Nuclear Freeze Campaign
Coming at the end of the "Age of Non-Conformity" the Nuclear Freeze Campaign was the last upsurge of public activism that had a major impact on national policy. The two decades of public protest were characterized by grass-roots organizations mobilized on specific issues, such as civil rights and the Vietnam War, and organized on an ongoing basis to influence national policy.
The Nuclear Freeze Campaign was the the last effective formation of this type of political action in recent history. There have certainly been subsequent upsurges of public protest, but they either did not seek or did not achieve an ongoing institutional capacity to influence national policy. While there was a massive upsurge of opposition to the US invasion of Iraq in 1983, the main coalition against the war was "astroturf" - managed by a public relations firm. This campaign's leadership was drawn from various Washington-based membership organizations eager to ensure that the anti-war upsurge would not deplete their mailing lists. As soon as the war began, the anti-war movement ended, expecting the sort of short and glorious military victory of the first Gulf War.
The public is usually passive, but, on occasion, it can and has been energized. In this context, the role of NGOs (non-governmental organizations] and what they are or are not able to accomplish is not merely significant, but central, to the US decisionmaking process. These include long-standing, professionally managed groups whose purpose is mainly to provide a continuing body of knowledge and expertise and make it available to the Congress and the media. The Arms Control Association a good example of this category. Another category of groups are long-standing, highly active, direct political action qroup, representing a specific group of people. The Council for a Liveable World is an example.
The height of the Nuclear Freeze movement, from 1982 to 1987, encompassed the years of Ronald Reagan's presidency and the years when the United States and the Soviet Union entered a period of renewed tensions, which included a new emphasis on production and deployment of nuclear weapons. This period saw the renewed activity of the national peace movement, as well as the formation of anti-nuclear groups at the state and local levels.
Proposals for a "freeze" on the production of nuclear weapons have circulated, in one form or another, since 1945. They were rejected by the Soviets and failed to catch fire with the protest movement in the West.
In March 1980, Randall Forsberg, a former intern at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), first proposed a bilateral freeze on the testing, production, and deployment of new nuclear weapons. Conceived as a mechanism for reuniting and reinvigorating the peace movement, the freeze quickly attracted support from a broad array of mainstream politicians and political groups as well.
Leonid Brezhnev espoused the idea of a "moratorium" on nuclear weapons production in his February 23, 1981 address to the 26th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
The American left was mobilized for action on this issue on a major scale after March 20, 1981, when a meeting of peace activists assembled at Georgetown University in Washington. By January 1982, more than two dozen city councils, 300 towns, and six New England state legislatures had endorsed the freeze.
There were partisan disagreements in the 1950s, for example over ``who lost China". The war in Vietnam shattered the bipartisan consensus on waging the Cold War. In the 1970s, even Republicans were divided over the wisdom of pursuing the Nixon-Kissinger policy of detente. Moreover, in the later years of the Cold War, debates over the nuclear freeze, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), opposing communist aggression in Central America, or using force to defend US interests reflected very little bipartisanship.
Cold War children had grown up with "Duck and Cover", and were frequently exposed to accounts of war and violence (including news, cartoons and adult conversation) and to war toys and games (e.g., Rambo, G.I. Joe and other toy aisle "dominators"), and , as such, were aware and concerned about war.
From the mid-1960s until the early 1970s, many local and national peace groups shifted their focus, concentrating instead on the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. The anti-nuclear movement was not reinvigorated until the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Europe and the United States experienced a resurgence of concern over nuclear weapons.
The intensity of anti-nuclear activism varied depending on the political climate. Public debate over nuclear weapons in America remained virtually nonexistent during much of the 1960s. The signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty by the United States and the Soviet Union in 1963 appeared to reduce the public's concern over the nuclear weapons issue, as nuclear testing went underground. Nuclear weapons development and testing continued unabated, however—the United States conducted more tests in the five years after the test ban treaty than the five years before its signing—the perception of the nuclear threat lost its immediacy.
In Europe the renewed activism centered on anxiety over the arms build-up during the Reagan administration and the proposed deployment by the United States of short and medium range nuclear missiles in continental Europe. These anxieties sparked numerous European protests against the arms race that helped inspire the dormant American anti-nuclear movement. Activists in the United States shared the European's concerns over the nuclear deployments in Europe. Greater public concern in the United States over nuclear missile silos also coincided with the emergence of the nuclear freeze movement, which attracted strong support in the United States.
In 1982, Newsweek reported that "a cross section" of Americans, including "homemakers and businessmen, clerks and doctors, clergymen, teachers, scientists and even military men," had "suddenly enlisted" in this "loosely linked, burgeoning campaign to end the nuclear arms race." Their numbers were "mushrooming," the newsmagazine reported, growing faster than "even their own leaders ever expected." Similarly, Time reported that the freeze had attracted "broad-based support" from "across the socioeconomic spectrum." In March 1982, the newsmagazine declared the freeze movement "far more broadly based" than the anti-war movement of the 1960s and began a cover story on the phenomenon under the Victor Hugo quotation, "No army can stop an idea whose time has come".
Reagan's effective choices in transformation, entitlement, and identification produced a disarmament drama that enabled many American listeners to cope with the arms race. The understandings created by this drama appealed to an audience that had been aroused by the freeze movement about the danger of nuclear war. Reagan's rhetorical choices included transforming the conflict of the people versus the arms race into a conflict between the people and the Soviet threat, entitling a nuclear buildup START to make it appear that reduction goes further than freezing weapons, and identifying with America's desire not to repeat past mistakes of history by promoting a need for a strong Alliance. Reagan reinforced the drama of an arms buildup as a road to peace.
Helen Caldicott was the most visible anti-nuclear activist of the 1980s. During the debate over a proposed "freeze" on nuclear weapons in 1980-1984, she simply dominated the news. Caldicott was the archetypal, even stereotypical freeze activist: well-educated, professionally successful, and economically secure. She epitomized the sort of activist that led Robert Coles to dub the freeze movement "the crusade of the leisure class." Even her supporters acknowledged that she was "a little casual with the facts."
Her personal crusade most directly inspired the resurrection of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR)--an organization of medical professionals dormant since the 1960s--and its sister group, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). PSR in turn inspired a number of copy-cat groups, including Educators for Social Responsibility and even Architects, Designers, and Planners for Social Responsibility.
Reagan stated categorically that the Soviet Union was pulling the strings on the nuclear freeze, which he said was being manipulated by "those who want the weakening of America." Reader's Digest, the monthly "for people who hate to read", has a circulation of 17,875,545. Thornton Wilder, possibly its severest critic, called it a "magazine for boors, by boors about boors." The hot item in the October 1982 issue, "The KGB's Magical War for 'Peace,'" was hard-breathing account about how the KGB was pulling the wool over the eyes of the millions of innocent Americans who supported the freeze. John Barron interviewed Stanislav Aleksandrovich Levchenko who was a KGB agent in 1979 to describe how Europe successfully supported and manipulated various peace groups and the nuclear freeze campaigns.
On June 23, 1982 the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives voted 26-11 in favor of a joint resolution calling for a nuclear freeze. The nuclear freeze resolution had been introduced by the committee's chairman, Representative Clement J. Zablocki of Wisconsin. The object of the resolution was to express profound concern over the threat posed to the peace and safety of the world by the nuclear arms race. The adversaries argued that passage of the resolution would weaken the Reagan Administration's leverage in negotiating a satisfactory arms agreement with the Soviet Union. The Reagan Administration was adamant in its opposition to the resolution and worked dillgently to assure that the vast majority of House Republicans and Southern Democrats would cast negative votes.
A substitute resolution authored by Republican Representative William S. Broomfield of Michigan was a vague endorsement of the Administration's nuclear policy. In an extraordinarily close roll call the substitute prevailed by a 204-202 margin. If a single vote had changed, the tabulation would have been 203-203 and the substitute would have been defeated.
In the aftermath of the elections of 1982 there were several indicators which proved quite encouraging to the future prospects of a nuclear freeze resolution. On November 2, 1982 the Democrats gained an impressive total of twenty-six seats in the House. After the Speaker's gavel fell, the House was recorded 278-149 in favor of the modified Zablocki Resolution.
While in the House, Congressman Edward J. Markey was a leader of the national Nuclear Freeze movement and has been a Congressional champion on nuclear nonproliferation. His amendment to ban all underground nuclear testing passed in 1986, and in the 1990s, he fought to tighten controls on global trafficking in nuclear technology.
Some 750 nuclear freeze activists gathered at the Bel Aire Hilton in St. Louis from 7-9 December 1984 to debate their protest agenda for 1985. The organizing group was the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign (NWFC). Among the most visible participants were the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), Mobilization for Survival (MFS), the War Resisters League (WRL), the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), and the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA) and a variety of its front organizations.
Members of the NWFC's strategy committee include Daniel Ellsberg, of "Pentagon Papers" fame and Betsy Taylor of SANE, an "Old Left" disarmament lobby. Ms. Taylor has been involved in a number of IPS spin- offs, including the National Conference for Alternative State and Local Public Policies which has supported the idea of "nuclear free zones" on the municipal level.
The 1985 "strategy paper" circulated at the conference stressed grassroots organizing "to bring overwhelming pressure to bear on our locally elected Congress to initiate a de facto bilateral freeze by suspending funds for nuclear weapons activities."
The number of protesters who were willing to face arrest, fines, and imprisonment has steadily increased. In the first eleven months of 1987, nearly 3,000 protesters were arrested for anti-nuclear civil disobedience, compared with 1,056 in 1984. Second, some large, diverse groups of protesters have stretched the ability of their own organizers to control events involving civil disobedience. Consequently, the number of skirmishes between protesters and security personnel increased.
Groups that engaged in civil disobedience were usually screened, trained, and supervised in nonviolent protest by the protest organizers. Most leaders of these groups seemed to be not only deeply committed to the principles of nonviolence, but also keenly aware that violence is likely to erode popular support. Second, although the number of arrests increased dramatically, the number of actual crimes involving destruction of property at or associated with nuclear facilities, remained constant since 1984 at about five incidents per year. There is little evidence that the more violent radical environmentalists would join the anti-nuclear movement.
Anti-war protesters were not primarily anti-nuclear, but they were closely linked to the anti-nuclear movement. In fact, their membership, philosophy, and tactics overlap with those of anti-nuclear groups. The main difference is that anti-war groups opposed all war and all defense spending. Anti-nuclear protesters did not necessarily reject the need to prepare for or fight a war.
By proposing the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), Ronald Reagan co-opted the rhetoric of the nuclear freeze movement and reversed the relationship that had previously existed between himself and his anti-nuclear opponents. By adopting a proposal for space-based missile defenses, Reagan took on the role of the peace-loving nuclear critic. The Strategic Defense Initiative eclipsed the ethical appeals of the nuclear freeze movement, promising the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons.
While some freeze activists turned to direct action, others simply claimed victory and moved on to other issues. Insisting that they had "won" the freeze debate, some even took credit for Reagan's subsequent willingness to negotiate a new arms control treaty with the Soviets. According to Douglas C. Waller, a legislative assistant to congressional freeze supporter Edward J. Markey, for example, Reagan finally agreed to negotiate with the Soviets only because of the public pressure created by the freeze campaign. In other words, Reagan moved "in the direction in which the movement had been pushing him."
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