Tad Daley: The Case for a World Republic

Tad Daley is the author of Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World (Rutgers University Press), soon in paperback. He is currently working on a new book about the history and future of the ancient idea that something like a world republic could serve as the solution to the problem of war.

A reflection on:
Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement
Lawrence Wittner
272 pages, $21.95

In 2011, people across the planet reached out to Japan in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami. Millions watched as one nation after another rose in mass revolutions across the Arab world. The Occupy movement blossomed, as citizens in cities around the globe expressed rage over the excesses of capitalism and corporate power. And Time magazine named "The Protester" its annual Person of the Year.

The world has never been smaller. Citizen movements increasingly demonstrate their limitless promise. So, think it sounds too dreamy to imagine that someday people power might transform our small world into one world -- a united republic of Earth?

Then read Lawrence Wittner's 2009 book, Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement. And think again.

Dawn of a movement. Confronting the Bomb is a condensation of Wittner's epic, three-volume masterpiece of historical research, The Struggle Against the Bomb. An overarching message of the book will surprise even nuclear policy experts, because Wittner starts with an incontrovertible historical fact almost wholly forgotten today: For the first several years of the nuclear age, the ultimate aspiration of the disarmament crowd was not just to eliminate nuclear arsenals, but to create a federal republic of the world....