>> 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 you and to welcome to our series professor petra goedde from 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 -- 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 us on if you want peace, or william detours on the

politics of peace in the early cold war. >> thank you to everyone who makes this possible for inviting me. 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. so, writing a 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. -- not orweillian detours. i put a picture of it.

my sister is design-oriented since she was a teenager, wanted white books. i set 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 politically 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 awe today of how much power they actually gained. and they are still may be in a sentence, i do not know. the early 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 was built 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. so these experiences 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 1960's. to write a transnational history of the 1960's new left. i hoped to find a lot of personal interactions between americans, british, european student activists, but i was soon disappointed. my first trip to that wisconsin archives will that do nothing. in terms -- 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. that led me to an eclectic group of individuals, who are either members of long-standing international peace organizations, or founded new ones in the postwar. . those were individuals like--in the postwar period. -- those were individuals like, i think this expensing a revival. frederick, a nobel prize winner in chemistry, a communist resistance fighter in france. he was the first president of the world peace council. individuals like--frederic

joliot-curie. gerda lerner,. norman cousens. == cousins. a protestant dutch minister who led the fellowship of reconciliation, a.j. muste. the founder or cofounder of the campaign against nuclear disarmament, canon john, 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 period. 1945 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 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 and other countries, and west germany 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. one is that deterrence works. or worked. you all know the roman adage, if you want peace, prepare for war. 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. i am arguing here that nuclear 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 policy in this period was 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.

it rested on an assumption they made 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 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. and the third point i want to make, i want to get at the assumption that the detant as a

conservative response to the student protests of the 1960's -- that detente was a 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 antiestablishment students of the 1960's. but i argue that detente started 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 detente, 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 broader cold war historiography. 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 cold war period. , 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 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. and for much of the 1950's and 1960's, western policymakers accused peace advocates of at best, being naive 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. so, let me turn to the first misconception. deterrence works. this is the crux of my first

point. among historians in u.s. no clear strategy as well is contempt a nuclear strategist in the u.s., the consensus still prevails, that nuclear -- that the nuclear 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 in nuclear terms -- 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 cafe, 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. showing how 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. we can, however, document the 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. russians, eastern europeans, 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 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. and i just read this morning in the news that now everyone 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 nuclear weapons within four to five years, 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 immediately 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 front organization -- the wpc. but we need to look at this organization on its own terms in the context of the postwar. at least in the early stages it

was supported by intellectuals and scientists initially. the fear of nuclear war was widespread and many moderates in the u.s. felt that only through cooperation with those on the others, with communists, could -- could a nuclear war avoided. the wpc promised that kind of cooperation, at least in the early phases. frederic, a member of the french communist party was an open communist and do not hide this. he was married to the daughter of marie curie, a very prominent scientific family. pablo picasso drew the first of

his iconic doves. 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. among them, wb dubois and paul robeson. robeson gave a speech that was critical of u.s. policy and he paid for it dearly, 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 pretty much shot after that. there was early criticism of

the wpc,. as an organization. but also a lot of support. the goodwill among western, non-communists faded over the course of the 1950's, as the wpc became more and more partisan, more and more pro-soviet. several stages diminished the international reputation of the wpc as a forum for international corp. one was a 1956 hungarian uprising. and in the 1960's when the organization refused to condemn the soviet union for its acts of aggression. and even communist parties left the wpc. one that did not was the u.s.

communist part, 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 rhetoric, the united states -- international political rhetoric, the united states went the opposite direction. they began to associate peace 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. peace have an effect on nations that are intended victims of communism.

excessive concern 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 1962. 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 in the media. i see there in 1962, a significant shift already toward this close association between communism and peace organization. and the women were very, very

shrewd in exploiting in 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 called paix et liberte, from 1951. you see stalin there putting the the dove out front with a peace sign in one hand. and a weapon in the other. 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, a show of military strength, was the only way to avoid nuclear war. but, there was a dilemma for western policymakers. it simply did not look good in the international community to condemn peace. [laughter] to constantly be saber rattling. it made the u.s. 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. much as the 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. -- i am 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. to be sure, 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. what i am arguing here is that peace through strength or deterrence contributed to the threat of war, made americans and soviets feel less secure than it ha, had both decided to follow a genuine politics of peace. so misconception number two. the general consensus of the cold war were realists, who analyzed risk factors, uses scientific methods to arrive at a grand strategy to keep

america 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, that was based on pure national interest. we have to 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 was an assumption. it is a nonrational assumption. there was no way of knowing it. both sides engaged in the same thing.

those who divide these doomsday plans, who argue more weapons have a chance for permanent peace and a threat to national security, their policies are 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 dispassionate 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. peace was not promulgated by

those too 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 trace in my book is this path from the extra governmental diplomacy of these peace advocates, to 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. in order to 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. camus's 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. we know 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. in political terms, the superpowers had to advocate for peace because the use of atomic weapons would destroy their enemy and their own population as well. they had to constantly signal to the adversary they were willing to wage war, even nuclear war. they could not give up nuclear weapons. they could not use them either. this means the foundation of deterrent is fundamentally absurd. it was a catch 22. doomed if you do, or if you don't.

the term catch 22 did not 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 corporation, people like -- who both acknowledged it was irrational or even insane. the use of nuclear weapons was insane. the willingness to use weapons was considered realist. it was even argued that nuclear war was possible and winnable. his approach could be

summarized this way. i am not saying we would not get our hair mussed, no more than 10 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 thermal nuclear war and subscribed to the atomic scientists, which was created by the scientists against

nuclear war. i am moving into the cultural 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 psycho 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 tale. 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. you see in the background, it is actually prominent, this is a scene from the air force base

where this psychotic general who wants to start a nuclear war has hunkered down. what you see is soldiers fighting. this is one battalion coming in to fight 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--general turgidson tackles the soviet ambassador, the president admonishes them,

gentlemen, you can't fight 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 way to expose the absurdities of the arms race. the report from iron mountain is another. has anyone heard of this report? it was considered a serious report for a short time by many people. it was a manufactured report published in 1967 that warned about the economic and political destabilization should permanent peace arise. it mocked the rand corporation and other think tanks and exposed the logic of what eisenhower had called the luke

perry industrial complex. -- the military-industrial complex. so by the 1960's, that theme of 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 that followed the detonation of nuclear bombs in the united states and all over the world. it also came in 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 in the japanese court, its members were suffering from radiation disease. one died. he created a huge panic when an entire week's worth of tuna fish stock 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 public and increase to the 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. detonated six atomic tests in the pacific. between 1951 and 1958, there were 170 tests. 97 of those were atmospheric tests conducted in nevada. they were actually killing

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 tests by the end of 1958. another dramatic expansion in the size of the bombs, the first hydrogen bomb had a power that was 500 times that of the bomb 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 ban treaty in 1963. 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 the 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 americans on matters of peace advocacy and sharing of scientific research in the process. that brings me to the final point, the political

transformation toward detente did not occur in a sudden turnabout around nixon. nixon did formulate a more 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, political leaders had viewed peace advocacy as a threat to national security. by the 1960's, 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. the turn toward a politics of 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, it became politically accessible and shrewd to develop a policy of peace. i want to zero in on two

leaders, nixon is one example. the other one if brant was a conservative. the other was a social democrat. both of them came to a politics of peace. we know nixon's 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. detente was not a radical departure. rather 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 yesterday pretty much exactly 50 years ago. he developed his policy of change through rapprochement when he was no position to implement it. he was mayor of bellaire in -- berlin at the time. by 1966, he had become foreign minister of german ministryy and when he became chancellor he was able to implement his

politics which meant improving relations with moscow, warsaw in 1970. he conducted, signed the basic treaty which normalized relations with east germany, followed by a treaty in 1973. these three treaties acknowledged the existing postwar borders. he actually gave up any claim to 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. neither fit neatly into the

conventional camps of the time. nixon was a staunch 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. let me conclude by saying yes, the peace advocates were dreamers. they also succeeded in developing a practical approach that promised the greatest chance toward peace and prosperity. political leaders today need to understand investing in a pragmatic policy of peace provides the biggest long-term dividends. they need to understand they have 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 late 1960's. waging war requires a lot less political skill than sustaining peace. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you professor. excellent presentation. very stimulating, and i think we will have a good number of questions. let me just sort of -- a first comment just to say how the big peace march in peace demonstration in 1983 -- it's interesting i was also from there so, affirmative more moment and my political consciousness.

i remember also hesitating, whether i should go or not. my family lived there, my parents sensed i really wanted to go, but maybe did not have quite have the courage. they drove me to bond and i was able to participate on this. we were at a close advantage there. thank you so much for your presentation. let me start at the home of the cold war and national history project, which is focused on archives. 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 or three decades on our website. digital archive start oh archie at no charge.

some people call us documented archive threat shifts fetishes. you hinted a little bit about the sources that underlie your book, your argument, and to talk a little bit about how you went beyond what other cold war historians have before. >> thank you. 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 archives and 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.

much of it from the soviet side, 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 and tell them, 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. and also in amsterdam, the social -- i forget the name. lots of organizations that 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 information from a very broad

archival process. i've got two questions maybe three but i will only ask to. the first has to do with untangling the concept of peace itself. it is so encompassing and elastic that it seems to embrace many different things here. if you are talking about the war resist are sleek, the fellowship of reconciliation, the american friends service committee, were papers arts warrants more. there, it's pretty clear, this is a pacifist tendency on the american left, when you get to all of these sections and the book about anti nuclear weapons protests, nuclear weapons are

not the same thing as peace. you can talk about environmental desegregations, mothers, children's teeth, etc etc. the demonstration example you, used in the early 1980 is 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 fcm l and, the el salvador, near nicaragua, groups that are engaged in war to some degree horn other. why piece? why not anti nuclear activity? >> >> i wrestled with this for a long time.

part of me wanted to do right a cynical book about the use and abuse of peace as a word and concept. because people have very 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. this is why we call it the cold war. even though technically the united states was at peace, it was not. it was in a state of preparation for war. i also make a distinction in the chapter when i talk about the antiwar movement because i see a cleared divergence and i say the antiwar activists were not part of the peace movement. they were not pacifist. they began to embrace the

national liberation. the anticolonial movement is a divide and something i did not say in my talk, i see a complete 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 pacifists as weak, as not 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. he's never picking up arms 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 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 sierra leone in 1966 and spent 13 years on nato nuclear weapons. culminating, 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 led

to the euro missiles, we americans had no position. it was a consensus among the group. the point is my basic option was let all the nukes in europe disappear, go away. second option was more 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 into russia short of moscow. i asked my dutch colleague why. he said we think the polls are victims. by the way, that same gentleman i met 20 years later in moscow discussing russia and nato. he was the belgian ambassador

to russia. the point was, we were eroding away all of that nuke stuff. we were completely, most of our work was on improving the conventional balance. the same time the carmelo report was being prepared. you heard about mcnamara's flexible response. written by tim stanley. as my mentor said, the difference between that which it said you may count on nuclear weapons from the outset, or relying on conventional forces. i was also in 1963 in a meeting

in harry owen's office anyway, one of the big nuclear guys said if you can imagine the day the russian military was told nukes are not just another artillery system. in other words we were working to that. we were working to get rid of that. none of the international relations literature across all those years was of any help whatsoever.

>> did you know about all this kind of work in nato? >> 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 effort to reduce and get rid of 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. over here.

i was a senior adviser to trump for president campaign in 2016. my question is, and if any of you three wish to answer, please. what is -- what you think the effects concerning these and certainly, what you are advocating and the book -- what would be the effects of this definite rise of nationalism, not only in eastern europe but other parts of the world, would have an effect on this or you can call it sort of an anti globalist fervor, which is obviously taken, or would have an effect on the 2020 presidential elections. >> you are asking with the

effect of rice and nationalism is on the international community or more specifically on peace? >> what do you think it would have on peace in terms of, like the opposite, so the possible pushback, or opposite philosophies or world views of these nationalists who are -- i mean it is more than just a few people. it is a feeling throughout the whole world, and you can also see from public opinion, president trump probably -- if you take the whole world certainly not western europe, but the whole world, he probably has the highest favourability rating throughout the world if you go to these so called developing nations. >> >> nationalism is one 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 approach, it is very hard to align that with internationalists. if you do not 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 peace now than we had 10 years ago, 15 years ago.

it's not -- we are not going in the right direction. >> we have several more the gentleman on the left. please be assisting. we have a good number of >> i was a speaker here in january. i agreed with everything you said about the cold war 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. 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. without mentioning stalin, one 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. >> the soviets built the atomic bomb because the u.s. and british refused -- yes, 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. if the plan 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 union, the british developed it. 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. in that sense, i would disagree nothing would have changed had international control been an option. >> thank you. i am retired. the 1950's, 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 munic 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. the arms race was in many ways a 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. nsc 68, the message was that the u.s. tried to actively foster, 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. i'm with the program at the wilson center. my question, is a sort of response to your top and the question from the gentleman on the side, essentially relates or revolves around theory, could you engage with it a little more, if i were a realist, i might respond to your your top that you think the u.s. foreign policy is generally for a realist, but it wrestling the assumption that the other side is inherently

expansionist. if i'm a realist i would say something along the lines of, aren't you supposed to distrust, when you have no evidence for or against that claim, the fundamentals of realist theory, giving rise to the security dilemma, any measure that i take that is purely defensive may be interpreted as offensive. that as a response to that deterrence, which essentially eliminates the distinction between offensive and defensive measures, would not be a response to the security level, wouldn't that inherently be a guarantee for peace. the realist line of argument would go along those lines. could you engage with that a little bit more? >> yes, so i see realist theory as we, is basically a complex math problem where every

calculation is correct and perfectly rational and based on neutral factors. except for the two original variables. so there is the sense, for i come to this from having engaged, and written foreign relations, on culture engender. for me, this was initially an uphill battle to convince my foreign policy colleagues, that culture mattered. i am becoming more and more convinced, and looking at realist historical writing but realist policymaking, that there is the false assumption that our cultural assumptions, that everything could be rational and systematic. we take the human factor, with cultural assumptions and

stereotypes, fears out of the equation. and we cannot do that. we can have the realist school of thought, but even a realist school of thought has to acknowledge that some deep level, it is based on a set of assumptions that are essentially for non quantifiable, non verifiable, based on assumptions we have to make. we have to make those assumptions. i am not saying that realist policy makers, we dismiss it entirely. but we need to acknowledge that there is a foundation to this policy that is fundamentally based on a set of assumptions that we are making. that means the idea of the rational actor, which really is incomplete. because no human being as long as we have human beings

involved, we have to make in diplomacy particularly, certain assumptions of the other side. and it could go one way or the other. in the cold war americans for the longest time, assumed and along with soviet to, the worst about the other side. and the question is, why did they change? in the 1960s and the 1970s why was it possible to come to an agreement and that is also not a rational decision. nothing rational changed. but human assumptions and a cultural understanding shifted, and in some ways it is a leap of faith that people like kennedy and nixon took had a particular moment in time. >> we have five minutes left,

and still so many questions. let's do this, let's take a few final round questions. several of you have been waiting patiently. we will try to get to you. we will give the professor one more chance to answer the question succinctly and then we will continue to the discussion, we over a glass of wine at the reception. let's start over there with the gentleman, and then with three -- brief questions please. >> i'm from the catholic university of america from. >> i am working on a book on the 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. he was portrayed as a cold war 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 what you think about, i mean, we have more studies on religion and emotions in the cold war. i think there's reasons why he was so popular. i would like to know how you think -- that america was in a crusade it a holy crusade against and evil force, which gave a moral superiority to the united states.

>> thank you again for your top. i have two short questions. the first one is i may be missed it but, i really enjoyed how you brought the cultural aspect into the political environment. would like to know how you connected the cultural shifting and the sixties with a shifting of the politics of the seventies? like i did not see the direct connection there, even though you make the argument. and the other one question would be, and your presentation, but also in the discussion here, seems to me there is a lot of irrational vocabulary, or strengths and weaknesses. i would like to ask if you

could talk a bit more about the underlying gender of the topic. >> the gentleman to the left here, yes. >> hi, i just am curious. what non-western voices are a part of this global cold war history? >> thank you. finally, over here. >> thank you very much i'm benjamin. i have a two part question first part is, how do you interpret the current student uprisings and some that are not and volley, not just students but by civil servants and others around the world, and divest people in france,

uprisings and oppositions and places like latin america, honduras. secondly, you said that there are more threats to peace now and ten years ago. can you identify a couple of these threats, and who are responsible for them? >> over the next hour and a half. just kidding. >> five questions. you have one minute left. and go. >> i actually have a chapter on religion. i have a chapter on gender. i cut both of these out because they were just getting so large, but i think religion and peace activism is very important, but you are right. there is also a conservative element to that in there. in terms of connecting the culture and the politics, it is

sort of a question of looking at how the public discourse occurs. one moment of transmission of overlap icy is from the quote i gave in 1962, it was sort of a political spectacle that was ridiculed in the media in the public. it was the sense that the fact that there was so much popularity to these cold war movies, but also books, like catch 22. there was an indirect discourse the public discourse in the media changes. the attacks on the cold war politics becomes more pronounced, and that is the connection they there with politics. there is no smoking gun. we also seen, for nixon, for

instance, he says, i have to be seen as being for peace, because people want it, even if i do not like it. i have to do it. to me, that means fine. you do not have to like it, but the fact that he followed through on a policy means he had an effect. you can see those relations. non-western voices is a really good question. i have one chapter in there that deals with the national liberation movements. this is actually an assault on peace. it relates to the gender because in the sixties we have, at the same time, and association of many anti war activists, where people were saying, like ho chi minh, characters like ho chi minh, she cabrera is huge, but he is a militarist. he is violent. he is a freedom fighter to these people.

it also creates a gendered notion that we introduce a gender notion of peace, that pieces for the weak minded, it means you are giving in, that you are not showing your strength. this is shown in the black power movement but also through other movements, and also we turn toward terrorism. united states, the weatherman and germany, the army faction, they glorified violence. even the anti war movement becomes more militant. and that is also gendered connotations. this is the moment where women 's movements were taking off. i cannot possibly begin to answer all your questions. the current uprisings are all over the place. one point i want to be clear it's, i am teaching a class on

global studies and i decided to discuss greta thunberg in there. she is a perfect example of a young student who makes an enormous impact in a, but only doesn't have the wherewithal to make these international connections. unless the older generation knows of us who were there when these parties involved, unless there is sort of a buying from that older generation, this movement will peter out and will not go anywhere, because these young people have the enthusiasm. they will tell the older generation all the ways in which they have misstep and are messing up. but the political ability to maneuver and make changes rests with a middle aged, 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 changes. i will not answer the rest. (applause)

>> next, we hear from monica kim, author of "the interrogation rooms of the korean war: the untold story." she analyzes the unauthorized tactics used by the u.s. and its allies. the wilson center and the national history center cosponsored this. >> welcome to the seminar, a