Protests against nuclear weapons in Britain and elsewhere during the Cold War have by and large been examined as part of the peace movement. This paper, by contrast, offers a novel approach to anti-nuclear-weapons protests by viewing them as a form of professional activism. It focuses on two key British professional organizations – the Atomic Scientists’ Association (ASA) and the Medical Campaign against Nuclear Weapons (MCANW) – during two pivotal moments of the Cold War.

Shortly after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, British nuclear scientists who had by and large participated in the creation of the first atomic bombs founded the ASA out of the social responsibility that they felt was emerging from their wartime work. The ASA represented the British counterpart of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) – perhaps the best-known organization of the atomic scientists’ movement. In 1980, during the so-called Second Cold War that was characterized by a renewed intensification of fears of nuclear war, British medical professionals – above all, physicians – founded the MCANW based on their professional ethos to help all mankind under the Hippocratic Oath.

The paper examines the two organizations’ ‘moral economies’, which constitute, according to Janet Atkinson-Grosjean and Cory Fairley’s broad definition, ‘systems of shared values, traditions, and conventions about ways of doing, being, knowing, and exchange’ that ‘are expressions of the moral communities that hold them’ with regard to the ASA’s and the MCANW’s anti-nuclear-arms activism. Particular attention will also be paid to claims to expertise and expert knowledge by members of these two groups. For heuristic purposes, the paper focuses on the ASA’s promotion of the international control of atomic energy to prevent a nuclear arms race in the immediate postwar period and the MCANW’s treatment of the medical consequences of atomic war in the early 1980s.

Since the two professional bodies formed part of larger, transnational networks, the paper analyses their campaigns within the transnational context of professional antinuclear- weapons activism to demonstrate how professional activism during the Cold War was played out on a national level and reach conclusions about its broader and nationally distinctive cultural and social impacts. In the case of the ASA, it will offer comparisons with FAS policies on and communication between the American and British sister organizations on international control. As the MCANW became the British affiliate of the transnational network International Physicians for the Prevention of a Nuclear War (IPPNW), the paper will compare and contrast the MCANW’s take on the medical effects of nuclear war with that by the US-based umbrella organization as well as the West German IPPNW section.