The danger of nuclear war, which almost disappeared from public consciousness at the end of the twentieth century, has returned in the third decade of the twenty-first. In the 1980s, when the threat came from a new stage in the nuclear arms race, mass movements protested across the Western world. Yet when a threat of actual use arose during a major war in Europe in 2022, public concern was muted. It was as though the protests of earlier decades had been forgotten. This book, which tells the story of the antinuclear campaign in Britain – one of the first places where it developed and was influential – offers a reminder that since nuclear weapons were invented, people have acted to prevent the catastrophe they could cause.

The world first became aware of this danger on 6 and 9 August 1945, when the United States of America destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs, instantly killing tens of thousands and irradiating many more. Millions had already died during the Second World War, but most recognized the “atom bomb” as a radically new threat. Alarm grew much further as the Cold War sharpened and both the USA and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) developed thermonuclear hydrogen weapons or “H-bombs” – a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb – as well as intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) to deliver them to each other's countries, opening up the prospect of a new age of warfare that could destroy human society.

In Britain, Clement Attlee's Labour government decided secretly in 1947 to develop its own atomic bomb, making it the third nuclear-armed state; the UK and Canada had helped the USA in the wartime Manhattan Project that developed the bomb, but the US McMahon Act of 1946 barred further nuclear collaboration. By the time Britain tested its first bomb in 1952, under the Conservative government of Winston Churchill, antinuclear activism was beginning. In 1958 the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was founded and quickly generated a new type of mass protest movement, famously centred around marches from the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, Berkshire, to London's Trafalgar Square. Its slogan, “Ban the Bomb”, and its new symbol soon spread around the world.