The Struggle Against the Bomb. Volume 3. Towards Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (review)

In the third volume of his encyclopedic The Struggle Against the Bomb, Lawrence Wittner presents a comprehensive, chronological narrative of the global antinuclear peace movement. Starting in 1971 and ending in 2002, Wittner narrates the ebb and flow of national and international peace organization across Europe, the Soviet Union, North America, South America, Asia, and Australia. He documents and analyses a range of public activities: massed marches, petition drives, blockades of missile sites, antinuclear films, television documentaries, conferences, meetings, and public opinion polls. Wittner asserts that the cumulative effect of these global antinuclear activities, which continued year after year at differing levels of intensity, caused the international system to consider, discuss, negotiate, ratify, and implement a series of dramatic arms reduction treaties and agreements in the 1990s: Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), Conventional Arms Reduction Treaty in Europe (CFE), and the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) Treaty. These major treaties, he argues, were never achieved easily; national and international military industrial complexes were powerful, entrenched, and influential. In recent years, he writes that the United States revived the nuclear arms race precisely at a time when the public antinuclear movement was at a low point.

Lawrence Wittner in this volume, indeed in the previous two, rejects the idea that nuclear weapons should constitute any part of any country's national security strategy. However, nuclear weapons were and are a part of many countries' national security strategies. That is not an idea, but historical reality. During the Cold War, military commanders, national leaders, political parties, and large sections of the public endorsed the fusing of nuclear weapons and modern weapons systems—bombers, missiles, submarines—into nuclear deterrence forces. This broad, entrenched consensus, especially in the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union, made it extremely difficult for the antinuclear movement to influence changes in national security strategy. Wittner has written a comprehensive history of one element forcing change; however, it was not the only one. Others, sustained diplomacy on nuclear arms reductions over twenty years, critical national leadership, especially by Mikhail Gorbachev, George H. W. Bush, and James A. Baker, and the acceptance of new methods of verification, on-site inspections, along with satellite and technical intelligence, all played a role in shaping the contemporary world of controlling and reducing nuclear weapons.