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The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and changing attitudes towards the Earth in the nuclear age

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 January 2013

JODI BURKETT
JODI BURKETT*
Affiliation:
School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies, University of Portsmouth, Milldam, Burnaby Road, Portsmouth, PO1 3AS. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

The nuclear age had a profound impact on politics and international affairs. More fundamentally, it altered the way people saw the planet and their relationship with it. These attitudes changed gradually in the post-war period, with the 1960s a key transitional moment. This article explores these changing attitudes towards the environment within the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). At the beginning of the 1960s CND's concerns about nuclear testing and fallout fit easily into the dominant anthropocentric view of the environment. However, by the end of the decade they espoused a much more holistic, even ecocentric, attitude. This article examines how attitudes towards the environment were changing in the 1960s through a close examination of attitudes within CND, and argues that the modern environmental movement was a product of the nuclear age.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 45 , Issue 4: Special Issue: British Nuclear Culture , December 2012 , pp. 625 - 639
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2013

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References

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