Realism, Utopia, and the Mushroom Cloud: Four Activist Intellectuals and their Strategies for Peace, 1945-1989--Louise Weiss (France, Leo Szilard) - Hardcover

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 nonviolence of Dolci to Szilard's relentless quest for U.S. - 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 nonviolence. By comparing the ideals, successes, and failures of these activists, this book illustrates the problematic boundary between "realism" and utopianism" in the nuclear age.

Michael Bess is assistant professor of history at Vanderbilt University.