Editing Nuclear disarmament (section)

===World Peace Council===

One of the earliest peace organisations to emerge after the Second World War was the [[World Peace Council]],<ref>Wittner, Lawrence S., ''One World or None: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement Through 1953'', Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Paperback edition, 1995. {{ISBN|0804721416}}</ref><ref>Santi, Rainer, ''100 years of Peace Making: A History of the International Peace Bureau and other international peace movement organisations and networks'', Pax förlag, International Peace Bureau, January 1991</ref><ref>Wernicke, Günther, "The World Peace Council and the Antiwar Movement in East Germany", in Daum, A. W., L. C. Gardner and W. Mausbach (eds), ''America, The Vietnam War and the World'', Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003</ref> which was directed by the [[Communist Party of the Soviet Union]] through the [[Soviet Peace Committee]].  Its origins lay in the [[Communist Information Bureau]]'s (Cominform) doctrine, put forward 1947, that the world was divided between peace-loving progressive forces led by the Soviet Union and warmongering capitalist countries led by the United States. In 1949, Cominform directed that peace "should now become the pivot of the entire activity of the Communist Parties", and most western Communist parties followed this policy.<ref name=deery>{{cite web| url = https://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst?docId=5000637202| archive-url = https://archive.today/20130131221927/http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst?docId=5000637202| url-status = dead| archive-date = January 31, 2013| title = Deery, P., "The Dove Flies East: Whitehall, Warsaw and the 1950 World Peace Congress", ''Australian Journal of Politics and History'', Vol. 48, 2002}}</ref> [[Lawrence S. Wittner|Lawrence Wittner]], a historian of the post-war peace movement, argues that the Soviet Union devoted great efforts to the promotion of the WPC in the early post-war years because it feared an American attack and American superiority of arms<ref name=wittner/> at a time when the USA possessed the [[atom bomb]] but the Soviet Union had not yet developed it.<ref name=santi>{{Cite web |url=http://santibox.ch/Peace/Peacemaking.html#5.%20A%20New%20Start |title=Santi, Rainer, ''100 years of peace making: A history of the International Peace Bureau and other international peace movement organisations and networks'', Pax förlag, International Peace Bureau, January 1991 |access-date=September 18, 2014 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120421104457/http://santibox.ch/Peace/Peacemaking.html#5.%20A%20New%20Start |archive-date=April 21, 2012 |url-status=dead }}</ref>

In 1950, the WPC launched its [[Stockholm Appeal]]<ref name=peaceoffensive>{{Cite web |url=https://archive.org/stream/reportoncommunis00unit/reportoncommunis00unit_djvu.txt |title=&#91;&#91;Committee on Un-American Activities&#93;&#93;, ''Report on the Communist "peace" offensive. A campaign to disarm and defeat the United States'', 1951 |access-date=November 25, 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160120025448/http://archive.org/stream/reportoncommunis00unit/reportoncommunis00unit_djvu.txt |archive-date=January 20, 2016 |url-status=live }}</ref> calling for the absolute prohibition of nuclear weapons. The campaign won support, collecting, it is said, 560 million signatures in Europe, most from socialist countries, including 10 million in France (including that of the young [[Jacques Chirac]]), and 155 million signatures in the Soviet Union – the entire adult population.<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.intl.hiroshima-cu.ac.jp/~yulia/publ/peace.htm |title=Mikhailova, Y., ''Ideas of Peace and Concordance in Soviet Political Propaganda (1950 – 1985'' |access-date=September 18, 2014 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150402140141/http://www.intl.hiroshima-cu.ac.jp/~yulia/publ/peace.htm |archive-date=April 2, 2015 |url-status=dead }}</ref>  Several non-aligned peace groups who had distanced themselves from the WPC advised their supporters not to sign the Appeal.<ref name=santi/>

The WPC had uneasy relations with the non-aligned peace movement and has been described as being caught in contradictions as "it sought to become a broad world movement while being instrumentalized increasingly to serve foreign policy in the Soviet Union and nominally socialist countries."<ref>Wernicke, Günter, [http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/pech/1998/00000023/00000003/art00002 "The Communist-Led World Peace Council and the Western Peace Movements: The Fetters of Bipolarity and Some Attempts to Break Them in the Fifties and Early Sixties"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140311003938/http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/pech/1998/00000023/00000003/art00002 |date=March 11, 2014 }}, Peace & Change, Volume 23, Number 3, July 1998, pp. 265–311(47)</ref> From the 1950s until the late 1980s it tried to use non-aligned peace organizations to spread the Soviet point of view. At first there was limited co-operation between such groups and the WPC, but western delegates who tried to criticize the Soviet Union or the WPC's silence about Russian armaments were often shouted down at WPC conferences<ref name=wittner>Lawrence Wittner, ''Resisting the Bomb'', Stanford University Press, 1997</ref> and by the early 1960s they had dissociated themselves from the WPC.