In it to win it

Hibakusha won the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize. The history of the organization and of the Japanese government's efforts to warn the world that nuclear arms are little more than a suicide pact is an important one right now. Those weapons, like so many aspects of war, are dependent on lies and cover-ups, as well as hidden agendas. 

Hiroshima is the classic, canonical piece that helped the US citizenry and others understand the effects of "just" one atomic bomb, written by John Hersey and published in 1946 first in The New Yorker and then as a small and highly influential book. I would estimate that literally tens of millions of us have read it, based on observations of the immediate aftermath: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima

The next iconic writing read by many more millions of us came out in 1982 in The New Yorker, also published subsequently as a book, Fate of the Earth, by Jonathan Schell. It was published on the cusp of the Euromissile Crisis of 1983, when Ronald Reagan was flippantly musing that nuclear war could be waged in Europe, confined to Europe, and that we could win it. Europe lost its collective mind at that ignorant, provocative US presidential idiocy and tens of thousands were arrested across the continent, largely at the gates of US military bases there, bases that not only were on other nation's "sovereign" soil but that housed US nuclear missiles, making them all absolute targets by Soviet SS-20s, which were not all that far away, and which were more crude, bigger, and more susceptible to accidental launch in periods of tension. Schell and the Nuclear Freeze movement were largely prompted by the analysis of Randy Forsberg, a previously little-known American analyst working at a disarmament organization in Scandinavia. She published alarming findings in the late 1970s, ironically based on the combination of the Cold War posturing and weapons production by the US under Jimmy Carter and the Soviets under a succession of strongmen leaders. https://archives.newyorker.com/newyorker/1982-02-01/flipbook/046/

I was privileged to meet the late Randy Forsberg in St Louis at a national Nuclear Freeze conference, as we ramped up thousands of volunteers to get the Freeze onto the ballots of any state with initiative and referendum. We succeeded in doing so in many states--every one we tried except Arizona. It was, and still is, the largest direct democracy exercise in American history (in contrast to representative democracy, in which we vote for a person to make policy, direct democracy, as we use in Oregon and some other states, allows citizens to create and vote on particular public policy). 

After observing the impressive power of our global movement to rise up against the stupidest nuclear initiatives, Jonathan Schell went on to study and write about it in another book, Unconquerable world: Power, nonviolence, and the will of the people. Like many of us, he was interested in it strategically, not so much as a philosophy or as some religious mandate. Indeed, I met him in New York at Manhattan College where he gave a talk to an academic association for which I was co-chair for a couple terms, the Peace and Justice Studies Association. As he separated his thinking about the power of nonviolence as mass action contrasted with the nice but usually ineffective religous commitment to nonviolence, he challenged those who eschewed the strategic focus, "I am so tired of going down in noble defeat," he said, really summing up the weakness of just acting out of a wish to be a nice person. 

Indeed, at another such conference earlier in Albany, New York, the father of nonviolence history, Dr. Gene Sharp, offered a similar challenge. He said that reliance on nice ethical and moral values was fine as a baby first step but pointed to the many times when nonviolent action was victorious and they were essentially all based on a careful strategy, mixing politics, resistance, and media work.

Yes, part of the strategy is willingness to suffer, to sacrifice for the advancement of the campaign. In that, there is effectively no difference from a military campaign. The idea is to win, and in the case of social movements, winning is dependent on remaining nonviolent and thus increasingly attractive to, and recruiting from, the greater populace.