Transcripts For CSPAN3 Cold War Peace Politics 20240713

Associate professor of history at temple university. Shes a specialist in transnational culture, gender history and the history of cultural globalization. Shes a coeditor of the one of the most important journals in the field, diplomatic history. And her publications include two books. Now, of course, politics of peace published by oxford this year. Its based on this book that she will be speaking to us today. She has coedited two books, the human rights revolution, oxford 2012, and the oxford handbook of the cold war published in 2013. Today she will be speaking on, quote, if you want peace, detours on the path to politics of peace in the early cold war. You have the floor. Thank you very much. Thanks to christian, eric, to peter, rachel and everybody else who makes this possible for inviting me. Its a great honor to be here. I was embarrassed to have to admit i had never been here. Im going to try and make an effort, because i realize philadelphia is not that far from washington, at least by train. I can do this in one day back and forth. Writing a book as im sure some of you in this audience know is not an easy feat. Without some personal investment in it, most of us never finish it. So i want to actually start this talk by telling you a little bit more about what led me to write a book about peace in the first place, including some of the detours in my case not orwellian. I put a picture. My sister is very design oriented. She always when she was a teenager, she wanted white books. I said, i have to have a white book so she puts it on her shelf. I got that wish. Im a child of the 60s, which meant that i missed theidi exci was taught in west germany were called the 68ers. As a became politically conscious, i got a good dose of that 60s ideas of the 60ss ideas in my history, social studies and literature classes. My political maturation coincided with the ascent of the green party in germany, which was really a rare instance of an extra Parliamentary Movement making the transition into a political party. Im still in awe today as how much power they have actually gained and are still maybe. I dont know. The early 80s saw the revival of the Antinuclear Movement in the United States. As you remember, it was the Freeze Movement led by ted densy. In euro in europe, the double track decision of 1979. The stationing of midrange Nuclear Missiles in western europe. This led to massive demonstrations. I was too chicken to go and march. I didnt. I didnt even sign petitions. I was interested in it. I did go in 1983 when i was in london for a year, i did go to a demonstration there, which i later found out was billed as the biggest antinuclear demonstration in british history. So i actually had to leave my country in order to be brave enough to participate in some kind of mass political movement. So these experienced did not drive me toward writing this book. But they did help shape the direction it took once i got started. My original idea actually was to research the transnational connections of the student and civil rights activists in the 1960s, to write a transNational History of the 1960s new left. I hoped to find a lot of personal interactions between americans, british, europeans, student activists. I was disappointed. My first trip to the wisconsin archives yielded next to nothing in terms of direct context. I found an older generation of internationalists, of activists. They were middle class, middleaged and they were well connected and they were fairly wealthy. In other words, people who could afford to travel abroad, who could afford to nurture contacts in international in the international arena. Something the students didnt have. That led me to an eclectic group of individuals who were either members of longstanding International Peace organizations or founded new ones in the postwar period. Those were individuals like i put this on. I forgot. Thats the i think its experiencing a revival, the nuclear power. I will talk more about frederick. He was one of them. Nobel prize winner in chemistry. Communist resistance fighter in france. He was the first president of the world peace counsel. Individuals like gerda lerner, womens historian. Founds member of the congress of american women. Later the now movement. Norman cousins who ran the review of literature, founder of sane. People like a. J. Muste, protestant dutchamerican minister who led the fellowship of reconciliation. People like yanon john collins in britain, cofounder of the campaign against nuclear disarmament. Anon john collins in britain, cofounder of the campaign against nuclear disarmament. Canon john collins in britain, cofounder of the campaign against nuclear disarmament. That ground is responsible for our peace sign. Martin neimoller, cofounder of the march movement in germ nir. And dagmar wilson. A lot of different individuals who i came across who engaged i. And dagmar wilson. A lot of different individuals who i came across who engaged. N and dagmar wilson. A lot of different individuals who i came across who engaged in or played a key role. Im focusing between 1945 and early 1970s. At a point when this takes hold. These individuals, these groups contributed in significant ways to the transformation of peace from a lofty idealist, some would say naive aspiration to a pragmatic politics of peace that could become the foundation of a conservative Foreign Policy agenda in the United States through nixon but also the foundation of a social democratic Foreign Policy agenda in other countries in west germany. So with this book, im taking on several conceptions or i want to call them misconceptions. I first called them minute myt thought that was too strong. Its dominated today i want to single out three that i will talk in more detail about. One is deterrents worked. You know the roman adage, if you want peace, prepare for war. This has long been and still continues to be a dominant assumption for political strategists, political scientists and historians that the cold war was prevented from turning into a hot war because of the policy of deterrents. I am arguing here that nuclear war was avoided not because of the policy of deterrents but despite of it. The policy of the deterrents kept the world on the brink of war rather than establishing Permanent Peace. Second point is, u. S. Foreign policy in this early period was realist. We have the realist policy makers but we have realist historians. I actually call it the myth of the rational actor, which i think does not exist. I think its time we do away with it. To be sure, the leading architects of cold war deterrents used sophisticated scientific methods and complex models to devise their policy proposal. But while the construction of their strategies might have been rational and realist, its foundation was profoundly nonrational. I wouldnt call it irrational but it was nonrational. It rested on an assumption they made about soviet intentions, about the other side. There was the assumption that the other side was bent on World Domination. If the foundation of this policy is flawed, then the whole apparatus could fall like a house of cards. So i will explain later how the concept of the absurd i use that as an aid in making sense of this u. S. And soviet cold war policy. And that is a profoundly nonrational, irrational kind of idea or approach to the cold war. The third point i want to make is i want to get at the assumption that it was a conservative response to the student protests of the 1960s. This argument pits nixons policy in opposition to the student and civil rights protests of the 1960s. To be fair, theres something to be said in favor of this argument. After all, no love was lost between nixon and those antiwar, antiestablishment students of the 1960s. I argue that it started much earlier, in the early 1960s, before long before the mass protests against the vietnam war took hold in the west, long before young people challenged the cold war order in central and Eastern Europe. Its impulse, the impulse came from the middle class moderate middleaged political and intelle intellectual activists who exposed the dangerous nature of the arms race as well as the environmental and Health Threats of Nuclear Testing. So before i go into more detail about each of these interpretations, let me briefly situate my book within the broader cold war history. Im not going to bore you. I will say here that this book really represents an effort to figure out what peace actually meant for both Foreign Policy elites and nongovernmental political activists during the first 25 years of the cold war. We think of the cold war as an era of constant war preparedness, of People Living with a permanent threat of nuclear war. We think of the many cold war crises, berlin crisis of 61, cuban missile crisis of 1962. We think of the korean war, vietnam war. While much has been written about these krcrises and wars a the Nuclear Arms Race, those are thats excellent scholarship. I do not want to dismiss this. This is important work. But not much scholarship deals with the meaning of peace during the cold war. How people and politicians sought to secure it, how they defined it, how they framed it and how they fought it. By that i really mean they fought peace. Because that is what much of the 1950s Foreign Policy maneuvering, at least in the u. S. And the west was about. It was a war on peace of sorts in the early period. We all know peace is a very simple, straightforward concept. Everybody, were all for peace. We all want peace. Nobody likes war. Thats a given. Thats a premise. Yet particularly in the early cold war period, from the late 60s to t 40s to the late 1960s, political leaders as well as the soviet sphere talked in ways that could have come out of George Orwells 1984. Like ministry of peace in the novel whose purpose was to wage war, so did political leaders seek to associate peace with strength and military preparedness. For much of the 50s and 60s, western policy makers accused peace advocates of being naive and idealistic. One of my friends who wrote about Nuclear Strategy talked of the hold hands kind of group, which irked me a little bit. I think it drove me a little more into this subject. At best idealistic. At worst, communist agents who undermined the wests National Security. In short, these people regarded peace as a threat to National Security. Let me turn to the first misconception, deterrents works. This is the crux of my first point. Among historians of u. S. Nuclear strategy as well as contemporary Nuclear Policy strategist in the u. S. , the consensus still prevails that nuclear arms that the Nuclear Arms Race prevented the soviet union and the u. S. From going to war against each other and that deterrent is still a useful approach to u. S. Foreign policy. In other words, if you want peace, prepare for war. To put in nuclear terms, if you want to avoid nuclear war, prepare for nuclear war. This is what americans and soviets did, of course, in the 1950s. S they prepared the populations for nuclear war. If you have not seen the 1982 documentary atomic cafe, i can recommend it highly. It shows with disarming clarity and a lot of humor the futile measures under way in american towns and cities in the 1950s. Citizens who showing how citizens thought they could protect themselves from Nuclear Attack by literally duck and cover. We all know burt the turtle. The building of fallout shelters even in backyards. Whats interesting about this documentary is it has no voiceover. It only has straight footage from the 50s. You will be amazed at how they belittled and how they gave the false sense of security to the american people. Nuclear war did not happen. That was good. But we should not confuse correlation with causation. It is impossible really to prove that deterrents worked. We can, however, document the myriad moments of intense crisis in International Relations, the moments where both super powers came dangerously close to nuclear war because of existence of Nuclear Weapons. Russians, Eastern Europeans, western europeans, americans lived in constant fear of nuclear war. As a result, they were constantly preparing for war, precisely because of existence of Nuclear Weapons. War could come without a moments notice, without warning, much as it had come to hiroshima and nagasaki, in the flash of a second. I just read this morning in the news that now erdogan is thinking of getting a nuclear weapon. I think it kind of supports a little bit my argument, if we had done what atomic scientists had suggested right in 1945, we might not be in this situation today. They were the first to challenge the United States stance on Nuclear Policy. They argued immediately after the dropping of the two atomic bombs in japan that Nuclear Weapons should be placed under International Control and that not doing so would lead to an unstoppable arms race. Several of them banded together to educate the public about the dangers of a Nuclear Arms Race. They predicted that the soviet union would develop its own Nuclear Weapons within four to five years, which was precisely right. They also became leading proponents of a global peace movement. Some of them even of a world government idea. They called for the complete abolition of Nuclear Weapons, cl th which they saw as the only alternative to nuclear a armagedd armageddon. I was interested in figuring out what happened to the message of peace during this period. I found talk of peace was everywhere in International Politics in the early cold war. It was an orwellian talk of peace. The soviets jumped on the peace train, adjusting it to just about every International Initiative they took. Youth organizations, trade, science, weapons groomens gro. The americans were slow on the uptake. They initially branded peace as a communist plot until they figured out that they had to go on record as defenders of peace, that they were playing right into the hands of the soviets as who branded them as militaryists. They were saying peace is dangerous. We should not be for peace. Ists. They were saying peace is dangerous. We should not be for peace. It took center stage at the world Peace Council. Many scholars dismiss the wpc as a communist front organization. We need to look at this organization on its own terms and in the context of the immediate postwar period. For at least in the early stages, it was supported by western noncommunists and communists alike. By Eastern European and soviet intellectuals and scientists. The fear of nuclear war was widespread and many moderates in the west felt that only through cooperation with those on the other side with communists could a nuclear war be avoided. The wpc promised that kind of cooperation. At least in the early phase. Frederic, a member of the french communist party, he was an open communist. He did not hide this. Was the first president. He was married to irene who was the daughter of marie curie. A prominent scientific family. Pablo picasso actually drew the first of his iconic doves. This is the first peace dove he painted, he drew specifically for the first Peace Council that happened that convened in paris in 1949. This is the poster for that. The paris meeting included a lot of communists from Eastern Europe but also many prominent western intellectuals. Robson gave a speech at the conference that was critical of u. S. Policy. He paid for it dearly because when he returned, the American Media basically crucified him and effectively shut down his career. He was black listed for much of the 1950s and his career was pretty much shot after that. There was early criticism of the wpc. A lot of support also. I wanted to briefly wrap this up. The good will among western noncommunists faded over the 1950s. As the wpc became more and more partisan, more and more prosoviet. There were several stages that really diminished the Reputation International reputation of the wpc as a forum for International Cooperation. One was the hungarian uprising in 1956. A lot of western noncommunists supporters left. The final straw was 196 when 8 they refused to condemn the soviet union for the acts of aggression. Even western communist parties left the world Peace Council. One that didnt was the u. S. Communist party, which was by that time more stalinist than even soviet communists. They were stern, held fast to this. While the soviet union capitalized on peace and used the term too liberally in its political rhetoric, the United States went the opposite direction. It began to associate any peace organization, any peace pronouncement from individuals with communism. It used the two terms synonymously. Peace advocates were regularly investigated by the house on american activities committee. Peace groups became targets of mccarthyism. As late as 1962, the chairman had this to say. Im quoting here. Its quite interesting. It is a basic communist doctrine to fight for peace. Peace propaganda anda aggitatio have an affect. It impedes or prevents adequate defense preparation, hinders effective diplomacy in the national interest, undermines the will to exist and Saps National strength. This was the opening remarks at the investigation of the womens strike for peace in 1962. The hearings went wrong. The women showed up with their children. They brought flowers. They were celebrating their day in court, so to speak. They were actually ridiculed in the media. I see there in 1962 a significant shift already toward this Close Association between communism and peace organizations. The women were very, very shrewd in exploiting that because they were just ordinary mothers and women. Early on, we have other ways of ridiculing the peace offensive. This is a cover from Time Magazine from 1951 where you see sort of an image of the peace dove with the olive branch in one hand and a revolver in the other above the kremlin. This one of a series of cartoons drawn posters drawn up by a french anticommunist group. From 1951. You see stalin there, you know, putting the dove out front, peace sign in one hand and a flail in the other. The french and americans often either jucxtaposed peace and freedom or tried to make a conjunction between them. So the message from politicians and anticommunists in the west for much of the 50s was clear. Peace say threis a threat of na security. Deterrence was the only way to avoid nuclear war. But there was a dilemma for western policymakers. It did not look good in the International Community to condemn peace. To constantly be saber rattling. It made the u. S. Look as mi militarist. It did not look good in the global south. What to do . The solution to the problem was straight out of orwells 1984. Make deterrence look like a peace offensive. Much as the ministry of peace was designed to wage war. We have phrases like peace through strength, which is a really kind of masculine military idea of peace. We have Foreign Ministers, if you look at the speeches the Foreign Ministers gave at the signing ceremony of nato in 1949, you will see peace over and over and over in their speeches. Im just sort of cherry picking some here. Quote, an essential milestone on the road leading to the consolidation of peace, this is about nato. Nato as a force for peace. An instrument for peace. A few years later, of course, we have eisenhower developing food for peace. Then we follow up with kennedys peace corps. In other words, you have peace also everywhere in the political rhetoric of the United States and western europe. To be sure, they were not doing anything different from the soviets. But even though i believe that the soviets were a little more desperate toward actually achieving a genuine era of peaceful cooperation, because they simply did not have the resources to keep up this arms race for much longer. What im arguing here though is that peace through strength or deterrents contributes to the threat of war, made americans and soviets feel a lot less secure than it had had both sides followed a genuine politics of peace. Misconception number two. Im going to hold off on dr. Strangelove here. The consensus that those who devised the early Foreign Policy of the cold war were realists who analyzed risk factors, determined Americans National interests, used scientific methods to arrive at a grand strategy were rational actors and kept america safe. Those that advocates for peace were naive or communist agents. Im arguing the opposite here. Namely that what we identify as realist was a lot less realist than we assume. I dont want to rename the Realist School of thought. But i do want us to understand that the Realist School of thought had a scaffolding that was realist, that was based on Pure National interest. But we have to dig deeper and look at the foundation of that realist policy. That was fundamentally based on an assumption, that the other side was out for World Domination. That foundation is really an assumption. It is a nonrational, nonrealist assumption. Because theres no way of knowing it. Both sides engaged in the same kind of thinking. So those who devised these doomsday plans, who propagated peace through strength, whoing orred argued that peace was a communist plot and a threat to National Security based their policies on essential lly non l nonrational assumptions rather than facts. These facts could not be known. That does not make the policy apparatus one that was dispassionate and rational. In order to have peace, you need to stop stockpiling, that they were making a lot of sense. They were rational and sane. Peace was not an idealistic pipe dream promulgated by those too naive to understand the dangers from the other side. It evolved into a pragmatic policy with the help of a dedicated group. Most of them initially outside the inner circle of political power. What i trace in my book is this path from the extra governmental informal diplomacy of these peace advocates to a transnational pragmatic politics of peace that got the ear of the political elite. I took a lot of back channel informal diplomacy and grassroots pressure to make political leaders see the rationality of that politics of peace. In order to showcase this irrational foundation or nonrational foundation of the Realist School of thought, let me take a brief detour, so to speak, into the absurd. Im talking about the Philosophical School of thought developed in the 19th century and revived in the 20th century by people like george orwell, literary figures and Joseph Heller engaged in that absurd genre of literature. 1942, essay, the myth of sisaphys. It had a lot to do with the absurdity of the threat of nuclear war. We know the story. He had to haul a rock up the hill over and over only to be told by the gods it fell back down. So he was eternally forever condemned to do the same task over and over and over again without accomplishing it. To many of the philosophers, the age of Nuclear Weapons presented such an absurdist loop. Let me put this in political terms. In the atomic age, the two superpowers had to advocate for peace because the use of atomic weapons would not only destroy their enemy but their own population as well. They had to constantly signal to the adversary they were willing to wage war, even nuclear war. In other words, they could not give up Nuclear Weapons, but they could not use them either. This means that the foundation of deterrents was fundamentally absurd. It was a catch 22. Doomed if you do or if you dont. The term catch 22 didnt exist yet. It came in the 1960s through Joseph Hellers novel. People immediately recognized that this was something that could be applied to the impossibility of nuclear war. Furth furthermore, the policy of deterrence rested on this. Who are the people . The people at the Rand Corporation. People like herman kahn who acknowledged Nuclear Aggression was irrational or insane. The use of Nuclear Weapons was insane. But still, the willingness to use weapons was considered realist. He argued in his 1960 book on thermonuclear war that it was possible and winnable. His approach could be summarized this way. Im quoting. Im not saying we wouldnt get our hair mussed. But i do say no more than ten to 20 million killed tops. Who knows where this quote originated. It wasnt kahn. Anybody . It was general turbison. The one from dr. Strangelove. He said that in the war room. It could have come from kahn. When Stanley Kubrick actually read kahns on thermonuclear war. Im moving here into the cultural realm of the 1960s. Kubrick devised the movie based on the novel by peter george called red alert. It was a classic and serious cold war psycho thriller. He ultimately decided he could not treat this subject in a serious way. He had to use satire, he had to turn it into an absurdist kind of tale, into a black comedy. Thats what he did. I believe he gave us the greatest cold war movie of all time, to this day. Maybe theres some new one coming out soon. The movie is peppered with references to peace. As you see in this still, you see in the background its not in the background. Its prominent. Peace is our profession. This is a scene from the air force base where the psychotic general who single handedly stant wants to start a nuclear war has hunkered down. What you see here, of course, is soldiers fighting. This is one battalion being coming in to fight actually fight and concur their own fellow soldiers on american soil. There are other references to peace. For instance, theres a scene where the soviet ambassador refers in the war room refers to the arms race, the space race and the peace race. When the general tackles the soviet ambassador to the ground, the president admonishes both of them, gentlemen, you cant fight in here, this is the war room. Or theres no fighting in the war room. Finally, the recall code devised by this psychotic general in order to stop that Nuclear Armageddon is poe, short for peace on earth. Dr. Strangelove is a fictional way to expose the absurdity of the arms race. The report from Iron Mountain is another. Has anyone heard of this report . It actually was considered a serious report for a short time by many people. But it was a manufactured, leaked report that was published in 1967 that warned about the economic and political destabilization that would occur should Permanent Peace arrive. It mocked, of course, the Rand Corporation and other think tanks in its and its deterrents, intellectuals and exposed the twisted logic of what eisenhower called the military industrial complex. What im arguing with this book and with this and i talk about catch 22 is that by the 60s, that theme of the absurdity of the the impossibility of nuclear war had entered into the public realm, had become part of popular culture. And that created a completely different atmosphere also for politicians that made that impressed upon them the need to actually do something more serious about preventing nuclear war. So peace advocates tried to overcome this way of thinking by pointing to the damage done by the Nuclear Arms Race. One group was sane, the committee for sane Nuclear Policy. This group emerged in 1957. This was this is not easy to see. They actually came on the National Scene with a huge ad campaign. They took out one page ads in the new york times, the Los Angeles Times and others. We are facing a danger like any danger that ever existed. They took a different approach to the Antinuclear Movement by pointing out the environmental and Health Hazards that followed the detonation of Nuclear Bombs in the United States and all over the world. And it also came in response to the 1954 lucky dragon incident where one Nuclear Bomb Test in the pacific went horribly wrong. Fallout spread in the wrong direction, contaminated a tuna trawler. Within two weeks when the tuna trawler arrived in the japanese port, its members were already suffering from radiation disease, one died, but it created a huge, huge panic where an entire sort of weeks worth of tuna fish stock was eliminated. So this is a new wave of Antinuclear Movements that stressed environmental and health risks. Scientists had found massively elevated levels of a radioactive element released by Nuclear Testing in the bones and teeth of children all over the United States. I see this as a moment in which a pragmatic politics of peace was taking shape. The argument of longterm damage to health to the health of the human body particularly the bodies of small children res natu resonated with the American Public and increased the pressure on political leaders to stop. To give an example, here is a map of all the Nuclear Tests that were conducted. And where they were conducted. To give you figures here, in the first four years between 45 and 48, the u. S. Detonated six atomic conducted six atomic tests, all in the pacific. Between 1951 and 58, there were 170 tests. 97 of those were atmospheric tests conducted in nevada. That is spreading massive fallout into the atmosphere. They were actually killing or making sick their own people. Nuclear war was in a strange way happening on american soil. But also on soviet soil. So they were actually endangering the health of their own people. As just a means of comparison, the soviet union conducted about 83 tests had conducted by the end of 58 about 83 tests. Another dramatic expansion of of course in the size of the bombs, the First Hydrogen bomb was dedicated in 1952. It had a power that was 500 times that of the bomb dropped on nagasaki, 500 times more powerful. So in a way, we do have a significant level of fallout in the atmosphere at this point. This leads to pressure and eventually to the Nuclear Test Ban treaty. The partial Nuclear Test Ban treaty in 1963. Norman cousin, the founder of sane, played a significant role in bringing about this test ban treaty. He engaged in a lot of secret shuttle diplomacy between the kremlin, the kennedy administration, but also involving the pope in the process. He writes about it in his book. He was able to do this because he had forged these relationships with soviet intellectuals and scientists, because he invited them over the course of the 50s to conferences where they engaged with americans in on matters of peace advocacy but also scientific sharing of Scientific Research in the process. So that brings me to the final point. T the political transformation did not occur in a sudden turnaboutd by a ske secretive Foreign Policy group around nixon. To be sure nixon did form a more coherent strategy of detente than his predecessors did but he built on a Solid Foundation laid in the 1960s. So detente was a gradual process that unfolded over the 60s and emanated from multiple origins and was shaped by a diverse set of actors, many of those i showed you in the beginning of this talk. So while during much of the 50s western political leaders had frequently assessed peace advocacy as a threat to National Security, by the 1960s, they were beginning to coopt it. So political elites on both sides of the cold war divide had long understood the rhetorical virtues of peace but in the early 60s they began to understand it toward a political strategy. The turn occurred at least in part to these grass root movements of the late 50s and 60s driven by those individuals earlier that i mentioned and not the student protesters. And it was the people who had the connections to political elites, to political leaders, not just in the u. S. But transnationally. So in the aftermath of the berlin wall and the cuban missile crisis it became not only politically acceptable but also politically shrewd to develop a political Strategic Policy of peace. And i want to zero in here on two leaders, of course, nixon is one example, but the other one is ville bront. And i want to point out nixon was a conservative and bront was a social democrat but both of them came to a politics of peace. So we know nixons achievements, as much as he was a hawk and fought peace, he did engage in it, he did the china visit in february, moscow in may, signed treaties at this meeting in moscow and, of course, achieved the vietnam peace accords in 1973. Detente was not really a radical departure from the established cold war order. Rather the dramatic public enactments have to be seen as the culmination of the transnational peace politics that had been in the making in the previous two decades. And billy bront, who became chancellor of germany, pretty much i found out yesterday when i looked up the exact date, he became chancellor exactly 50 years ago, on october 22nd, tomorrow, 50 years ago. He developed his policy of it was called change through in the early 1960s, when he was in no position to implement it. At the time he was mayor of berlin. He was mayor of berlin during the berlin wall crisis. By 1966, i believe, he had become foreign minister of germany in a Coalition Government and then in 1969, when he finally became chancellor, he was able to implement his politics, which consistented primarily of improving relations with Eastern European countries, moscow, 1970, warsaw also 1970, he signed the basic treaty which normalized relations with east germany in 1972 and the treaty in 1973. These three treaties basically acknowledged the existing post war borders. So bront actually gave up any claim to the territories that germany had lost at the end of world war ii. So neither his off politics or nixons peace politics were conservative measures born out of a desire to quell domestic opposition. Neither fit neatly into conventional camps of the time. Nixon a conservative, bront a social democrat, so the fact they were able to come to the middle to develop a peace politics shows the pragmatic source of this peace politics. So let me conclude by saying that yes, the peace advocates of the 1950s were dreamers, but they also succeeded in developing a practical approach to International Cooperation that promised the greatest possible chance towards peace and prosperity. Political leaders today need to understand, i think, that investing in a pragmatic policy of peace provides the biggest longterm dividend. They need to understand that they have to align national and International Interests. Focussing on just one and not the other will not work. But unfortunately i think today were farther away from that understanding than we have been since the late 1960s and waging war it turns out requires a lot less political skill than sustaining peace. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Professor gooede for excellent presentation. I think very stimulating. I think well have a good number of questions here. Let me just sort of, by way of first comment just to say how the big peace march and peace demonstration in 1983 was its interesting you were there . A formative moment in my sort of political consciousness. And i remember also hesitating whether i should go or not, and i live my parents i think sort of sensed that i really wanted to go but maybe didnt quite have the courage or didnt quite know how to manage. So they actually drove me to bon and was able to participate in this. We were all close and local, so i had an advantage there. Thank you so much for your presentation. Let me sort of start out, since youre here at the home of the cold war, the National History project, which is focussed on archives, many especially to those of you perhaps viewing this program, you can access a lot of these materials that we have unearthed over the last two, almost three decades on our website at digitarchive. Org. Some people call us a document or archive fetishists. Let me start by asking a little bit more, you already hinted a little bit about the sources that underlie your book, your argument, and to talk about how you went beyond what the other cold war historians have done before. Thank you. So i dont speak russian. That was a challenge, because i wanted to actually get at the russian sources. I went to the standard archives, the National Archives in the u. S. , the british, the french archives, the german archives, and through the having access to east german sources, i got some of the soviet material from there and some others through translation. Thanks to your center, some documents are being translated and have been translated. And much of it from the soviet side, also the tremendous Popular Support for peace for peace in the soviet union, i also got through secondary literature. There was a really interesting article about how, for the the russians were too enthusiastic about peace. They signed the stockholm declaration in 1950, but they were really very, very much into peace and the soviets had to the political leaders had to backtrack and tell them, no, not, not you know, in very much the same way as the americans were doing. That too much peace was dangerous for it had to be muscular kind of peace. So those were the political archives. And then i went, did a lot of research fortunately very close to my home is swathmore college, which has a tremendous peace collection, a wonderful, wonderful archive. So a lot of the material came from there. Wisconsin historical society, hoover institution. And also, in amsterdam there is the social i forget the name science archive. So there were lots of organizations social history archive. Of social history, yeah, that housed some of the materials. And then there was a lot of published material. For instance, if you look at the saturday review of literature, Norman Cousins had literally in every issue had an article and debate among scientists, among intellectuals about fallout about nuclear the nuclear threat. Those kinds of things. So i pieced together pieced together a lot of information from a very, very broad sort of archival base in the process. Thank you, eric. I have got two questions, maybe 30 but ill only ask two. And the first has to do with kind of untangling the concept of peace itself. Its a short word, to the point. But its a concept that is so all encompassing and elastic that it seems to embrace many, many Different Things here. So if youre talking about the war resisters league, the fellowship of reconciliation, the American Friends Service committee, groups whose papers are at swathmore, and its a wonderful collection using it myself, its a pacifist tendency on the american left. When you get to the sections in the book about antiNuclear Weapons protests, Nuclear Weapons are not the same thing as peace. So you can talk about environmental degradation. But using the demonstration example in the early 1980s, one of the biggest demonstrations in new york city for the nuclear freeze. People are against Nuclear Weapons, but at the same time many of the same people support the anc in south africa, the sand neez stans in nicaragua, groups engaged in war to some degree or another. So why peace and not antinuclear activity . I wrestled with this for a very long time and part of me wanted to write a very cynical book about the basically the use and abuse of peace as a word, as a concept. Because people have very different uses of the term. Very different conceptions of the tomorrow. And i make did i have rfferenti book. One thing was peace is more than the absence of war. It is the absence of the threat of war. And this is why we called the cold war period the cold war period because even though technically the United States was at peace, it was not because it was in a constant state of preparation for war. I also make a clear distinction in the chapter one i talk about the Antiwar Movement in the 1960s. Because i see a clear divergence here. I say the antiwar activists were not part of the peace movement. Right. They were not pacifists, because they began to embrace National Liberation. I see the anticolonial movements of the 1960s as a divide. And in some ways its something that i didnt say in my talk, i see a complete sort of, in some ways, a flip in their rhetoric used. The antiwar protesters become a lot more militant in their rhetoric. And they use some of the same kind of thing by dismissing pacifists as weak, as not achieving what needs to be achieved. And they support National Liberationists who pick up arms and you have people even people like john paul who wrote the preface to wret chet of th earth. The colonizer is so violent and therefore the system is predicated on violence, therefore resistance to colonialism cannot happen the peaceful and nonvie reolent way. And john paul said youre right. Hes never picking up arms himself but he condones it and theres several other civil rights or new left intellectuals who jump on that same bandwagon and are abandoning the idea of nonviolence and activism. And others stick to it. Some are critical. Hannah is part of the new Left Movement but by 66, 67, shes very much against the student protesters who pick up, who engage in violence, who support violent resistance movements because she says this is going down the wrong way. So there are differences that have to be made. Ill hold off my second second because i can see there are hands. Christiane . Gentlemen up here. If you can state your name. Im henry gaffe. Spent 51 years in defense matters. I was employed by the department of defense and came back from my Doctoral Research in sierra leon in 1966 and spent the next 13 years on nato Nuclear Weapons, culminating in giving the whole business of the neutron bomb where ministers said they didnt even know this was going on, in my creating the High Level Group and setting out options for them, which led to the euro missiles, we americans had no position. It was a consensus among the group, but the point is, we if my my basic option was what i call the slicinger option, let all the nukes in europe disappear, just go away. The second option was, you know, more battlefield weapons. I knew the germans would reject all that. The third was longer range stuff but short of the soviet union. The fourth option was into the soviet union. The group chose longer range into russia short of moscow. And i asked my dutch colleague why, he said because we think the pols are victims. By the way, that same gentleman i met 20 years later in moscow when we were discussing russia and nato, he was the belgian ambassador to russia. Across that whole period, we were eroding away all that nuke stuff. We were completely most of our work was on improving the conventional balance, at the same time the caramel report was being prepared. You heard of macnamaras flexibility response, mc 143 written by tim stanley and arthur hawkday who dont appear in all of those things. And as my mentor said the difference between mc 142 which said you may count on Nuclear Weapons from the outset and mc 143 was you cant count on them and we will rely on our conventional forces. I also was, in 1963, in a meeting in harry rhones office, and whats his name what am i coming up with . Names come shortly to me. Why am i not coming up with it . But anyway, it was one of the big nuclear guys said, you can imagine the day the russian soviet military was told that nukes are not just another nuclear another artillery system. In other words, we were all working to that. He said it was all junk. And we were working to get rid of all that. In other words but none of the International Relations literature, across all those years, was of any help to us whatsoever do you have a question . My question is, did you know about all this kind of work in nato . I could not know the secret behind the much of it was secret, yes. But im not surprised by the 1960s, mid 1960s into the 70s and 80s, there is this effort to reduce you know, to get rid of Nuclear Weapons, because there was this it fits with the story im telling, even kennedy saying eisenhower was so liberal he had no intention of using Nuclear Weapons but it was on the table, whereas kennedy said, we cant. We cant keep it on the table because its an impossibility. Let me add to that no. There are others who would like to speak as well. They were trying to get us to keep 7,000 weapons in europe. Thank you. Lets go to the next question over here. Gentleman over here . Augusta salzona. I was Senior Adviser to the trump for President Campaign 2016 philippine desk. My question is this, and if any of you three wish to answer it, of course. What is the what do you think the effects concerning peace and certainly whats your advocating in the book, what would be the effects of this definite rise of nationalism, not only in Eastern Europe but in other parts of the world, would have an effect on this or you can call it in general sort of an antiglobalist fervor, which is obviously taken root and will probably even have an affect on the 2020 president ial elections . Thank you. Are you asking what the effect of the rise in nationalism is on the International Community or more specifically on peace . What do you think it would have on peace and in terms of sort of the like the opposite. The possible pushback or opposite philosophies or world views of these nationalists who are i mean, its more than just a few people. Yes. Its just a feeling throughout the whole world. You can also see, certainly from Public Opinion polls, President Trump probably if you take the whole world, certainly not western europe, but the whole world is he probably has the hi highest favorability rating throughout the world, especially if you go to these socalled developing nations. I mean, i think that nationalism is one of the biggest threats to International Peace right now. And it is sort of the problem. Its what i ended with, the national and International Peace is possible only if national and International Interests align. And that every and that if you have a nationalist policy approach, it is very hard to align that with internationalist, if you have only your own national if you do not believe that your own National Interests are connected and related to whats going on in the International Community, you set yourself up for conflict with other countries. And were seeing this happening as we speak. We have a lot more threats to peace now than we had ten years ago, 15 years ago. And its not were not going in the right direction. All right. We have several more questions on the table. Gentleman on the left and then over here. Yes. Please be succinct we have a good number of questions still. Derrick liebart, i had the honor of being a speaker here in february. I was going to say i agree with everything you said about the three fault cold war assumptions, but i have to disagree about ike. Ike was certainly ready to use atomic weaponry in vietnam in 54 and certainly against china had it encroached on taiwan. I agree with the three assumptions from a slightly different angle. Of course deterrence barely worked. It was by and large sheer luck that got us through. And u. S. Policy was anything but realistic. Americans were winging it throughout. The u. S. Doesnt do considered Foreign Policy, no more so today than in the late 1940s or during the era of deterrence. But my question, i dont think i heard you mention stalin. And that is pretty significant. Without mentioning stalin, one might assume there was something the United States could have done to prevent the soviets from building an atomic bomb continuing to build an atomic bomb. That seems really unlikely. It also seems really unlikely that we would have prevented the british from building an atomic bomb. So i think we have to be somewhat careful here about the extent of u. S. Global influence. Im grateful for your presentation. Thank you. The soviets built the atomic bomb because the u. S. And the british did because the u. S. Refused to place they had started it before and they were yes, they were already in 1945, they were 90 i think scientists said they were already 93 there because the development of the atomic bomb was actually an International Conglomerate of scholars, some coming from poland, the soviet union. Therefore, they all knew what their colleagues also knew, and so they were very, very close. If international if the plan had been followed, which was to place atomic weapons under International Control, we might have not had an arms race. Its not so much whether or not the soviet union, the british or later other countries developed it, but placing these weapons under International Control might have prevented an enormous arms race. It might have prevented the development of hydrogen bombs. It might have prevented the enormous increase in capacity of destruction that weve seen over the course of the 50s. It would have certainly not led to the kind of map that we see here where is it . With all these weapons tests in the process. So in that sense, i would i would disagree that nothing would have changed had International Control not been had International Control been an option. Thank you. Thank you. Dave rubenowitz. The 1950s when the policy was first formulated was less than 20 years after the munich conference when chamberlain decided to go for peace in our time and learned the other side was out for World Domination. Given that people lived through this thing it seems like peace through strength sounds like a more rational idea than peace out strength. Is it really so irrational . Yes, the question is what is the Nuclear Atomic weapons did make an enormous difference in the equation. You dont think so. I think it did. And people thought about this in very different terms. And peace was both a necessity and a deep desire of all populations in the aftermath of world war ii but youre right, peace was also discredited because of the munich syndrome. Thats one of the paradoxes of the postwar period. But theres nothing that tells us that the soviet union and the u. S. Could not have avoided a cold war. And there is the arms race was, in many ways, a very irrational response to the global situation, because it rested on the assumption, and it would be a false assumption, to say that stalin or the soviet union was bent on World Domination after it had suffered such a devastating defeat. And we also have to look at other documents. We have to for instance look at nsc68. The message there was that the u. S. Tried to actively foster undermining from the inside the soviet system. And therefore, there was the fear on both sides and the fear on the soviet side was justified that the u. S. Was bent on destroying the soviet union just as the u. S. Might have assumed that the soviet union wanted to destroy the u. S. Okay. Over here. Thank you very much professor for your talk. Im lillian stadler im with the program with the wilson center. My question is really a sort of response to your talk and the question from the gentleman on the other side, which essentially relates or evolves around realist theory, i was wondering if you could engage with it a little bit more, because essentially if i were a realist, i might respond to your you noted in your talk that you think u. S. Foreign policy is generally viewed as realist. But that it rests on the assumption that the other side is inherently expansionist. Now if i were a realist, id probably Say Something along the lines of, arent you supposed to distrust in a situation where you have neither evidence for nor evidence against that claim, and being the fundamentalist realist theory, and that giving any measure i take thats defensive might be interpreted by the other side as being offensive and as a response to that deterrence, which essentially eliminates the distinction between offensive and defensive measures wouldnt that be a response to the security dilemma and wouldnt that inherently be a gar rant for peace . I would assume the realist line of argument would run along those lines, and i was wondering if you could engage with that a little bit more . Yes. So i see realist theory as basically the a complex math problem where every calculation is correct and perfectly rational and based on really neutral factors, except for the two original variables. So theres the sense that i come from this i come to this from having engaged having written Foreign Relations history with an emphasis on culture and gender. So for me, this was, you know, initially an uphill battle to convince my Foreign Policy colleagues that culture mattered. And im becoming more and more convinced and when i look at sort of realist historical writing but also realist policy making that there is the false assumption that our cultural assumptions that everything could be rational and systematic. And that we take the human factor, the cultural assumption, stereotypes, fears out of the equation and we cannot do that. So we can have a Realist School of thought, but even a Realist School of thought has to acknowledge that at some deep level it is based on a set of assumptions that are essentially n n nonquantity final, nonverbal, and assumptions we have to make and we have to make those assumptions. Im not saying that realist policy makers we dismiss it entirely but we need to acknowledge there is a foundation to this policy that is fundamentally based on a set of assumptions we are making. And that means that the idea of the rational actor really is incomplete because no human being, as long as we have human beings involved, we have to make in diplomacy in particular we have to make certain assumptions of the other side and it could go one way or another. And in the cold war, americans for the longest time, assumed and soviets too the worst about the other side. And the question is, why did they change in the 1970s, in the 1960s . Why was it possible to come to an agreement . And that is also not a rational decision. Nothing rational changed, but human assumptions and sort of level a cultural deeper cultural level shifted and in some ways its a leap of faith that people like kennedy and people like nixon in a way but also brunt took at a particular moment in time. We have five minutes left and still so many questions. Why dont we do this. Why dont we take a final round of questions, several of you have been waiting patiently, and well try to get to you. Well give professor goede one more chance to sort of answer the questions succinctly, and then well continue the discussion over a glass of wine at the reception. So lets start over there with the gentleman and then mike. Brief questions. Im working on a book on cardinal mince in the early 70s and he was a figure of cold war warrior, especially in this time of the detente. And what im interesting in is why because Public Opinion had become, as you very much pose it, detente in that time, and mince was portrayed as a cold war warrior, person of the past. Im interested in why it was why he was still very popular, especially in west germany but also in other places, and so i would like to know more about what you think about the i mean, we have now more studies on religion and emotions in the cold war and i think theres reasons why deterrent was so popular your question, please. Yeah, i guess i would like to know what you think how important american exceptionalism was, the idea that america was in a holy crusade against an evil force, which gave a moral superiority to the United States. Thank you. Thanks again for your talk, im mika with the history and policy program. Two short questions, the first would be i maybe miss it but i really enjoy how you brought the cultural aspect into the political realm, and but i maybe was how you connected, actually, the cultural shifting in the 60s with the shifting of the politics in the 70s. I didnt see the direct connection there, even though you make the argument. And the other one question would be, in your presentation but also in the discussion here, it seemed to me theres a lot of genderized vocabulary here, like rational, irrational, strength, weakness, and i would like to ask if you can maybe talk a bit more about the underlying gendgender of the topic. Thank you. The gentleman to the left here. Yep. Hi, tyler kirk, cane institute, university of alaska, fair banks. Im curious, what nonwestern voices are part of this global cold war history . Thank you. Finally, over here. Yep. Thank you very much. Im benjamin tour, retired diplomat. I have a twopart question. The first part is, how do you interpret the current student uprisings and some that are not involve not just student but are led by Civil Servants and others around the world, the blue vest people in france, and uprisings and opposition in places like latin america, i think honduras is one. And secondly, you said that there are more threats to peace now than ten years ago. Could you identify a couple of these threats, and who are responsible for them . Over the next hour and a half. All right. Just kidding. You have five questions, you have one minute left. And go so i actually have a chapter on religion, on jegender. I cut both of these out because theyre getting so large. But i think religion and peace activism is really, really important. But youre right, theres also a conservative element to that in there. In terms of connecting the cultural and the politics, it is sort of a question of looking at how the Public Discourse occurs. One moment of transition of overlap i see is, for instance, this quote i gave you from 1962, this was sort of a political spectacle that was ridiculed in the media in the public, and there was this sense, the fact that there was so much popularity to these cold war mov movies, but also books like catch22. Theres this indirect that the Public Discourse, the Public Discourse in the media changes and the attacks on the cold war politics becomes more pronounced and thats sort of the connection i see there with politics. Theres no smoking gun. Theres no, you know but we also see for nixon, for instance, we have a quote where he says i have to be seen for wanting peace even if i dont want it because the people like it. I have to do it. That means fine you dont have to like it, but the fact that he followed through on the policy means it had an effect, that you can see those relations. Nonwestern voices is a really, really good question. So i have one chapter in there that deals with the National Liberation movements. And this is actually an assault on peace. And that relates also to the gender notions because in the 60s we have at the same time an association of many antiwar activists who are saying who are admiring people like hoe keymin. So those are characters. Of course hes huge but hes a militaryist, hes violent. And france fenon is a nonwestern voice thats also very important in there. But it also creates it reintroduces a regendered notion that peace is for the weak minded, peace means you are giving in, that you are known someh showing your strengths. This is shown. Even the Antiwar Movement becomes more militant and that is also a gender connotation, pro seussly at the moment when the Womens Movement is also taking off. I cannot possibly begin to answer your questions. The current student uprising, the current uprisings are all over the place. One point i want to make clear is im teaching a class on global studies now, and i decided to discuss Greta Thunberg in there and shes a student that makes an enormous impact in a way but doesnt have the wherewithal to make the international connections. So unless the older generation, those of us maybe who were, you know, there when green parties evolved, unless there is a buy in from that older generation, this movement will peter out and will not go anywhere because these young people have the enthusiasm and they would tell the older generation all the ways in which they have messed up and are messing up. But the political ability to maneuver and make changes rests with a middleaged, middle class, well connected, well educated, fairly wealthy group of people and it is up to them to put the final pressure on political leaders to actually make a change, i think. Im not going to answer the threats to peace. I think thats good. [ applause ] weeknights this month were featuring American History tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan 3. Tuesday, Smithsonian Associates with kermit roosevelt, a constitutional law professor and the great, great grandson of theodore roosevelt. 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