Realism, Utopia, and the Mushroom Cloud

Regular price €38.99
A01=Michael Bess
Author_Michael Bess
Category=DNBH
Category=GTU
Category=JPA
Category=JPS
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics

Product details

  • ISBN 9780226044217
  • Weight: 539g
  • Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
  • Publication Date: 01 Dec 1993
  • Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
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How have the weapons of the nuclear age changed the rules of international politics? Can co-operation replace coercion as an instrument of security? This book compares the biographies of four dissident intellectuals who grappled with these questions throughout their careers - Louise Weiss, Leo Szilard, E.P. Thompson, and Danilo Dolci. Though they shared a revulsion for the "balance of terror," they possessed sharply divergent visions of a post-Cold War peace, from the Gandhi-like non-violence of Dolci to Szilard's relentless quest for US-Soviet joint diplomacy. Weiss, a French journalist and realpolitiker, believed that a united European military power would break the Cold War impasse; Szilard, a physicist and father of the atomic bomb, pressed for co-operative diplomacy between the superpowers; Thompson, a British historian, mobilized millions in the grassroots campaign for European Nuclear Disarmament; and Dolci, an Italian poet, experimented with conflict resolution through education and non-violence. By comparing the ideals, successes, and failures of these activists, this book illustrates the problematic boundary between "realism" and utopianism" in the nuclear age.