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  • Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971–Present
  • Russell Olwell (bio)
Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971–Present. By Lawrence S. Wittner. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv+657. $32.95.

Nuclear weapons are a technology that dominated the latter half of the twentieth century, and continue to shape policies of war and peace into the twenty-first. Born at the same time as the cold war, atomic weapons have spread through Europe and Asia, and their development and threatened use are in our news almost continuously.

This makes Lawrence Wittner's new book Toward Nuclear Abolition both more relevant than ever and out of step with the times. In this third volume of his trilogy The Struggle Against the Bomb, Wittner starts in the 1970s and ends in 2002. The book includes some of the antinuclear movement's most powerful and visible moments: the rise of Great Britain's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, led by historian E. P. Thompson, as well as the American Nuclear Freeze movement.

Since the election of George W. Bush to the American presidency, the situation has changed entirely from the high tide of the movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Disarmament and nonproliferation have become excuses for war, not a path to peace. Missile shields once rejected as utopian are back in production. Plutonium production is gearing up, while cleanup efforts at nuclear sites are out of the public eye. It would seem as though we have returned to the world of 1945, with the United States possessing an uneasy dominance of the atomic world, waiting to take on all potential rivals.

Hence the current relevance of Wittner's book. The story he tells and the analysis he presents of the latter part of the twentieth century demonstrate the ways in which mass movements helped curb the nuclear ambitions of national leaders. Wittner, unlike most historians, is truly global in his approach, taking us from Europe, into the Soviet Union, out to New Zealand and back to America, for almost every topic he covers. His thesis, that ordinary people built powerful social movements to rein in their leaders, East and West, is well-documented. Wittner has spent time in archives throughout the world, and has interviewed top policymakers to chart the [End Page 868] impact of the antinuclear movement on their thinking. He has pieced together the story of the antinuclear movement in the United States, in Great Britain, and behind the Iron Curtain.

The story he tells is one of the antinuclear movement managing to exercise some restraint on national leaders, but never really coming to power. While majorities of voters in western nations were fearful of atomic weapons policy and the threat of nuclear war, those same publics elected Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and other nuclear hawks. Even those leaders who questioned the use nuclear weapons, such as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, never moved to make the deep cuts in weapons programs that the antinuclear movement demanded.

Will the current situation foster a new nuclear disarmament movement? On Wittner's evidence, yes. He shows that even under the most repressive conditions, such as Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union, independent peace movements could spring up, organize, and survive, waiting for the right opening to make their case to the wider public. Will the current arms race be held in check? There is nothing restraining the current U.S. administration's ambitions that stem from world nuclear supremacy. However, as Wittner points out, popular movements do place limits on national leaders, if only so that those leaders can portray themselves as men of peace at election time.

Russell Olwell

Dr. Olwell teaches in the Department of History and Philosophy at Eastern Michigan University. His book At Work in the Atomic City will be published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2005.

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