Disarming discourse: Thomas Merton’s Breakthrough to Peace, October 1961-September 1962
A curious publication associated with the Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915-68) in the Merton Collection in St. Michael’s Priory, Milton Keynes, is a paperback entitled Breakthrough to Peace: Twelve Views on the Threat of Thermonuclear Extermination . No editor is credited, but only an introduction by Thomas Merton. This paperback is an anthology of previously published essays by notable peace writers. The full list of contributors is as follows: Lewis Mumford , Tom Stonier , Norman Cousins , Erich Fromm & Michael Maccoby , Thomas Merton , Gordon Zahn , Howard Gruber , Walter Stein , Herbert Butterfield , Allan Forbes Jr. , Joost Meerloo , and Jerome Frank . A spate of paperback books had begun to be published in the United States in 1962 with the common characteristic approach to peace as voicing the public's anxiety for mankind in the nuclear age. The question of nuclear disarmament was a controversial topic during a dangerous year of a nuclear show of streng