The antinuclear uprising of the late 1940s had some impact upon public policy. Major governments, previously enthusiastic about nuclear weapons, grew ambivalent about their development and use. Indeed, the appearance of the Baruch Plan, the world's first serious nuclear disarmament proposal, owed much to the postwar agitation.
Nevertheless, as the Cold War emerged, the officials of the great powers rejected the new way of thinking about relations among nations championed by Einstein and other activists. Instead of restructuring international relations to cope with the unprecedented peril of the Bomb, they incorporated the Bomb into the traditional framework of international conflict. The result was a nuclear arms race and a growing sense that agitation for transforming the international order was, at best, naïve, or, at worst, subversive.
These narrowed political horizons meant that, when the antinuclear movement revived in the late 1950 s, it championed more limited objectives, beginning with a call for ending nuclear testing. And this goal proved attainable, at least in part, because halting atmospheric nuclear testing did not seriously hinder the great powers, which could move tests underground and, thereby, upgrade their nuclear arsenals. The result was the passage of the world's first nuclear arms control agreement, the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963.
Admittedly, ban-the-bomb movements also sprang up in numerous countries. But, although they were sometimes headed by long-time proponents of world government, including Norman Cousins (chair of America's National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy) and Bertrand Russell (president of Britain's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), they, too, focused on weapons rather than on reforming the international system. The result was a welcome surge of nuclear arms control treaties in the late 1960s and early 1970s that quieted the fears of activists and led to the movement's decline.
When the Cold War revived in the late 1970s and early 1980s, so did an outraged antinuclear campaign. Indeed, this third wave of the nuclear disarmament movement proved the largest and most successful yet, securing substantial decreases in nuclear arsenals and significantly reducing the danger of nuclear war.
Of all the major actors of that era, though, only Mikhail Gorbachev seemed ready to move beyond weapons cutbacks to advocate the development of a new international security system. But with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev was swept from power. And, in recent decades, rising international tensions have swept away the antinuclear campaign's hard-won gains, as well.
Those gains, though evanescent, were important, for they helped the world to avoid nuclear war while giving it time to press on toward a nuclear weapons-free future.
But this history also suggests that, in the struggle for survival in the nuclear age, confronting the continued anarchy of nations cannot be avoided. Indeed, given the severity of our current international crises and the escalating nuclear menace that they generate, the time has come to revisit the forgotten issue of strengthening the international security system.
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