THE ANTINUCLEAR MOVEMENT

Countdown to Doomsday

In the early 1980s the specter of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union began to haunt the public consciousness more forcefully than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Warning of "the Soviet military threat," and calling the Soviet Union "the focus of evil in the world/' President Ronald Reagan presided over a __BODY__.5 trillion military buildup that pointedly included new generations of nuclear weapons. At the same time, the Soviet Union continued to add aggressively to its own nuclear arsenal. In the United States defense officials spoke of fighting a "protracted" nuclear war, while military strategists suggested nuclear war was "winnable." Periodically during these years, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the hands of its "Doomsday Clock," which represents the statistical probability of nuclear war, closer and closer to midnight. In a 1983 Gallup poll 40 percent of the respondents thought it likely a nuclear war would occur within ten years. In November of the same year, when ABC broadcast The Day After, a fictional dramatization of a nuclear attack on Kansas City, 100 million Americans tuned in.

The Freeze Movement

Appalled by the accelerating arms race in a world where fifty thousand nuclear war-heads already existed, many people began to protest the military policies of the Reagan administration and the Soviet leadership. Spearheaded by existing groups such as the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), the growing antinuclear movement assimilated new peace organizations at local and state levels. Fundamentally a grassroots phenomenon, it embraced secular and religious groups, winning the support of activists and volunteers from all walks of life and in all areas of the country. One popular proposal of these groups called for an immediate halt to the arms race—a "freeze" on all nuclear weapons testing, production, and deployment. Once the freezing of arms levels was achieved by both superpowers, proponents called for determined arms-control negotiations. In 1982 polls showed that a weapons freeze was supported by 70 percent of the American public. The idea of a nuclear freeze is usually credited to Randall Forsberg, a woman who headed the antinuclear group FREEZE and worked long and hard to win public support for the plan. Freeze propositions were placed on many state ballots and approved in some states. The freeze movement also won the support of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and others in Congress, as well as the distinguished diplomat George F. Kennan, who said in an address accepting the Albert Einstein Peace Prize in 1981, "We have gone on piling weapon upon weapon, missile upon missile, new levels of destructivencss upon old ones. We have done this helplessly, almost involuntarily: like the victims of some sort of hypnotism, like men in a dream, like lemmings headed for the sea, like the children of Hamlin marching blindly along behind their Pied Piper. And the result is that today we have achieved, we and the Russians together, in the creation of these devices and their means of delivery, levels of redundancy of such grotesque dimensions as to defy rational understanding."

The Fate of the Earth.

Although members of the anti-nuclear movement sometimes disagreed on the methods of achieving disarmament, they were united by an urgent conviction that continuing the present course of escalation and confrontation was an invitation to disaster. Many writers warned that the fate of the planet was literally hanging in the balance, but in the early 1980s one book in particular was widely read and gave eloquent expression to the fundamental concerns of antinuclear activists. The book was The Fate of the Earth (1982) by Jonathan Schell, who argued that the horrors of a nuclear war must be avoided at all costs, not only to save the present human race but to save the unborn millions of future generations. Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Kai Erikson said that The Fate of the Earth "accomplishes what no other work has managed to do in 37 years of the nuclear age. It compels us—and compels is the right word—to confront head on the nuclear peril in which we all find ourselves." Many readers said reading The Fate of the Earth marked a turning point in their thinking about the nuclear threat. Toward the end of his book Schell wrote:

The task is nothing less than to reinvent politics: to reinvent the world. However, extinction will not wait for us to reinvent the world. Evolution was slow to produce us, but our extinction will be swift; it will literally be over before we know it. We have to match swiftness with swiftness. Because everything we do and everything we are is in jeopardy, and because the peril is immediate and unremitting, every person is the right person to act and every moment is the right moment to begin, starting with the present moment. For nothing underscores our common humanity as strongly as the peril of extinction.

The Demonstration in New York

In June 1982 the strength of the antinuclear movement was made vividly clear when more than a half million people gathered in New York City to advocate world nuclear disarmament. This massive peace rally, held in conjunction with the opening of the United Nations Special Session on Disarmament, was one of the largest political gatherings in American history. The immediate concern to many at this gathering was the projected deployment of new U.S. intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Western Europe. The Reagan administration argued that such an action was necessary to counter the Soviets' deployment of SS-20 missiles in Eastern Europe. Antinuclear activists feared the introduction of U.S. missiles in Europe would make serious arms negotiations less likely and a nuclear confrontation more probable. Their concerns about this "Euromissile" crisis were shared by a strong antinuclear movement in Western Europe. Following the great out-pouring in New York City, activists continued to lobby Congress, to support profreeze candidates for public office, to sponsor public symposia, to publish books and articles, and to speak on television and radio. Prominent in the movement were such well-known peace activists as pediatrician Benjamin Spock, physicist Linus Pauling, and Rev. William Sloane Coffin. Members of the antinuclear movement also opposed the building of new nuclear power plants in the United States.

The Reagan Reaction

The Reagan administration paid little attention to the antinuclear movement, except to suggest its wrong-headedness, and it never supported the idea of a nuclear freeze, arguing that it would lock the Soviet Union in a position of nuclear superiority. The administration believed the only way to achieve serious arms control with the Soviet Union was to show an unwavering resolve to continue the U.S. nuclear buildup. In March 1983 President Reagan surprised almost everyone by proposing the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), soon popularly known as "Star Wars." Under this plan the United States would construct an enormous shield in space to protect itself against incoming Soviet missiles. The president claimed that the successful deployment of such a shield would render nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete." Antinuclear activists were among the many Americans who were skeptical about the proposal, judging it merely another high-tech, exorbitantly expensive acceleration of the arms race. Nevertheless, SDI undercut, at least rhetorically, some of the power of the antinuclear movement's arguments and allowed President Reagan, in a sense, to present himself as the biggest antinuclear activist in the country.

Later Years

In 1986, four years after the huge New York rally, the antinuclear movement made headlines again with the Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament. Climaxing an eight-month, cross-country march, demonstrators carried their disarmament message to the gates of the White House. The number of participants in this event disappointed many in the movement, and the 1982 outpouring in New York was not equaled by any subsequent event either. While activists continued to campaign throughout the 1980s, disagreements about tactics slowed their earlier momentum; moreover, their agenda seemed to many to become somewhat less urgent. After Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union in 1985, it soon became apparent that he was working to lessen tension between his nation and the United States, especially after he proposed at the Reykjavik summit meeting in October 1986 that the two nations eliminate all nuclear weapons over a period of ten years. In the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty they signed in December 1987, Reagan and Gorbachev agreed that both powers would remove their intermediate-range nuclear weapons from Europe, thus ending the Euromissile crisis. Serious negotiations for the reduction of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) followed.

Assessment

As the decade drew near its close, critics of the antinuclear movement claimed that progress in reducing the threat of nuclear war was achieved despite the efforts of the "freezeniks." Yet peace activists argued that their grassroots advocacy had been instrumental in pressuring government leaders to alter disastrous policies. Whatever the extent of their influence, the freeze movement kept public attention focused on the horrors of nuclear warfare and the profoundly human costs of the arms race.