sunday night on q&a, a professor of medicine at columbia university talks about her book, the first cell and the human cost of pursuing concert to the last. >> on the surface i should be pro claiming victory from the rooftops now, that we have gone from basically having universal death sentence as you said to curing 68% of cancers today. 32% of people die. but with both groups, the treatable and non-treatable ones, i asked a fund mental question. curing, 60%, are my frustration is, where we still using these paleolithic approaches of/, poison and burn? where have $200 billion of research gone?

why are we not finding better ways of treating cancer? >> sunday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span's q&a. >> next author petra goedde , talked about her book, "the politics of peace: a global cold war history." she explored the emerging politics of peace during the early years of the cold war. the woodrow wilson center & the national history center hosted this event. >> thank you. i am delighted to see so many of series to welcome to our fromsor petra goedde temple university. she is a professor in the history of globalization. she is a co-editor of one of the most important journals in the field, dip the medic history.

-- diplomatic history. her publications include gis and germans, culture, gender and foreign relations, 1945-1949. and now, "the politics of peace: a global cold war history." she had it published by oxford this year. it is based on this book that she will be speaking to us today. she has also co-edited two books, the human rights revolution, oxford 2012. and the oxford handbook of the cold war, published in 2013. today, she will be speaking with if you want peace, or politicsetours on the of peace in the early cold war. thank you to everyone who makes this possible for inviting me. as it is a great honor to be here.

i was embarrassed to admit that i had never been here and i'm going to try to make an effort because i realized philadelphia's not that far from washington at least by train. i can do this in one day back and forth. book as i am 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. i want to 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 a william detours. illian detours. it.t a picture of my sister is design oriented and choice, since she was a teenager, wanted white books. i set i have to have a white book so she puts in on herself.

-- on her shelf. i am a child of the 60's, which meant i missed a interesting exciting 60's. instead, i was taught in school by what in west germany were called the 1968'ers. as i became politely conscious i got a good dose of that 1960's ideas in my history, social studies and literature classes. my political maturation coincided with the assent of the green party in germany, which was a rare instance of an extra parliamentary movement making the transition into a political party and i am still in our today of how much power they actually gained.

and they are still may be in a sentence, i do not know. scendance. 1980's saw the antinuclear movement. it was the freeze led by ted kennedy. in europe it was the opposition to the nato double track decision of 1979, the stationing of midrange nuclear missiles in western europe. all this led to massive demonstrations in the early 1980's. if you think that i would brag i was part of it, i was not. i was too chicken to go and march. in bonn, i had some classmates who did but i did not. i do not even sign petitions. but i was interested in it. i did go in 1983 and i was in london for a year, i did go to a demonstration there which i later found out is billed as the biggest antinuclear demonstration in british history. so i had to leave my country in order to be brave enough to

participate in some kind of vast political movements. did not experiences drive me toward writing this book. but they did help shape the direction it took once i got started. actually, wasea, to research the transnational connections of the student and civil rights activists in the 1960's. to write a transnational history of the 1960's left. ofoped to find a lot personal interactions between americans, british, european student activists, but i was soon disappointed. my first trip to that wisconsin archives will that do nothing. yielded next to nothing in terms of direct contact. instead i found an older generation of internationalists, activists but they were middle-class and middle-aged and they were well-connected and 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 did not have. eclectic groupan of individuals, who are either members of long-standing international peace organizations, or founded new ones in the postwar. . -- in were individuals like he postwar period. those were individuals like, i think this expensing a revival. , a nobel prize winner in chemistry, a communist resistance fighter in france. he was the first president of the world peace council. -- frederic like joliot-curie.

lerner, . norman cousens. cousins. a protestant dutch minister who led the fellowship of muste.liation, a.j. the founder or cofounder of the campaign against nuclear john,ament, canon collins. that group is responsible for the iconic piece i'm we have today. and from germany, martin niemoller. and the leader of peace strike in the 1960's, dagmar wilson. so a lot of individuals i came

across who engaged in or played a key role in reconceptualizing the idea of peace in the early cold war. and i'm focusing, in my book, on the. 1945n-- period between and the early 1970's at a point when that on truly takes hold. so these individuals, these groups contributed in significant ways to the transformation of peace from a lofty idealist, some would say naïve, 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 and other countries, and as billy brunt showed.

i'm taking on several historic graphical conceptions with this book or i want to call them -- with this book i'm taking on several historographical mis-conceptions. or is that deterrence works. worked. you all know the roman outage, if you want peace, prepare for war. -- roman adage. this has long been and continues to be a dominant assumption for political strategists. for political scientists and historians, that the cold war was prevented from turning into a hot war because of the policy of deterrence. nuclearuing here that war was avoided not because of the policy of deterrence, but despite it. the policy of deterrence

actually kept the world on the brink of war, rather than establishing permanent peace. second point is, u.s. foreign wascy in this period realist. we have realist policymakers but we also have realist historians i call it the myth of the rational actor, which i thing does not exist. and i think it's time we do away with it. to be sure, the leading architects of cold war deterrence used sophisticated scientific methods and complex models to devise their policy proposals. but while the construction of their strategies might have been rational and realistic, it's foundation was profoundly nonrational. i will not call irrational, but it was nonrational. arrested on an assumption they ,ade about soviet intentions about the other side.

there was an assumption that the other side was bent on world domination. so if the foundation of this policy is flawed, the whole apparatus could fall like a house of cards. so i will explain later how the -i use thatthe absurd 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. and the third point i want to at the want to get assumption that the tom was a conservative response to the student protests of the 1960's was at détente conservative response to the student protests of the 1960's.

there something to be said in favor of this argument peered after all, no love was lost between nixon and the antiwar, and his talisman students of the 1960's. startedgue that détente much earlier, the early 1960's, 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. it's impulse, the impulse for détente, came from these middle-class, moderate, middle-aged political activists who exposed the absurd and 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 toriography. war his this book represents an effort

to figure out what peace actually meant for both foreign policy elites and nongovernmental political activists during the first five years of the cold war. we think of the cold war as an era of constant war preparedness, people living with the permanent threat of nuclear war. we think of the many cold war crises, the berlin crisis of 1961, the cuban missile crisis of 1962. we think of the korean war, the vietnam war. and well much as been written about these crises and wars, and about the nuclear arms race, those were all really 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 mean they fought

peace. because that is what much of the 1950's 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. in the early period. we all know that peace is a straightforward concept, we are all for peace, nobody likes war. yet, particularly in their early work cold war. , from the late 1940's to the early 1960's, political leaders in the west as well as in the soviet sphere, talked of peace in ways that could have come straight out of george orwell's 1984. much like the mystery of peace in the novel whose purpose was to wage war. leaders seek to associate peace with strength and military preparedness. andfor much of the 1950's 1960's, western policymakers accused peace advocates of at best, being naïve and dangerously idealistic.

one of my friends who wrote about nuclear strategy talked about kumbaya and hold hands groups. that irked me a little bit and drove me more into the subject. at best, they were idealistic and at worst they were communist agents undermining west national security. in short, these people regarding peace as a threat to national security. to the firstrn misconception. deterrence works. this is the crux of my first point. in u.s. no clear strategy as well is contempt a nuclear strategist in the u.s., the consensus still prevails, nuclearlear -- that the arms race prevented the soviet union and the u.s. from going to war against each other, and that deterrence is still a useful

approach to u.s. foreign policy. in other words, if you want peace, pair for war. or to put -- prepare for war. or to put in nuclear terms, if you want to avoid nuclear war, prepare for nuclear war. and this is what americans and soviets did in the 1950's. they stockpiled nuclear weapons, they prepare their populations for nuclear war. if you've not seen the 1982 documentary atomic café, i recommend it highly. it shows with disarming clarity and a lot of humor, the futile measures underway in american towns and cities in the 1950's. citizens thought they could protect themselves from nuclear attacks by literally duck and cover. we all know bert the turtle. the building of fallout shelters, even in backyards. what is interesting about this

documentary, is it has no voiceover. it only has straight footage from the 1950's. and you will be amazed at 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's impossible, really, to prove that deterrence worked. thean, however, document myriad moments of intense crisis in international relations, the moments where both superpowers came dangerously close to nuclear war, because of the existence of nuclear weapons. europeans,astern western europeans, americans lived in constant fear of nuclear war. as a result, they were constant preparing for war, precisely

because of the existence of new care 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. this morning in the news that now everyone is thinking of getting a nuclear -- erdogan is thinking of getting a nuclear weapon too. if we had done what scientists suggested in 1945, we might not be in the situation today. where the united states stands on nuclear policy. they argued immediately after the dropping of 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 the soviet union would develop its own new care weapons within four to five years, which was cicely right -- which was precisely right. they became proponents of a global peace movement and some of the world governments idea. they called for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons which they saw as the only alternative to nuclear armageddon. the story the arms race that ensued is a familiar one. but i was interested more in figuring out what happened to the message of peace during this. . -- during this period. and what i found is that talk of peace was everywhere in international politics in the early cold war. but it was what i call and orwellian talk of peace. the soviets a meet at lee jumped on the peace train, attaching the message of peace to just about every international initiative they took. youth organizations, trade,

science, women's groups, you name it. the americans, in turn, were slow on the uptake. the initially branded peace as a communist plot [laughter] until they figured out they had to go on record as defenders of peace, that they were actually playing right into the hands of the soviets, who branded them as militarist, because they were saying that peace is dangerous, we should not be for peace. so one place where international peace advocacy took center stage was the world peace council, founded in 1949. many scholars to this day dismiss the upc as a communist the wpc.anization -- but we need to look at this organization on its own terms in the context of the postwar. at least in the early stages -- of the postwar period. it was supported by

intellectuals and scientists initially. the fear of new clear war was widespread and many moderates in the u.s. felt that only through cooperation with those on the others, with communists, could clearwire be avoided -- could a nuclear war avoided. promised that kind of cooperation, at least in the early phases. deric, a member of the french coming this party was an open communist and do not hide this. he was married to the daughter a very curie, prominent scientific family. public picasso drew the first of the firstdoves. 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. included a lotng of communists from eastern europe, but also many prominent western intellectuals. and paulm, wb dubois robeson. gave a speech that was critical of u.s. policy any pay for it nearly because when he returned, the american media basically crucified him and effectively shut down his career. he was blacklisted for much of the 1950's and his career was pre-much shot after that. there was early criticism of the wpc. as an organization. but also a lot of support. western,ill among

non-communist, faded over the course of the 1950's, as the wpc became more and more partisan, more and more pro-soviet. several things diminished the international reputation of the wpc as a forum for --ernational corp. operation international cooperation. one was a 1956 hungarian uprising. the 1960's when the organization refused to condemn the soviet union force its acts of aggression. and even communist parties left one that did not was the u.s. coming this which was at that time more stalinist than even the soviet communist party. so they were stern and held fast to this.

so while the soviet union capitalized on peace and use the term too liberally in its domestic and international plucker rhetoric, the united states -- international political rhetoric, the united states went the opposite direction. peaceegan to associate activists with communism. peace activists were investigated by the house on americans activities committee and peace advocates became targets of mccarthyism. as late as 1962, the chairman of huac had this to say. it is a basic commonest doctrine to fight for peace. have an effect on nations that are intended victims of communism. assertion of peace on the part of any nation impedes adequate defense preparation, hinders effective diplomacy and the

national interest, undermines the will to resist and saps national strength. these were the opening remarks at the investigation of the women strike for peace in 19 1962.2 -- in this was at a point where the hearings went horribly wrong for huac. because the women showed up with their children. they brought flowers. they were celebrating their day in court, so to speak. and they were ridiculed and the media. i see there in 1962, a significant shift already toured this close association between communism and peace organization. and the women were very, very shrewd and exploiting that because they were just ordinary mothers and women. ok? early on we have other ways of ridiculing the peace offensive.

this is a cover from time magazine from 1951, where you see an image of the peace dove with the olive branch in one hand and a revolver in the other , hovering above the kremlin. this is one of a series of cartoons drawn, posters drawn up by a french anti-communist group from paix et liberte, 1951. you see stalin there putting the draw of-- putting the dove out front with a peace sign in one other.nd a weapon in the the french juxtaposed peace and freedom or tried to make a conjunction between them, ok? so the message from politicians and anti-communists in the west was clear.

peace is a threat to national security. deterrence, show of military strength, was the only way to avoid nuclear war. dilemma foras a western policymakers. it civilly did not look good in the international community to condemn peace. [laughter] to constantly be saber rattling. it made the u.s. the -- look as militarist as the soviets were claiming all along. and it did not look good in the global south. so what to do? the solution to the problem was straight out of orwell's 1984. make deterrence look like it is a peace offensive. --h as the administrator ministry of peace was designed to wage war. we have expressions like peace through strength, which is a really muscular military idea of peace. we have foreign ministers, if you look at the speeches foreign

ministers gave at the signing ceremony of nato in 1949, you will see peace over and over and over in their speeches. here -- i amg some cherry picking some examples here. this is all about nato, nato as a force for peace, as an instrument for peace. a few years later we have eisenhower developing atoms for peace, 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. they were not doing anything different from the soviets. but i believe the soviets were 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. here is thatuing peace through strength or deterrence contributed to the threat of war, made americans and soviets feel less secure than had both decided to follow a genuine politics of peace. so misconception number two. the general consensus of the , whowar were realists analyzed risk factors, uses scientific methods to arrive at keep americaegy to safe. those who advocated for peace were naive or communist agents.

i'm arguing the opposite. what we identify as realists were less realist than we assume. i don't want to rename the realist school of thought. i do want us to understand the realist school of thought had a scaffolding that was realist, ure nationaled on p interest. we have to look at the foundation of that realist policy. that was fundamentally based on that the other side was out for world domination. an assumption. it is a nonrational assumption. there was no way of knowing it. both sides engaged in the same thing. these doomsdaye

plans, who argue more weapons have a chance for permanent peace and a threat to national arerity, their policies based on nonrational assumptions rather than fact. it is because these facts could not be known. that does not make the policy apparatus one that was and rational. i'm also arguing the opposite and making the case the piece applicants who said you needed to stop nuclear weapons, there were in fact making sense. they were rational and sane. promulgated by those two naive. it evolved into a pragmatic policy with the help of a

dedicated group of activists, most of them initially outside political power. what i chasten my book is this path from the extra governmental diplomacy of these peace a transnational politics of peace that got the ear of the political elite. it took a lot of back channel diplomacy and pressure to make political leaders see the rationality of that politics of peace. showcase this irrational foundation of the realist school of thought, let me take a brief detour into the philosophical school of thought developed by kierkegaard in the

19th century and revived by people like albert camus, orwell, john paul sartre, kurt vonnegut, joseph heller also engaged in that absurd genre of literature. essay the myth of sisyphus inaugurated that postwar wave of absurdist literature. i argue it has to do with the absurdity, the threat of nuclear war. the story of sisyphus. he had to lift this rock up a hill only to be told by the dogs and fell back down so he would be forever condemned to do the same task over and over without accomplishing it. for many of these intellectuals

of the mid 20th century, the age of nuclear weapons presented such an absurd loop. terms, thel superpowers had to advocate for peace because the use of atomic weapons would destroy their enemy and their own population as well. toy had to constantly signal the adversary they were willing to wage war, even nuclear war. they could not give up nuclear weapons. they could not use them either. foundation of deterrent is fundamentally absurd. it was a catch 22. doomed if you do, or if you don't. term catch 22 exist yet. it came in the 1960's from joseph heller's novel. people immediately recognized

this was something that could be applied to the impossibility of nuclear war. the policy of deterrent rested on the assumption, not fact, and speculation. who are these theorists of nuclear deterrence? the folks at the rand -- whotion, people like both acknowledged it was irrational or even insane. the news of nuclear weapons was insane. the willingness to use weapons was considered realist. even argued that nuclear war was possible and winnable. his approach could be summarized in way. i am not saying we would not get more than 10ed, no

million, 20 million killed, tops. who knows where this quote originated? it was not kahn. anybody? it was general turgedson from dr. strangelove. [laughter] he said that in the war room. it could have come from kahn. when stanley kubrick planned the movie, he read kahn's on therm al nuclear war and subscribed to the atomic scientists, which scientists by the against nuclear war. the culturalnto realm of the 1960's.

stanley kubrick devised the movie based on the novel called red alert. the novel was really a classic and serious cold war thriller. kubrick decided he could not treat the subject in a serious way. he had to use satire. he had to turn it into an absurdist tail. into a black comedy. that is what he did. he gave us the greatest cold war movie of all time to this day. the movie is peppered with references to peace. see in the background, it is actually prominent, this is a scene from the air force base whoe this psychotic general hass to start nuclear war

hunkered down. what you see is soldiers fighting. this is one battalion coming in and conquer their fellow soldiers. on american soil. there are other references to peace. there's a scene where the soviet ambassador refers to the arms race and the peace race. and when journal --general turgidson tackles the soviet ambassador, the president admonishes them, gentlemen, you can't find in here. this is the war room. [laughter] there is no fighting in the war room. and finally the recall code devised by this psychotic

general in order to stop armageddon is poe, short for peace on earth. dr. strangelove is a fictional absurdities ofhe the arms race. the report from iron mountain is another. has anyone heard of this report? considered a serious report for a short time by many people. reporta manufactured published in 1967 that warned about the economic and political destabilization should permanent peace arise. corporatione rand and other think tanks and exposed the logic of what eisenhower had called the luke

perry industrial complex. -- the military-industrial complex. that theme of's, the absurdity of the impossibility of nuclear war had entered into the public realm and become part of popular culture. that created a different atmosphere for politicians that made it and impressed upon them the need to do something more serious about preventing nuclear war. peace advocates had tried to overcome this way of thinking. one group spearheading the effort was the committee for sane policy. this group emerged in 1957.

they actually came on the national scene with a huge ad campaign. they took out one page in the new york times and los angeles times and others arguing we are facing a danger unlike anything that has existed. they took a different approach by pointing out the environmental and health hazards detonation ofthe nuclear bombs in the united states and all over the world. response to the 1954 lucky dragon incident where one nuclear bomb test in the pacific went wrong. fallout spread in the wrong direction and contaminated a tuna trawler and when it arrived

, itse japanese court members were suffering from radiation disease. one died. he created a huge panic when the fish stock of tuna was eliminated. this is the new wave of anti-nuclear movements that stressed to the health risk. scientists have found elevated levels of a radioactive element released by nuclear testing in the bones and teeth of children. all over the united states. so i see this as a moment in which the pragmatic policy of peace was taking shape. the argument of longtime damage to the health of the human body

and the bodies of small children resonated with the american theic and increase to pressure on political leaders. to give an example, this is a map of the nuclear tests that were conducted and where they were conducted. to give you some figures, and the first four years, the u.s. atomic tests in the pacific. between 1951 and 1958, there one 100 70 tests. 97 of those were atmospheric tests conducted in nevada. they were actually telling their own people. nuclear war was happening on american soil. also on soviet soil.

they were endangering the health of their own people. the soviet union conducted 83 by the end of 1958. another dramatic expansion in the size of the bombs, the first hydrogen bomb had a power that bomb00 times that of the dropped on nagasaki. in a way, we do have a significant level of fallout in the atmosphere. this leads to pressure and eventually to the nuclear test in 1963.y the founder played a role in bringing about this test ban

treaty. he engaged in a lot of diplomacy between the kremlin, the kennedy administration, and pope john the 23rd. he writes about it in his book .he improbable triumvirate norman cousins was able to do this because he had forged these relationships with soviet intellectuals and scientists. he invited them to conferences where they engaged with of peace on matters advocacy and sharing of scientific research in the process. that brings me to the final point, the political transformation did not occur in around nixon.bout

more did formulate a coherent strategy than his predecessors. he built on a solid foundation in the early 1960's. it was a gradual process that unfolded over the 1960's and emanated from multiple origins and was shaped by a diverse set of actors. many of them i showed you in the beginning of this talk. during much of the 50's, viewedal leaders had peace advocacy as a threat to national security. by the 1960's, they were bitter getting -- they were beginning to co-opted. they understood the rhetorical virtues of peace. in the early 1960's, they began to understand its virtues as a

political strategy. a politics ofd peace occurred in part in response to these grassroots movement given by those individuals i mentioned earlier. it was not driven by the 1960's student and antiwar protesters. it was these people who had the connections to political elites and leaders. not just the u.s., but transnationally. in the aftermath of the berlin wall and cuban missile crisis became politically accessible and shrewd to develop a policy of peace. twont to zero in on leaders, nixon is one example. nixon was ae --

conservative. the other was a social democrat. both of them came to a politics of peace. achievements, as much as he was a hawk and might have fought the idea of waging peace, he did engage in it. of course he did the china visit, moscow, signed treaties in moscow and of course achieved peace accords in 1973. radicalwas not a departure. the thematic public enactment of peace politics had to seen as a culmination in the making in the previous decades.

the chancellor of germany, pretty much i found out pretty much exactly 50 years ago. policy ofed his change through rapprochement when he was no position to implement it. he was mayor of bellaire in -- berlin at the time. become foreign y and when heerman ministry became chancellor he was able to implement his politics which meant improving relations with

moscow, warsaw in 1970. treatyucted the basic which normalized relations with east germany, followed by a treaty in 1973. these three treaties acknowledged the existing postwar borders. toactually gave up any claim the territories germany had lost at the end of world war ii. neither were conservative measures. born out of a desire to quell domestic opposition. theher fit neatly into conventional of the time. staunchs a conservative. the fact both of them were able to come to the middle and

develop a piece politic showed the pragmatic source of this piece politics. saying yes,ude by the peace advocates were dreamers. they also succeeded in developing a practical approach that promised the greatest chance toward peace and prosperity. today need toers understand investing in a pragmatic policy of peace provides the biggest long-term dividends. they need to understand they .ave to align national interest focusing on one or the other will not work. we are farther from that understanding then we have been since the 1960's. waging war requires a lot less

political skill than sustaining peace. thank you very much. [applause] you, professor gooedde, for that excellent presentation. we will have a good number of questions. of firsty by way big peace say how the demonstration in 1983 was interesting for me and a my politicalent in consciousness. i remember hesitating whether i should go or not. sensed i really wanted to go.

maybe he did not quite have the courage. i wasctually drove me and able to participate. we were close and local. i had an advantage there. thank you for your presentation. -- since we are archives, you can access a lot of these archival materials that we have unearthed the last two decades on our website at no charge. documents, so on theme start by asking about

book,s that underlie your your argument. and to talk about how you went beyond what other cold war historians found. ms. goedde: i don't speak russian. that was a challenge. i wanted to get at the russian sources. i went to the standard archives in the u.s., the british and french archives, the german having access to east german sources, i got some of the soviet material. and some other through translation. thanks to your center, some documents are being translated and have been translated. side,f it from the soviet the tremendous support for peace

in the soviet union. i also got through secondary literature. there was an interesting article about how the russians were too enthusiastic about peace. they signed the stockholm declaration in 1950. they were very much into peace and the soviets had to backtrack not, the same way the americans were doing. too much peace was dangerous. those were the political archives. and then i did a lot of research very close to my home in swarthmore college which had a tremendous piece collection. a wonderful archive.

a lot of the material came from there. the hoover institution. also in amsterdam, the social -- i forget the name. thatof organizations housed some of the materials. and then there was a lot of published material. you look at the review of literature, norman cousins had every issue with an article and a debate among scientists and intellectuals about fallout about the nuclear threat. those kinds of things. i pieced together a lot of broadation from a very archival process. questions.wo

two. 30, i will only ask the untangling concept of peace itself. short word. to the point. it's a concept that is so all-encompassing and elastic it seems to embrace many different things. theou are talking about fellowship of reconciliation, the service committee, groups whose papers are at swarthmore and it is a wonderful collection, it is clear, this is a pacifist tendency on the american left. when you get to the sections about anti-nuclear weapons protests, nuclear weapons are not the same as peace. you can talk about environmental degradation, mothers and using the teeth, but

demonstration example, in the early 1980's, one of the biggest demonstrations in new york city. people are against nuclear weapons. many of those people support the anc in south africa, el salvador, groups engaged in war to some degree. not anti-nuclear activity? wrestled with this for a long time. part of me want to do right a use andbook about the abuse of peace as a word and concept. veryse people have different uses of the term. very different conceptions of

the term. i make differentiations in my book. i refused to give a single definition. one consensus was that peace is more than the absence of war. it is the absence of the threat of war. it the coldwe call war. even though technically the united states was at peace, it was not. it was in a state of preparation for war. in themake a distinction chapter when i talk about the antiwar movement because i see a say thevergence and i antiwar activists were not part of the peace movement. they were not pacifist. embrace theo national liberation. movement is aal

divide and something i did not complete talk, i see a flip in the rhetoric used. the antiwar protesters become a lot more militant in the rhetoric and the use some of the same things by dismissing , as nots as weak achieving what needs to be achieved and they support national liberationists who pick up arms and even people like jean-paul sartre who wrote the preface to the wretched of the earth and in the first chapter is about violence and the inevitability of violence and decolonization because the colonizer is so violent. the system is predicated on violence and resistance cannot possibly happen.

john paul sartre said you are right. up armser picking himself, but he condones it. there are several civil rights or new left intellectuals who jump on that same bandwagon and abandoned the idea of nonviolence. others stick to it. people like norman cousins, hannah arent, who is part of the new left movement. by 1967, she is very much against the student protesters who engage in violence and support violent resistance movements. because she says it is the wrong way. there are these differentiations that have to be made. >> i will hold off my second question because i see there are

hands. >> if you could please state your name and affiliation. i spent 51 years in defense matters. i was employed by the department of defense and came back from the sierra leone in 1966 and spent 13 years on nato nuclear weapons. , given the business of the neutron bomb, where they did not even know this was going on, in my creating the high-level group and setting out options for them, which went to the euro missiles, we americans had no position. it was a consensus among the group. option wass my basic

let all the nukes in europe disappear, go away. was moretion battlefield weapons. i knew the germans would reject that. the third was long-range stuff. short of the soviet union. the fourth option was into the soviet union. the group chose longer-range moscow.sia short of i asked my dutch colleague why. he said we think the polls are victims. gentleman, that same i met 20 years later in moscow discussing russia and nato. he was the belgian ambassador to russia. , we were eroding

all of that nuke stuff. most of ourletely, work was on improving the conventional balance. the same time the carmelo report was being prepared. you heard about mcnamara's flexible response. .ritten by tim stanley as my mentor said, the difference between that which it said you may count on nuclear , orons from the outset relying on conventional forces. meetingso in 1963 in a in -- what is his name, what am i coming up with?

anyway, one of the big nuclear guys said if you can imagine the military wasan told nukes are not just another artillery system. in other words we were working too bad. to get rid ofg that. none of the international relations literature across all those years was of any help whatsoever. >> do you have a question? >> did you know about all this kind of work in nato? ms. goedde: i could not know the secrets behind -- but i am not surprised by the 1960's and the

70's and 80's there's this and get rid ofe nuclear weapons. there was -- and it fits with the story i'm telling. even kennedy said, eisenhower was so liberal. he had no intention of using nuclear weapons. it was on the table. kennedy said we can't. we can't keep it on the table. it's an impossibility. others would like to speak as well. no, sir. >> requiring us to keep 7000 weapons. >> thank you. let's go to the next question. over here. >> i was a senior advisor to the trump for president campaign

2016. is if any of you isee wish to answer, what the effect concerning these, what you are advocating in the book, what will be the effects of this definite rise of nationalism not only in eastern europe but other parts of the world? anti-globalist fervor , which has taken root and will probably have an effect on the 2020 president election. effect of thee rise in nationalism on the international community? peacet it would have on and in terms of the opposite

possible pushback or philosophy or worldview of these nationalists -- it is more than just a few people. it's a feeling throughout the world you can see from public opinion polls, president trump -- if you take the world, not he probably has ratinghest favorability throughout the world if you go to these so-called developing nations. is onedde: nationalism of the biggest threats to international peace right now. it is a problem. it is what i ended with. the national and international, peace is possible only if the interests align and every -- if

you have a nationalist policy toroach, it is very hard align that with internationalists. believe your own interests are connected and related to the national community, you set yourself up for conflict with other countries. we see this happening as we speak. we have a lot more threats to 10 years than we had ago, 15 years ago. going in-- we are not the right direction. >> we have several more questions. the gentleman on the left. please be assisting. we have a good number of questions. >> i was a speaker here in

january. i agreed with everything you cold wart the assumptions. i have to disagree about ike. he was ready to use atomic weaponry in vietnam, certainly against china had it encroached on taiwan. i agree with the three assumptions from a different angle. of course deterrence barely worked. it was sheer luck that got us through. u.s. policy was anything but realistic. americans were winging it throughout. the u.s. does not do consider it foreign policy, no more so today than in the 1940's or the era of deterrence. i don't think i heard you mention stalin.

that is significant. stalin, oneioning might assume there was something the united states could have done to prevent the soviets from building an atomic bomb. that seems unlikely. it also seems unlikely we could have prevented the british from building an atomic bomb. we have to be somewhat careful about the extent of u.s. global influence. ms. goedde: the soviets built the atomic bomb because the u.s. -- yes,ish refused they were 93% there. because the development of the

atomic bomb was actually an international conglomerate of scholars. some of them coming from poland and the soviet union. therefore they knew what their colleagues also knew. they were very close. had been followed, which was to place atomic weapons under international control, we might have not had the arms race. it's not whether the soviet developed it.tish placing these weapons under international control might have prevented enormous arms race. might have prevented the development of hydrogen bombs. that we have seen over the

course of the 1950's. it would have not led to the kind of map we see here -- where is it? with all of these weapon tests. i would disagree nothing would have changed had international control been an option. >> thank you. i am retired. when deterrence policy was formulated, was less than 20 years after the munich conference when chamberlin decided to go for peace in our time and learned the other side really was out for world domination. given people who had lived through this, it seems like piece from strength sounds like

a more rational idea than peace without strength. is it really so irrational? the nuclear atomic weapons did make an enormous difference in the equation. you don't think so. i think it did. people thought about this in different terms. peace was a necessity and a desire of all populations in the aftermath of world war ii. it was also discredited because of the unix syndrome. that is one of the paradoxes of the postwar period. there is nothing that tells us the soviet union and u.s. could not have avoided a cold war.

ways as race was in many very irrational response to the global situation because it rested on the assumption, the false assumption, to say stalin was bent on world domination after it had suffered such a devastating defeat. we have to look at other documents. 68, the message was that the foster,ed to actively undermining from the inside, the soviet system. therefore there was fear on both sides. and the fear the u.s. was bent on destroying the soviet union just as the u.s. might have assumed the soviet union wanted to destroy the u.s. >> over here.

>> thank you very much for your talk. i'm at the wilson center this term. question is a response to your talk and the question from the gentleman on the other site, around the realist theory. could you engage with it more? if i were a realist, i might thinkd -- you noted you u.s. foreign policy is generally viewed as realist. it rests on the assumption the other side is expansionist. say was a realist, i would aren't you supposed to distrust where you have no evidence for

or against that claim? that gives rise to the security dilemma that any measure i take might naturally be interpreted as being offensive. which eliminates the distinction between offensive and defensive measures, wouldn't that be a response to the security dilemma? wouldn't that be for peace? i would assume the realist argument would run along those lines. ms. goedde: yes. asee realist theory basically a complex math problem where every calculation is correct and rational and based on neutral factors, except for the original barriers. there's a sense -- i come from

from having written formulations with an emphasis on culture and gender. me, initially an uphill colleaguesonvince that culture mattered. i'm becoming more and more convinced looking at the realist historical writing and policymaking there is a false assumption our cultural assumptions, everything could be rational and systematic and that we take the human factor, the cultural assumptions, stereotypes, fears, out of the equation. we cannot do that. we can have a realist school of thought. even a realist school has to

acknowledge at some level it is based on a set of assumptions non-quantifiable or verifiable and based on assumptions we have to make. we have to make those assumptions. i'm not saying realist policy makers that we dismiss it. we need to acknowledge there is a foundation to this policy that is fundamentally based on a set of assumptions we are making. that means the idea of the is incomplete being, we haven assumptions of the other side. it could go one way or another.

in the cold war, americans for , andongest time assumed the soviets, the worst about the other side. the question is, why did they change in the 1970's? why was it possible to come to agreement? that is not a rational decision. nothing rational changed. but human assumptions and the cultural level shifted. in some ways it is a leap of faith that people like kennedy brandt took. >> we have five minutes left. why don't we take a final round of questions. several of you have been waiting

. we will try to get to you. we will give professor goedde one more chance to answer the questions and then we will continue the discussion over a glass of wine at the reception. let's start over there with the gentleman. brief questions. book on theing on a early 1970's. he was a figure of a cold war warrior, especially this time of detente. i'm interested in why -- public opinion had become very much positive about detente in that time. as a cold wared warrior, person of the past. i am interested in why he was

still very popular in west germany and other places. i would like to know more about wet you think about, i mean, have more studies on religion and emotions in the cold war. hehink there's reasons why was so popular. >> question please. americanportant is exceptionalism to the idea america was in a holy crusade against an evil force which gave a moral superiority to the united states? -- goedde: >> thanks for your talk. question, maybe i missed it, but i enjoyed how you

brought the cultural aspect into the political environment. connected the cultural theting in the 1960's with shifting of the politics in the 1970's. i did not see the direct connection even though you make the argument. the other one was in your thatntation, it seems vocabulary like rational, irrational, strength, weakness. i would like to ask if you can underlyingthe generalization of the topic. >> the gentleman to the left.

i am curious, what non-western voices are part of this global cold war history? >> over here. thank you very much. i'm a retired diplomat. part, how do you interpret the current student uprisings? not just students, but civil servants and others around the world. the blue vest people in france. opposition in places like latin america, honduras is one. arendly, you said there

more threats to peace now than 10 years ago. could you identify a couple of these threats and who are responsible for them? >> over the next hour and a half. [laughter] >> you have one minute left. [laughter] i have a chapter on religion. i have a chapter on gender. i cut them out because they are getting so large. religion and peace activism is important. you are right. there's also conservative elements to that. in terms of connecting the alture and politics, it is question of looking at how the .ublic discourse occurs one moment of transition of

1962.p is this quote from spectacle political that was ridiculed in the media and the public. there was a sense the fact there was so much popularity to these cold war movies and also books like catch-22, there's this indirect discourse in the media the changes. the attacks on the cold war politics becomes more pronounced. see.is the connection i there is no smoking gun. we also see for a nixon, you have a quote where he says i seen as wanting peace, even if i don't like it. that means, fine, you don't have

to like it. the fact he followed through means it had an effect. you can see those relations. non-western voices is a good question. i have one chapter that deals with the national liberation movement. a piece thatlly relates to the gender notion. of manyan association antiwar activists who admire people like ho chi minh. those are characters, che guevara is huge. he's a military asked. he's a freedom fighter to these people. it also creates the gendered notion of peace, that peace is for the weak minded and it means

you are giving in. you are not showing your strength. this is shown through the black power movement and other movements. also the turn toward terrorism in the united states. the weatherman in germany, the red army faction, they glorify violence. movementthe antiwar becomes much more militant. precisely at the moment when the women's movement is taking off. i cannot possibly answer your question. uprisings are all over the place. 1.i want to make clear, i am teaching a class now and i decided to discuss greta thornburg in there. she's a perfect example of a student who makes an impact.

but doesn't have the wherewithal to make these international connections. generation,'s,r who were there when the green party evolved, unless there is a buy-in from that generation, this movement will peter out and will not go anywhere. these young people have the enthusiasm and will tell the older generation all the ways in which they have messed up and are messing up. political ability to maneuver and make changes rests with a middle-aged, middle-class, well-connected and educated, wealthy group of people. it is up to them to put the final pressure on political leaders to make a change. i'm not going to answer the second piece. [applause]

[captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2019] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> tv" all weekend every weekend on c-span3. announcer 2: next on history bookshelf fergus bordewich talks about his book america's great debate, henry clay, stephen douglas and the compromise that preserved the union. he describes the debate over slavery and westward expansion that led to the compromise of 1850. we recorded his remarks in 2012 at the 12th annual national book festival in washington, dc. [applause] >> good afternoon, everyone. dan. you, i want to extend my thanks to the washington post library of congress and the other sponsors of this terrific festival in previous years. my wife and i have sat in many