Pacifism and the Cold War, appunti delle lezioni del Prof. Moro, International History of Peace

Pacifism and the Cold War

After the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing, an agreement about nuclear weapons was necessary and urgent. Pacifism was still for a long time dealt in traditional terms, it was spread especially among tiny sects, and an atomic consciousness grew very slowly and reached the peak only during the 1960’s. The after-war period was also called the “age of peace movements”. New movements, more pragmatic and with limited goals demanding for “no more war” and “ban the bomb”, took the place of the peace organizations which were weakened by their appeasement in WWII.

After WWII, as Howard wrote in his book The Invention of Peace, a new international order emerged and was characterized by new institutions based on the values of the western parliamentary democracies. The new framework of the UN was made up by a General Assembly, which embodied legislative power, and by a Security Council, which represented the executive power. But Stalin had another vision of the world, that was incompatible with the principles and values imposed by western liberal democracies.

Consequently, the Cold War began and it divided the world into two spheres of influence, each one linked with a super-power: U.S and USSR. When the Cold War started, the perspective of a world agreement and control on nuclear weapons was soon put in doubt, and the nightmare of a possible nuclear war came back. Both United States and Soviet Union started a program of militarization. Truman presidency made the choice of an atomic arsenal as a fundamental element of American strategy of defense, and the Soviets started the building of the atomic bomb.

Emergence of anti-nuclear movements

In front of this situation, new anti-nuclear movements emerged, especially in Japan, with the hibakusha movement. In 1948, the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace was held in Poland; it included the participation of the most important Communist personalities.

The post-war peace movement took shape after the World Peace Committee held in Paris in 1949. As Phillip Deery wrote in his article The Dove Flies East, the Committee recommended the creation in every country of “national peace committees” in order to promote peace at a national level. The only mass protest for peace during the early years of the Cold War came from the Communist movement of the “Partisans of Peace”.

The role of the Cominform

In 1947, during the inaugural conference of the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau), the Soviet representative Zdhanov divided the world in two parts: the world of peace-loving led by the Soviets, and the capitalist world led by the U.S. In 1949, a Cominform resolution stated that peace should be the first objective of the Communist parties around the world.