The Antinuclear Movement wasEffective-But Not Completely

Book reviewed in this article: Lawrence S. Wittner, Resisting the Bomb: A History of the World Disarmament Movement, 1954-1970 This brilliantly written and prodigiously researched volume is an excellent example of multinational history. Wittner conducted research in fifteen countries, on more than a hundred peace groups and government agencies. Many of the documents – such as those drawn from the files of the U.S. State Department, the Atomic Energy Authority of Great Britain, and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – were, until recently, classified as top secret. Together with personal interviews and material drawn from peace movement literature, the documentation provides a solid foundation for Wittner's vivid panorama of the global antinuclear campaign and the forces, personalities, and events that molded it.1 Wittner points out that the second phase of the movement, covered in Resisting the Bomb, was triggered by the U.S. hydrogen bomb tests conducted in 1954, which were emulated during the period by the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China. In reaction to the vast amounts of reactive material that they injected into the stratosphere, Bertrand Russell, the famed mathematician and philosopher, took the lead in alerting the general public to the dangers of radioactive fallout. Russell was soon joined by scores of scientists from around the world – including Linus Pauling, Leo Szilard, and Andrei Sakharov, the “father” of the Soviet H-bomb. Their work to educate the public was reinforced by the likes of Albert Schweitzer, the great humanitarian and physician, George Kennan, the “author” of the U.S. containment policy, and the publisher Norman Cousins, the cofounder of SANE, perhaps the most prominent antinuclear weapons organization in the United States

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