Toward Nuclear Abolition:
A Book Review
by Bruce Kent*, January, 2004
This is the third volume of an epic work. The first
two One World or None and Resisting the Bomb covered antinuclear
activity worldwide up to 1970. Now, the detailed, fascinating
pages of Toward Nuclear Abolition take us almost up to the present
day. The scholarship is clear. There are nearly 100 pages of references
at the end, as well as a bibliography, an index, and an explanation
of abbreviations. . . .
Every group should buy at least a paperback copy
and circulate it among their members. It should also be put on
the “please buy” hardback list at all local libraries.
We need to take the long view of our work, and we need our share
of encouragement. This substantial volume provides both.
For starters, have a look at the sixteen photographs
in the middle of the book. They start with the Seabrook protests
of 1977 and continue with a wonderful picture of the New Zealand
Peace Squadron obstructing a US nuclear submarine. Then comes
the Venerable Nichidatsu Fujii and fellow Buddhists, at the first
1978 UN Special Session on Disarmament. . . . Mary Kaldor of END,
Randall Forsberg of the US Freeze campaign, and the leaders of
the Moscow Trust group, as it was in the 1980s, are all there.
So are Edward Thompson and Helen Caldicott, passionate in front
of their microphones. . . .
The book is a realistic, detailed account of the
immense activity undertaken by tens of thousands of ordinary people
worldwide, which over the years has had a significant effect on
the policies of politicians. The unilateral Gorbachev pause on
nuclear testing, the World Court ruling of 1996, and the Canberra
Commission Report did not come out of thin air. They were all
the result of hard work. That citizens’ campaigns actually
matter is the overall message of the book. Says the author: “Recounting
the history of nuclear arms control and disarmament without referring
to the antinuclear movement, is like telling the story of civil
rights legislation without referring to the civil rights movement.”
. . .
In a concluding and optimistic chapter, he gives
his own ideas about future progress at a time when the current
Washington regime seems bent on tearing up every nuclear arms
control agreement that it can get its hands on. The author asks
if the people of the world are “ready for the new thinking
about international relations necessitated by the nuclear age”?
His answer is yes. “Another world is possible” is
the theme of current anti-globalization campaigns. So too is a
more intelligent and a more moral approach to international security,
and that is the direction in which our efforts are moving us.
*Bruce Kent is vice president of the Campaign
for Nuclear Disarmament.
The Struggle Against the Bomb Volume
3, Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament
Movement, 1971 to the Present by Lawrence S. Wittner, Stanford
University Press, 2003, 657 pp., illustrated. Paperback, $32.95.
Cloth, $75.00.
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