ABSTRACT
To understand how nuclear realists came to reflect upon the nature of scientific and political knowledge, as well as their own roles as intellectuals, academics and social critics, this chapter first zooms in on the atomic phase of the revolution, which provides the background against which nuclear realist thinking developed over the course of the 1950s. It begins with a brief examination of the nature and character of the anti-nuclear weapons campaign organized by nuclear scientists in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Their claim that the destructive potential of science could only be balanced through radical and far-reaching political reform has been widely discussed in the literature. A decisive reason for the seeming success and broad appeal of the scientists' movement during these early post-war years was that the United States was still the only nation in possession of nuclear weapons.
