Socialist History Society online meeting
Tuesday 16 September 2025 at 7pm

All welcome, but you will need to register in advance:

Martin Shaw will talk about his new book The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (Agenda Publishing), a history of the antinuclear movement in Britain up to the present day. In the late 1950s, this was the first mass protest movement of the postwar period and proved seminal for the antiwar and social movements which followed, which in turn profoundly influenced its second big wave in the 1980s. 

The book covers the Committee of 100, European Nuclear Disarmament, the Greenham Common women’s peace camp and other direct action as well as CND itself. Just as the movement was central to the left in two key periods of the late twentieth century, so the organised left – the New Left, the Communist Party and Trotskyist and anarchist groups – have played key roles in the antinuclear campaign, and Martin will discuss these as well as the movement itself.

Martin Shaw is emeritus professor of International Relations and Politics at Sussex University and research professor at IBEI, Barcelona, and has written widely on global politics, war and genocide. He was involved in CND in the early 1960s, the anti-Vietnam War and student movements, and CND/END in the 1980s.