Disarmament, Citizen Activism, or What? Beliefs and Values of the Nuclear Test Ban Movement of 1957-63

An analysis of the beliefs and values of the popular movement for a nuclear test ban in the United States between 1957 and 1963. The movement’s history is summarized. Advertisements in the New York Times placed by SANE are used as evidence of the movement’s beliefs and values. The main values the ads advocate are found to be disarmament, the unity of the world’s peoples, inter-government co-operation, and citizen activism. The most common factual belief found in the ads is that the world faces a vast danger. Differences between the values expressed in the Eisenhower and Kennedy years reflect perhaps a greater sense of political opportunities under Ken-nedy. It is suggested that SANE’s ads deflect charges of Communist sympathies partly by drawing on traditional American values like citizen activism. The movement to ban nuclear tests between 1957 and 1963 was the first time in the nuclear age that a mass movement in America occurred to changed the country’s nuclear weapons policy’. Yet the movement happened at a time when most of the American public was strongly committed to an ideology of combatting Communism at home and abroad, and fully accepted the president’s leadership in foreign an