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Crossing
Arms
By Tom Nattell
 Toward
Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament
Movement, 1971 to the Present
By
Lawrence S. Wittner
Stanford University Press, 657 pages, $32.95
Now known for providing dramatic backdrop for the filming
of Lord of the Rings, New Zealand once posed a major
security threat to the United States. “A piss-ant little country
south of nowheresville” is how one Reagan administration official
back in the 1980s described New Zealand after the country
refused to allow U.S. warships with nuclear weapons into its
harbors. In retaliation, then-Rep. Dick Cheney introduced
a bill to bar imports from New Zealand, and Reagan threatened
to wield White House authority to squash the “piss-ant.” Ironically,
these U.S. threats actually fueled a trade boom for the island
nation as disarmament groups worldwide helped along a dramatic
spike in New Zealand’s international commerce. This is only
one of many fascinating stories contained in Lawrence Wittner’s
latest addition to his multivolume history of the nuclear-disarmament
movement, Toward Nuclear Abolition.
Ever since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945,
groups have actively sought to ban nuclear weapons. This disarmament
movement has waxed and waned over the years in response to
technological innovations in weaponry, political decisions
regarding that technology’s costs, deployment and control,
and the level of concern expressed by the public.
In his three-volume history, The Struggle Against the Bomb,
University at Albany professor and peace scholar Lawrence
Wittner has provided a well-documented and researched account
of the events, organizations, politics and people that affected
the movement’s ebbs and swells. In his first two volumes in
this series, One World or None (1993) and Resisting
the Bomb (1997), Wittner recounted the history of the
nuclear movement up through 1970. In Toward Nuclear Abolition,
Wittner describes this movement and its political terrain
from 1971 through 2002.
In this latest offering, Wittner makes ample use of newly
available archives from the former Soviet Union and its Warsaw
Pact allies, as well as archives of U.S. government officials
and disarmament organizations. He also conducted direct interviews
with pivotal former officials and key disarmament activists
to further flesh out historic details. The heavily footnoted
book includes more than 100 pages of notes. There is also
an impressive compilation of the archives consulted, an extensive
bibliography and a list of more than 100 interviews included
in the author’s research.
Through Wittner’s diligent research and documentation, Toward
Nuclear Abolition delivers an important international
perspective, recounting the disarmament activities and events
in a diverse array of countries around the world. Wittner
uses this perspective to delineate an international chronology
of political and social history that often resulted in an
awkward dance between popular movements for nuclear disarmament
and the actions of their respective governments.
The book also shows that disarmament groups have had a lot
more influence on nuclear policies and programs than they
generally get credit for. Wittner also looks directly into
the evidence extant regarding a number of popular interpretations
of history espoused by recent American administrations.
One such interpretation by the Reagan and the first Bush administrations
was that the worldwide antinuclear “movement” was under the
direction and control of the Communist Party (remember the
Cold War?). According to their argument, the World Peace Council
was often cited as the communist front organization most likely
responsible for this civic havoc. Wittner’s investigation
found plentiful evidence that the WPC would have loved that
these U.S. government fantasies be true. But that was not
the case.
The truth was that the disarmament movement during those times
had grown into an international mobilization of protest. It
was garnering popular support and wielding policy power far
beyond the control and direction of any representatives of
either Reagan or the alleged Evil Empire. Wittner chronicles
with documents and interviews how the nuclear abolitionists
were as much of a threat to the Communists as they were to
the Reagan Administration. As Wittner notes from his review
of national disarmament movements behind the Iron Curtain,
these movements were often strongly linked to indigenous human
rights movements, posing a double threat to their national
powers that be.
Another popular interpretation of history is that the “peace
through strength” policies of the 1980s won the Cold War,
led to arms-control agreements, and dissolved the Soviet Union.
Wittner’s work argues that these events took place despite
the nuclear buildup this country pursued at the cost of amassing
record levels of national debt.
According to Wittner, the world’s largest popular movement
and its disarmament demands had a far greater effect on things
than an expanded threat of nuclear annihilation that had surpassed
the point of overkill years earlier. Wittner also presents
the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, and the Soviet leader’s
willingness to actively consider the disarmament movement’s
demands, as critical to the nuclear-arms reductions that followed.
Toward
Nuclear Abolition provides a well-documented view of the
disarmament movement over the last three decades of the 20th
century. This view makes clear the potent power of popular
movements in changing national policy and the dynamics of
international relations. It certainly has lessons for those
currently engaged in disarmament issues, which have stalled
and moved backward under the reign of George W. While it is
awash in details regarding national nuclear- policy decisions,
the book does not describe the significant corporate intersts
that lobbied for the arms race and profited from the manufacture
of these weapons of mass destruction.
Wittner’s total three-volume tome is of a size and cost that
might better lend itself to the budget of your local library
than your personal book-buying budget. If your local library
hasn’t ordered a copy, the full series would be a great recommendation
for enriching their shelves with a significant work of peace
scholarship for the coming new year.
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