Nicolas Hardy Walter (22 November 1934 – 7 March 2000) was a British anarchist and atheist writer, speaker and activist. He was a member of the Committee of 100 and Spies for Peace, and wrote on topics of anarchism and humanism. Background Nicolas was the son of Katherine Monica (née Ratcliffe) and William Grey Walter, an American-born British neurophysiologist, cybernetician and robotician. His paternal grandfather was Karl Walter (1880-1965), a journalist, writer and translator who worked for the Kansas City Star and the Horace Plunkett Foundation. Karl married an American woman called Margaret Hardy and lived in the US from 1908 until the outbreak of the First World War. His maternal grandfather was Samuel Kerkham Ratcliffe (1868-1958), a former member of the executive of the Fabian Society. After his parents divorced in 1945, his mother Monica (1911-2012) subsequently married a Cambridge University scientist Arnold Beck with whom she brought up Nicolas. Walter attended Rendcomb College, Cirencester. He served two years National Service in the Royal Air Force, where he learned Russian prior to working in Signals Intelligence, and then read modern history at Exeter College, Oxford. At this time he joined the Labour Party. Alongside his work for media associated with the causes that became his personal mission, as a working journalist Walter held editorial roles at Which? and The Times Literary Supplement before working as press officer for the British Standards Institution. Peace movement activism Walter was heavily involved in the peace movement, being a founder member of the Committee of 100. Walter married Ruth Oppenheim, another member of the Committee of 100 in 1962, who was the daughter of refugees from Nazi Germany. The couple had two children, Susannah (born 1965) and Natasha Walter (born 1967), but divorced in 1982. Walter was a member of Spies for Peace, which only became known after he died, along with Ruth, who was happy to be publicly identified by Natasha Walter in 2013. In March 1963, the group broke into Regional Seat of Government No. 6 (RSG-6), copied documents relating to the Government's plans in the event of nuclear war and distributed 3,000 leaflets revealing their contents. In 1966, Walter was imprisoned for two months under the Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction Act 1860, after a protest against British support for the Vietnam War. As Prime Minister Harold Wilson read the lesson (on the subject of beating swords into ploughshares) at a Labour Party