"I am become death, the shatterer of worlds." Robert Oppenheimer, the "father" of the atomic bomb, muttered these Hindu words after the initial successful test of the new weapon during the summer of 1945. Although Oppenheimer's scientific expertise produced the bomb, he grew increasingly uneasy over its application and destructive power. Oppenheimer became the first of a long line of antinuclear activists and scientists to protest nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

In the early 1950s, the United States began testing an even more powerful nuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb, in Nevada and the islands of the South Pacific. This testing came in the wake of the cold war, a struggle for power and survival between the United States and the Soviet Union following World War II. With the Soviet Union's development of its own atomic bomb in 1949, American policymakers became increasingly concerned that such a weapon could...