Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) began in 1957 with a small group of public figures and grew into a mass movement that would resonate worldwide. Martin Shaw details CND’s rise, the activists involved, the tensions around direct action, and the culture, radicalism and social groups that the campaign mobilized to ＂ban the bomb＂. He shows how CND’s approach, as part of the Stop the War Coalition in response to the Iraq War, influenced the Labour Party and, indirectly, the Obama administration, when the Party opposed Cruise missile attacks in Syria in 2013, and when Jeremy Corbyn, a lifelong CND supporter, was elected its leader in 2015.

The book shows CND to be a pioneering example of activism for peace whose style and ideas continue to reverberate in the wider protest movements of the twenty-first century, from Occupy to Extinction Rebellion.

Martin Shaw is Emeritus Professor of International Relations and Politics at the University of Sussex. He was involved in the student and Vietnam War movements in the late 1960s and co-founded a local European Nuclear Disarmament (END) group in Hull and became a member of END’s national committee. He was also chair of Humberside CND and took part in national CND affairs in the 1980s.