower years, excluding
underground nuclear testing from the test ban treaty during the
Kennedy years, securing the deployment of an ABM system during the
Johnson years, and keeping the U.S. government busily engaged in
the nuclear arms race during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter years –
he came into his own after the 1980 election victory of Ronald Reagan.
Teller arranged for the appointment of a protégé of
his as the president’s Science Advisor, became a member of the White
House Science Council, met with the president at the White House
on nuclear issues, and did as much as any other individual to convince
him that the creation of a Star Wars anti-missile system was vital
to the national defense. The Russians, Teller told Reagan, were
about to deploy "powerful directed energy weapons" in
space, thus enabling them to "militarily dominate both space
and the earth, conclusively altering the world balance of power."
Thus, "urgent action" was needed to build an anti-missile
system that would be powered by nuclear weapons explosions and could
be deployed within a few years.

As
is well-known, Reagan swallowed this anti-missile proposal hook,
line, and sinker though, in fact, Teller’s claims for it had little
relation to reality. Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, was more
dubious about the project, but he did approve a modified version,
Brilliant Pebbles, also championed by Teller. Republicans in Congress
also rallied behind the idea of missile defense, and during the
Bill Clinton years – used their newfound strength in that legislative
body to keep the project alive and the appropriations flowing to
America’s weaponeers. Thereafter, George W. Bush, taking office,
ordered the deployment of the new system and, a week before Teller’s
death in 2003, awarded him the President’s Medal of Freedom, this
nation’s highest civilian award. Along the way, Teller’s brainchild
helped to sabotage an agreement at Reykjavik to eliminate strategic
nuclear weapons, caused the scrapping of the ABM treaty, and resulted
in expenditures of over $100 billion. And there is still no indication
that it works.

Overall,
Goodchild’s book provides a fascinating, well-researched, and at
times sympathetic study of an extraordinary individual. Unfortunately,
though, the author has a much better grasp of Teller’s life than
he does of his times. Thus, he makes some glaring historical mistakes.
Among them are the claims that, before Japanese surrender, the U.S.
government provided assurances to the Japanese government of the
emperor’s safety and that "Soviet armies invaded Czechoslovakia"
in February 1948. Even so, Edward Teller is a book well worth
reading. Provocative and convincing, it highlights the importance
of the personal dimension – including personal neuroses –
in the history of the nuclear arms race.

January
29, 2005

Lawrence
S. Wittner [send him mail]
is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany.
His latest book is Toward
Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement,
1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press). This article
originally appeared on the History News
Network. Reprinted with permission of the author.