Doris Lessing and the Madness of Nuclear Deterrence

Doris Lessing’s long and multifaceted history of antinuclear activism is by this point well known. She was present at the formation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in 1957 and participated in the famous first Aldermaston March of 1958 (and several of the subsequent annual marches), an event she later recounted in The Four-Gated City (1969).1 But, according to her autobiography Walking in the Shade, after she was spuriously conscripted into the Committee of a Hundred, the CND’s de facto leadership, she grew frustrated with the organized antinuclear movement for many of the same reasons she had previously become disenchanted with communism: Here again was the potent and charismatic leader, this time Ralph Schoenman, a young American. It was he who spoke, in that style perfected by History itself, combining idealism with a cold, clipped precision, and full of contempt for opponents, who were by definition cowards, poltroons, and morally defective, for the people in this room had on their shoulders the responsibility for the future of all humankind. (294)