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Reducing the danger from the large global stocks of fissile materials will require them to be drastically reduced and their regulation to be approached as if the world is preparing for complete nuclear disarmament. To this end, much greater transparency of fissile material stockpiles will be required. It also will be necessary to end verifiably all further production of plutonium and highly enriched uranium and to verifiably dispose of stockpiles as irreversibly as possible. Verifying past production will need new cooperative approaches for forensic analysis of former production sites and related records and waste materials (“nuclear archaeology”). Verifying elimination will require societal verification, in which the duty to report violations of nuclear disarmament obligations is recognized as a right and duty of all citizens.

Triumphalists contend that President Reagan won the Cold War by employing hard-line policies and refusing to negotiate with Moscow. Reagan’s refusal to engage with the enemy compelled the Soviet Union to disarm, adopt democratic reforms, and ultimately collapse. This chapter debunks the notion that Reagan was a hard-liner throughout his time in office, as well as the idea that he rejected diplomacy. It demonstrates that Reagan’s initially hawkish posture brought the superpowers to the brink of war in 1983. By 1984 the president was actively seeking negotiations aimed at improving superpower relations and reducing nuclear arsenals. Reagan was seeking dialogue and disarmament even before Mikhail Gorbachev came to office and years before the Soviet Union began to reform. By the time he left the White House, Reagan had met with his Soviet counterparts more frequently than any previous American president. These negotiations were critical to the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War. Diplomacy, engagement, and dialogue are core components of Reagan’s legacy.

The world has struggled for over six decades with the dangers posed by huge quantities of plutonium and highly enriched uranium, the chain reacting fissile materials that are the key ingredients of nuclear weapons and that were described by the eminent physicist Niels Bohr in 1944 as possibly posing a “perpetual menace” to humankind. Since the failure of the post-World War II efforts to ban nuclear weapons and control fissile materials, nine other states have followed the United States and produced fissile materials and nuclear weapons. This chapter provides an overview of the book and an introduction to the fissile material problem and the proposals to cap, reduce, and eventually eliminate fissile materials. It explains why such initiatives are critical to support deep reductions and eventual elimination of all nuclear weapons, to make such nuclear disarmament more difficult to reverse, to raise the barriers to nuclear weapon proliferation, and to prevent nuclear terrorism.

Triumphalism not only claims to explain the surprising end of the Cold War, it also stipulates how to cope with current conflicts. But triumphalism is a series of myths. President Reagan did not seek to destroy the USSR; rather, he sought to improve superpower relations so as to eliminate nuclear arsenals. Moreover, his initial hard-line policies did not compel the USSR to disarm, reform, and collapse. They strengthened the position of Soviet hard-liners who opposed disarmament, made it more difficult for Gorbachev to implement New Thinking, and brought the superpowers to the brink of war. In short, compellence failed miserably. The Cold War was resolved through diplomacy, not threats. President Reagan eventually engaged in meaningful dialogue so as to ease Moscow’s security concerns, build trust, and focus on the superpowers’ mutual interest in eliminating nuclear arms. For his part, Gorbachev sought to end the arms race so as to divert resources to democratization. He too sought dialogue and trust. The ending of the Cold War demonstrates the importance of moral leadership. Reagan and Gorbachev both rose above their differences and introduced new ideas about nuclear security. Consequently, both encountered serious domestic opposition. Each persevered, however, leading their nations toward a safer, more humane future.

‘The Peculiarities of the English’ is perhaps the most celebrated of the four texts Edward Palmer Thompson collected in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. Through 1960, Thompson was kept busy addressing Left Club meetings, writing for the New Left Review, and speaking at Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) demonstrations. Thompson begins ‘Where Are We Now?’ by interrogating the concept of ‘intellectual work’. Thompson contested Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn's portrait of the English bourgeoisie as a weak class mired in pre-capitalist ideology and he was fearful of confronting the remnants of the old feudal class. ‘The Peculiarities of the English’ rapidly became a classic, breeding a large and mostly admiring body of commentary. Thompson's engagement with the ‘New New Left’ only served to emphasise his alienation from a new generation of activists.

British culture struggled to understand the threat of nuclear war during the Cold War. This difficulty in fully ‘imagining’ the destruction a future war would bring had important consequences for how the Cold War was understood and fought in Britain. In the years after Hiroshima, atomic war was understood primarily through the prism of the memory of the 1939-45 war. Atomic destruction was downplayed as people elided future destruction with that experienced in the Blitz. From 1954, however, the hydrogen bomb ensured that the opposite was true: its city destroying power making any sort of survival difficult to imagine. This vision of the Apocalyptic nuclear war drove both the peace campaign and the Government’s deterrent policy. As such, Britain’s nuclear culture from 1945 onwards rested on how nuclear war was – and could be – imagined.

This chapter traces the coalescence between pacifist and environmental concerns around the issue of nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s and early 1960s in the West. Scientists, health professionals, educators, and middle-class families grew increasingly concerned about the health hazards of fallout from nuclear testing. They built a grassroots movement that transcended the traditional Cold War divisions and ignored political warnings about the need for nuclear deterrence against the communist threat. Clean soil, clean air, and clean food, as well as the health of current and future generations of children, were at stake, making the cost of defense against an abstract communist enemy too high a price to pay for many. The struggle for peace thus expanded from political-ideological to the medical-environmental realm.