Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2025
This has been a short history of a long campaign. Yet after many decades of protest, no end to nuclear weapons is in sight. Most states have signed a treaty against nuclear proliferation and many have signed one to abolish nuclear weapons, but proliferation continues, both horizontally to new states and vertically in the enhanced weaponry of both recognized and unrecognized nuclear powers. In 2023, nine states had over 12,500 nuclear warheads between them, over 11,000 of which belonged to the USA and Russia, and the UK and France remained the only other states to actually deploy the weapons (SIPRI 2023: 248).
Over this time, states have evolved ways of managing war without using nuclear weapons and society has lived with the threat of nuclear annihilation. Although the danger never disappeared – it needs only one sequence of misjudged reactions to cause a global catastrophe – at times even antinuclear activists ceased to believe in it. Bruce Kent, whose campaigning spanned almost the entire period of this book, commented nine years before he died that in the old days, CND used The War Game to arouse fear of nuclear weapons, but “nobody believes there's going to be a nuclear war today, so there's no point in playing the fear card” (Kirby 2013: 22).
It is increasingly difficult to remain so sanguine. The idea of a pervasive “nuclear taboo” does not entirely convince (Freedman 2013), and nearly 40 years after the peace movement helped end the Cold War, NATO and Russia have come closer than ever to a hot war in Europe, while something like a cold war is developing between the USA and China. In 2022–3, Russia engaged in nuclear blackmail, and although NATO limited its military support for Ukraine so as not to provoke Russian nuclear use, it was not only CND that said that the danger was greater than for decades.
Weapons technology and strategic thinking are also changing, with some analysts raising the spectre of a “third nuclear age” (Futter & Zala 2021; Crilley 2023). If the first centred on the prospect of mutually assured destruction by the superpowers and the second saw the West countering the proliferation of WMD to hostile regimes, in the third, it is argued, “strategic non-nuclear weapons” will blur the line between conventional and nuclear war.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge-org.demo.remotlog.com is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.