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It was striking this week–with all the talk at the United Nations of getting rid of nuclear weapons–that the rhetoric was coming from the mouths of world leaders rather than the megaphones of demonstrators. It got us wondering what ever happened to the nuclear disarmament movement? Jonathan Schell and Lawrence Wittner have some answers. Schell is a fellow at The Nation Institute and author of The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger. Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York, Albany, and author of Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement. That book is an abbreviated version of a much longer trilogy about the movement called The Struggle Against the Bomb.

Both describe the movement as losing steam but not dying at the end of the Cold War, and now experiencing a resurgence in part through the advocacy of  former (heavyweight, bipartisan) national security officials such as George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn and William Perry.