This collection originates in the anti-nuclear and pacifist work of Kate (Boanas) Dewes and Robert Green, who together established The Disarmament and Security Centre in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1998. Much of the collection contains material from 1990 onwards and covers the activities of the Centre, but there is also earlier material, from pacifist documents connected to World Wars I and II, through global nuclear events, to the anti-nuclear and peace movements of the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.
The collection includes material connected to New Zealand and the Pacific, but also reflects the wide-ranging international anti-nuclear activities of Kate Dewes and Robert Green. The collection contains papers and other items concerning various New Zealand peace, human rights, and anti-nuclear organisations, nuclear testing in the Pacific, a range of New Zealand defence, domestic, and foreign policy issues, and the declaration of New Zealand as a nuclear free zone. Internationally, a central focus of the collection is the initiative to obtain a ruling on the legality of nuclear weapons via the World Court Project and the International Court of Justice. This includes papers on the subsequent Abolition 2000 project, and other outcomes of the ICJ ruling. Also included: material on the activities of international anti-nuclear organisations and individuals; nuclear-free zones across the globe; the risks of nuclear energy, weapons and propulsion; nuclear reactor accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island; and documents from the Hinkley Point C Inquiry. Woven through the collection is material on the impact and memorialization of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs, and the impact of nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific and Australia. The collection includes audio, video and transcribed interviews with a large number of chiefly New Zealand activists, pacifists and politicians.