Disarming the Atom

The world first witnessed the enormous destructive power of nuclear weapons in August 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. In the following decades, the Cold War spurred an arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States that created enormous nuclear arsenals.

Since the end of the Cold War, initiatives to reduce the stockpiles of nuclear weapons met with early success but have since stalled. Today the struggle for peace entails preventing not only the use of these deadly weapons but also their proliferation. For some, the only way to ensure peace and prevent the destruction of civilization is to bring about the elimination of all nuclear weapons.

Harold Agnew and a few colleagues flew as scientific observers aboard The Great Artiste, the instrumentation aircraft behind the Enola Gay, during the mission. Bringing a movie camera with him, Agnew shot the only existing footage of the bombing of Hiroshima from the air.

The Hoover Institution Library & Archives was originally founded in response to World War I with the purpose to collect, preserve, and study materials related to war, revolution, and peace. Ever since, curators have often gathered material on disarmament as an important component for the study of peace. Many can be found as part of the Hoover Institution Library Pamphlet Collection, which includes more than 50,000 documents on a variety of topics, and can be explored online through Finding Aids and Searchworks. The Poster Collection also features material from an array of groups on the topic of disarmament, and can be searched online through the Hoover Institution Digital Collections.

Andrei Sakharov was a Soviet nuclear physicist who became a human rights activist and political dissident. While working to develop a Soviet hydrogen bomb, Sakharov used his position as a world-renowned scientist to campaign for free speech within the Soviet Union and to speak out against Soviet human-rights violations.

A few years after receiving the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on behalf of human rights, Sakharov was labeled an enemy of the state and sentenced to exile in the city of Gorky. During Sakharov’s years in exile, concerned scientists in the West led a campaign to keep international attention focused on his plight and to win his release.

Spearheading these efforts was Stanford physicist, and later Hoover fellow, Sidney D. Drell, who first met Sakharov at a 1974 conference hosted by the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Sakharov was allowed to return to Moscow in 1986 and devoted his energies to the struggle for democracy in the Soviet Union until his death, in 1989. In an article in Physics Today from 2000, Sidney Drell wrote, "A decade after Sakharov's death, his guidance remains relevant to the nuclear perils we face in today's post-cold war world."

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