Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 10. April
2008 / Time Line April 10, 2008
Version 3.0
9. April 2008, 11. April 2008
04/10/2008
Why Today's Peace Activists Should Not Be Discouraged: An
Example from 1958
By Lawrence S. Wittner
After nearly five years of bloody, costly war in Iraq, with no end
in sight, many peace activists feel discouraged. Protest against
the war and the rise of antiwar public opinion seem to have had
little effect upon government policy.
But, in fact, it is too early to say. Who really knows what impact
peace activism and widespread peace sentiment have had in the past
five years or will have in the near future? Certainly not
historians, who will spend decades pulling together such
information from once secret government records and after-the-fact
interviews.
What historians can do, of course, is assess the impact of popular
protest on events in the more distant past. And here the record
provides numerous intriguing illustrations of the power of
protest.
One example along these lines occurred fifty years ago, in 1958,
when the Soviet and U.S. governments stopped their nuclear
explosions and commenced negotiations for a nuclear test ban
treaty.
Ever since the first explosion of an atomic bomb, at Alamogordo, in
July 1945, the great powers had been engaged in a deadly race to
develop, test, and deploy what they considered the ultimate weapon,
the final guarantee of their "national security." The United
States, of course, had the lead, and used this with devastating
effect upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But, in 1949, the U.S. monopoly
on nuclear weapons was cracked by the Soviet Union. In 1952, the
British also entered the nuclear club. As the nuclear arms race
accelerated, all three powers worked on producing a hydrogen
bomb--a weapon with a thousand times the destructive power of the
bomb that annihilated Hiroshima. Within a short time, all of them
were testing H-bombs for their rapidly-growing nuclear
arsenals.
The nuclear tests--which, by late 1958, numbered at least 190 (125
by the United States, 44 by the Soviet Union, and 21 by
Britain)--were conducted mostly in the atmosphere and, in these
cases, were often quite dramatic. Enormous explosions rent the
earth, sending vast mushroom clouds aloft that scattered
radioactive debris (fallout) around the globe. The H-bomb test of
March 1, 1954, for example--which the U.S. government conducted at
Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands, a U.N. trust territory in the
Pacific—was so powerful that it overran the danger zone of
50,000 square miles (an area roughly the size of New England).
Generating vast quantities of radioactive fallout that landed on
inhabited islands and fishermen outside this zone, it forced the
evacuation of U.S. weather station personnel and Marshall Islanders
(many of whom subsequently suffered a heavy incidence of
radiation-linked illnesses, including cancer and leukemia). In
addition, the Bikini test overtook a Japanese fishing boat, the
Lucky Dragon, which received a heavy dose of radioactive ash that
sickened the crew and, eventually, killed one of its members.
Recognizing that these nuclear tests were not only paving the way
for mass destruction in the future, but were already beginning to
generate sickness and death, large numbers of people around the
world began to resist. Prominent intellectuals, such Albert
Schweitzer, Bertrand Russell, and Linus Pauling, issued public
appeals to halt nuclear testing. Pacifists sailed protest vessels
into nuclear test zones in an attempt to disrupt planned weapons
explosions. Citizens' antinuclear organizations sprang up,
including the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (better
known as SANE) in the United States, the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament in Great Britain, and dozens of others in assorted
nations. In the United States, the 1956 Democratic presidential
candidate, Adlai Stevenson, made a halt to nuclear testing a key
part of his campaign. Antinuclear pressures even developed within
Communist dictatorships. In the Soviet Union, top scientists, led
by Andrei Sakharov, appealed to Soviet leaders to halt nuclear
tests.
Polls during 1957 and 1958 in nations around the globe reported
strong public opposition to nuclear testing. In the United States,
63 percent of respondents favored a nuclear test ban; in Japan, 89
percent supported a worldwide ban on the testing and manufacture of
nuclear weapons; in Britain, 76 percent backed an agreement to end
nuclear tests; and in India (with the survey sample limited to New
Delhi), 90 percent thought the United States should unilaterally
halt its nuclear tests. In late 1957, pollsters reported that the
proportion of the population viewing H-bomb testing as harmful to
future generations stood at 64 percent in West Germany, 76 percent
in Norway, 65 percent in Sweden, 59 percent in the Netherlands, 60
percent in Belgium, 73 percent in France, 67 percent in Austria,
and 55 percent in Brazil.
Within the ranks of the U.S. government, this public aversion to
nuclear testing was regarded as bad news, indeed. The Eisenhower
administration was firmly committed to nuclear weapons as the
central component of its national security strategy. Thus, halting
nuclear testing was viewed as disastrous. In early 1956, Lewis
Strauss--the chair of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and the top
figure in setting the administration's nuclear weapons
policy--insisted: "This nonsense about ceasing tests (that is
tantamount to saying ceasing the development) of our nuclear
weapons plays into the hands of the Soviets." The United States, he
told Eisenhower, should hold nuclear tests "whenever an idea has
been developed which is ready for test."
And yet, other administration officials felt hard-pressed by the
force of public opinion. In a memo written in June 1955, Secretary
of State John Foster Dulles noted that, although the United States
needed a nuclear arsenal, "the frightful destructiveness of modern
weapons creates an instinctive abhorrence to them." Indeed, there
existed "a popular and diplomatic pressure for limitation of
armament that cannot be resisted by the United States without our
forfeiting the good will of our allies and the support of a large
part of our own people." Consequently, "we must . . . propose or
support some plan for the limitation of armaments."
But Dulles equivocated over specific plans, and the administration
increasingly felt the heat. In September 1956, with Stevenson's
call for an end to nuclear testing now part of the presidential
election campaign, Eisenhower ordered an administrative study of a
test ban, citing "the rising concern of people everywhere over the
effect of radiation from tests, their reaction each time a test was
reported, and their extreme nervousness over the prospective
consequences of nuclear war." Given opposition from other
officials, this study, too, went nowhere. Even so, Eisenhower
remained gravely concerned about the unpopularity of nuclear
testing. In a meeting with Edward Teller and other nuclear weapons
enthusiasts in June 1957, the president told them that "we are . .
. up against an extremely difficult world opinion situation," and
"the United States could [not] permit itself to be 'crucified on a
cross of atoms.' " There was not only "the question of world
opinion . . . but an actual division of American opinion . . . as
to the harmful effects of testing."
By early 1958, the outside pressures were becoming so powerful that
Dulles began a campaign to halt U.S. nuclear tests unilaterally.
Having learned, through the CIA, that the Soviet government was
about to announce a unilateral suspension of its tests, he called
together top administration officials on March 23 and 24 and
proposed that Eisenhower issue a statement saying that, after the
U.S. government completed its nuclear test series that year, there
would be no further U.S. nuclear testing. "It would make a great
diplomatic and propaganda sensation to the advantage of the United
States," Dulles explained, and "I feel desperately the need for
some important gesture in order to gain an effect on world
opinion." But Strauss and Defense Department officials fought back
ferociously, while Eisenhower, typically, remained indecisive.
Testing was "not evil," the president opined, "but the fact is that
people have been brought to believe that it is." What should be
done in these circumstances? Nothing, it seemed. Eisenhower
remained unwilling to challenge the nuclear hawks in his
administration.
However, after March 31, 1958, when the Soviet government announced
its unilateral testing moratorium, the U.S. hard line could no
longer be sustained. With the Soviet halt to nuclear testing,
recalled one U.S. arms control official, "the Russians boxed us
in." On April 30, Dulles reported that an advisory committee on
nuclear testing that he had convened had concluded that, if U.S.
nuclear testing continued, "the slight military gains" would "be
outweighed by the political losses, which may well culminate in the
moral isolation of the United States." The following morning,
Eisenhower telephoned Dulles and expressed his agreement.
Thereafter, the president held steady. Meeting on August 12 with
Teller and other officials, he reacted skeptically to their
enthusiastic reports about recent weapons tests. "The new
thermonuclear weapons are tremendously powerful," he observed, but
"they are not . . . as powerful as is world opinion today in
obliging the United States to follow certain lines of policy. Ten
days later, after a showdown with the Defense Department and the
AEC, Eisenhower publicly announced that, as of October 31, the
United States would suspend nuclear testing and begin negotiations
for a test ban treaty.
As a result, U.S., Soviet, and British nuclear explosions came to a
halt in the fall of 1958. Although the French government conducted
its first nuclear tests in early 1960 and the three earlier nuclear
powers resumed nuclear testing in late 1961, these actions proved
to be the last gasps of the nuclear hawks before the signing of the
Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963--a measure resulting from years of
public protest against nuclear testing. Against this backdrop, the
1958 victory for the peace movement and public opinion should be
regarded as an important break in the nuclear arms race and in the
Cold War.
Thus, if peace activists feel discouraged today by the continuation
of the war in Iraq, they might well take heart at the example of
their predecessors, who recognized that making changes in powerful
institutions requires great perseverance. They might also consider
the consequences of doing nothing. As the great abolitionist
leader, Frederick Douglass, put it in 1857: "If there is no
struggle, there is no progress."
04/10/2008
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