Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War

by Matthew Evangelista

Throughout the Cold War, people worldwide feared that the U.S. and Soviet governments could not prevent a nuclear showdown. Citizens from both East-bloc and Western countries, among them prominent scientists and physicians, formed networks to promote ideas and policies that would lessen this danger. Two of their organizations―the Pugwash movement and the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War―won Nobel Peace Prizes. Still, many observers believe that their influence was negligible and that the Reagan administration deserves sole credit for ending the Cold War. The first book to explore the impact these activists had on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain, Unarmed Forces demonstrates the importance of their efforts on behalf of arms control and disarmament. Matthew Evangelista examines the work of transnational peace movements throughout the Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev eras and into the first years of Boris Yeltsin's leadership. Drawing on extensive research in Russian archives and on interviews with Russian and Western activists and policymakers, he investigates the sources of Soviet policy on nuclear testing, strategic defense, and conventional forces. Evangelista concludes that transnational actors at times played a crucial role in influencing Soviet policy―specifically in encouraging moderate as opposed to hard-line responses―for they supplied both information and ideas to that closed society. Evangelista's findings challenge widely accepted views about the peaceful resolution of the Cold War. By revealing the connection between a state's domestic structure and its susceptibility to the influence of transnational groups, Unarmed Forces will also stimulate thinking about the broader issue of how government policy is shaped.

Genres: Politics, History

416 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1999

Reviews

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 4 out of 5]

The current champions of our national essence would have you think that the Cold War was largely won due to exuberant American economic and military largesse which saw us wildly spending so much money on defense and spending so much vehement breath threatening the Evil Soviet Empire, that said Empire collapsed!
Well, turns out that wasn't quite the case as this book shows. At least in part (and there are probably multiple other more nuanced and less self-stroking reasons than the one elucidated above on the American left and right) it was the result of scientists and activists appealing to the better angles of human nature to show politicians what a waste and how deadly the focus on nukes and conventional forces were. More, this book shows how Soviet decision-making wasn't monolithic and bad 80s-action-movie stupid. Gorbachev and others had nuances to their approaches to these matters and the action of groups like Pugwash had a big role in those shifts.