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REALISM, UTOPIA, AND THE MUSHROOM CLOUD: Four Activist Intellectuals and Their Strategies for Peace by Michael Bess University of Chicago Press. 322 pp. $54.95, cloth; $19.95, paper.
Louise Weiss (1893-1983) was an influential French journalist whose dreams of European internationalism died under Hitler's boot in World War II, only to take new life in an imperialist ethic that helped shape the postwar atomic era.
Leo Szilard (1898-1964) was a Hungarian-born American scientist whose political dabblings gave birth both to the building of the atomic bomb and to high-level efforts to contain the fearsome new weapon.
E.P. Thompson (1924-1993) was an English social historian who emerged to lead an international mass movement that rocked the citadels of nuclear-deterrence policy in Washington, Moscow, and other capitals.
Danilo Dolce (born 1924) is a charismatic Italian philosopher whose practical applications of nonviolent struggle in the slums and rural wastelands of Sicily provide the model for much of what remains of the world's once formidable resistance to atomic suicide.
These four lives, researched and skillfully presented by historian Michael Bess of Vanderbilt University, make fascinating stories in themselves. They also serve as useful vehicles for examining major crosscurrents of Cold War resistance.
A gifted writer and editor whose feminist and antimilitarist impulses sprang from the carnage of World War I, Louise Weiss espoused international cooperation as the only alternative to the mayhem of Europe's recurring wars. She wrote articles and lobbied political leaders on the principles of collective security and mediation of international disputes, fought to strengthen the League of Nations, and founded a school in Paris, Ecole de la Paix, for the scientific study of peace.
But then came World War II. Traumatized by the German occupation of Paris, in which most of her personal papers were torched by the Nazis, she emerged with a refurbished international ethic based on the concept of peace through strength.
Distrustful of a bipolar world order dominated by two non-European superpowers, Weiss advocated the internationalization of Europe as a third force capable of steering an independent course between the United States and the Soviet Union and leaving its own civilizing imprint on the world. Her views found early fruition in an independent French nuclear deterrent, in the movement toward European economic and political...