The Politics of Peace

The last chapter examines the migration of a politics of peace from the margins to the centers of political power. As leading antinuclear and peace advocates became increasingly marginalized by the student and antiwar movements, their efforts were beginning to bear fruit in the arena of international politics. They were helped by a popular groundswell of sentiment that saw the arms race and the political ideology of nuclear deterrence as increasingly absurd. Absurdist writers, filmmakers, and philosophers of the 1950s and 1960s creatively underscored the absurdist nature of Cold War politics through works such as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction film Dr. Strangelove, and the fictional secret government Report from Iron Mountain. Together, they helped pave the way for political leaders, including Nixon in the United States, and Willy Brandt in West Germany, to develop a more pragmatic politics of peace.