The Second World War culminated with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The twin problems which were now to confront both pacifists and pacificists were nuclear weapons and the Cold War; but a surprisingly long time was to elapse before sustained campaigns against the testing and possession of nuclear weapons got under way in the late 1950s. As early as 1945 Alex Comfort observed: ‘The atomic bomb is not different in kind or in result from the other weapons and methods of war which characterize contemporary society…’ To most participants in the future nuclear disarmament movement this assertion would have seemed a nonsense, since for them nuclear weapons were demonstrably, monstrously different from conventional armaments and it was exactly this difference which motivated their activism. Yet a significant minority were led – largely independently of theorists and ideology – to deduce libertarian conclusions as a result of their experiences, especially their involvement in the non-violent direct action of civil disobedience, and of their reflections on the relationship between ‘the Bomb’ and the State. How could nuclear weapons be eliminated without a profound social re-ordering, without indeed revolutionary change? Surely the problem was rooted in the very nature of governmental society and the State? Colin Ward was to ask

Ward continued:

The nuclear disarmament movement finally began to mobilize with the British government's announcement in 1957 that it was to develop the hydrogen bomb. The Emergency Committee for Direct Action Against Nuclear War was immediately set up to support Harold Steele in his attempt to enter the testing area in the Pacific.