ABSTRACT
In the 1930s, in what was perhaps the most successful mass antiwar movement in history, thousands of college students in Britain and United States (US) signed the Oxford Pledge, vowing that they would never go to war. The US government offered several justifications for it-an embarrassment of justifications. The justification for counter intervention is the reestablishment of the status quo ante: the situation that existed before the first intervention. Republican isolationists joined Communists in denouncing the industrialists and imperialists who, they claimed, had misled the US into the Great War. Immediately after World War II pacifism showed some signs of resurgence as a movement toward world federation, but it was doused again by the cold war. In the 1960s and 1970s it revived in the more moderate form of a movement, not against war, but against nuclear war-a movement to restrict, rather than abolish, war.
