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BOOK REVIEW: Martin J. Sherwin, “Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis”

In Being a World Citizen, Book Review, Conflict Resolution, Nuclear weapons, Peacebuilding, Solidarity, The Search for Peace on August 5, 2025 at 7:00 AM

By Lawrence Wittner

Martin J. Sherwin, Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

New York: Vintage Books, 2020.

The development and the deployment of nuclear weapons are usually based on the assumption that they enhance national security. But, in fact, as this powerful study of nuclear policy convincingly demonstrates, nuclear weapons move nations toward the brink of destruction.

The basis for this conclusion is the post-World War II nuclear arms race and, especially, the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. At the height of the crisis, top officials from the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union narrowly avoided annihilating a substantial portion of the human race by what former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, an important participant in the events, called “plain dumb luck.”

The author of this cautionary account, Martin Sherwin, who died shortly after its publication, was certainly well-qualified to tell this chilling story. A professor of history at George Mason University, Sherwin was the author of the influential A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies and the co-author, with Kai Bird, of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which, in 2006, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography. Perhaps the key factor in generating these three scholarly works was Sherwin’s service as a U.S. Navy junior intelligence officer who was ordered to present top secret war plans to his commander during the Cuban missile crisis.

In Gambling with Armageddon, Sherwin shows deftly how nuclear weapons gradually became a key part of international relations. Although Harry Truman favored some limitations on the integration of these weapons into U.S. national security strategy, his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, significantly expanded their role. According to the Eisenhower administration’s NSC 162/2, the U.S. government would henceforth “consider nuclear weapons as available for use as other munitions.” At Eisenhower’s direction, Sherwin notes, “nuclear weapons were no longer an element of American military power; they were its primary instrument.”

Sherwin adds that, although the major purpose of the new U.S. “massive retaliation” strategy “was to frighten Soviet leaders and stymie their ambitions,” its “principal result . . . was to establish a blueprint for Nikita Khrushchev to create his own ‘nuclear brinkmanship.’” John F. Kennedy’s early approach to U.S. national security policy – supplementing U.S. nuclear superiority with additional conventional military forces and sponsoring a CIA-directed invasion of Cuba – merely bolstered Khrushchev’s determination to contest U.S. power in world affairs. Consequently, resumption of Soviet nuclear weapons testing and a Soviet-American crisis over Berlin followed.

Indeed, dismayed by U.S. nuclear superiority and feeling disrespected by the U.S. government, Khrushchev decided to secretly deploy medium- and intermediate-range ballistic nuclear missiles in Cuba. As Sherwin observes, the Soviet leader sought thereby “to protect Cuba, to even the balance of nuclear weapons and nuclear fear, and to reinforce his leverage to resolve the West Berlin problem.” Assuming that the missiles would not be noticed until their deployment was completed, Khrushchev thought that the Kennedy administration, faced with a fait accompli, would have no choice but to accept them. Khrushchev was certainly not expecting a nuclear war.

But that is what nearly occurred. In the aftermath of the U.S. government’s discovery of the missile deployment in Cuba, the Joint Chiefs of Staff demanded the bombing and invasion of the island and were supported by most members of ExComm, an ad hoc group of Kennedy’s top advisors during the crisis. At the time, they did not realize that the Soviet government had already succeeded in delivering 164 nuclear warheads to Cuba and, therefore, that a substantial number of the ballistic missiles on the island were already operational. Also, the 42,000 Soviet troops in Cuba were armed with tactical nuclear weapons and had been given authorization to use them to repel an invasion. As Fidel Castro later remarked: “It goes without saying that in the event of an invasion, we would have had nuclear war.”

Initially, among all of Kennedy’s advisors, only Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, suggested employing a political means – rather than a military one – to secure the removal of the missiles. Although Kennedy personally disliked Stevenson, he recognized the wisdom of his UN ambassador’s approach and gradually began to adopt his ideas. “The question really is,” the president told his hawkish advisors, “what action we take which lessens the chance of a nuclear exchange, which obviously is the final failure.” Therefore, Kennedy tempered his initial impulse to order rapid military action and, instead, adopted a plan for a naval blockade (“quarantine”) of Cuba, thereby halting the arrival of additional Soviet missiles and creating time for negotiations with Khrushchev for removal of the missiles already deployed.

U.S. military leaders, among other ostensible “wise men,” were appalled by what they considered the weakness of the blockade plan, though partially appeased by Kennedy’s assurances that, if it failed to secure the desired results within a seven-day period, a massive U.S. military attack on the island would follow. Indeed, as Sherwin reveals, at the beginning of October, before the discovery of the missiles, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff were already planning for an invasion of Cuba and looking for an excuse to justify it.

Even though Khrushchev, like Kennedy, regarded the blockade as a useful opportunity to negotiate key issues, they quickly lost control of the volatile situation.

For example, U.S. military officers took the U.S.-Soviet confrontation to new heights. Acting on his own initiative, General Thomas Power, the head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command, advanced its nuclear forces to DEFCON 2, just one step short of nuclear war – the only occasion when that level of nuclear alert was ever instituted. He also broadcast the U.S. alert level “in the clear,” ensuring that the Russians would intercept it. They did, and promptly raised their nuclear alert level to the same status.

In addition, few participants in the crisis seemed to know exactly what should be done if a Soviet ship did not respect the U.S. blockade of Cuba. Should the U.S. Navy demand to board it? Fire upon it? Furthermore, at Castro’s orders, a Soviet surface-to-air battery in Cuba shot down an American U-2 surveillance flight, killing the pilot. Khrushchev was apoplectic at the provocative action, while the Kennedy administration faced the quandary of how to respond to it.

A particularly dangerous incident occurred in the Sargasso Sea, near Cuba. To bolster the Soviet defense of Cuba, four Soviet submarines, each armed with a torpedo housing a 15-kiloton nuclear warhead, had been dispatched to the island. After a long, harrowing trip through unusually stormy seas, these vessels were badly battered when they arrived off Cuba. Cut off from communication with Moscow, their crews had no idea whether the United States and the Soviet Union were already at war.

All they did know was that a fleet of U.S. naval warships and warplanes was apparently attacking one of the stricken Soviet submarines, using the unorthodox (and unauthorized) tactic of forcing it to surface by flinging hand grenades into its vicinity. One of the Soviet crew members recalled that “it felt like you were sitting in a metal barrel while somebody is constantly blasting with a sledgehammer.” Given the depletion of the submarine’s batteries and the tropical waters, temperatures ranged in the submarine between 113 and 149 degrees Fahrenheit. The air was foul, fresh water was in short supply, and crew members were reportedly “dropping like dominoes.” Unhinged by the insufferable conditions below deck and convinced that his submarine was under attack, the vessel’s captain ordered his weapons officer to assemble the nuclear torpedo for action. “We’re gonna blast them now!” he screamed. We will die, but we will sink them all―we will not become the shame of the fleet.”

At this point, though, Captain Vasily Arkhipov, a young Soviet brigade chief of staff who had been randomly assigned to the submarine, intervened. Calming the distraught captain, he eventually convinced him that the apparent military attack, plus subsequent machine gun fire from U.S. Navy aircraft, probably constituted no more than a demand to surface. And so they did. Arkhipov’s action, Sherwin notes, saved not only the lives of the submarine crew, “but also the lives of thousands of U.S. sailors and millions of innocent civilians who would have been killed in the nuclear exchanges that certainly would have followed from the destruction” that the “nuclear torpedo would have wreaked upon those U.S. Navy vessels.”

Meanwhile, recognizing that the situation was fast slipping out of their hands, Kennedy and Khrushchev did some tense but serious bargaining. Ultimately, they agreed that Khrushchev would remove the missiles, while Kennedy would issue a public pledge not to invade Cuba. Moreover, Kennedy would remove U.S. nuclear missiles from Turkey – reciprocal action that made sense to both men, although, for political reasons, Kennedy insisted on keeping the missile swap a secret. Thus, the missile crisis ended with a diplomatic solution.

Ironically, continued secrecy about the Cuba-Turkey missile swap, combined with illusions of smooth Kennedy administration calibrations of power spun by ExComm participants and the mass communications media, led to a long-term, comforting, and triumphalist picture of the missile crisis. Consequently, most Americans ended up with the impression that Kennedy stood firm in his demands, while Khrushchev “blinked.” It was a hawkish “lesson” – and a false one. As Sherwin points out, “the real lesson of the Cuban missile crisis . . . is that nuclear armaments create the perils they are deployed to prevent, but are of little use in resolving them.”

Although numerous books have been written about the Cuban missile crisis, Gambling with Armageddon ranks as the best of them. Factually detailed, clearly and dramatically written, and grounded in massive research, it is a work of enormous power and erudition. As such, it represents an outstanding achievement by one of the pre-eminent U.S. historians.

Like Sherwin’s other works, Gambling with Armageddon also grapples with one of the world’s major problems: the prospect of nuclear annihilation. At the least, it reveals that, while nuclear weapons exist, the world remains in peril. On a deeper level, it suggests the need to move beyond considerations of national security to international security, including the abolition of nuclear weapons and the peaceful resolution of conflict among nations.

Securing these goals might necessitate a long journey, but Sherwin’s writings remind us that, to safeguard human survival, there’s really no alternative to pressing forward with it.

Lawrence Wittner (http://lawrenceswittner.com) is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany.

BOOK REVIEW: A. Fonseca Pimentel, “Democratic World Government and the United Nations”

In Being a World Citizen, Book Review, Conflict Resolution, NGOs, Peacebuilding, Solidarity, The Search for Peace, Track II, United Nations, World Law on August 5, 2025 at 7:00 AM

By René Wadlow

A. Fonseca Pimentel, Democratic World Government and the United Nations.
Brasilia, Escopa Editions, 1980, 158pp.

The United Nations (UN) was created in the spirit of world citizenship (“We the Peoples…”). The history of the UN can be seen as the development of world citizen values and world law. The world community is in a period of vast transformation being brought about by powerful economic, political, and cultural agents to cope with the challenges of growing interdependence among all peoples and the growing impact of people on the natural environment.

Structures of world law are needed to provide a framework for this transformation. The UN General Assembly has proclaimed the standards of international law such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) which has become the world standard and guide for both regional and national human rights law. Such declarations are part of a trend of building and strengthening a world peace structure composed of world law and intergovernmental institutions which command such general acceptance that resort to world law will replace unilateral actions of States based on narrow domestic political considerations. Governments, business corporations, and transnational social movements are increasingly convinced that they all possess a stake in an orderly world society which can be endangered by the use of force.

However, as Pimentel points out, an orderly world society is not a world society without change. No rule of law is possible without sufficient methods for solving grievances.

Fonseca Pimentel was a Brazilian scholar and economist with long experience in public administration and as a UN advisor on administrative reforms. As he notes, “The dilemma facing the United Nations is to find a way to go further on the road to world citizenship.” At this time when there is armed violence in many parts of the world and consistent violations of human rights, he sets out the challenges clearly.

Prof. René Wadlow is President of the Association of World Citizens.

BOOK REVIEW: Peter L. Wilson, “Peacock Angel: The Esoteric Tradition of the Yezidis”

In Being a World Citizen, Book Review, Conflict Resolution, Cultural Bridges, Human Rights, Humanitarian Law, International Justice, Middle East & North Africa, Modern slavery, Peacebuilding, Refugees, Religious Freedom, Solidarity, Spirituality, Syria, The Search for Peace, United Nations, War Crimes, Women's Rights, World Law on August 4, 2025 at 5:55 PM

By René Wadlow

Peter L. Wilson, Peacock Angel: The Esoteric Tradition of the Yezidis.

Rochester, VT, Inner Traditions, 2022, 272pp.

Peter Wilson, a specialist on the Middle East, has written a useful book on the religious framework of the Yezidis as seen by someone outside the Yezidi faith. A Yezidi website has been established by Yezidis living in Nebraska, USA: https://yeziditruth.org.

The yearly Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought awarded by the European Parliament was given on October 27, 2016 to Nadia Murad who is also the co-laureate of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize. She had been taken captive by the forces of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in August 2014 and then sold into sexual slavery and forced marriage. She was able to escape with the help of a compassionate Muslim family and went to Germany as a refugee. She has become a spokesperson for the Yezidi, especially Yezidi women.

There are some 500,000 Yezidis, a Kurdish-speaking religious community living in northern Iraq. There were also some 200,000 Yezidis among the Kurds of Türkiye, but nearly all have migrated to Western Europe, primarily Germany as well as to Australia, Canada, and the USA.

There are also some Yezidi among Kurds living in Syria, Iran and Armenia. The Yezidis do not convert people. Thus, the religion continues only through birth into the community.

The structure of the Yezidi religious system is Zoroastrian, a faith born in Persia proclaiming that two great cosmic forces, that of light and good and that of darkness and evil are in constant battle. Humans are called upon to help light overcome darkness.

However, the strict dualistic thinking of Zoroastrianism was modified by another Persian prophet, Mani of Ctesiphon in the third century of the Common Era. Mani tried to create a synthesis of religious teachings that were increasingly coming into contact through travel and trade: Buddhism and Hinduism from India, Jewish and Christian thought, Hellenistic Gnostic philosophy from Egypt and Greece as well as many small belief systems.

Mani kept the Zoroastrian dualism as the most easily understood intellectual framework, though giving it a somewhat more Taoist (yin/yang) flexibility, Mani having traveled to China. He developed the idea of the progression of the soul by individual effort through reincarnation. Unfortunately, only the dualistic Zoroastrian framework is still attached to Mani’s name – Manichaeism. This is somewhat ironic as it was the Zoroastrian Magi who had him put to death as a dangerous rival.

Within the Mani-Zoroastrian framework, the Yezidi added the presence of angels who are to help humans in the constant battle for light and good, in particular Melek Tawsi, the peacock angel. Although there are angels in Islam, angels that one does not know could well be demons. Thus, the Yezidis are regularly accused of being “demon worshipers”.

The Yezidis have always been looked down upon by both their Muslim and Christian neighbors as “pagans”. The government of Saddam Hussein was opposed to the Yezidis not so much for their religious beliefs but rather because some Yezidis played important roles in the Kurdish community, seen as largely opposed to the government. The Yezidi community is still in socio-economic difficulty given the instability of the situation in Iraq.

Peter Wilson has written a useful introduction to this little-known faith.

Prof. René Wadlow is President of the Association of World Citizens.

BOOK REVIEW: Samuel Zipp, “The Idealist: Wendell Willkie’s Wartime Quest to Build One World”

In Being a World Citizen, Book Review, Conflict Resolution, Democracy, Peacebuilding, Solidarity, The Search for Peace, United States, World Law on August 4, 2025 at 6:40 AM

By Lawrence Wittner

Samuel Zipp, The Idealist: Wendell Willkie’s Wartime Quest to Build One World.

Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020

Wendell Willkie – successful lawyer and businessman, as well as a defeated candidate for U.S. President on the Republican Party ticket in 1940 – is a largely forgotten figure today. But, as Samuel Zipp reminds us, Willkie was extremely influential during World War II, when he launched a popular campaign for “global interdependence” or, as it became known, “One World.”

In this beautifully written and well researched book, Zipp, Professor of American Studies at Brown University, points out that, unlike the conservatives and isolationists in his party, Willkie was a liberal who had backed Woodrow Wilson’s call for a League of Nations, advocated racial equality, and usually supported President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policy of collective security.

Indeed, with World War II well underway, he and Roosevelt hatched a plan to have Willkie embark on a worldwide goodwill tour, by aircraft, from August to October 1942. This well-publicized venture was designed to demonstrate America’s political unity in wartime, foster support for the Allied powers, and provide a source of information on governmental and public opinion abroad.

Willkie – an informal, garrulous, likeable individual with a common touch – not only had great success along these lines, but was powerfully influenced by what he saw. Appalled by imperialism and racism and impressed by the demand for freedom of colonized or subordinate people in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, Willkie returned, as Zipp notes, convinced of the need to get Americans “to see the wider world through the lens of fraternity and cooperation.” He hoped to convince them that their independence “would require a new form of interdependence with the world,” one in harmony with “global desires for an end to empire and a guarantee of self-determination.”

Back in the United States, Willkie embarked on a round of interviews, speeches, and articles along these lines, capped off by the publication of an immensely popular book, One World. With sales topping 1.6 million copies by July, some observers called it the best-selling book in U.S. history. Furthermore, that June over 100 newspapers in the United States and abroad, with a combined circulation of over seven million readers, ran an abridged version in their pages. Using his celebrity status to assail both “narrow nationalism” and “imperialism,” Willkie produced what Zipp calls “a fleeting moment,” when he “showed the country an alternative possible future.”

But the moment passed. Nationalists and imperialists began to criticize this vision, the Republican Party repudiated his leadership, and, in October 1944, Willkie – only 52 years of age – died of a heart attack. Although, after the atomic bombing of Japan, world federalist and nuclear disarmament groups adopted “One World or None” as their slogan, the idea of egalitarian global interdependence gradually lost favor, despite its occasional revival by environmentalists and others.

Even so, Zipp concludes, Willkie’s “diagnosis of the value of global interdependence has never been more prescient,” while “his warnings about the perils of racially charged ‘narrow nationalism’ have never been more indispensable.”

Lawrence Wittner (http://lawrenceswittner.com) is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany.

BOOK REVIEW: Robert K. Musil, “Rachel Carson and Her Sisters: Extraordinary Women Who Have Shaped America’s Environment”

In Book Review, Environmental protection, Human Rights, Literature, Solidarity, Women's Rights on July 31, 2025 at 7:00 AM

By Lawrence Wittner

Robert K. Musil, Rachel Carson and Her Sisters: Extraordinary Women Who Have Shaped America’s Environment.

New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014

Despite the central role of women in the environmental movement, surprisingly little is known about them. Furthermore, what is known is usually limited to the work of Rachel Carson, whose powerful call to action, Silent Spring (1962), is widely credited with jump-starting the modern environmental movement. But, as shown by Robert Musil’s new book, Rachel Carson and Her Sisters, Carson is merely the most visible of numerous women who have had a powerful impact upon how Americans have viewed the natural environment and sought to preserve it.

Musil, who is senior fellow at the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University, first became intrigued with Carson’s life in 2007, when, 43 years after her death, rightwing talk show hosts launched vicious attacks upon her. “I wanted to know more about the roots of such venom,” he recalled. He soon “realized that there had been other Rachel Carsons long before she was born, and that many women have built on her legacy since her untimely death.”

Musil points out that, as the nineteenth century progressed, increasing numbers of American women obtained better education and the ability to travel, write, and take action. They hiked, explored, and botanized, while observing the encroachment of manufacturing and urban life on the countryside. Although restricted by gender discrimination from playing top roles in academia, the professions, and publishing, they nonetheless produced a flood of books, magazine articles, journals, and children’s stories, many of them about nature. In addition, Martha Maxwell began the development of natural history museums, while Susan Fenimore Cooper became active in the movement to stop the slaughter of birds for fashionable women’s hats.

Cooper, daughter of the famed American novelist, was immensely influential. Her book, Rural Hours (1850), a best-selling environmental work, underwent four decades of popular publication and revision, in the United States and overseas. Numerous very popular writings of hers followed. Fluent in three languages and often residing abroad, Cooper moved in the highest circles of intellectuals, scientists, and naturalists.

Other key activists included Graceanna Lewis (a popular ornithologist, as well as a painter); Ada Botsford Comstock (who spread nature study throughout the nation); Florence Merriam Bailey (an organizer of bird-lovers and the most eminent female naturalist writer and organizer of her time who was well-connected to the male-dominated worlds of science and Washington policy); Olive Thorne Miller (a children’s author and environmental educator); and Mary Hunter Austin (a well-known writer about nature but, also, a campaigner against the diversion of water resources to insatiable Los Angeles). By the twentieth century, a nationwide conservation movement had taken shape―one within which women played an important role.

Many of these women lived unorthodox lives. Maxwell, though a vegetarian, gathered her animal and bird specimens by shooting them with a rifle―something considered scandalous when done by women. Lewis was active in the Underground Railroad and the women’s suffrage movement. Bailey combined her ornithology with social work. Austin, a poet and mystic, wrote thirty books, was friends with Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Willa Cather, and was active in the suffrage and birth control movements.

Their pioneering work was later supplemented by Ellen Swallow Richards and Alice Hamilton, who were keenly attuned to the growing industrial age in America and focused their attention on the plight of poor workers and urban landscapes.

Richards, who first introduced the concept of ecology to the United States, launched associations, founded disciplines, and pioneered health and environmental studies. The first American woman admitted to a high-level science institute of any kind, she performed brilliantly in her field of chemistry. She was also, Musil observes, “in effect, the founder of the American consumer, nutrition, health, and right-to-know movements.” In addition, Richards was a founder of what became the American Association of University Women and chaired its executive committee, authored numerous books, organized the scientific examination of food, and helped the Massachusetts legislature pass the nation’s first pure food laws. She completed the most comprehensive water quality survey in the nation, which sparked the state’s first water quality laws and sewage treatment, and led the campaign to expose the dangerous health conditions in Boston’s schools, thus stirring local and nationwide school reforms.

Hamilton, “the founder of occupational and environmental medicine in the United States,” was trained as a doctor. Employed at the Women’s Medical School of Northwestern University in Chicago, she went to live in Hull House, an institution that drew a number of women environmental activists into its orbit. Here she began to focus on occupational and environmental disease. In 1908, the Governor of Illinois appointed her as the chief medical investigator of a new nine-member commission to study industrial disease in the state. Turning up dramatic indications of lead poisoning, she spoke at numerous conferences and was invited by the U.S. Commissioner of Labor to conduct a nationwide study of the lead industry. A new state law regulating lead, the first in the nation, was passed in Illinois, and similar laws followed elsewhere. While continuing to expose industrial conditions, Hamilton became deeply involved in the peace movement during World War I, attending peace congresses and supporting peace plans developed by Jane Addams and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. After the war, she joined the faculty of the Harvard Medical School as assistant professor of industrial medicine. Thriving in this role, Hamilton became the leading American expert on diseases caused by exposure to industrial pollutants, such as benzene, mercury, and lead.

Many women activists experienced substantial gender discrimination, and were passed over for appointments or denied admission to academic and other institutions. Richards was initially rejected for admission to MIT as a regular student and, despite her later outstanding record, was subsequently refused admission to its doctoral program. Offered a position at Johns Hopkins, Anna Baetjer was informed that it was contingent on promising not to marry. Hamilton was told, when hired at Harvard, that she would not be allowed to use the faculty club or to sit on the platform with male faculty at commencement.

Musil shows that, although Carson herself worked well with men, her deepest influences, relationships, networks and insights, her love of nature and science, her influential and political contacts, and her intimate personal support came from women. In the early 1940s, she and her associates were concerned about the possible toxic effects of DDT. But, when Reader’s Digest rejected her 1945 proposal to write an article on DDT’s dangers, she turned the direction of her freelance writing elsewhere, ultimately producing The Sea Around Us (1951), a best-seller that made her famous. Now financially secure, she left her job at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to concentrate on writing. She worked closely with environmental activists in planning, researching, and writing Silent Spring and, together, they conducted an enormous publicity and organizing campaign for the book, which achieved their goal of alerting the public to the dangers of pesticides and securing government reform. Deeply committed to this cause, as well as to ending nuclear weapons testing, she continued to write Silent Spring, appear on television, and testify before Congress while she was dying of breast cancer.

After Carson’s death, women’s leadership in the environmental movement continued. Terry Tempest Williams, an environmental writer and antinuclear activist, relied, like Carson, on imagination, empathy, and science, and, Musil remarks, was her “metaphorical” and “spiritual daughter.” Another key writer and activist was Sandra Steingraber, who focused on environmental cancer. A poet and biologist, Steingraber played an important role in securing the Stockholm treaty of 1981, which banned persistent organic pollutants (such as pesticides)―a treaty that has yet to be ratified by the U.S. Senate. There was also Devra Davis―a passionate writer who argued that millions had died from modern industrial pollution, and more would in the future, unless remedial action was taken. Moreover, Theo Colborn, a former pharmacist and sheep rancher, became a leading environmental researcher, exposing how synthetic chemicals (such as PCBs) caused animal and human endocrine disruption.

Musil emphasizes the enormous corporate resistance to environmental safety. Although lead is a neurotoxin that lowers IQ and impairs mental performance, “the National Lead Company fought product labelling, not to mention bans; brought lawsuits; and finally, when the danger was undeniable,” blamed children and their families when children consumed lead paint chips. The DuPont Corporation squelched research showing the connection between the chemical dyes in its factories and cancer. The auto corporations battled against the Clean Air Act of 1970. There was also a sharp struggle over leaded gasoline, which had been an issue since the 1920s, when Standard Oil and the Ethyl Corporation “went to great lengths to keep industrial fatalities secret.” The Electric Power Research Institute (the industry group representing coal-fired utilities) hired researchers to challenge any evidence, methodology, or doubt about the hazards of burning coal. When Dow Chemical’s own research revealed that benzene was causing damage to chromosomes, the company pulled the plug on funding for the research. Also, industry fought fiercely―and successfully―every attempt to restrict, remove, or ban cancer-causing, arsenic-treated wood used for children’s playgrounds, outdoor decks, and picnic tables.

Hostile corporations also savagely attacked leading environmental activists. Mary Amdur, “the mother of smog research,” was not only fired and blocked from securing tenured employment, but directly threatened by thugs who demanded that she not deliver a talk to the American Industrial Hygiene Association on the ill effects of smog. (She gave it anyway.) Colborn had her M.A. thesis defense interfered with by the head of operations of a mining corporation, angered by the potential impact of her research. According to Musil, when her powerful book, Our Stolen Future, appeared in 1996, “industry, its PR men, and its political allies went berserk.”

Much the same happened to Carson. As Musil notes, when Silent Spring appeared, she was “immediately faced with an attack campaign orchestrated by the Manufacturing Chemists Association and its corporate allies like DuPont, Monsanto, Dow, and W.R. Grace. Publishers were threatened with lawsuits; public forums were created with doctors and scientists willing to attack Carson.” Monsanto even published a parody of her work. She was assailed as a “peace-nut,” as well as “denounced by critics as a spinster, unscientific, a pro-communist, and more.”

Musil contends that, despite the corporate assault on environmental activism, the environmental movement has grown into “the largest reform movement in American history.” In Washington, DC alone, there exist 34 national environmental organizations with an estimated twelve million dues-paying members, millions more electronic activists, and local chapters in every state in the nation. And women remain at the center of the campaign.

Thus, the struggle continues. Musil concludes that “those who pollute and plunder have huge resources at their command. They challenge serious science, real reform, and . . . block every reasonable effort to build a better, healthier environment for our children and generations yet to come.” Nevertheless, “their sway is slowly, steadily, being reduced over time by the determination of ordinary citizens. . . . We can draw inspiration and leadership from the long line of American women who somehow defied the cinched circumstances and enervated expectations for their gender to become extraordinary leaders of many kinds. They have brought us thus far,” and “we can start now down the path that they have set before us.”

People who want to learn more about this path can turn to Rachel Carson and Her Sisters for a richly detailed, documented, and eloquent history―a ground-breaking account of undaunted American women, determined to prevent environmental catastrophe.

Lawrence Wittner (http://lawrenceswittner.com) is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany.

BOOK REVIEW: Allen Pietrobon, “Norman Cousins: Peacemaker in the Atomic Age”

In Being a World Citizen, Book Review, Conflict Resolution, Nuclear weapons, Peacebuilding, Solidarity, The Search for Peace, World Law on July 31, 2025 at 7:00 AM

By Lawrence Wittner

Allen Pietrobon, Norman Cousins: Peacemaker in the Atomic Age.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022

Although Norman Cousins was a major figure in U.S. and world affairs during his lifetime (1915-1990), this is the first book-length biography of that extraordinary individual.

The book, written by Allen Pietrobon, an Assistant Professor of Global Affairs at Trinity Washington University, argues that, unlike many peace activists during the Cold War, Cousins had “an enormous impact on domestic politics and international relations.” The key to this impact, Pietrobon observes, was Cousins’s role, for 35 years, as editor of the Saturday Review, which he built into the third most popular public affairs magazine in the United States, with a circulation of 650,000. This role enabled him to have a significant impact upon public opinion and, also, to build up a network of connections with prominent individuals, including Adlai Stevenson, Nikita Khrushchev, Pope John XXIII, Albert Schweitzer, Norman Thomas, Jawaharlal Nehru, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many more.

According to Pietrobon, the atomic bombing of Japan set the course for Cousins’s peace advocacy. That bombing, Cousins wrote in Modern Man Is Obsolete, “marked the violent death of one stage in man’s history and the beginning of another.” It meant that war, which had persisted throughout human history, finally had to be ended, for, given the advent of nuclear weapons, the alternative was global suicide. And war could only be ended, Cousins maintained, by establishing a world government.

Naturally, then, Cousins, gravitated toward aiding victims of the atomic bombing, promoting world federalism (for example, leading United World Federalists and, later, the World Federalist Association), founding and co-chairing the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), brokering the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, and improving East-West relations. In addition, he sought to end the wars in Vietnam and Biafra and, from 1948 to 1964, gave an estimated 2,100 speeches for peace. He also worked to assist victims of Nazi “medical experiments,” prepared speeches for U.S. presidential candidates and presidents, and from 1940 to 1964 alone, published just under 600 editorials and wrote or edited ten books.

In compiling this excellent account of Cousins’ busy and productive life, Pietrobon has drawn upon Cousins’s lengthy correspondence (located at UCLA), his extensive published writings, interviews with his daughters, and relevant manuscript materials at U.S. presidential libraries, the German Federal Archives, and Princeton University.

Although Pietrobon has done an outstanding job of pulling together many facets of Cousins’s extraordinary career and grounding them in the relevant sources, some areas would have benefited from further exploration. For example, Cousins was probably the most important figure in the history of SANE and of the U.S. branch of the world federalist movement. And yet his role in many of SANE’s internal operations―including its ordeal over the role of Communists in its ranks―is not examined. Nor, for that matter, is his presidency of the World Federalist Association from 1976 to 1990.

Overall, though, readers will learn much from this fine study of one of the most prominent figures in the 20th century peace movement.

Lawrence Wittner (http://lawrenceswittner.com) is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany.

Opposing the Death Penalty: The Fight Goes On

In Current Events, Democracy, Human Rights, International Justice, Middle East & North Africa, NGOs, Religious Freedom, Solidarity, United Nations, World Law on July 29, 2025 at 7:45 PM

By René Wadlow

In a July 28, 2025 statement, the United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, called for a moratorium on capital punishment in Iran where at least 48 persons are currently on death row. According to information gathered by the UN Human Rights Office in Geneva, at least 612 persons were reportedly executed in the first half of 2025. Minorities continue to be disproportionately affected by executions.

Religious minorities in Iran include Sunni Muslims, Christians, Baha’is, Zoroastrians, Jews, and the Gonabali Sufi community. Religious and ethnic identities in Iran often overlap.

(C) Amnesty International

Türk added, “Information received by my Office also indicates that judicial proceedings in a number of cases, often held behind closed doors, have consistently failed to meet due process and fair trial guarantees…The death penalty is incompatible with the right to life and irreconcilable with human dignity. Instead of accelerating executions, I urge Iran join the worldwide movement abolishing capital punishment starting with a moratorium on all executions.”

The Association of World Citizens has repeatedly called upon governments for a moratorium on executions with a view of abolishing the death penalty – a penalty that extensive research has shown has little or no impact on the level of crime and too often opens doors to judicial errors and injustices.

Prof. René Wadlow is President of the Association of World Citizens.

BOOK REVIEW: Lesley M. M. Blume, “Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World”

In Being a World Citizen, Book Review, Conflict Resolution, Nonviolence, Nuclear weapons, Peacebuilding, Solidarity, The Search for Peace, World Law on July 29, 2025 at 4:00 PM

By Lawrence Wittner

Lesley M. M. Blume, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World.

New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020

In this crisply-written, well-researched book, Lesley Blume, a journalist and biographer, tells the fascinating story of the background to John Hersey’s pathbreaking article, “Hiroshima,” and of its extraordinary impact upon the world.

In 1945, although only 30 years of age, Hersey was a very prominent war correspondent for Time magazine—a key part of publisher Henry Luce’s magazine empire—and living in the fast lane. That year, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, A Bell for Adano, which had already been adapted into a movie and a Broadway play. Born the son of missionaries in China, Hersey had been educated at upper class, elite institutions, including the Hotchkiss School, Yale, and Cambridge. During the war, Hersey’s wife, Frances Ann, a former lover of young Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, arranged for the three of them to get together over dinner. Kennedy impressed Hersey with the story of how he saved his surviving crew members after a Japanese destroyer rammed his boat, PT-109. This led to a dramatic article by Hersey on the subject—one rejected by the Luce publications but published by the New Yorker. The article launched Kennedy on his political career and, as it turned out, provided Hersey with the bridge to a new employer – the one that sent him on his historic mission to Japan.

Blume reveals that, at the time of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Hersey felt a sense of despair—not for the bombing’s victims, but for the future of the world. He was even more disturbed by the atomic bombing of Nagasaki only three days later, which he considered a “totally criminal” action that led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

Most Americans at the time did not share Hersey’s misgivings about the atomic bombings. A Gallup poll taken on August 8, 1945 found that 85 percent of American respondents expressed their support for “using the new atomic bomb on Japanese cities.”

Blume shows very well how this approval of the atomic bombing was enhanced by U.S. government officials and the very compliant mass communications media. Working together, they celebrated the power of the new American weapon that, supposedly, had brought the war to an end, by producing articles lauding the bombing mission and pictures of destroyed buildings. What was omitted was the human devastation, the horror of what the atomic bombing had done physically and psychologically to an almost entirely civilian population—the flesh roasted off bodies, the eyeballs melting, the terrible desperation of mothers digging with their hands through the charred rubble for their dying children.

The strange new radiation sickness produced by the bombing was either denied or explained away as of no consequence. “Japanese reports of death from radioactive effects of atomic bombing are pure propaganda,” General Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, told the New York Times. Later, when, it was no longer possible to deny the existence of radiation sickness, Groves told a Congressional committee that it was actually “a very pleasant way to die.”

When it came to handling the communications media, U.S. government officials had some powerful tools at their disposal. In Japan, General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander of the U.S. occupation regime, saw to it that strict U.S. military censorship was imposed on the Japanese press and other forms of publication, which were banned from discussing the atomic bombing. As for foreign newspaper correspondents (including Americans), they needed permission from the occupation authorities to enter Japan, to travel within Japan, to remain in Japan, and even to obtain food in Japan. American journalists were taken on carefully controlled junkets to Hiroshima, after which they were told to downplay any unpleasant details of what they had seen there.

In September 1945, U.S. newspaper and magazine editors received a letter from the U.S. War Department, on behalf of President Harry Truman, asking them to restrict information in their publications about the atomic bomb. If they planned to do any publishing in this area of concern, they were to submit the articles to the War Department for review.

Among the recipients of this warning were Harold Ross, the founder and editor of the New Yorker, and William Shawn, the deputy editor of that publication. The New Yorker, originally founded as a humor magazine, was designed by Ross to cater to urban sophisticates and covered the world of nightclubs and chorus girls. But, with the advent of the Second World War, Ross decided to scrap the hijinks flavor of the magazine and begin to publish some serious journalism.

As a result, Hersey began to gravitate into the New Yorker’s orbit. Hersey was frustrated with his job at Time magazine, which either rarely printed his articles or rewrote them atrociously. At one point, he angrily told publisher Henry Luce that there was as much truthful reporting in Time magazine as in Pravda. In July 1945, Hersey finally quit his job with Time. Then, late that fall, he sat down with William Shawn of the New Yorker to discuss some ideas he had for articles, one of them about Hiroshima.

Hersey had concluded that the mass media had missed the real story of the Hiroshima bombing. And the result was that the American people were becoming accustomed to the idea of a nuclear future, with the atomic bomb as an acceptable weapon of war. Appalled by what he had seen in the Second World War—from the firebombing of cities to the Nazi concentration camps—Hersey was horrified by what he called “the depravity of man,” which, he felt, rested upon the dehumanization of others. Against this backdrop, Hersey and Shawn concluded that he should try to enter Japan and report on what had really happened there.

Getting into Japan would not be easy. The U.S. Occupation authorities exercised near-total control over who could enter the stricken nation, keeping close tabs on all journalists who applied to do so, including records on their whereabouts, their political views, and their attitudes toward the occupation. Nearly every day, General MacArthur received briefings about the current press corps, with summaries of their articles. Furthermore, once admitted, journalists needed permission to travel anywhere within the country, and were allotted only limited time for these forays.

Even so, Hersey had a number of things going for him. During the war, he was a very patriotic reporter. He had written glowing profiles about rank-and-file U.S. soldiers, as well as a book (Men on Bataan) that provided a flattering portrait of General MacArthur. This fact certainly served Hersey well, for the general was a consummate egotist. Apparently as a consequence, Hersey received authorization to visit Japan.

En route there in the spring of 1946, Hersey spent some time in China, where, on board a U.S. warship, he came down with the flu. While convalescing, he read Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which tracked the different lives of five people in Peru who were killed when a bridge upon which they stood collapsed. Hersey and Shawn had already decided that he should tell the story of the Hiroshima bombing from the victims’ point of view. But Hersey now realized that Wilder’s book had given him a particularly poignant, engrossing way of telling a complicated story. Practically everyone could identify with a group of regular people going about their daily routines as catastrophe suddenly struck them.

Hersey arrived in Tokyo on May 24, 1946, and two days later, received permission to travel to Hiroshima, with his time in that city limited to 14 days.

Entering Hiroshima, Hersey was stunned by the damage he saw. In Blume’s words, there were “miles of jagged misery and three-dimensional evidence that humans—after centuries of contriving increasingly efficient ways to exterminate masses of other humans—had finally invented the means with which to decimate their entire civilization.” Now there existed what one reporter called “teeming jungles of dwelling places . . . in a welter of ashes and rubble.” As residents attempted to clear the ground to build new homes, they uncovered masses of bodies and severed limbs. A cleanup campaign in one district of the city alone at about that time unearthed a thousand corpses. Meanwhile, the city’s surviving population was starving, with constant new deaths from burns, other dreadful wounds, and radiation poisoning.

Given the time limitations of his permit, Hersey had to work fast. And he did, interviewing dozens of survivors, although he eventually narrowed down his cast of characters to six of them.

Departing from Hiroshima’s nightmare of destruction, Hersey returned to the United States to prepare the story that was to run in the New Yorker to commemorate the atomic bombing. He decided that the article would have to read like a novel. “Journalism allows its readers to witness history,” he later remarked. “Fiction gives readers the opportunity to live it.” His goal was “to have the reader enter into the characters, become the characters, and suffer with them.”

When Hersey produced a sprawling 30,000 word draft, the New Yorker’s editors at first planned to publish it in serialized form. But Shawn decided that running it this way wouldn’t do, for the story would lose its pace and impact. Rather than have Hersey reduce the article to a short report, Shawn had a daring idea. Why not run the entire article in one issue of the magazine, with everything else—the “Talk of the Town” pieces, the fiction, the other articles and profiles, and the urbane cartoons—banished from the issue?

Ross, Shawn, and Hersey now sequestered themselves in a small room at the New Yorker’s headquarters, furiously editing Hersey’s massive article. Ross and Shawn decided to keep the explosive forthcoming issue a top secret from the magazine’s staff. Indeed, the staff were kept busy working on a “dummy” issue that they thought would be going to press. Contributors to that issue were baffled when they didn’t receive proofs for their articles and accompanying artwork. Nor were the New Yorker’s advertisers told what was about to happen. As Blume remarks: “The makers of Chesterfield cigarettes, Perma-Lift brassieres, Lux toilet soap, and Old Overholt rye whiskey would just have to find out along with everyone else in the world that their ads would be run alongside Hersey’s grisly story of nuclear apocalypse.”

However, things don’t always proceed as smoothly as planned. On August 1, 1946, President Truman signed into law the Atomic Energy Act, which established a “restricted” standard for “all data concerning the manufacture or utilization of atomic weapons.” Anyone who disseminated that data “with any reason to believe that such data” could be used to harm the United States could face substantial fines and imprisonment. Furthermore, if it could be proved that the individual was attempting to “injure the United States,” he or she could “be punished by death or imprisonment for life.”

In these new circumstances, what should Ross, Shawn, and Hersey do? They could kill the story, water it down, or run it and risk severe legal action against them. After agonizing over their options, they decided to submit Hersey’s article to the War Department—and, specifically, to General Groves—for clearance.

Why did they take that approach? Blume speculates that the New Yorker team thought that Groves might insist upon removing any technical information from the article while leaving the account of the sufferings of the Japanese intact. After all, Groves believed that the Japanese deserved what had happened to them, and could not imagine that other Americans might disagree. Furthermore, the article, by underscoring the effectiveness of the atomic bombing of Japan, bolstered his case that the war had come to an end because of his weapon. Finally, Groves was keenly committed to maintaining U.S. nuclear supremacy in the world, and he believed that an article that led Americans to fear nuclear attacks by other nations would foster support for a U.S. nuclear buildup.

The gamble paid off. Although Groves did demand changes, these were minor and did not affect the accounts by the survivors.

On August 29, 1946, copies of the “Hiroshima” edition of the New Yorker arrived on newsstands and in mailboxes across the United States, and it quickly created an enormous sensation, particularly in the mass media. Editors from more than thirty states applied to excerpt portions of the article, and newspapers from across the nation ran front-page banner stories and urgent editorials about its revelations. Correspondence from every region of the United States poured into the New Yorker’s office. A large number of readers expressed pity for the victims of the bombing. But an even greater number expressed deep fear about what the advent of nuclear war meant for the survival of the human race.

Of course, not all readers approved of Hersey’s report on the atomic bombing. Some reacted by canceling their subscriptions to the New Yorker. Others assailed the article as antipatriotic, Communist propaganda, designed to undermine the United States. Still others dismissed it as pro-Japanese propaganda or, as one reader remarked, written “in very bad taste.”

Some newspapers denounced it. The New York Daily News derided it as a stunt and “propaganda aimed at persuading us to stop making atom bombs . . . and to give our technical bomb secrets away . . . to Russia.” Not surprisingly, Henry Luce was infuriated that his former star journalist had achieved such an enormous success writing for a rival publication, and had Hersey’s portrait removed from Time Inc.’s gallery of honor.

Despite the criticism, “Hiroshima” continued to attract enormous attention in the mass media. The ABC Radio Network did a reading of the lengthy article over four nights, with no acting, no music, no special effects, and no commercials. “This chronicle of suffering and destruction,” it announced, was being “broadcast as a warning that what happened to the people of Hiroshima could next happen anywhere.” After the broadcasts, the network’s telephone switchboards were swamped by callers, and the program was judged to have received the highest rating of any public interest broadcast that had ever occurred. The BBC also broadcast an adaptation of “Hiroshima,” while some 500 U.S. radio stations reported on the article in the days following its release.

In the United States, the Alfred Knopf publishing house came out with the article in book form, which was quickly promoted by the Book-of-the-Month Club as “destined to be the most widely read book of our generation.” Ultimately, Hiroshima sold millions of copies in nations around the world. By the late fall of 1946, the rather modest and retiring Hersey, who had gone into hiding after the article’s publication to avoid interviews, was rated as one of the “Ten Outstanding Celebrities of 1946,” along with General Dwight Eisenhower and singer Bing Crosby.

For U.S. government officials, reasonably content with past public support for the atomic bombing and a nuclear-armed future, Hersey’s success in reaching the public with his disturbing account of nuclear war confronted them with a genuine challenge. For the most part, U.S. officials recognized that they had what Blume calls “a serious post-`Hiroshima’ image problem.”

Behind the scenes, James B. Conant, the top scientist in the Manhattan Project, joined President Truman in badgering Henry Stimson, the former U.S. Secretary of War, to produce a defense of the atomic bombing. Provided with an advance copy of the article, to be published in Harper’s, Conant told Stimson that it was just what was needed, for they could not have allowed “the propaganda against the use of the atomic bomb . . . to go unchecked.”

Although the New Yorker’s editors sought to arrange for publication of the book version of “Hiroshima” in the Soviet Union, this proved impossible. Instead, Soviet authorities banned the book in their nation. Pravda fiercely assailed Hersey, claiming that “Hiroshima” was nothing more than an American scare tactic, a fiction that “relishes the torments of six people after the explosion of the atomic bomb.” Another Soviet publication called Hersey an American spy who embodied his country’s militarism and had helped to inflict upon the world a “propaganda of aggression, strongly reminiscent of similar manifestations in Nazi Germany.”

Ironically, the Soviet attack upon Hersey didn’t make him any more acceptable to the U.S. government. In 1950, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover assigned FBI field agents to research, monitor, and interview Hersey, on whom the Bureau had already opened a file. During the FBI interview with Hersey, agents questioned him closely about his trip to Hiroshima.

Not surprisingly, U.S. occupation authorities did their best to ban the appearance of “Hiroshima” in Japan. Hersey’s six protagonists had to wait months before they could finally read the article, which was smuggled to them. In fact, some of Hersey’s characters were not aware that they had been included in the story or that the article had even been written until they received the contraband copies. MacArthur managed to block publication of the book in Japan for years until, after intervention by the Authors’ League of America, he finally relented. It appeared in April 1949, and immediately became a best-seller.

Hersey, still a young man at the time, lived on for decades thereafter, writing numerous books, mostly works of fiction, and teaching at Yale. He continued to be deeply concerned about the fate of a nuclear-armed world—proud of his part in stirring up resistance to nuclear war and, thereby, helping to prevent it.

The conclusion drawn by Blume in this book is much like Hersey’s. As she writes, “Graphically showing what nuclear warfare does to humans, `Hiroshima’ has played a major role in preventing nuclear war since the end of World War II.”

A secondary theme in the book is the role of a free press. Blume observes that “Hersey and his New Yorker editors created `Hiroshima’ in the belief that journalists must hold accountable those in power. They saw a free press as essential to the survival of democracy.” She does, too.

Overall, Blume’s book would provide the basis for a very inspiring movie, for at its core is something many Americans admire: action taken by a few people who triumph against all odds.

But the actual history is somewhat more complicated. Even before the publication of “Hiroshima,” a significant number of people were deeply disturbed by the atomic bombing of Japan. For some, especially pacifists, the bombing was a moral atrocity. An even larger group feared that the advent of nuclear weapons portended the destruction of the world. Traditional pacifist organizations, newly-formed atomic scientist groups, and a rapidly-growing world government movement launched a dramatic antinuclear campaign in the late 1940s around the slogan, “One World or None.” Curiously, this uprising against nuclear weapons is almost entirely absent from Blume’s book.

Even so, Blume has written a very illuminating, interesting, and important work—one that reminds us that daring, committed individuals can help to create a better world.

Lawrence Wittner (http://lawrenceswittner.com) is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany.

BOOK REVIEW: Lawrence S. Wittner, “Working for Peace and Justice”

In Being a World Citizen, Book Review, Conflict Resolution, Nonviolence, Nuclear weapons, Peacebuilding, Solidarity, The Search for Peace, United Nations, World Law on July 28, 2025 at 8:15 PM

By René Wadlow

Lawrence S. Wittner, Working for Peace and Justice

Knoxville, TN/University of Tennessee Press, 2012, 268pp.

Laurence Wittner has written a very moving account of his efforts as an activist for peace and social justice. At this present time, when such efforts are very necessary, the memoir is a guideline for concerted efforts, both the joys and the difficulties.

Wittner was largely based at the State University of New York at Albany, which is the administrative capital of New York, home of the governor, although New York City has a much larger population and is a center of economic, cultural, and political power.

In the fall of 2005, his long-time activity in the peace movement combined with his books on anti-nuclear weapons such as Struggle Against the Bomb and Toward Nuclear Abolition, both published by Stanford University Press) led to his election to the national board of Peace Action, the largest, broadly based United States (U.S.) peace organization with some 100,000 members. Thus, he writes on activities at the local level, mostly Albany, as well as at the national level with the factionalism and sectarianism that have often characterized Left movements such as democratic socialism in which Wittner was active.

Yet, as he writes, “Over the course of history, there are heartening indications that people of goodwill and determination have made headway in pulling humanity out of the nightmare of ignorance, superstition, slavery, tyranny, exploitation and militarism that has characterized the past. In my own lifetime I have seen courageous people topple dictatorships, shatter systems of racial oppression, roll back corporate domination, bring an end to unjust wars and avert a nuclear holocaust. And I am confident that efforts to extend human progress will continue.”

Progress requires organizing, persistence, and a sense of community with those with whom one is working. For Wittner, music was an important activist tool; he played the guitar and often performed songs at political meetings.

There is much to be done to create a harmonious world society, and Working for Peace and Justice sets out important paths of action.

Prof. René Wadlow is President of the Association of World Citizens.

Thailand-Cambodia: Good Faith Negotiations Needed

In Asia, Being a World Citizen, Conflict Resolution, Current Events, NGOs, Nonviolence, Peacebuilding, Solidarity, The Search for Peace, Track II, United Nations, World Law on July 26, 2025 at 9:50 AM

THAILAND-CAMBODIA: GOOD FAITH NEGOTIATIONS NEEDED

The Association of World Citizens (AWC) expresses deep concern over the rising political tensions and military clashes between Thailand and Cambodia which has led to a large displacement of civilians from the border areas.

On July 24, 2025, Cambodian forces launched artillery attacks on civilian targets in Thai territory, and Thailand responded with airstrikes on Cambodia. Landmines have been set in the contested border areas. The AWC has long been active against the use of landmines. This escalation of Thai-Cambodian tensions risks a destabilization of both governments and societies.

Therefore, the AWC calls for an immediate ceasefire and the start of negotiations in good faith.

Prof. René Wadlow, President of the Association of World Citizens