Lawrence S. Wittner The Struggle against the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 3 vols. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1...

Lawrence S. Wittner
The Struggle against the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 3 vols. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1993, 1997, 2003
Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2009

In the building of a world federation, as in that of the European Union, when will the people be ready to exercise their responsibilities no less than to enjoy their rights as world citizens? If global democracy is to be the form of a world union, ruling by law, can its citizens be relied upon to do more than occasionally voting for representatives to a world legislature or for world executives – leaving the day-to-day work of government to national politicians and their diplomats? When will they become a true body politic of humanity, animated by concern for justice, no less than interest, in the making of the world laws? If we imagine that a world republic, representative of the people, would, as Thomas Paine argued, be more peaceful than the separate states today – for to make war they would have to approve hostilities against people just like themselves – then can the world constitution provide safeguards not only against the old privileged élite but also against a hysterical public? Our world federation must be both effective in abolishing war and safe in laying its foundation on the sovereignty of the people. It must be a good world government.

To ask these questions is almost to answer them in the negative, for national passions are now very strong, and the degeneration of a world government into world tyranny will always be a threat no matter what the constitutional safeguards and the eternal vigilance of the people. But the reasons for confidence must be laid out. The book under review – Lawrence Wittner’s history of the nuclear disarmament movement, from Hiroshima to the present – demonstrates that what has prevented nuclear war is not just “peace through strength”, mutual deterrence, but also, as he says in the preface to his one-volume abridgment, a “massive nuclear disarmament movement … that has mobilized millions of people in nations around the globe” and forced government officials to compromise with this public opposition. The use of A-bombs and H-bombs has been delegitimized, their only official function is for deterrence, their proliferation to the 44 actual and potential nuclear weapon states that are identified in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty slowed, the Euro-missiles (SS-20s, Pershing IIs, and cruise missiles) withdrawn, the neutron bomb and MX missile cancelled, SDI restricted to sites guarding North Korea and Iran, and START III talks opened.

Wittner concludes on world federalist note, “Why have nations not taken the logical step of abolishing these weapons of global annihilation? The answer lies in the pathology of the nation-state system”. What will be needed to complete the work of abolition? Creation of an “effective international security system”. The millions of people in his account took up the same purposes as the United Nations, principally the maintenance of international peace and security, and then, without any institution provided for their participation, mobilized in ad hoc groups, associations, and non-governmental organizations to express public opinion, shame the nations, and prepare the way for a nuclear free world. If we interpret the international nuclear disarmament movement as an historical stage in the formation of a responsible, independent world citizenry, necessary for a safe and effective world federal government, the hard question is, Does the movement exhibit signs not only of the negative work of resistance to national policies of reliance on nuclear weapons for national security, but also of the positive work of creating just such an effective international security system?

Here the answer must be that, as Wittner shows, the nuclear disarmament movement, though it did show the readiness of millions of people to take up issues of international peace and security, was never able to do the positive work of construction of more effective international institutions alone. The popular movement was always complemented by enlightened national leadership that made the decisions to curtail the production of new arms or negotiate the treaties of arms control. The national bureaucracies were divided – particularly in the first half of the Carter administration or the second half of the Reagan administration, and then when led by the world statesmanship of Mikhail Gorbachev – until, in times full of contradictions, the balance of decisions shifted first to unilateral steps of Soviet disarmament, and then to general agreements to reduce intermediate nuclear forces and conventional forces in Europe. The Cold War ended.

So it must be in any foreseeable, practical world federation: The nations must be preserved as subordinate authorities, ruling by law in their more local jurisdictions, even while the union government is vested with supreme powers of world law to achieve their general purposes beyond the capacity of the nation states to achieve separately. Wittner acknowledges that, although the organized World Federalists had mostly dropped out of effective opposition to the Bomb by 1954, many of the remaining leaders were in principle world federalists or globalists: Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Norman Cousins, Hideki Yukawa, Lord Boyd-Orr, E. P. Thompson, Jawaharlal Nehru, and, under the influence of “New Thinking”, Mikhail Gorbachev. Both John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev saw, even before the Cuban missile crisis, that nuclear weapons had made necessary the abolition of war itself. “Mankind must put an end to war – or war will put an end to mankind”, said Kennedy to the United Nations in 1961. Khrushchev, in debate over the Third Party Program of that year, argued that in a nuclear war “the victor will be barely distinguishable from the vanquished. A war between the Soviet Union and the United States would almost certainly end in mutual defeat”.

Because nuclear weapons were illusory for national defense – as Clarence Pickett of the American Friends Service Committee said in 1957, “We are relying on means of defense which threaten to defend nothing and destroy everything” – it could be objected that the nuclear disarmament movement took up the easy negative work of dispelling an illusion, without coming to grips with the positive task of providing the nations with the necessary effective international security system to abolish war itself. Indeed, as Wittner recounts, national leaders realized that nuclear weapons offered no quick victory in war, which might be dated to public outcry against Truman’s casual mention of using the Bomb in Korea in November 1950 (before MacArthur suggested it). But then they had recourse not to abolition but to conventional war. Hence, the Vietnam War and wars since have been fought with “conventional” weapons, while weapons of mass destruction remain in development. It must be admitted, therefore, that the popular movement, even if it is seen as a step in forming a responsible world citizenry, has yet to join with those national leaders, in divided bureaucracies, who might actually create the third generation world organization.

Here is where all those friends of global democracy have their work cut out for themselves. Wittner mentions no definite plan for a new international security system, with the possible exception of Labour MP Frank Beswick’s Towards World Government (1961). Clark and Sohn’s World Peace through World Law (1958) and Hutchins and Borgese’s Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution (1948) get only passing mention. Where is the plan that might guide the next round of the movement? Thomas G. Weiss, president of the International Studies Association, has recently opened up discussion of world federalist alternatives (“What Happened to the Idea of World Government?” International Studies Quarterly [2009] 53: 253-71). Weiss refers at length to my own two-volume history, The Politics of World Federation (2004), which has a bibliography of plans.

The books of Daniele Archibugi on cosmopolitan democracy have drawn attention, but in his recent book, The Global Commonwealth of Citizens (2008), reviewed in these pages by Lucio Levi (The Federalist Debate, July 2009), Archibugi shrinks from global government. Raffaele Marchetti has written a big book, Global Democracy: For and Against; Ethical Theory, Institutional Design and Social Struggles (Routledge, 2008), which deserves a reader with the stamina of a reader of Wittner’s three volumes. In the United States, much attention is rightly focused on Richard Falk and Andrew Strauss’s shrewd proposal for a Global Parliamentary Assembly to be introduced parallel to the U.N. General Assembly. Their thinking is that, if the people could participate by electing representatives to such an assembly, they might become able to contribute safely to a more effective United Nations. There are also proposals to give the people more direct access, such as the World Citizens Party, Massachusetts Branch, which aims to bring about a U.N. general conference in accordance with Art. 109 of the Charter, leaving the details of amendment to the national delegates. David Wylie, former elected Cambridge city councilor, has written a novel proposal, City, Save Thyself! (2009), to extend working democracy at the level of cities and towns to that of an international “municipal security assembly”.

For scholars and readers looking for a compendium of citizens’ actions around the globe since World War II to build a more united and peaceful world, Wittner’s Struggle against the Bomb will repay patient reading. It is international history at its best. Not only Europe and America are covered, but so are the Communist countries, east Asia, south Asia, Latin America, and Africa south of the Sahara. Why did Ghana’s finance minister Agbeli Gbedemah become a president of the World Association of World Federalists? Because that was part of Africans’ resistance to French nuclear testing in the Sahara. What prompted Albert Schweitzer to issue profound warnings, suppressed in the U.S.A., against development of nuclear weapons in 1957-58? Norman Cousins’ visit to him in Lambaréné to urge him to take up the larger cause of world law, like that of Clark and Sohn. Who broke through the Iron Curtain to enlist brave and liberal minded Soviets in the anti-nuclear cause? Scientists by 1955 in the Pugwash movement led by Joseph Rotblat, and physicians Bernard Lown and Evgenii Chazov in International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War after 1979. What was the movement’s response to the Helsinki Accords of 1975? Daring individuals who formed Moscow Trust and Charter 77 to exercise the promised rights, which gradually undermined Communist tyranny. What was END, European Nuclear Disarmament’s contribution to the building of united Europe? It questioned NATO’s lockgrip on the region, if it meant general nuclear destruction. Wittner’s account of Mikhail Gorbachev, a “convert to the antinuclear cause”, is invaluable. President H.W. Bush, by comparison “did not have a foreign policy”.

In the United States, if one wants to keep straight the many organizations and leaders of the movement, this is the book to do so: Admirals Gene LaRocque and Eugene Carroll in the Center for Defense Information; Helen Caldicott in Physicians for Social Responsibility; the Mobilization for Survival, which organized the massive demonstration of one million people in New York in 1982; SANE, led by publisher Norman Cousins, Socialist Norman Thomas, and Unitarian Homer Jack; Jeremy Stone of the Federation of American Scientists; the Freeze campaign led by Randall Forsberg and Randy Kehler; and many others, like Women Strike for Peace and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Wittner sums up: “It was the largest, most dynamic citizens movement of modern times”. The one-volume abridgment will surely make this a popular book in history and political science courses.