When you think of American student peace activism, you probably don’t think of the late 1950s and early 1960s. But you probably should, and today is the fiftieth anniversary of one huge reason why.
For most of the 1950s the United States was regularly testing nuclear weapons above ground, and in ways that today seem almost unimaginably reckless. Dozens of atomic bombs were set off in Nevada, barely sixty milesfrom Las Vegas. Other tests were conducted near populated islands in the Pacific, including one that led to large-scale evacuations after the bomb turned out to be nearly twice as powerful as planned. In 1958 the US detonated a nuclear weapon in space, and planned to use several more to carve out an artificial harbor in northern Alaska to use as a transit point for oil and coal shipments from the area.
For student activists of the age, nuclear weapons represented everything that was wrong about modern militarism — the threat of global war, the targeting of civilians, the recklessness of US-Soviet brinksmanship, ties between the military and corporations. In 1957 students created a campus affiliate of the new National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), and two years later, in 1959, they established two independent student antiwar groups, the Student Peace Union and the College Peace Union.
This campus organizing of the late 1950s was limited in comparison with the protests that came later, but it helped to build toward what followed — Student SANE, SPU , and CPU were organizing on campuses before SDS or
