There May Yet Be Hope

On September 12, 1961, a thirty-four-year-old activist from Connecticut named Stephanie May travelled to New York and began a hunger strike outside the Soviet mission on East Sixty-Seventh Street. Two police officers threatened to arrest her for vagrancy the moment she arrived; they agreed to let her stay only after she promised not to spend the night. For the next six days, May occupied the sidewalk from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., living on water and broth and feeling, as she later wrote, “absolutely invisible, except to little children instructed not to look, and to teenagers in parochial school uniforms who stole furtive glances and then giggled.” The resolute woman wore a body-length sign strapped around her neck: “RUSSIA! STOP Nuclear Testing!! Stop poisoning the air!”

The Soviet Union had just announced it was abandoning the moratorium on atmospheric nuclear testing then in place between the world’s two superpowers — a moratorium that Stephanie May had played a...