This is the reading list Peace Source pointed its visitors to, a working bibliography for anyone who wanted to understand the case for nuclear disarmament in depth rather than in headlines. It is preserved here as it stood in 2008, lightly cleaned for readability.
Books and Articles
The list opened with a recommendation to browse the publications collected by the Middle Powers Initiative, a long-running effort to press the nuclear-weapon states toward their disarmament obligations.
A recurring theme was the moral history of occupation and war. The founder singled out a New York Review of Books essay, Patricia Meehan's "Cruel Allied Occupiers," a review of Giles MacDonogh's After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (Basic Books, 618 pp.), arguing that it read as a warning: that abuses like Abu Ghraib sit within a long tradition, and that "torture accompanies the last throes of Empire."
The Founder's Own Writing
Two of Dr. Barrie Machin's own publications anchored the list:
- Every Day Is 9/11 (2006), described as a radical critique of US foreign policy in Iraq, proposing that military involvement give way to a large increase in aid, a recommencement of nuclear disarmament, honouring the NPT, and a strengthening of the United Nations.
- The Moral Premises of Nuclear War (1987, revised 2006), a 45-page essay examining the thinking behind the arms race: "the myth of scientific expertise; the myth of the external present; the conceptual status of the 'other'; ... the rights of children; the damage inflicted by undropped bombs."
Organisations and Further Links
For readers who wanted primary sources, the page pointed to the disarmament and security-research bodies of the day, among them the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy, the Nuclear Threat Initiative and its NPT tutorial, the Center for Defense Information, and the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs. New Scientist was recommended for its special reports on the nuclear issue.
For the ideas these works support, continue to our archive on nuclear disarmament and the reflections in Additional Holocausts.