Public Diplomacy for the Nuclear Age: the United States, the United Kingdom, and the End of the Cold War
PUBLIC DIPLOMACY FOR THE NUCLEAR AGE: THE UNITED STATES, THE UNITED KINGDOM, AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History By Anthony M. Eames, M.A. Washington, DC April 9, 2020 Copyright 2020 by Anthony M. Eames All Rights ReserveD ii PUBLIC DIPLOMACY FOR THE NUCLEAR AGE: THE UNITED STATES, THE UNITED KINGDOM, AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR Anthony M. Eames, M.A. Thesis Advisor: Kathryn Olesko, Ph.D., David Painter, Ph.D. ABSTRACT During the 1980s, public diplomacy campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic competed for moral, political, and scientific legitimacy in debates over arms control, the deployment of new missile systems, ballistic missile defense, and the consequences of nuclear war. The U.S. and U.K. governments, led respectively by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and backed by a network of think tanks and political organizations associated with the New Right, sought to win public support for a policy of Western nuclear superiority over the Soviet bloc. Transatlantic peace movement and scientific communities, in contrast, promoted the language and logic of arms reduction as an alternative to the arms race. Their campaigns produced new approaches for relating scientific knowledge and the voice of previously neglected groups such as women, racial minorities, and the poor, to the public debate to illuminate the detrimental effects of reliance on nuclear weapons for Western society. The conflict between these simultaneously domestic and transnational campaigns transformed the nature of diplomacy and public diplomacy, in which official and unofficial actors engaged transnational publics in order to win support for their policy preferences, emerged as an important complement to state-based institutional channels of international relations.
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