Beyond the Cold War; A New Approach to the Arms Race and Nuclear Annihilation

New York: Pantheon Books, 1982. First American Edition [stated]. Presumed first Printing. Hardcover. Good/Good. Charles Kreloff (Jacket Design). xxii, 198, [4] pages. Chapter Notes. Upper corner of fep snipped off. Pencil erasure on half-title page. DJ has some wear and soiling. This volume includes the text of what has originally been intended as the Dimbleby Lecture, 1981. Owing to the withdrawal of the BBC's invitation, it was delivered in Worchester on 26 November 1981. This work reveals the author's rare ability to look at all of the military and political arguments being put forward by those to urge increased armaments, and to attack them in their own terms. Thompson links the campaign for peace with the struggle for freedom in Poland and elsewhere. This book is both an informative polemic and a survey of the broader historical issues. Edward Palmer Thompson (3 February 1924 - 28 August 1993), usually cited as E. P. Thompson, was a British historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the British radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class (1963). He also published influential biographies of William Morris (1955) and (posthumously) William Blake (1993) and was a prolific journalist and essayist. He also published the novel The Sykaos Papers and a collection of poetry. His work is considered to have been among the most important contributions to labor history and social history in the latter twentieth-century, with a global impact, including on scholarship in Asia and Africa. Thompson was one of the principal intellectuals of the Communist Party in Great Britain. Although he left the party in 1956 over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he nevertheless remained a "historian in the Marxist tradition", calling for a rebellion against Stalinism as a prerequisite for the restoration of communists' "confidence in our own revolutionary perspectives".[3] Thompson played a key role in the first New Left in Britain in the late 1950s. He was a vociferous left-wing socialist critic of the Labor governments of 1964-70 and 1974-79, and an early and constant supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, becoming during the 1980s the leading intellectual light of the movement against nuclear weapons in Europe. This volume includes the text of what has originally been intended as the Dimbleby Lecture, 1981. Owing to the withdrawal of the BBC's invitation, it was delivered in Worchester on 26 November 1981. This work reveals the author's rare ability to look at all of the military and political arguments being put forward by those to urge increased armaments, and to attack them in their own terms. Thompson links the campaign for peace with the struggle for freedom in Poland and elsewhere. This book is both an informative polemic and a survey of the broader historical issues.