Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear, and the Cold War of the 1980s
ECKART CONZE Philipps-Universita¨t Marburg
MARTIN KLIMKE New York University Abu Dhabi
JEREMY VARON The New School
. 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, usa
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107136281 © Cambridge University Press 2017 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2017 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Conze, Eckart, editor. | Klimke, Martin, editor. | Varon, Jeremy, 1969– editor. Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear and the Cold War of the 1980s / Eckart Conze, Philipps-University Marburg; Martin Klimke, New York University, Abu Dhabi; Jeremy Varon, Eugene Lang College, The New School. New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, [2017] | Series: Publications of the German Historical Institute | “This book originated in a global conference in 2010, “Accidental Armageddons: The Nuclear Crisis and the Culture of the Second Cold War, 1975–1989.” Hosted by the German Historical Institute (GHI), the gathering was co-sponsored by New York University, the National Security Archive, and the New School for Social Research/Eugene Lang College”–Acknowledgements. LCCN 2016026287 | ISBN 9781107136281 LCSH: Antinuclear movement – History – Congresses. | World politics – 1975–1985 – Congresses. | World politics – 1985–1995 – Congresses. | Cold War – Congresses. LCC JZ5574 .N83 2017 | DDC 327.1/74709048–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016026287 isbn 978-1-107-13628-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
. 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear, and the Cold War of the 1980s
This book brings together cutting-edge scholarship from the United States and Europe to address political as well as cultural responses to both the arms race of the 1980s and the ascent of nuclear energy as a second, controversial dimension of the nuclear age. Diverse in its topics and disciplinary approaches, Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear and the Cold War of the 1980s makes a fundamental contribution to the emerging historiography of the 1980s as a whole. As of now, the era’s nuclear tensions have been addressed by scholars mostly from the standpoint of security studies, focused on the geo- strategic deliberations of political elites and at the level of state policy. Yet nuclear anxieties, as the essays in this volume document, were so pervasive that they profoundly shaped the era’s culture, its habits of mind, and its politics, far beyond the domain of policy.
Eckart Conze is Professor of History at the University of Marburg. He is the author of, most recently, Die Suche nach Sicherheit. Eine Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland and Das Auswärtige Amt. Vom Kaiserreich bis zur Gegenwart. Martin Klimke is Associate Dean of Humanities and Associate Professor of History at New York University Abu Dhabi. He is the author of The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties, co-author of A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany, as well as editor of the pub- lication series Protest, Culture & Society. Jeremy Varon is Associate Professor of History at The New School in New York City. He is the author of Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies and The New Life: Jewish Students of Postwar Germany, as well as co-founder and editor of The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture.
. 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 . 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear, and the Cold War of the 1980s
This book brings together cutting-edge scholarship from the United States and Europe to address political as well as cultural responses to both the arms race of the 1980s and the ascent of nuclear energy as a second, controversial dimension of the nuclear age. Diverse in its topics and disciplinary approaches, Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear and the Cold War of the 1980s makes a fundamental contribution to the emerging historiography of the 1980s as a whole. As of now, the era’s nuclear tensions have been addressed by scholars mostly from the standpoint of security studies, focused on the geo- strategic deliberations of political elites and at the level of state policy. Yet nuclear anxieties, as the essays in this volume document, were so pervasive that they profoundly shaped the era’s culture, its habits of mind, and its politics, far beyond the domain of policy.
Eckart Conze is Professor of History at the University of Marburg. He is the author of, most recently, Die Suche nach Sicherheit. Eine Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland and Das Auswärtige Amt. Vom Kaiserreich bis zur Gegenwart. Martin Klimke is Associate Dean of Humanities and Associate Professor of History at New York University Abu Dhabi. He is the author of The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties, co-author of A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany, as well as editor of the pub- lication series Protest, Culture & Society. Jeremy Varon is Associate Professor of History at The New School in New York City. He is the author of Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies and The New Life: Jewish Students of Postwar Germany, as well as co-founder and editor of The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture.
. 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 . 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 publications of the german historical institute
Edited by hartmut berghoff with the assistance of David Lazar
The German Historical Institute is a center for advanced study and research whose purpose is to provide a permanent basis for scholarly cooperation among historians from the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States. The Institute conducts, promotes, and supports research into both American and German political, social, economic, and cultural history; into transatlantic migration, especially during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and into the history of international relations, with special emphasis on the roles played by the United States and Germany.
Recent Books in the Series Adam T. Rosenbaum, Bavarian Tourism and the Modern World, 1800–1950 Jonas Scherner, Paying for Hitler’s War: The Consequences of Nazi Economic Hegemony for Europe Gerald D. Feldman, Austrian Banks in the Period of National Socialism Eric C. Steinhart, The Holocaust and the Germanization of Ukraine Hartmut Berghoff and Uta Andrea Balbier, The East German Economy, 1945–2010: Falling Behind or Catching Up? Thomas W. Maulucci, Jr., and Detlef Junker, editors, GIs in Germany: The Social, Economic, Cultural, and Political History of the American Military Presence Alison Efford, German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era Lars Maischak, German Merchants in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Ingo Köhler, The Aryanization of Private Banks in the Third Reich Hartmut Berghoff, Jürgen Kocka, and Dieter Ziegler, editors, Business in the Age of Extremes Yair Mintzker, The Defortification of the German City, 1689–1866 Astrid M. Eckert, The Struggle for the Files: The Western Allies and the Return of German Archives after the Second World War Winson Chu, The German Minority in Interwar Poland Christof Mauch and Kiran Klaus Patel, The United States and Germany during the Twentieth Century Monica Black, Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany John R. McNeill and Corinna R. Unger, editors, Environmental Histories of the Cold War
. 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 Roger Chickering and Stig Förster, editors, War in an Age of Revolution, 1775–1815 Cathryn Carson, Heisenberg in the Atomic Age: Science and the Public Sphere Michaela Hoenicke Moore, Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism, 1933–1945
. 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear, and the Cold War of the 1980s
ECKART CONZE Philipps-Universita¨t Marburg
MARTIN KLIMKE New York University Abu Dhabi
JEREMY VARON The New School
. 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, usa
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107136281 © Cambridge University Press 2017 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2017 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Conze, Eckart, editor. | Klimke, Martin, editor. | Varon, Jeremy, 1969– editor. Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear and the Cold War of the 1980s / Eckart Conze, Philipps-University Marburg; Martin Klimke, New York University, Abu Dhabi; Jeremy Varon, Eugene Lang College, The New School. New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, [2017] | Series: Publications of the German Historical Institute | “This book originated in a global conference in 2010, “Accidental Armageddons: The Nuclear Crisis and the Culture of the Second Cold War, 1975–1989.” Hosted by the German Historical Institute (GHI), the gathering was co-sponsored by New York University, the National Security Archive, and the New School for Social Research/Eugene Lang College”–Acknowledgements. LCCN 2016026287 | ISBN 9781107136281 LCSH: Antinuclear movement – History – Congresses. | World politics – 1975–1985 – Congresses. | World politics – 1985–1995 – Congresses. | Cold War – Congresses. LCC JZ5574 .N83 2017 | DDC 327.1/74709048–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016026287 isbn 978-1-107-13628-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
. 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear, and the Cold War of the 1980s
This book brings together cutting-edge scholarship from the United States and Europe to address political as well as cultural responses to both the arms race of the 1980s and the ascent of nuclear energy as a second, controversial dimension of the nuclear age. Diverse in its topics and disciplinary approaches, Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear and the Cold War of the 1980s makes a fundamental contribution to the emerging historiography of the 1980s as a whole. As of now, the era’s nuclear tensions have been addressed by scholars mostly from the standpoint of security studies, focused on the geo- strategic deliberations of political elites and at the level of state policy. Yet nuclear anxieties, as the essays in this volume document, were so pervasive that they profoundly shaped the era’s culture, its habits of mind, and its politics, far beyond the domain of policy.
Eckart Conze is Professor of History at the University of Marburg. He is the author of, most recently, Die Suche nach Sicherheit. Eine Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland and Das Auswärtige Amt. Vom Kaiserreich bis zur Gegenwart. Martin Klimke is Associate Dean of Humanities and Associate Professor of History at New York University Abu Dhabi. He is the author of The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties, co-author of A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany, as well as editor of the pub- lication series Protest, Culture & Society. Jeremy Varon is Associate Professor of History at The New School in New York City. He is the author of Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies and The New Life: Jewish Students of Postwar Germany, as well as co-founder and editor of The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture.
. 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 . 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 publications of the german historical institute
Edited by hartmut berghoff with the assistance of David Lazar
The German Historical Institute is a center for advanced study and research whose purpose is to provide a permanent basis for scholarly cooperation among historians from the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States. The Institute conducts, promotes, and supports research into both American and German political, social, economic, and cultural history; into transatlantic migration, especially during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and into the history of international relations, with special emphasis on the roles played by the United States and Germany.
Recent Books in the Series Adam T. Rosenbaum, Bavarian Tourism and the Modern World, 1800–1950 Jonas Scherner, Paying for Hitler’s War: The Consequences of Nazi Economic Hegemony for Europe Gerald D. Feldman, Austrian Banks in the Period of National Socialism Eric C. Steinhart, The Holocaust and the Germanization of Ukraine Hartmut Berghoff and Uta Andrea Balbier, The East German Economy, 1945–2010: Falling Behind or Catching Up? Thomas W. Maulucci, Jr., and Detlef Junker, editors, GIs in Germany: The Social, Economic, Cultural, and Political History of the American Military Presence Alison Efford, German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era Lars Maischak, German Merchants in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Ingo Köhler, The Aryanization of Private Banks in the Third Reich Hartmut Berghoff, Jürgen Kocka, and Dieter Ziegler, editors, Business in the Age of Extremes Yair Mintzker, The Defortification of the German City, 1689–1866 Astrid M. Eckert, The Struggle for the Files: The Western Allies and the Return of German Archives after the Second World War Winson Chu, The German Minority in Interwar Poland Christof Mauch and Kiran Klaus Patel, The United States and Germany during the Twentieth Century Monica Black, Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany John R. McNeill and Corinna R. Unger, editors, Environmental Histories of the Cold War
. 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 Roger Chickering and Stig Förster, editors, War in an Age of Revolution, 1775–1815 Cathryn Carson, Heisenberg in the Atomic Age: Science and the Public Sphere Michaela Hoenicke Moore, Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism, 1933–1945
. 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear, and the Cold War of the 1980s
ECKART CONZE Philipps-Universita¨t Marburg
MARTIN KLIMKE New York University Abu Dhabi
JEREMY VARON The New School
. 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, usa
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107136281 © Cambridge University Press 2017 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2017 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Conze, Eckart, editor. | Klimke, Martin, editor. | Varon, Jeremy, 1969– editor. Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear and the Cold War of the 1980s / Eckart Conze, Philipps-University Marburg; Martin Klimke, New York University, Abu Dhabi; Jeremy Varon, Eugene Lang College, The New School. New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, [2017] | Series: Publications of the German Historical Institute | “This book originated in a global conference in 2010, “Accidental Armageddons: The Nuclear Crisis and the Culture of the Second Cold War, 1975–1989.” Hosted by the German Historical Institute (GHI), the gathering was co-sponsored by New York University, the National Security Archive, and the New School for Social Research/Eugene Lang College”–Acknowledgements. LCCN 2016026287 | ISBN 9781107136281 LCSH: Antinuclear movement – History – Congresses. | World politics – 1975–1985 – Congresses. | World politics – 1985–1995 – Congresses. | Cold War – Congresses. LCC JZ5574 .N83 2017 | DDC 327.1/74709048–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016026287 isbn 978-1-107-13628-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
. 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear, and the Cold War of the 1980s
This book brings together cutting-edge scholarship from the United States and Europe to address political as well as cultural responses to both the arms race of the 1980s and the ascent of nuclear energy as a second, controversial dimension of the nuclear age. Diverse in its topics and disciplinary approaches, Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear and the Cold War of the 1980s makes a fundamental contribution to the emerging historiography of the 1980s as a whole. As of now, the era’s nuclear tensions have been addressed by scholars mostly from the standpoint of security studies, focused on the geo- strategic deliberations of political elites and at the level of state policy. Yet nuclear anxieties, as the essays in this volume document, were so pervasive that they profoundly shaped the era’s culture, its habits of mind, and its politics, far beyond the domain of policy.
Eckart Conze is Professor of History at the University of Marburg. He is the author of, most recently, Die Suche nach Sicherheit. Eine Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland and Das Auswärtige Amt. Vom Kaiserreich bis zur Gegenwart. Martin Klimke is Associate Dean of Humanities and Associate Professor of History at New York University Abu Dhabi. He is the author of The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties, co-author of A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany, as well as editor of the pub- lication series Protest, Culture & Society. Jeremy Varon is Associate Professor of History at The New School in New York City. He is the author of Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies and The New Life: Jewish Students of Postwar Germany, as well as co-founder and editor of The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture.
. 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 . 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 publications of the german historical institute
Edited by hartmut berghoff with the assistance of David Lazar
The German Historical Institute is a center for advanced study and research whose purpose is to provide a permanent basis for scholarly cooperation among historians from the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States. The Institute conducts, promotes, and supports research into both American and German political, social, economic, and cultural history; into transatlantic migration, especially during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and into the history of international relations, with special emphasis on the roles played by the United States and Germany.
Recent Books in the Series Adam T. Rosenbaum, Bavarian Tourism and the Modern World, 1800–1950 Jonas Scherner, Paying for Hitler’s War: The Consequences of Nazi Economic Hegemony for Europe Gerald D. Feldman, Austrian Banks in the Period of National Socialism Eric C. Steinhart, The Holocaust and the Germanization of Ukraine Hartmut Berghoff and Uta Andrea Balbier, The East German Economy, 1945–2010: Falling Behind or Catching Up? Thomas W. Maulucci, Jr., and Detlef Junker, editors, GIs in Germany: The Social, Economic, Cultural, and Political History of the American Military Presence Alison Efford, German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era Lars Maischak, German Merchants in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Ingo Köhler, The Aryanization of Private Banks in the Third Reich Hartmut Berghoff, Jürgen Kocka, and Dieter Ziegler, editors, Business in the Age of Extremes Yair Mintzker, The Defortification of the German City, 1689–1866 Astrid M. Eckert, The Struggle for the Files: The Western Allies and the Return of German Archives after the Second World War Winson Chu, The German Minority in Interwar Poland Christof Mauch and Kiran Klaus Patel, The United States and Germany during the Twentieth Century Monica Black, Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany John R. McNeill and Corinna R. Unger, editors, Environmental Histories of the Cold War
. 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 Roger Chickering and Stig Förster, editors, War in an Age of Revolution, 1775–1815 Cathryn Carson, Heisenberg in the Atomic Age: Science and the Public Sphere Michaela Hoenicke Moore, Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism, 1933–1945
. 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear, and the Cold War of the 1980s
ECKART CONZE Philipps-Universita¨t Marburg
MARTIN KLIMKE New York University Abu Dhabi
JEREMY VARON The New School
. 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, usa
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107136281 © Cambridge University Press 2017 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2017 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Conze, Eckart, editor. | Klimke, Martin, editor. | Varon, Jeremy, 1969– editor. Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear and the Cold War of the 1980s / Eckart Conze, Philipps-University Marburg; Martin Klimke, New York University, Abu Dhabi; Jeremy Varon, Eugene Lang College, The New School. New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, [2017] | Series: Publications of the German Historical Institute | “This book originated in a global conference in 2010, “Accidental Armageddons: The Nuclear Crisis and the Culture of the Second Cold War, 1975–1989.” Hosted by the German Historical Institute (GHI), the gathering was co-sponsored by New York University, the National Security Archive, and the New School for Social Research/Eugene Lang College”–Acknowledgements. LCCN 2016026287 | ISBN 9781107136281 LCSH: Antinuclear movement – History – Congresses. | World politics – 1975–1985 – Congresses. | World politics – 1985–1995 – Congresses. | Cold War – Congresses. LCC JZ5574 .N83 2017 | DDC 327.1/74709048–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016026287 isbn 978-1-107-13628-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
. 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 Contents
List of Contributors page xi Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: Between Accidental Armageddons and Winnable Wars: Nuclear Threats and Nuclear Fears in the 1980s 1 Eckart Conze, Martin Klimke, and Jeremy Varon
Part I: Defining Threat: Nuclear Dangers and the Moral Imagination 25 1 Nuclear Winter: Prophecies of Doom and Images of Desolation during the Second Cold War 27 Wilfried Mausbach 2 Atomic Nightmares and Biological Citizens at Three Mile Island 55 Natasha Zaretsky 3 Missile Bases as Concentration Camps: The Role of National Socialism, the Second World War, and the Holocaust in the West German Discourse on Nuclear Armament 79 Eckart Conze
Part II: Popular Culture 99 4 “Will you sing about the missiles?”: British Antinuclear Protest Music of the 1980s 101 William M. Knoblauch
vii
. 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 viii Contents
5 From Artists for Peace to the Green Caterpillar: Cultural Activism and Electoral Politics in 1980s West Germany 116 Martin Klimke and Laura Stapane 6 A Tenuous Peace: International Antinuclear Activism in the East German Writers Union during the 1980s 142 Thomas Goldstein
Part III: Local and Transnational Activism 165 7 The “Example of Wyhl”: How Grassroots Protest in the Rhine Valley Shaped West Germany’s Antinuclear Movement 167 Stephen Milder 8 No Nukes and Front Porch Politics: Environmental Protest Culture and Practice on the Second Cold War Home Front 186 Michael Stewart Foley 9 Global Micropolitics: Toward a Transnational History of Grassroots Nuclear-Free Zones 206 Susanne Schregel 10 European Nuclear Disarmament: Transnational Peace Campaigning in the 1980s 227 Patrick Burke 11 A Case of “Hollanditis”: The Interchurch Peace Council in the Netherlands and the Christian Peace Movement in Western Europe 251 Sebastian Kalden
Part IV: The Challenge for High Politics 269 12 Peace through Strength?: The Impact of the Antinuclear Uprising on the Carter and Reagan Administrations 271 Lawrence S. Wittner 13 Did Protest Matter? The Influence of the Peace Movement on the West German Government and the Social Democratic Party, 1977–1983 290 Tim Geiger and Jan Hansen
. 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 Contents ix
14 Why Was There No “Accidental Armageddon” Discourse in France? How Defense Intellectuals, Peace Movements, and Public Opinion Rethought the Cold War during the Euromissile Crisis 316 Katrin Rücker 15 Building Trust: The G7 Summits and International Leadership in Nuclear Politics 335 Enrico Böhm
Index 355
. 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 . 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 Contributors
enrico boehm is Advisor to the Executive Board of the Bertelsmann Foundation. He is the author of Die Sicherheit des Westens. Entstehung und Funktion der G7-Gipfel, 1975–1981 (2013). patrick burke is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster. eckart conze is Professor of History at the University of Marburg. His publications include Aristokratismus und Moderne. Adel als politisches und kulturelles Konzept 1890–1945 (2013), Das Auswärtige Amt. Vom Kaiserreich bis zur Gegenwart (2013), Das Amt und die Vergangenheit. Deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und der Bundesrepublik (2010), The Genocide Convention 60 Years after Its Adoption (2010) (with C. Safferling), and Die Suche nach Sicherheit. Eine Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (2009). michael stewart foley is Professor of American Political Culture and Political Theory at the University of Groningen. He is the author of Dead Kennedys Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (2015), Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s (2013), and Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance during the Vietnam War (2003). He is a co-editor of Home Fronts: A Wartime America Reader (2008), Witness against Torture: The Campaign to Shut Down Guantanamo (2008), and editor of Dear Dr. Spock: Letters about the Vietnam War to America’s Favorite Baby Doctor (2005). tim geiger works at the Institute for Contemporary History Munich- Berlin; Department within the Foreign Ministry of the FRG (Edition
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“Foreign Relations of the Federal Republic of Germany”). He is the author of Atlantiker gegen Gaullisten. Außenpolitischer Konflikt und innerparteilicher Machtkampf in der CDU/CSU 1958–1969 (2008), and editor of Die Einheit. Das Auswärtige Amt, das DDR-Außenministerium und der Zwei-plus-Vier-Prozess (2015), Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Vol. 1976, 1977, 1980, 1983 (2014), and Zweiter Kalter Krieg und Friedensbewegung. Der NATO- Doppelbeschluss in deutsch-deutscher und internationaler Perspektive (2011). thomas william goldstein is Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of History, University of Arkansas. jan hansen is Research Associate and Lecturer at the Humboldt University Berlin, Department of History. He is the author of Abschied vom Kalten Krieg? Die Sozialdemokraten und der Nachrüstungsstreit (1977–1987), 2016. sebastian kalden works as Project Manager for the Mecklenburger AnStiftung Foundation. martin klimke is Associate Dean of Humanities and Associate Professor of History at New York University Abu Dhabi. He is the author of The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany & the United States in the Global Sixties (2010), co-author of A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany (2010), and co- editor of several volumes on transnational and transatlantic history, as well as the Cold War. william knoblauch is Assistant Professor of History at Finlandia University. He is the author of Selling the Second Cold War: Antinuclear Cultural Activism in the Reagan Era (forthcoming 2016). wilfried mausbach is Executive Director of the Heidelberg Center for American Studies at the University of Heidelberg. He is the co-editor of The Nuclear Crisis; Arms Race, Atomic Anxiety, and the German Peace Movement of the 1980s (forthcoming 2016), The American Presidency (2012), and Changing the World, Changing Oneself: Political Protest and Collective Identities in West Germany and the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s (2010), associate editor of The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War, 1945–1990. A Handbook (2004) and America, the Vietnam War, and the World: Comparative and International Perspectives (2003), and the author of Zwischen
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Morgenthau und Marshall. Das wirtschaftspolitische Deutschlandkonzept der USA, 1944–1947 (1996). stephen milder is Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen. His publication Greening Democracy: The Antinuclear Movement and Political Environmentalism in Western Europe, 1968–1983 is forth- coming with Cambridge University Press. katrin ru¨ cker is Research Fellow at the Faculty of Law at the University of Geneva. susanne schregel is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne, University of Cologne. Her publica- tions include Der Atomkrieg vor der Wohnungstür. Eine Politikgeschichte der neuen Friedensbewegung in der Bundesrepublik, 1970–1985 (2011). laura stapane is Project Manager of the research, digitization, and exhibition project The Civil Rights Struggle, African-American GIs, and Germany as well as for The Nuclear Crisis – Transatlantic Peace Politics, Rearmament, and the Second Cold War project. She also works as a Senior Creative Consultant. jeremy varon is Associate Professor of History at The New School in New York City. He is the author, most recently, of The New Life: Jewish Students of Postwar Germany (2014), and co-founder and editor of The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture. lawrence s. wittner is Professor of History emeritus at the University of Albany. His publications include What’s Going On at UAardvark? (2013), Working for Peace and Justice (2012), Confronting the Bomb (2009), Toward Nuclear Abolition (2003), Resisting the Bomb (1997), One World or None (1995), Rebels against War (1984), American Intervention in Greece, 1943–1949 (1982), and Cold War America (1978). natasha zaretsky is Associate Professor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Her publications include No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968–1980 (2007) and The Womb and the Reactor: Three Mile Island and the Birth of the Ecological Age (forthcoming).
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Under any circumstances, a book is a collaborative endeavor, made by villages and not individuals. A book such as this – edited by three people from diverse professional cultures, corralling the insight of dozens of accom- plished, far-flung scholars – is exponentially more a communal effort. This book originated in a global conference in 2010, “Accidental Armageddons: The Nuclear Crisis and the Culture of the Second Cold War, 1975–1989.” Hosted by the German Historical Institute (GHI), the gathering was co-sponsored by the National Security Archive, and the New School for Social Research/Eugene Lang College. We are extremely grateful to each of these institutions for having had the willingness, resources, and heart to sponsor our conference, in particular Hartmut Berghoff (GHI Director), William Burr (Senior Analyst/Director of Nuclear History Documentation Project, National Security Archive), and Neil Gordon and Robert Kostrzewa (The New School). Our special thanks go to Bärbel Thomas, Nicole Kruz, Sabine Fix, Betsy Hauck, and Matthias Ball at the GHI, who ran the conference with typical efficiency and aplomb. Yet again, the GHI demonstrated what commitment to ideas can look like and mean, in a world starved for historically informed understandings of the challenges of the present and future. The co-editors of this volume, Professors Conze, Klimke, and Varon, were each supported in this project by their host institutions. Special thanks go therefore to Marburg University, the New School, and the GHI, as well as subsequently New York University Abu Dhabi, each of which encouraged the synergy of good minds, acting in concert. Each of the volume’s many contributors hails as well from some place, whether a university or a research institute. We are equally grateful of the support
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the individual authors received from their colleagues and institutions. This book, in sum, is the sum of the many parts that made it. Cambridge University Press was a great steward of the project, under- standing its unique value, and carrying forth its vast editorial work with great professionalism and passion. We are especially thankful for the support of David Lazar, who coordinates the GHI’s publications, and Deborah Gershenowitz and David Morris of Cambridge University Press, who took charge of the project. Our copyeditors, Linda Truilo and Brian Black, were heroic in the process, providing invaluable guidance of each piece in the volume, while contending with the many complexities of subject matter and of language. This book deals seriously and at length with a period we know well and whose importance we seek to promote. Nothing has been so terrifying as the prospect of species annihilation through nuclear war. Little has been as reassuring as the efforts – across the Atlantic and throughout the political spectrum – to ensure that this cataclysm has not yet come to pass. The world remains choked with nuclear dangers, embodied by new nuclear actors (including, potentially, terrorists) and exacerbated by a potentially resurgent nuclear power industry. The latter brands itself as the “clean” alternative to fossil fuels, obfuscating very real, persisting dangers and decades of advocacy work to highlight that hazard. We have limited ability to influence the course of the world, with respect to nuclear weapons or energy. We hope, nonetheless, to contribute to a historically informed understanding of current debates and the conse- quences of various positions. If the effect of our volume is to give some elevated sense to the contested and often contradictory nature of historical and, by extension, contemporary discourses about the concepts of security and safety, it will have succeeded in its grand aim. We hope that readers enjoy and learn from what the talented group of authors behind this volume have to say. We would like, finally, to acknowledge the crucial role in the conference from which this volume sprung – and the decades of his wisdom on nuclear issues – of the late Jonathan Schell. Mr. Schell was kind enough to give the keynote address of the conference and to help to set the terms of our dialogue. For decades prior, he had been among the world’s most thoughtful voices in considering the implications of nuclear weapons for the fate of human kind and the planet. We will sorely miss his insight and humanity.
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Eckart Conze, Martin Klimke, and Jeremy Varon
In 1977 the board game “Fulda Gap: The First Battle of the Next War” hit the shelves in the United States. Playing on the central geostrategic role of West Germany in the Cold War, publicity for the game stated, “If war ever again comes to Europe, the major Soviet thrust must be aimed at the powerful US forces guarding southern Germany. In order to breach NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] defenses and break through to the heart of Europe, the armored columns of the Warsaw Pact must force their way through the Fulda Gap.”1 As a war simulation on the brigade level, the game underscored the vulnerability of US troops to a Soviet advance. Through its two main scenarios – the “Tripwire” (a Soviet surprise attack) and “Advance Warning” (partial mobilization/ redeployment of NATO forces), as well as their variants “Warsaw Pact/ NATO Disintegration”–it also reminded its players of the drastic con- sequences of war, which might include the use of chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons. Only a few years later, the military strategy and security policy of the superpowers had vastly overtaken the premises of the game. The introduction of the Soviet SS-20 and the planned stationing of Pershing II and Cruise Missiles as NATO’s response – the policy centerpieces of what contemporaries perceived as a “second Cold War”–intensified both the speed of any potential conflict and its destructive impact on Europe.2 The choice to deploy the Pershing missiles represented a fundamental diplomatic departure, working against years of détente efforts, from West Germany’s Ostpolitik to East-West disarmament and human rights agreements (1972: SALT I; 1975: Helsinki Accords; 1979: SALT II). Alarmed by the 1975 introduction of the SS-20, the NATO Council
1
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in December 1979 ratified the “Double-Track Decision,” followed in short succession by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The NATO docu- ment called for negotiations with the Soviet Union to correct the strategic imbalance and to establish a mutual limitation on intermediate-range ballistic missiles. Should these talks fail, NATO would immediately undertake a modernization of its nuclear arsenal, including the produc- tion of Pershing II and Cruise Missiles and their placement in Western Europe.3 As negotiations sputtered, due both to the Soviet Union’s refusal to withdraw the SS-20s and, at least in part, to the West’s weak interest in an agreement, NATO initiated the rearmament plan, further heightening superpower tensions. Concomitant with this escalation was a strategic shift in US security policy from the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) prevailing in the early decades of the Cold War to a “countervailing strategy” expressed in Presidential Directive 59 in July of 1980. The reorientation now allowed for the possibility of a winnable nuclear war, especially if confined to the European theater. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 reconfirmed the widespread impression of a departure from the tradi- tional balance-of-power doctrine to a more aggressive phase of global competition between the two superpowers and a remilitarization of East- West conflict.4 Reagan presented his proposed Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) as defensive and even antinuclear, as it promised to deter a nuclear attack. But, as critics loudly noted, it also made an intercontinental nuclear war newly viable, insofar as one side might now “win” by knocking its opponents’ missiles out of the sky (or upper atmosphere). In addition, Reagan included Colin S. Gray, a key architect of the winnable nuclear war doctrine, among his top military advisors. These developments greatly increased public fears of nuclear calamity. Anxiety abounded throughout the world during the 1980s, spanning mass culture, the literary world, the news and entertainment media, religious and civil society institutions, activist enclaves, alternative arts scenes, government bodies, and the highest echelons of security policy.5 Most notable, in the cultural realm, was the made-for-television American movie The Day After, which first aired on November 20, 1983, to nearly 100 million viewers. In gripping melodrama, it envisioned the cataclysmic destruction brought on by a full-scale nuclear war and the dismal life for its survivors. The film incited torrents of commentary from pundits, security experts, and scientists. Activists, for their part, used it as an organizing tool, holding screenings in college dormitories, community centers, and churches. The movie was occasion for probably the greatest
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attention Americans had paid to the prospect of nuclear war since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Indeed, the movie provoked such alarming reactions even before its screening that the American Broadcasting Corporation organized a post- broadcast discussion with heavyweights like Secretary of State George Shultz, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, as well as journalist William F. Buckley and author/activist Elie Wiesel.6 Successfully or not, the panel tried to at least soften public fears. The film made an impression on President Ronald Reagan himself, who mused in his diary that it was “powerfully done,” “very effective & left me greatly depressed.” He wondered whether it would “be of help to the ‘anti nukes’ or not” and was resolved “to do all we can to have a deterrent & to see there is never a nuclear war.”7 In that sense Reagan may even have felt confirmed and legitimized in what he had declared as the ultimate goal of his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), namely “to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.”8 The film had international resonance as well. This was true, above all, in West Germany, as both the quintessential “frontline” state in a potential nuclear conflict and home to a spirited peace movement with roots in environmental and student activism, as well as prior antinuclear campaigns. The movie’s German distribution company held an exclusive screening for journalists and members of the German parliament before its broad release.9 Hitting German theaters one month after its US airing, the film attracted 3.6 million viewers in its first five weeks; its gross of $50 million equaled the US box-office revenues for the blockbuster Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi during the same period. Capturing the symbiosis of escalating geopolitical tensions and public worry – as well as the American penchant for exporting both its power and its protest culture – Die Zeit said of the film’s German release, “Aren’t they wonderful, these Americans? They sent us the Pershing and The Day After – the bomb and the [survival] manual at the same time.”10 The Day After was only the most prominent cultural representation of a nuclear showdown in a time-period saturated with them, on both sides of the Atlantic. The 1983 techno-thriller War Games further elevated the atomic threat to the level of mainstream debate. When the Wind Blows, the 1986 animated British film with a soundtrack featuring David Bowie and Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, achieved cult status as a dour, antinuclear polemic. Precedent had been set for this genre of doomsday verité (as opposed to the more allegorical “disaster film” or sci-fi dystopia) by the
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time of the release in 1979 of The China Syndrome, which depicted a meltdown at a commercial nuclear power plant. In an apparent case of life imitating art, just twelve days after its release there was a severe accident at a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island (TMI) in Pennsylvania. The film, the panicked reaction to TMI, and the fierce protests against nuclear power already taking place helped establish another hallmark of the era: the twinning of concerns about nuclear weapons and nuclear power in a novel mix of atomic-age fears. Both European and American musicians took up the nuclear issue, whether in apocalyptic musical visions or passionate appeals for peace. The Clash’s “London Calling,” the title song of its seminal 1979 album, described a nuclear attack in England’s capital.11 Kate Bush’s “Breathing” (1980) imagined survival after an atomic explosion: “Breathing the fall-out in, / Out in, out in, out in, out in. / We’ve lost our chance. / We’re the first and the last, ooh, / After the blast. / Chips of Plutonium / Are twinkling in every lung.”12 Such British groups as Ultravox, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Nik Kershaw, and Pink Floyd released their own antinuke compositions. Sting’s 1985 ballad “Russians” made a powerful plea for geopolitical rapprochement, declaring that “In Europe and America, there’s a growing feeling of hysteria” and wondering “How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer’s deadly toy.”“99 Red Balloons,” the antiwar pop anthem by West Germany’s Nena, instantly topped the West German charts in 1983, with the German original even making it to second place on the American Billboard Hot 100. American musicians mobilized against nuclear power as well. In 1979, A-list acts, including Paul Simon, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and Bruce Springsteen, held a series of now-famous No Nukes benefit concerts in New York City. The handsome triple-album from the concerts featured pages of informa- tion about nuclear hazards.13 In more traditional media, Time magazine – a standard-bearer of American journalism – made the nuclear threat a recurring cover story from 1979 to 1985. In his 1982 bestseller The Fate of the Earth, US journalist Jonathan Schell detailed the danger that nuclear warfare posed to the survival of humankind and the planet, while West German author Udo Rabsch’s 1983 novel Julius oder Der Schwarze Sommer (Julius or The Black Summer) depicted the psychological anguish of the renewed arms race. The novel’s nuclear-obsessed protagonist “had been preparing himself for the end of the world for years. His private library on the apocalypse filled an entire IKEA bookcase.” After the city of Stuttgart is hit by an atomic bomb, he experiences a sense of relief, steeped in irony:
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“He knew that it had finally happened. It was all good now. Only one moment longer, and he would have gone crazy.”14 These cinematic, musical, and literary expressions of nuclear anxieties both emerged from and bolstered a transnational antinuclear protest movement. Producing massive demonstrations, the movement shaped the political and cultural landscape in the United States and much of Europe. On October 10, 1981, in the biggest peace protest Germany had ever seen, at least 250,000 demonstrators of diverse social, political, and cultural backgrounds gathered in Bonn to protest the escalating arms race. Two weeks later, two hundred thousand people rallied in Brussels, home to the headquarters of NATO. On November 21, nearly four hundred thousand demonstrators rallied in Amsterdam; held in the Netherlands, a country of minor geostrategic significance, the protest indicated how deeply nuclear fears had touched Western Europeans. Though on a lesser scale, antinuclear protest emerged even in Eastern European countries, whose peace activism helped pave the way for the mass democracy movements of the end of the 1980s.15 In the fall of 1983 alone, a total of about five million people, mostly in Western Europe, took part in demonstrations against the so-called Euromissiles. In the United States, more than a million people participated in a Nuclear Weapons Freeze demonstration on June 12, 1982, in New York City. The gathering remains perhaps the largest political demonstration in a single locale in US history. Throughout these years of protest, an elaborate infrastructure of think tanks, NGOs, grassroots groups, and peace communities agitated for the freeze, reduction, or abolition of nuclear arsenals. Antinuke militants, often from the Catholic left, engaged in “high-risk” activism at nuclear sites and at the offices of weapons manufacturers, despite the threat of lengthy prison sentences. The Cold War of the 1980s, if centrally defined by superpower tensions, was also an era of unprecedented anti- nuclear protest. *** Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear, and the Cold War of the 1980s brings together scholarship from the United States and Europe to address responses to both the arms race of the 1980s and the ascent of nuclear energy as a second, controversial dimension of the nuclear age. Diverse in its topics and disciplinary approaches, the volume is varied as well in its core themes and ambitions. Most broadly, this volume contributes to the emerging historiography of the 1980s by focusing on an underresearched aspect of the decade.16
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The era’s nuclear tensions have been addressed by scholars mostly from the standpoint of security studies, focused on the geostrategic delibera- tions of political elites and at the level of state policy. Yet nuclear anxi- eties, as the essays document, were so pervasive that they profoundly shaped the era’s culture, its habits of mind, and its politics, far beyond the domain of policy. As during the “high Cold War” of the 1950s and early 1960s – and after an interregnum dominated by proxy conflicts between East and West in Vietnam and other “Third World” hotspots – the nuclear standoff between the Americans and the Soviets served in the 1980s as the alpha and omega of so much global politics.17 Renewed worries over an actual nuclear war, amplified by new scientific models spelling out the grisly consequences of nuclear conflict, made fear itself and a perpetual sense of crisis hallmarks of the era. This volume seeks to make palpable that elusive, ambient – yet essential – quality of the times.18 Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear also chronicles, following another major thread, the destiny of protest movements in the Western world after their assumed heyday in the 1960s. The 1980s are both commonly recorded and remembered as a period of social movement decline, domi- nated by the electoral ascent of the political right and the retreat of many on the left from activism. The administrations of Ronald Reagan in the United States, Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, and Helmut Kohl in the Federal Republic of Germany are thought to typify this right- ward turn in both domestic and foreign policy, with the latter defined by a newly resolute Western stand against Soviet communism. Ideologically tinged, much popular memory of the era credits President Reagan’s harsh stand toward the Soviets – and his aggressive embrace of a new arms race especially, which further damaged the Soviet economy – as key causes of the collapse of communism. Domestic political conflict, according to such portrayals, concerned mostly “cultural” issues such as reproductive rights and questions of diversity (in the United States at least), as well as debates over the size and scope of the welfare state, raging throughout the developed world. Another, more complex narrative exists, as this volume seeks to elucidate. The mobilization against nuclear arms and nuclear power in the 1980s are among the most robust social movements in human history, likely exceeding in its size international opposition to the Vietnam War or any other global cause.19 And though based in the political left, with organizational roots reaching back to early public responses to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Ban the Bomb efforts of the 1950sand60s, the movement cut substantially across ideological
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lines, uniting diverse actors in promoting a “culture of life” against nuclear threats. Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear seeks to capture the distinct qualities of antinuclear activism within the evolution of social movements. On one level, antinuclear campaigns were marked by the professionalization of its brand of activism. Expert advocates such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, lobbying organs such as SANE/Freeze, and countless think tanks and NGOs worldwide were drivers of debates over nuclear issues, wielding considerable influence on at least the articulation of policy options. As local governing bodies declared their jurisdictions “nuclear- free zones,” career politicians became antinuclear leaders as well. By the same token, the antinuclear movement was very much animated by grassroots activism. Opposition to nuclear energy in particular bred a new kind of “accidental activist,” motivated less by ideology than common-sense resistance to perceived threats to health, home, and family. Such efforts, moreover, might feature skepticism toward experts and science more generally, as well as a new mistrust of politicians thought to be in collusion with industry and dangerously out of touch with the public. In this sense, the nuclear anxiety of the late 1970s and 1980s further cast suspicion on establishment authority, whose credibility had already been damaged by the saga of the Vietnam War, in which so many government claims proved untrue, and by the corrosive malfeasance of the Watergate scandal. Significantly, women organizing as women were among the most spirited and influential antinuclear activists. Whether appealing to women’s maternal identities as guardians of the species and the planet, or to the presumed affinity of women for peace, they made gender a vital trope in antinuclear discourse and a basis for mobilization. Paradoxically, both feminism, versions of which posited women as more peaceful than men and averse to ego-driven militarism, and conventional views on femininity, which celebrated traditional motherhood as the great protector against the predations of out-of-touch elites, rallied to the antinuclear cause. Antinuclear activists in the United States and Europe, whether building on the tactics of the civil rights, anti–Vietnam War, or student movements of the 1960s, also practiced nonviolent, extralegal resistance on a massive – and historically underappreciated – scale. Opposition to the building of nuclear power plants in Seabrook, New Hampshire, and Diablo Canyon, California, produced among the largest civil disobedience campaigns in US history.20 In Wyhl, West Germany, tens of thousands of Germans occupied the proposed site of a nuclear power plant, preventing
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its construction. During the 1980s the same happened in the Bavarian town of Wackersdorf, the proposed site of a nuclear reprocessing plant, before the project was given up as politically unfeasible in 1989. With such tactics, antinuclear activists lent a radical edge to expanding under- standings of nonviolence as a comprehensive ethic that was politically and spiritually opposed to nuclear arms, nuclear power, and what they con- sidered a broader “culture of death.” In addition, such activism kept alive civil disobedience within the repertoire of civic action, for rediscovery and reinvigoration by subsequent movements like HIV/AIDS activism, the alter-globalization struggle of the late 1990s, and the campaign against fossil fuels in the present day. Documenting this aspect of antinuclear protest, Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear explores legacies of dissent within larger narratives of public engagement and civic action. Religious opposition to the arms race gave great moral weight to the antinuclear movement while enriching, especially in the “high-risk activism” of America’s Catholic left, traditions of prophetic moral witness. Recognizing the spiritual strain of antinuclear activism, the book speaks as well to efforts to define the political imperatives of faith and reimagine religion for the nuclear age. The era’s antinuclear dissent both presupposed and reacted against pronuclear sentiment, which experienced its own surge. Such sentiment coursed through the highest levels of establishment politics, most obviously in the administration and policies of Ronald Reagan. In the United States, a parallel network of think tanks promoted hawkish stances on nuclear issues, echoing a defense industry ever eager to develop and manufacture new armaments in response to new, perceived threats. Pro-nuclear feelings had a popular dimension as well. Indeed, much of the appeal of President Reagan stemmed from his rededication to the anti- Communist crusade and promise to restore, following the fiasco of the Vietnam War, American military prowess and “greatness” in the interna- tional arena. Above all, Reagan’s uncompromising stand toward the Soviets in a newly escalating arms race epitomized this resolve and cata- lyzed a resurgent Cold War patriotism.21 The essays in this volume understand pronuclear sentiment – whether at the level of policy or public feeling, elite or grassroots opinion, and whether directed against the military or the civil use of nuclear energy – to be the backdrop against which antinuclear politics existed. The pronuc- lear position is, in a sense, the story of Reagan’s policy footing and the ascent of the political right – topics thoroughly engaged in existing literature on the 1980s. The volume therefore addresses those narratives
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only indirectly, focusing mostly on the development of an antinuclear counterpolitics and culture. Another major theme of Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear is the very interpenetration during the 1980s of politics and culture with respect to nuclear issues. Its essays attest to the vital role of culture in communicat- ing and popularizing antinuclear messages, with bearing on transforma- tions in culture in the 1980s as a whole. Once again, the 1960s are an initial point of reference.22 Many of the artists rallying against nuclear weapons and energy, such as Crosby, Stills, and Nash, were long identified with the ’60s-era counterculture and known for taking up political causes. Punk rock, as the great rebel genre of 1970s and 1980s music (within broadly white culture), inveighed against the nuclear militarism of President Reagan and the larger Reagan-Thatcher juggernaut. Yet the 1980s also featured antinuclear-themed works from performers such as Sting, not conventionally thought of as “political” (and even less as creatures of the left). Commanding enormous pop audiences, they expressed themselves substantially through the new medium of the music video, conveyed through a new entertainment apparatus, MTV (Music Television). MTV itself became a major cultural institution of a kind that scarcely exists any longer in our current age of mp3 players, digital downloads, and the fragmentation of the cultural marketplace into innumerable niches. As a cultural commons with mass viewership, the network gave the political messages of its pop icons enormous reach and resonance. (The 1985 Live Aid benefit concert for famine relief in Africa, broadcast in full on MTV and England’s BBC, set an unsurpassed stan- dard of celebrity activism as cultural spectacle.)23 So, too, American net- work television, which had often censored even oblique expressions of opposition to the Vietnam War, embraced controversies over nuclear policy, both generating and shaping public debate. Political dissent, as this volume details, had clearly moved from the countercultural margins to the mass culture mainstream. Culture was vital to the antinuclear movement in a second sense, insofar as activists tried to build their communities of resistance as a far-reaching alternative to a mainstream culture thought largely to celebrate – whatever its strains of dissent – militarism and war. Peace encampments against nuclear weapons and the mass occupations of pro- posed sites of nuclear reactors were prime venues for elaborating the values, aesthetics, and existential demands of this oppositional culture. As investments in that culture grew, the movement experienced a sharp version of the tension – common among social movements – between the
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emphasis on prefigurative politics and personal transformation and the goal of building a maximally large base and elite support to effect actual policy change. This brings us to a related dimension of this volume: assessments of the impact of antinuclear activism on geopolitics, security policy, and the nuclear power industry.24 Such determinations engage persisting methodological issues in diverse disciplines – of great concern to activists as well – over how to measure the efficacy of political protest. For all the official handwringing and activist sound and fury over nuclear perils in the 1980s, it remains unclear what the consequences of antinuclear protest were. Did world leaders ultimately listen to the great swaths of their terrified populations and bend policy to the public will? Or did the narrow geopolitics of the Cold War, executed by rarified circles of world leaders only weakly accountable to their publics, drive policy? Rather than pro- posing definitive answers to these questions, the essays in this volume seek to pose the questions anew and consider highly mobilized public opinion and civic action as variables within complex sociopolitical processes.25 A final theme of this book, touched on by nearly all of its essays, is the quality and texture of nuclear worries in the 1980s. These ranged from fears of “accidental Armageddons” persisting from the first decades of the Cold War to intensifying anxiety stemming from the apparent belief of a new generation of leaders in “winnable wars.” The volume posits these as two poles within a continuum of fear. Such fear both reflected and addressed not just the geopolitical hazards of the moment, or even the constitutive perils of the nuclear age, but also humanity’s Janus-faced relationship to technology writ large. Fear over nuclear calamity is as old as the advent of nuclear arms, spiked by the Soviet acquisition of the bomb and the rapid development of the hydrogen bomb to replace its vastly weaker, atomic predecessor.26 For the two decades following the nuclear equilibrium reached around 1960 as a result of the experience of the Berlin and Cuban Missile Crises, the prevailing security doctrine between the superpowers was deterrence based on the morbid wages of mutually assured destruction (MAD). Given the suicidal irrationality of a nuclear war, any nuclear attack – even if ordered by political or military leaders – could be nothing that its perpetrator (unless a malevolent, rogue actor) ultimately wanted. The presumption of a mutually shared rationality placed nuclear war at the far margins of willful, political calculation. The postwar world was nonetheless haunted by the prospect of nuclear war, instigated by varieties of accidents. One possibility was a literal,
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technical accident, whether the unintentional delivery of nuclear ordi- nance via the malfunction of a nuclear armed airplane or submarine, or the errant launch of missiles from silos. But perhaps the greater likelihood – and the more richly imagined tragedy – was that breakdowns in communication systems could produce nuclear responses to ultimately phantom threats. The 1964 American film Fail Safe brilliantly depicted this scenario. In it, a minor technical-procedural glitch instructs a US bomber, believing the United States is facing attack, to strike the Soviet Union. Even after the error is identified, the strike protocols prove impermeable to the safety mechanisms built into their design and even the desperate attempts of the US president to call the attack off. The result is the sacrifice by the US president – portrayed in the film as a model of judiciousness and probity – of New York City for Moscow as the only way to prevent a wider war. Beyond its particular scenario, the film expressed the fear that a strategic-technological-military apparatus could escape the control of its master to assert, in effect, a will of its own. Such fear has deep roots in modern consciousness, running from Goethe’s 1797 tale of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” through the Frankfurt School’s dystopian images of instrumental rationality run amok. Nuclear weapons made the stakes of control infinitely high. A variant of nuclear fear recognized that geopolitical conflict could quickly escalate into brinksmanship culminating in a nuclear war. In this script, nuclear war results from political decisions, and thus is not, prima facie, accidental. Nonetheless, such a war might emerge from a rapidly intensifying conflict that, ceding to the rules of a geostrategic game of move and countermove, drives its antagonists down increasingly narrow decision pathways, as if inexorably, they wind up where neither had wished to go. This was, more or less, the doomsday momentum of the Cuban Missile Crisis, halted only when the Soviets blinked. Paradoxically, in the early decades of the Cold War, nuclear war was at once rationally prohibited by the ironclad logic of mutual deterrence and MAD; made possible by potential system failures; and endorsed by a politics of brinksmanship, whose efficacy requires that at least one side believes the threat of its adversary is credible. All the while, America’s civil defense apparatus promoted the idea – believable to some, ludicrous to others – that even a thermonuclear war is survivable if one takes proper refuge at a public fallout shelter, in a private bomb shelter, or under a school desk as instructed in the notorious “duck and cover” exercises of the 1950s.
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A final paradigm of nuclear fear imagined that the power to execute a nuclear strike might be seized by abject madmen, impervious to rational restraints. This was the nightmare depicted – in tones both macabre and absurd – in Stanley Kubrick’s iconic, 1964 film Dr. Strangelove. Viewed soberly, the film identifies through its freakish characters the American ideologies, impulses, and temperaments that exacerbate nuclear peril: zeal- ous anti-Communism tinged with paranoia; a cowboy super-patriotism tinged with nihilism; and a ghoulish fascination with the science of destruc- tion. (Recall that Senator Barry Goldwater lost the presidential election in 1964 in part because he was perceived by many voters as an extremist who could not be trusted with a nuclear arsenal.27) But more deeply, the film suggests that the entire arms race and broader standoff between the superpowers are intrinsically insane, even if political and military leaders – unlike the caricatures in the film – are nominally “reasonable.” No degree of retail sanity, the satire implies, can ultimately disguise the wholesale madness at its core. The overarching fear, as the sum of all particular worries, was that the entire system was so prone to accidents – both narrowly and broadly defined – that its continued existence made nuclear war increasingly likely or even inevitable. Put another way, the vagaries of chance, when locked in a certain structure of conflict, fed a fatalistic sense of Armageddon as destiny. Fear of accidental Armageddon, as many of the volume’s essays docu- ment, persisted and even intensified in the 1980s. The film War Games (1982) updated Fail Safe for the computer age. It imagines the more perfect automation of war through computer programs designed to limit the exercise of human discretion and, hence, human error. But the system is also therefore resistant to efforts to halt or reverse computerized com- mands to launch nuclear strikes. Worse still, as a hacker discovers, the computer cannot adequately distinguish simulated war from the real thing. Only quick thinking and technical skill prevent a war game from becoming Armageddon. The film’s grand metaphor is that humanity – or at least its obtuse leaders – is playing perilous games with lethal toys it cannot control. That sentiment was echoed in other media, by diverse voices. It also drove opposition to nuclear power, conceived as a second great site of a potential, catastrophic mishap. In a more political register, antinuclear activists feared that President Reagan’s often-bellicose rhetoric and reinvigorated militarist ethos might themselves precipitate crises with the potential to escalate into a nuclear exchange.28 Reagan’s harshest critics worried that he, no matter his “aw
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shucks” charm, was deep down a Strangelovian figure with a reckless appetite for war. The greatest catalyst for the era’s antinuclear protest was, however, the emerging doctrine of winnable war apparently underwriting both the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons and efforts to develop missile defense systems. With this doctrine, nuclear Armageddon potentially shifted from cruel destiny to clear-eyed choice. The story of antinuclear dissent in the 1980s presented in this volume describes the diverse efforts – ranging from the push for a nuclear arms freeze, to advocacy for superpower adoption of no first-strike policies, to calls for the outright abolition of nuclear weapons – to meet both old and new constellations of danger and fear. **** The first section of Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear focuses on new percep- tions of the nuclear threat and how they shaped political, moral, and scientific discourse. Wilfried Mausbach traces the history of the idea of “nuclear winter,” first introduced in 1983 by the American scientist Carl Sagan, best known as the impresario of the 1980 TV series Cosmos. Holding that nuclear explosions could trigger catastrophic climate change threatening the human race with extinction and planet Earth with ecolo- gical ruin, the theory caused great alarm among the public, while attract- ing the attention of policymakers. Though the science remained disputed, “nuclear winter” framed the nuclear threat in newly apocalyptic terms, helping to fuse issues of arms control with ecological concern, and the peace movement with environmental activism. Natasha Zaretsky, in a similar vein, examines how the reactor melt- down at Three Mile Island in 1979 was constructed in thought largely as a hazard to public health, and reproductive biology especially. Cast in this way, it incited local activism cutting across ideological lines to include both antinuclear advocates and elements within the Christian “right to life” movement. Together they promoted a “culture of life” deeply critical of unchecked technology, the “experts” promoting it, and the government officials evidently failing in their charge to protect the public. Finally, Eckart Conze analyzes how in West Germany in the 1980s the National Socialist past and the Second World War were invoked on all sides to frame the stakes of the nuclear threat, especially with the deployment of the Pershing II missiles. Warning of a “nuclear Holocaust” and “Euroshima,” peace and environmental activists – in a remarkable shift to a victim-centered discourse – declared Germany an “occupied country”
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at the mercy of US policy. Proponents of the missiles, in turn, accused the peace movement of a moral rigidity reminiscent of the Nazis and even linked disarmament with the “appeasement” policy of the 1930s. Valid or not, such constructions conveyed the intensity of German concern over nuclear perils. The brave new world of unprecedented nuclear threats was intimately bound up with interpretations of the German past and the complex wages of good and evil. The volume’s second section places culture at the center of the anti- nuclear movement, stressing the reach of nuclear anxieties and the role of artists and entertainers in disseminating them. As William Knoblauch observes, the 1980s saw a “transnational renaissance of atomic pop” in which the United Kingdom played a leading part. Pan-European fears over Euromissiles, as well as the memory of German bombings during both world wars spiked British concern, with major groups recording hit songs criticizing the arms race. A second, substantially global “British invasion” promoted a gospel of peace, both countering the ostensible warmongering of its US ally and protector and declaring a European independence from a hegemonic, American belligerence. Nuclear anxieties likewise permeated West German music, whose artists decried the apparent recklessness with which politicians jeopar- dized world peace, and German security especially. Some German artists deepened their political involvement, performing at events hosted by the nascent Green Party as it campaigned in the 1983 national elections. Hiring a seasoned concert promoter to bolster antinuclear performances, the Greens fused politics and culture in novel ways, establishing a firm base in the peace and antinuclear movements. Distancing themselves from traditional parties, while also mobilizing both undecided voters and those normally drawn to the Social Democrats, the Greens secured enough votes to at last enter Parliament. Culture, in sum, was integral to the ascent of a political party that soon took the global lead in antinuclear dissent. Writers both in East and West Germany, as Thomas Goldstein docu- ments, were also drawn into nuclear debates, revealing both the reach of – and limits to – state power. The East German Communist Party (SED) and the East German Writers Union teamed up to protest the NATO Double- Track Decision as part of a broader pro-Soviet peace campaign. Writers backed by the party published antiwar literature in international venues, while reaching out to like-minded writers in the Federal Republic. Yet instead of transcending the divisions inside the East German Writers Union, these officially orchestrated peace efforts provided a platform for criticism of the East German government, which promoted peace abroad
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while curtailing basic freedoms at home. In this way, antinuclear senti- ment contributed to domestic political dissent. The book’s third section explores the dynamic between local and transnational activism, starting with an account of how farmers, teachers, housewives, doctors, and others battled against a proposed nuclear power plant in the southwest German town of Wyhl in 1975. As Stephen Milder shows, this highly local movement soon became an object of national attention, drawing thousands of activists to block the plant by occupying its prospective site. The Wyhl protests helped birth the German antinuc- lear movement and provided grist for 1960s-era German radicals, while contributing to the emergence of the Green Party. The events in Wyhl inspired as well activists in the United States, whose antinuclear campaigns nonetheless failed to achieve similar success. In the 1980s antinuclear efforts against toxins in such places as Love Canal, as Michael Foley elaborates, benefited from a rising ecological awareness spurred by recent environmental disasters. Yet the mere threat of an accident at a nuclear site – as opposed to an actual hazard, such as the dumping of toxic waste – made it hard for antinuclear activists to attract sufficient support to scuttle the erection of power plants. Nuclear anxi- eties, as Foley reminds us, remained somewhat abstract, creating special challenges for political mobilization. Opposition to nuclear weaponry also drove the movement for nuclear-free zones (NFZs). Tracing declarations of NFZs from the Pacific to Europe and North America, Susanne Schregel examines how activists addressed geopolitical issues at the level of local neighborhoods. NFZs, moreover, helped to erode faith in the reigning doctrine of nuclear deterrence, which had failed, in minds of NFZ proponents, to ensure anyone’s safety. NFZs represented the collective rejection of the arms race and the coercive civil-defense agenda accompanying it, in favor of local decisions thought to promote the core values of life. If small in number and politically marginal, NFZs represented popular breaks with the ethos of the Cold War that privileged national security over species survival. Deterrence was questioned as well by European Nuclear Disarmament (END), one of the most influential groups within the Western European peace movement. As Patrick Burke documents, END’sgoalofbuildinga“transcontinental movement” united activists across Western Europe and served as a basis for reaching out to peace and dissident groups behind the Iron Curtain. (The Dutch Interchurch Peace Council, as Sebastian Kalden illustrates, also played the role of
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transnational facilitator, organizing religious opposition to nuclear weapons throughout Western Europe.) Though controversial among Western peace organizations – many of whom favored working with state representatives – such outreach helped form a vision of a “detente from below” that proved influential during the revolutions of 1989 and beyond. Antinuclear activism thus had far-reaching, if sometimes unintended, consequences. The volume’s final section explores both how nuclear anxieties chal- lenged the basic tenets of domestic and foreign policy during the 1980s and the impact of the peace movement on geopolitics. Lawrence Wittner, a prominent antinuclear activist and scholar of the age under considera- tion, makes the case for the movement’s strong influence. In his view, public protest not only thwarted the creation of the so-called neutron bomb (which would waste human life, while leaving physical infrastruc- ture in tact) but was also responsible for the introduction of the disarma- ment track in the NATO Double-Track Decision. Most dramatically, Wittner claims as partial accomplishments of the movement President Reagan’s remarkable shift on nuclear issues (including his 1984 call for the elimination of all nuclear weapons) and the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev’s “New Thinking,” paving the way for the end of the Cold War. Making more modest claims, Tim Geiger and Jan Hansen credit the West German movement with softening the position of Helmut Schmidt on Euromissiles and eventually forcing the Social Democrats to rethink their approach to nuclear issues. Katrin Rückert, on the other hand, illustrates how the NATO Double- Track Decision did not spark any comparable public debate in France before 1983, where antinuclear activism remained of marginal signifi- cance. The French press, the general public, as well as the Socialist President François Mitterrand and his party (once in power) were largely supportive of NATO’s course of nuclear deterrence, primarily consider- ing, as Rückert points out, the stationing of missiles and the rise of nuclear pacifism a “German matter.” Looking beyond the United States, Enrico Böhm illustrates how the emergence of G7 summitry in the second half of the 1970s coincided with the renewal of nuclear tensions in international relations and how the issue of nuclear policy gradually complemented the economic dimension of the summits. Challenged by both the Soviet Union and the public in the West, govern- ment leaders used these meetings to demonstrate unity and trust in their security strategies, which were nonetheless drawing increasing public scrutiny and skepticism.
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Rigorously researched and passionately argued, the essays in this volume thus aim to chart a new course for understanding the importance of controversies over nuclear technologies to the condition of humanity and the planet we share.
Notes
1. Jim Dunnigan, “Fulda Gap,” SPI (Simulations Publications, Inc.), 1977. 2. Although the “nuclear crisis” that emerged as a result of the Soviet deployment of SS-20 missiles aimed against Western Europe and the NATO Double-Track Decision of 1979 was one of the key events of the Cold War – and has recently even been labeled the “last battle of the Cold War”–its academic treatment still remains in its infancy. This is partially due to the fact that the history of the late 1970s and 1980s in general is only slowly beginning to enter historiographical discourse after the possibility of empirically grounded research. Existing studies on the NATO Double-Track Decision and its repercussions are, with the excep- tion of Jeffrey Herf’s study, largely situated in the fields of political science and international relations and include Karla Hannemann, “Der Doppelbeschluß der Nato. Genese, Motive und Determinanten einer umstrittenen bündnispolitischen Entscheidung,” Ph.D. diss., University of Munich, 1987; Dieter Arndt, Zwischen Alarmismus und Argumentation: Die sicherheitspolitische Öffentlichkeitsarbeit der Bundesregierungen zur innenpolitischen Durchsetzung des NATO- Doppelbeschlusses (Munich, 1988); Thomas Risse-Kappen, Null-Lösung. Entscheidungsprozesse zu den Mittelstreckenraketen 1970–1987 (Frankfurt, 1988); Herbert Dittgen, Deutsch-amerikanische Sicherheitsbeziehungen in der Ära Helmut Schmidt. Vorgeschichte und Folgen des NATO-Doppelbeschlusses (Munich, 1991); Jeffrey Herf, War by Other Means: Soviet Power, West German Resistance, and the Battle of the Euromissiles (New York, 1991); Anton Notz, Die SPD und der NATO-Doppelbeschluß. Abkehr von einer Sicherheitspolitik der Vernunft (Baden-Baden, 1991); Stephan Layritz, Der NATO-Doppelbeschluß. Westliche Sicherheitspolitik im Spannungsfeld von Innen-, Bündnis- und Außenpolitik (Frankfurt, 1992); Tim Matthias Weber, Zwischen Nachrüstung und Abrüstung. Die Nuklearpolitik der Christlich Demokratischen Union Deutschlands zwischen 1977 und 1989 (Baden-Baden, 1994); Manfred Becht, SPD, Ost-West-Konflikt und europäische Sicherheit. Sozialdemokraten und sicherheitspolitische Zusammenarbeit in Westeuropa (Aachen, 1997); Helga Haftendrn, Deutsche Außenpolitik zwischen Selbstbehauptung und Selbstbeschränkung (Stuttgart, 2001); Eckart Conze, “Modernitätsskepsis und die Utopie der Sicherheit. NATO-Nachrüstung und Friedensbewegung in der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik,” Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 7, no. 2 (2010), www.zeithistor ische-forschungen.de/16126041-Conze-2-2010. See most recently and surveying
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the existing literature: Leopoldo Nuti, ed., The Crisis of Détente in Europe. From Helsinki to Gorbachev, 1975–1985 (London/New York, 2009); Philipp Gassert, Tim Geiger, and Hermann Wentker, eds., Zweiter Kalter Krieg und Friedensbewegung. Der NATO-Doppelbeschluss in deutsch- deutscher und internationaler Perspektive (Munich, 2011); Hanno Balz and Jan-Henrik Friedrichs, “All we ever wanted ... ” Eine Kulturgeschichte europäischer Protestbewegungen der 1980er Jahre (Bonn, 2012); Christoph Becker-Schaum, et al., eds., Die Nuklearkrise: Der NATO- Doppelbeschluss und die Friedensbewegung der 1980er Jahre (Paderborn, 2012), to be published in English: The Nuclear Crisis: The Arms Race, Cold War Anxiety, and the German Peace Movement of the 1980s (New York, forthcoming 2016); Dmitry Dima Adamsky, “The 1983 Nuclear Crisis – Lessons for Deterrence Theory and Practice,” Journal of Strategic Studies 36, no. 1 (2013), 4–41; Leopoldo Nuti et al., eds., The Euro Missile Crisis and the End of the Cold War (Redwood City, Calif., 2015). See also the joint research initiative “The Nuclear Crisis: Cold War Cultures and the Politics of Peace and Security, 1975–1990” at www.nuclearcrisis.org. This historiographical situa- tion is similarly challenging in other countries; see, for example, Pierre Lellouche, “France and the Euromissiles. The Limits of Immunity,” Foreign Affairs 62 (1983/84), 318–34; Wolfgang Hofkirchner, “Notwendig, überflüssig oder gefährlich? Die militärische Reaktion der Sowjetunion auf die NATO- ‘Nachrüstung,’” Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 29 (1984), 396–409; J.M. Bik, “Die Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik der Niederlande nach dem NATO-Doppelbeschluß,” Europa-Archiv 41 (1986), 303–10; Francoise Sirjacques-Manfrass, Die französische Sicherheitspolitik nach der doppelten Null-Lösung (Frankfurt, 1988); Katrin Rücker, “Les gauches française et allemande dans la ‘guerre froide’ des euromissiles et la course au pacifisme. Entre malentendus et ‘Sonderweg,’” Revue d’histoire diplomatique 117 (2003): 35–62; Ruud van Dijk, “‘A Mass Psychosis’: The Netherlands and NATO’s Dual-Track Decision, 1978–1979,” Cold War History 12, no. 3 (2012), 381–405. 3. For an analysis of this Soviet propaganda and counterintelligence strategy and the connections and attitudes of peace groups toward Moscow, see Jürgen Maruhn and Manfred Wilke, eds., Die verführte Friedensbewegung. Der Einfluss des Ostens auf die Nachrüstungsdebatte (Munich, 2002); Udo Baron, Kalter Krieg und heisser Frieden. Der Einfluss der SED und ihrer westdeutschen Verbündeten auf die Partei “Die Grünen” (Münster, 2003); Michael Ploetz and Hans-Peter Müller, Ferngelenkte Friedensbewegung? DDR und UdSSR im Kampf gegen den NATO-Doppelbeschluß (Münster, 2004). See most recently Gerhard Wettig, “The Last Soviet Offensive in the Cold War: Emergence and Development of the Campaign against NATO Euromissiles, 1979–1983,” Cold War History 9, no. 1 (2009), 79–110; Holger Nehring and Benjamin Ziemann, “Do All Paths Lead to Moscow? The NATO Dual-Track
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Decision and the Peace Movement – A Critique,” Cold War History 12, no. 1 (2012): 1–24. 4. Fred Halliday, The Making of the Second Cold War (London, 1983). On the winnable war maxim, see Colin S. Gray and Keith Payne, “Victory Is Possible,” Foreign Policy (summer 1980): 14–27. 5. Similar to the diplomatic and strategic dimension of the NATO Double-Track Decision, historical research on the peace and protest cultures of the 1980s is still at its very beginning. Significant studies and research reviews in this area include Herbert Kitschelt, “Political Opportunity Structures and Political Protest: Anti-Nuclear Movements in Four Democracies,” British Journal of Political Science 16 (1986): 57–85; Thomas Rochon, Mobilizing for Peace: The Antinuclear Movements in Western Europe (Princeton, 1988); Alice Cooper, Paradoxes of Peace. German Peace Movements since 1945 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996); Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Ithaca, NY, 1999); Steve Breyman, Why Movements Matter: The West German Peace Movement and US Arms Control Policy (Albany, NY, 2001); Carl Lankowski, “Soziale Bewegungen in den USA und in der Bundesrepublik: Die Friedensbewegung und die Umweltbewegung,” in Detlef Junker, ed., Die USA und Deutschland im Zeitalter des Kalten Krieges, vol. 2 (Stuttgart, 2001), 644–54; Jan Grosse Nobis, Frieden. Eine kurze Geschichte der bundesdeutschen Friedensbewegung (Münster, 2001); David Meyer and Sam Marullo, “Antiwar and Peace Movements,” David Snow, Sarah Soule, and Hanspeter Kriesi, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (Oxford, 2003), 641–65; Susanne Schregel, “Konjunktur der Angst. ‘Politik der Subjektivität’ und ‘neue Friedensbewegung’, 1979–1983,” in Bernd Greiner et al., eds., Angst im Kalten Krieg (Hamburg, 2009), 495–520; Tim Warneke, “Aktionsformen und Politikverständnis der Friedensbewegung. Radikaler Humanismus und die Pathosformel des Menschlichen,” in Sven Reichardt et al., eds., Das alter- native Milieu: Antibürgerlicher Lebensstil und linke Politik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und Europa, 1968–1983 (Göttingen, 2010), 445–72; Susanne Schregel, Der Atomkrieg vor der Wohnungstür: Eine Politikgeschichte der neuen Friedensbewegung in der Bundesrepublik, 1970–1985 (Frankfurt, 2011); Silke Mende, Nicht rechts, nicht links, sondern vorn: Eine Geschichte der Gründungsgrünen (Munich, 2011); Becker-Schaum et al., Die Nuklearkrise (2012). See also the following recent dissertations soon to be published as books: Jan Ole Wiechmann, “‘Umkehr zum Leben.’ Konzepte von Sicherheit in der christlichen Friedensbewegung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1977–1984,” Ph.D. diss., University of Marburg, 2014; Sebastian Kalden, “Westeuropa und das Kreuz mit der Raketenfrage. Transnationalisierung und Transnationalität der christlichen Friedensbewegung in der Bundesrepublik, Großbritannien und den
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Niederlanden 1979–1985,” Ph.D. diss., University of Marburg, 2015); Jan Hansen, Abschied vom Kalten Krieg? Die Sozialdemokraten und der Nachrüstungsstreit (1977–1987) (2016); Stephen Milder, Greening Democracy: The Antinuclear Movement and Political Environmentalism in Western Europe, 1968–1983 (forthcoming). For recent local studies, see Nathalie Andries and Bernd Holtwick, Zerreissprobe Frieden: Baden- Württemberg und der NATO-Doppelbeschluss -Katalog zur Sonderausstellung im Haus der Geschichte Baden-Württemberg (Karlsruhe, 2004); Thomas Klein, “Frieden und Gerechtigkeit!” Die Politisierung der Unabhängigen Friedensbewegung in Ost-Berlin während der 80er Jahre (Cologne, 2007). 6. ABC News Nightline, “The Day After: Perils of Nuclear War” (MPI Home Video, CAT# MP8037V; originally broadcast as “Viewpoint,” November 20, 1983), available online at The Museum of Classic Chicago Television: www .fuzzymemories.tv/index.php?c=1823&m=xxdayafterxx (accessed April 2, 2012). ABC Community Relations and the nonprofit Cultural Information Service even produced a guide explaining the context of the movie with suggested readings. Cultural Information Service, The Day After: A Viewer’s Guide (New York, 1983). On the quality and transnational impact of the movie, see also the contemporary analysis by Susan Boyd- Bowman, “‘The Day After’: Representations of the Nuclear Holocaust,” Screen (July–October 1984): 71–97. 7. Quoted after Ronald Reagan, The Reagan Diaries, ed. Douglas Brinkley (New York, 2007), 186. On the 1983 Able Archer incident, see Vojtech Mastny, “‘Able Archer’. An der Schwelle zum Atomkrieg?” in Bernd Greiner et al., eds., Krisen im Kalten Krieg (Hamburg, 2008), 505–22; Arnav Manchanda, “When Truth Is Stranger than Fiction: The Able Archer Incident,” Cold War History 9, no. 1 (2009), 111–33; Len Scott, “Intelligence and the Risk of Nuclear War: Able Archer-83 Revisited,” Intelligence and National Security 26, no. 6 (2011), 759–77; Benjamin B. Fischer, “Anglo-American Intelligence and the Soviet War Scare: The Untold Story,” Intelligence and National Security 27, no. 1 (2012): 75–92. 8. Ronald Reagan, Address to the Nation on Defense and National Security, March 23, 1983. 9. Patricia Wiedenhöft, TOBIS Filmkunst an Petra Kelly, Nov. 4, 1983, Petra Kelly Papers, File 2070, AGG. 10. Ulrich Greiner, “Apocalypse Now,” Die Zeit, Dec. 2, 1983, p. 1. 11. The song intoned, “The ice age is coming, the sun is zooming in / Engines stop running and the wheat is growing thin / A nuclear error, but I have enough fear / London is drowning – and I live by the river.” 12. See also UB 40’s “The Earth Dies Screaming” (1981). 13. “No Nukes,” Elekra/Asylum Records, 1979.
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14. Udo Oskar Rabsch, Julius oder Der Schwarz Sommer (Tübingen, 1983). 15. On the connections of the Helsinki movement to the peace and antinuclear war movements in Europe, see Patrick Burke, “European Nuclear Disarmament. A Study of Transnational Social Movement Strategy,” Ph.D. diss., University of Westminster, 2005; Sarah Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (Cambridge, England, 2011); Kacper Szulecki, “Hijacked Ideas: Human Rights, Peace and Environmentalism in Czechoslovak and Polish Dissident Discourses,” East European Politics and Societies 25, no. 2 (May 2011), 272–95. 16. For the emerging historiography on the 1980s, see Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton, NJ, 2005); Dean Baker, The United States Since 1980 (New York, 2007); Michael Schaller, Right Turn: American Life in the Reagan-Bush Era, 1980–1992 (New York, 2007); Robert Collins, Transforming America: Politics and Culture during the Reagan Years (New York, 2007); Graham Thompson, American Culture in the 1980s (Edinburgh, 2007); Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (New York, 2008); Gil Troy and Vincent J. Cannato, eds., Living in the Eighties (New York, 2009); Bradford Martin, The Other Eighties: A Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan (New York, 2011); Kimberly R. Moffitt and Duncan A. Campbell, eds., The 1980s: A Critical and Transitional Decade (Lanham, MD, 2011); M. J. Heale, Contemporary America. Power, Dependency, and Globalization since 1980 (Malden, MA, 2011); Daniel Rodgers, The Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA, 2011); Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton, NJ, 2012); Andreas Wirsching, Abschied vom Provisorium. Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1982–1990 (Munich, 2006); Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, Special Issue “Wandel des Politischen: Die Bundesrepublik während der 1980er Jahre,” 52 (2012); Kiran Klaus Patel and Kenneth Weisbrode, eds., European Integration and the Atlantic Community in the 1980s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Doug Rossinow, The Reagan Era: A History of the 1980s (New York, 2015); Andrew L. Johns, ed., A Companion to Ronald Reagan (Hoboken, NJ, 2015). 17. On the relative inattention to nuclear issues during the height of anti–Vietnam War protest, see Lawrence Wittner, “The Nuclear Threat Ignored: How and Why the Campaign against the Bomb Disintegrated in the Late 1960s,” in Carole Fink et al., eds., 1968: The World Transformed (New York, 1998), 439–60. 18. For historiographical applications of the concepts of security and fear, see Eckart Conze, “Sicherheit als Kultur. Überlegungen zu einer ‘modernen Politikgeschichte’ der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 53 (2005): 357–81; Nina Tannenbaum, “Stigmatizing the
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Bomb: Origins of the Nuclear Taboo,” International Security 29 (2005): 5–49; Holger Nehring, “Diverging Conceptions of Security. NATO, Nuclear Weapons and Social Protest,” in Andreas Wenger, Christian Nünlist, and Anna Locher, eds., Transforming NATO in the Cold War. Challenges Beyond Deterrence in the 1960s (London, 2007), 131–47; Eckart Conze, Die Suche nach Sicherheit: eine Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland von 1949 bis in die Gegenwart (Munich, 2009); Bernd Greiner, ed., Angst im Kalten Krieg (Hamburg, 2009); Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (Cambridge, MA, 2009); Martin Klimke, Reinhild Kreis, and Christian Ostermann, eds., “Trust, but Verify”: The Politics of Uncertainty and the Transformation of the Cold War Order, 1969–1991 (Redwood City, CA, 2016). 19. The works by historian Lawrence Wittner on the global dimension of the movement against nuclear disarmament in the twentieth century have been groundbreaking in this regard: Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1979 to the Present, vol. 3 of The Struggle against the Bomb (Stanford, CA, 2003). Other volumes in the series (all by Wittner and published in Stanford, CA) are One World or None: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement through 1953 (vol. 1, 1993) and Resisting the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement 1954–1970 (vol. 2, 1997). 20. On US-based activism, see the contributions by Natasha Zaretsky and Mike Foley in this volume and most recently Kyle Harvey, American Anti-Nuclear Activism, 1975–1990: The Challenge of Peace (New York, 2014). 21. See most recently Michael V. Paulauskas, “Reagan, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War, 1981–1985,” in Johns, Companion to Ronald Reagan, 276–94. 22.Forthe“cultural turn” with regard to 1960s/70sprotestmovements,see Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth, “Maos Rote Garden? ‘1968’ zwischen kulturrevolutionärem Anspruch und subversiver Praxis,” in Klimke and Scharloth, eds., 1968.EinHandbuchzurKultur-undMediengeschichte (Stuttgart, 2007), 1–7;KlimkeandScharloth,“1968 in Europe: An Introduction,” in Klimke and Scharloth, eds., 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1965–77 (New York/London, 2008), 1–9;SvenReichardt and Detlef Siegfried, eds., Das Alternative Milieu: Antibürgerlicher Lebensstil und linke Politik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und Europa 1968–1983 (Göttingen, 2010). Following this trend for the 1970sinCzechoslovakia,see most recently Jonathan Bolton, Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77,ThePlastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism (Cambridge, MA, 2012). 23. See the contributions by William Knoblauch to this volume as well as Steve Greenberg, “Where Is Graceland? 1980s Pop Culture through Music,” in Troy/Cannato, Living in the Eighties, 152–66; Suzuko Morikawa, “Reading MTV: Proliferation of United States Culture in the Age of Globalization,” in
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Moffitt/Campbell, The 1980s: A Critical and Transitional Decade, 325–38; Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum, I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution (New York, 2011). 24. In recent years, various scholars have attempted to emancipate themselves from peace history/studies and explore new venues in what they perceive as an academic field that has become increasingly clouded by methodological pro- blems, value judgments, and exaggerated assessments of the impact of peace efforts on political decision-making. The most prominent of these projects is subsumed under the heading “Historical Peace Research,” a field whose proponents interpret peace movements as “important collective actors” that broke out of the military-strategic logic of the Cold War, thereby winning the “war of simulation” by reclaiming their own imagination rather than giving in to official, geopolitical doctrines. For a conceptual introduction to this approach, see Benjamin Ziemann, “Situating Peace Movements in the Political Culture of the Cold War,” and Ziemann, Peace Movements in Western Europe, Japan and the USA during the Cold War (Essen, 2008), 11–38. 25. See the contributions by Lawrence Wittner, Tim Geiger, Jan Hansen, Katrin Rücker, and Enrico Böhm to this volume, as well as Wittner, Toward Nuclear Abolition and Evangelista, Unarmed Forces. With regard to Reagan, see also Paul Vorbeck Lettow, Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (New York, 2005). 26. See, for example, Spencer Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, MA, 1988); Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Durham, NC, 1994); Joseph Cirincione, Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons (New York, 2008). 27. Robert Mann, Daisy Petals and Mushroom Clouds: LBJ, Barry Goldwater, and the Ad That Changed American Politics (Baton Rouge, LA, 2011). 28. For such criticism on the part of antinuclear/nuclear freeze activists, see Wilfried Mausbach, Natasha Zaretsky, Stephen Milder, Martin Klimke, Laura Stapane, and Patrick Burke in this volume.
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Defining Threat Nuclear Dangers and the Moral Imagination
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Nuclear Winter Prophecies of Doom and Images of Desolation during the Second Cold War
Wilfried Mausbach
On Halloween day in 1983, Cornell astronomer and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carl Sagan sprang an unsettling surprise on millions of American families. Sagan had been an advisor to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for many years and had become a television celebrity in the early 1980s when his series Cosmos conveyed the wonders of the universe to millions of viewers. Now, with Cold War tensions heading for a climax because of the imminent deploy- ment of new American missiles in Europe, he sounded an eerie alarm in the widely distributed newspaper supplement Parade magazine: the climatic and biological consequences of a superpower nuclear exchange, he averred, held “a real possibility of the extinction of the human species.”1 Sagan had arrived at this conclusion as part of a group of scientists that also included Richard Turco of R&D Associates, a defense contractor in Marina del Rey, California, as well as Owen Brian Toon, Thomas Ackerman, and James Pollack, all with NASA’s Ames Research Center, some 350 miles to the north at Moffett Field near Palo Alto. Referred to by the initials of their last names as TTAPS, the team had used models previously developed to study the effects of volcanic eruptions to calculate the consequences that large amounts of dust, smoke, and soot catapulted into the atmosphere by nuclear explo- sions would have on the world’s climate. They found that exchanges of several thousand megatons could result in dust and smoke clouds that would encircle the globe within one to two weeks, practically blotting out the sun and leading to – as they wrote in an article published in Science magazine a few weeks after Sagan’s clarion call –“significant surface darkening over many weeks, subfreezing land temperatures persisting
27
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for up to several months, large perturbations in global circulation pat- terns, and dramatic changes in local weather and precipitation rates – a harsh ‘nuclear winter’ in any season.”2 The notion of a nuclear winter caught on immediately. It assumed – as two close observers have written –“all the trappings of a scientific bandwagon rolling at full speed.”3 Hundreds of scientific papers and dozens of conferences devoted themselves to the subject. Several congres- sional hearings probed into the idea, policymakers and pundits argued about its relevance, and the media followed the twists and turns of both scientific discussions and politico-strategic debates. According to a later article in the New York Times, the nuclear winter thesis “spread rapidly through the culture, from children’s books to declarations by religious leaders” and “transformed the public debate over nuclear policy.”4 Two major questions dominated the hubbub: How scientifically sound was the thesis? And what strategic conclusions, if any, needed to be drawn from it? In what follows, I will outline these debates and – more importantly – try to put the notion of nuclear winter in a somewhat broader perspective. I will argue that it is an offspring not only of the nuclear age but also – and perhaps even more so – of the age of envir- onmentalism. In fact, nuclear winter is the one and only novel concept that separates the struggle against nuclear weapons in the 1980s from its antecedents in the 1950s. It presupposes an environmental awareness that simply did not exist three decades earlier, and probably could not have existed at that time. Its signature trait was a deeply felt concern not only for one’s own kin, nation, or even species but also for other plant and species as well and, ultimately, for Planet Earth itself. In this respect, nuclear winter was part and parcel of a larger discourse of doom and desolation signifying the 1970s and early 1980s.
The Nuclear Winter Scenario Although Carl Sagan made sure that nuclear winter would burst upon the scene with a bang in the fall of 1983, the scientific groundwork for the thesis had been in the making for more than a decade. Its building blocks were delivered at different times and by a great many disciplines, including astrophysics, biophysics and biochemistry, geophysics, particle microphy- sics, atmospheric chemistry, as well as climatology and meteorology. Indeed, Sagan himself had provided an early cornerstone by analyzing temperature changes on Mars after the US spacecraft Mariner 9 had reached the planet in late 1971 and had found it enveloped in a dust
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storm. The data had shown that Mars’s surface, partially shielded from sunlight, had become much chillier than usual. Sagan and his collabora- tors, who already included Brian Toon and James Pollack from what would become the TTAPS team, turned their sights on whether a similar phenomenon was conceivable for Planet Earth.5 They took their cue from volcano studies, which by the mid-1970s began to substantiate the rela- tionship between volcanic eruptions and subsequent cold spells.6 In 1980, the dust watchers received a boost to their efforts from a different direc- tion. A group of scientists from the University of California at Berkeley led by Walter Alvarez contended that an asteroid had smashed into the earth some sixty-five million years ago, lofting enough dust into the atmosphere to darken the skies for years on end, thus disrupting photosynthesis and bringing about, most notably, the extinction of the dinosaurs.7 It did not take very long for this interest in smoke and dust to reach those who were concerned with the consequences of nuclear weapons explosions. Astonishingly, three decades of the nuclear age had gone by without anyone paying much attention to the smoke and dust generated by such explosions. War planners and peaceniks alike had focused on the blast effect and, above all, on radiation. Only in the early 1980s did scattered reports commissioned by the Pentagon indicate that damage from fire might in fact be greater and more encompassing than that from blast or nuclear radiation.8 At about the same time, the effects of mass fires generated by nuclear war were sounding alarms in other areas of science, thanks to Paul Crutzen, a Dutchman and atmospheric chemist working at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, and John Birks, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The two had been approached by the editors of Ambio, a journal pub- lished by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, to contribute to a special issue on the aftermath of nuclear war. In their article, the chemists pointed out that a nuclear exchange would set fire not only to urban and industrial centers but also to vast forests and grasslands. And where there is fire, there is smoke. In this instance, as Crutzen and Birks explained, a thick smoke layer consisting of large quantities of dark particular matter would spread throughout the atmosphere for months, drastically reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the earth’s surface. In what they called “twilight at noon,” agricultural production would come to a halt, subjecting any survivors of nuclear war to certain famine.9 The TTAPS team basically bundled up all these threads, strengthening many filaments and stitching them together. Whereas Crutzen and Birks’s
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focus had been on wildfires, TTAPS was most concerned with black oily smoke from city fires, which would sponge up the sun’s rays most effec- tively. The group used the Cray supercomputer at NASA’s Ames Research Center to simulate about fifty different warfare and physics scenarios. Their computations showed that even a limited nuclear war involving only one hundred megatons would have catastrophic consequences if warheads were targeted exclusively on cities, with subfreezing land temperatures persisting for two months.10 Illustrating the nuclear winter thesis for a lay audience, Carl Sagan reminded his readers that a tempera- ture drop of no more than 12 to 15 degrees centigrade would eliminate agricultural production in the United States. Thus, vast numbers of survi- vors, if they did not freeze to death, would soon starve to death. Hundreds of millions of dead bodies would litter the landscape with no chance to be buried since the ground would be frozen to a depth of about a meter.11 Realizing the explosive nature of its conclusions, the TTAPS team strove hard to present a watertight case to the public. In late April 1983, they managed to assemble close to one hundred scientists at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a four-day conference to discuss their findings.12 Interestingly, the meeting was split into two parts. The first part was a discussion of the global atmospheric consequences of nuclear war as outlined in TTAPS’s research. The second part, however, was dominated not by physicists but by life scientists, who focused on long-term biological consequences. Six months later the nuclear winter scenario was presented to the public at a major conference in Washington, DC, with close to five hundred scien- tists, civilian and military officials, representatives of nongovernmental organizations, and religious leaders, as well as about 100 journalists bustling about at the Sheraton Hotel.13 In the December 1983 issue of Science magazine, the case was submitted to the scientific community.14 If anything, the biologists were even gloomier than their colleagues. They found it entirely possible – as Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Biological Sciences and Population Studies at Stanford University, explained at the Washington conference – that “the biological impacts of a war, apart from those resulting directly from a blast, fire, and prompt radiation, could result in the end of civilization in the Northern Hemisphere.”15 A nuclear war just prior to or during the growing season would wipe out practically all land plants in those latitudes. For those listeners unable to appreciate the full repercussions of this conclusion, Ehrlich did not hesi- tate to drive home the point: “Without the photosynthetic activities of plants, virtually all animals, including human beings, would cease to exist.
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All flesh is truly ‘grass.’”16 Vermin withstanding the extreme cold and feeding on cadavers would, of course, have a field day with untold numbers of unburied human and animal corpses. Rats, roaches, and flies could, because of their rapid population growth rates, become what Ehrlich called “the most prominent animals shortly after World War III.”17 He and his colleagues assumed that there would be some human survivors scattered throughout the Southern – and maybe even the Northern – Hemisphere. However, their social and physical environment would most likely not allow them to rebuild their population. Thus, as Ehrlich concluded, “We could not exclude the possibility of a full-scale nuclear war entraining the extinction of Homo sapiens.”18 Notification that the survival of the human species was hanging in the balance accounted for much of the excitement engendered by nuclear winter. To be sure, notions of catastrophe, the destruction of civilization, annihilation of all human life, or the coming of Armageddon had long been bound up with nuclear war. However, as Robert Jay Lifton observed at the 1983 annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Los Angeles, while the visual image of an overwhelming mushroom cloud had already evoked the vision of man’s extermination of his species by means of his own technology, it was the concept of nuclear winter that gave “concrete substance to that image.”19 Still, the idea could not remain a merely mental image. Nuclear winter shared with other depictions of the end of the world the aporia that no one would be around to report reality. As pointed out in the New Yorker, “NUCLEAR WAR ERUPTS – WORLD ENDS” is a headline that we’ll never see.” The magazine there- fore felt that the Washington conference should have prompted the news media to herald in “before-the-fact headlines” and to “treat the findings of the conference as though they had been extinction itself,” turning over entire front pages to its coverage, which, of course, had not happened.20 Jacques Derrida, drawing attention to the fact that the arms race itself had become increasingly dominated by an economy of speed, tagged the said aporia by employing the future perfect verb-tense when talking about the apocalypse: “At the beginning,” he said, “there will have been speed.”21 Jonathan Schell, who had covered much of the same ground as the Washington conference did in his 1982 bestseller The Fate of the Earth, reminded his readers that “we are forced in this one case to become historians of the future – to chronicle and commit to memory an event that we have never experienced and must never experience.”22 Equally tantalizing and inherently joined with the notion of the extinc- tion of humankind itself was the realization, graphically reinforced by
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nuclear winter, that he who did strike first would be second to die. As Carl Sagan warned in a lengthy piece for the policy journal Foreign Affairs, “We have, by slow and imperceptible steps, been constructing a Doomsday Machine. Until recently – and then, only by accident – no one even noticed.”23 The conceivability of such a device, designed to auto- matically destroy the world if deterrence failed, had first been raised by RAND Corporation strategist Herman Kahn in the early 1960s, and had been instantly immortalized in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The nuclear winter concept received additional resonance because it placed humanity firmly on the path of the dinosaurs. When Donald Kennedy, president of Stanford University, opened the Washington con- ference warning that “the greatest biological and physical disruptions of this planet in its last 65 million years” were in the offing, he was, of course, alluding to the famous K-T boundary at which dinosaurs had disappeared from the earth.24 The similarity of the scenarios cast a spell on publics and policymakers alike. Thus, when the US Senate’s Committee on Armed Services held hearings on the implications of the nuclear winter thesis, its chairman, Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), explained his motivation in calling the hearings as follows: “I do not see any new threat except the fact that there is that possibility of killing off a lot of people like the Nemesis theory killed off all the dinosaurs and I do not want to be one of those dinosaurs.”25 Perhaps inevitably, nuclear winter lost much of its sensational thrill when its identification with the idea of a doomsday machine precipitating the extinction of the human species waned after further research revealed that a less severe decline in temperatures would follow a nuclear exchange. Starley Thompson and Stephen Schneider, who had earlier been involved in the Washington conference, explained in a most influen- tial 1986 article that “[t]hese temperature changes more closely describe a nuclear ‘fall’ than a nuclear winter.” And they inferred that “the global apocalyptic conclusions of the initial nuclear winter hypothesis can now be relegated to a vanishingly low level of probability.”26 Other studies also chipped away at many of the original estimates. As much as members of the TTAPS team maintained that all this was nibbling at the margins and did not take anything away from the basic soundness of their case, one observer toward the end of 1986 aptly concluded, “Nuclear winter continues to melt.”27 By the end of the decade, the originators of the concept acknowledged that they had overestimated its severity. To be sure, biologists continued to point out that, as far as agriculture was
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concerned, there was hardly a difference between a nuclear winter and a nuclear fall as even a quite small reduction of temperatures during the growing season would result in an unprecedented disaster that could kill billions of people. Yet the press now allotted much more space to critics of the concept, who charged that “all the hype about a lot of freezing following a nuclear exchange is hyperbole” or even called the notion of nuclear winter a “blatant semantic aggression.”28 One of the more prolific and sharp-tongued critics riled that TTAPS’s research represented a “series of coin tosses” sold to the public “as a ‘sophisticated one- dimensional model’–a usage that is oxymoronic, unless applied to [slender British model] Twiggy.”29 More important, as scientists involved in the debate freely acknowledged, “[I]t was the extreme predictions of possible human extinction that originally gave the nuclear winter idea a special status, since it provided a compelling argument for the useless- ness of most of the world’s nuclear arsenals.”30 That special status was now gone. To be sure, nuclear winter was – initially at least – being taken quite seriously in the 1980s by both the Reagan administration and the larger national security community. The US government set up a program involving more than a dozen agencies to review the theory. This led the New York Times to speculate in a front page article that, if proven valid, “the threat of a ‘nuclear winter’ could force a dramatic overhaul of the nation’s nuclear arsenal and the military’splansandequipment for fighting a nuclear war.”31 Congress passed several bills and amend- ments asking the Pentagon for a comprehensive study of nuclear winter and its potential effects on defense strategy and doctrine.32 Defense experts wondered whether there should be a move to develop and deploy technologically advanced conventional weapons for strategic purposes or whether, at least, the targeting for nuclear war would have to be revised in order to avoid cities. Carl Sagan made no bones about his own policy prescriptions. He advocated slashing worldwide nuclear stockpiles by more than 90 percent to about two thousand warheads with an average yield of no more than one megaton so that “no concatenation of computer malfunction, carelessness, unauthor- ized acts, communications failure, miscalculation and madness in high office could unleash the nuclear winter.”33 Subsequently, he and his TTAPS colleague Richard Turco urged even deeper cuts to a few hun- dred warheads, which would still provide what they called “Minimum Sufficient Deterrence” (MSD) but would remain well below the thresh- old for a nuclear winter.34
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The vast majority of experts, however, saw no need for a radical turnabout. Joseph Nye, for example, wrote that “the scientific evidence about nuclear winter is too uncertain to serve as a base for precise policy conclusions about reduction of weapons.” Others were concerned that any fundamental reappraisal of existing strategies would undermine NATO. Most of all, however, many felt that the specter of nuclear winter actually reinforced the existing policy of deterrence that was designed to avert nuclear war in the first place.35 This was exactly the line taken by the Reagan administration. The comprehensive review of nuclear winter that Congress had requested from the Pentagon eventually came down to a mere seventeen typewritten pages expounding at length on the reasons why the administration’s policies decreased the chances of nuclear war, and thus the likelihood of nuclear winter. Indeed, the report touted Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), popularly referred to as “Star Wars,” as a congenial answer to nuclear winter since it would prevent the detonation of thousands of nuclear warheads and would thus have a greater mitigating effect on atmospheric consequences of nuclear war than arms control agreements. One of the congressional sponsors of the study fumed, “All the Pentagon has done is use this as a soapbox for defending ‘Star Wars.’”36 Not surprisingly, four years after TTAPS publicly launched the nuclear winter theory, there was little evidence that it had resulted in any specific changes in policy.37 In fact, even its impact on the massive peace movement that had sprung up in reaction to the demise of détente and the bellicose rhetoric that accompanied the Reagan administration’s plans to deploy new weapons systems in both the United States and Europe seems to have been ambig- uous. Although conservative critics asserted that the scenario had become “the new cause célèbre of nuclear freeze advocates”38 and even that the nuclear winter scare was “planned in early 1983 as a way of backing the political goal of a nuclear ‘freeze’ with the Soviet Union,”39 the reaction on the part of the peace movement was rather muted. One of the reasons might have been that neither a freeze on the testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons, around which the American movement rallied, nor a reversal of NATO’s decision to station Pershing II and cruise missiles in Europe, the chief target of European protesters, would have done anything to alleviate the threat of nuclear winter.40 Perhaps more important, to antiwar activists this might have simply looked like “cata- strophes piled on top of catastrophes.” As Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory sighed, “Now come the biologists to tell us again some- thing ordinary people have no trouble grasping, that nuclear warfare
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means the extinction of the human race.”41 As a mode of expression, moreover, the use of myriad numbers in describing everything from warheads to temperatures made the warnings of a nuclear winter resemble the talk of arms control experts much more closely than the usually emotive language of the antinuclear movement.42 And yet, there can hardly be any doubt that the nuclear winter scenario materially helped to change the discourse on nuclear weapons in the early 1980s. Not only did it reinforce the firm belief of antinuclear activists that nuclear war was unwinnable and unsurvivable, but it also most certainly paved the way for these convictions to finally command large majorities among the American people in general. For the first time, at any rate, pollsters in 1984 found that almost nine out of ten respondents felt that both the Soviet Union and the United States would be completely destroyed in an all-out nuclear war. And tellingly, 83 percent of respon- dents concurred with the statement that “we cannot be certain that life on earth will continue after a nuclear war.”43 There is even some evidence that the nuclear winter scenario might have abetted the astonishing celerity in which Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev reached major arms control agreements during the second half of the decade. Carl Sagan himself managed to brief the Soviet Central Committee on the concept in 1986, reportedly making a lasting impres- sion. Gorbachev personally told Sagan that he had familiarized himself with the research, and retrospectively he attributed his willingness to compromise in superpower negotiations partly to the specter of nuclear winter.44 As for Ronald Reagan, a streak of nuclear abolitionism seemed to have always been running through his veins.45 In the fall of 1983, it was obviously much strengthened. A series of critical events have been held responsible for this: the downing of Korean Airlines Flight 007 by a Soviet fighter plane in early September; a private prescreening for the president of the ABC television drama The Day After on October 20; Reagan’s eventual introduction to US nuclear war plans about a week later; and the apparent misreading in Moscow of NATO’s Able Archer exercise as cover for a nuclear first-strike in early November.46 While nuclear winter has not been mentioned in this context, Sagan’s initial article, the Washington conference, and the ensuing media blitz all fell smack dab into this crucial period and should have added to Reagan’s trepidation. In early 1985, at any rate, with Reagan’s rapprochement toward the Soviet Union well under way, the president told two journalists that “a [nuclear] war could just end up in no victory for anyone, because we would wipe out the Earth as we know it. And if you think back to a couple of natural
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calamities, back in the last century, in the 1800s, just natural phenomena from earthquakes – or, I mean, volcanoes, we saw the weather so changed that there was snow in July in many temperate countries. And they’ve called it the year in which there was no summer. Well, if one volcano can do that, what are we talking about with a whole nuclear exchange: the nuclear winter that scientists have been talking about? It’s possible.”47 If we cannot gauge with any precision the degree to which the nuclear winter scenario influenced peace activists or policymakers, the concept’s larger significance – it seems to me – lies somewhere else. For not only do its dire predictions enqueue the notion of nuclear winter in a discourse of doom and desolation that was the hallmark of the era, but also its unique blending of arms control and ecological concerns establishes it as a crossover phenomenon that anticipated the post–Cold War concerns of today’s world.
Nuclear Winter and the Narratives of Crisis in the 1970s and 1980s The 1970s is considered a long “decade of nightmares,” spanning a dozen or more years of “malaise and mayhem,” which, as one observer put it, were “characterized by bad hair, bad clothes, bad music, bad design, bad books, bad politics, bad economics, bad carpeting, bad fabrics and a lot of bad ideas.”48 “In the life of the mind,” wrote Tony Judt, “the nineteen seventies were the most dispirited decade of the twentieth century.”49 Whoever sought refuge in a movie theater better have gotten ready for “sinking ships, burning buildings, shark attacks, zombie invasions, and other disasters and tragedies that reflected the siege mentality and were staples of Hollywood in the era.”50 Columnist Matt Ridley remembers, “When I was a student, in the 1970s, the world was coming to an end. The adults told me so. They said the population explosion was unstop- pable, mass famine was imminent, a cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was beginning, the Sahara desert was advancing by a mile a year, the ice age was returning, oil was running out, air pollution was choking us and nuclear winter would finish us off ... By the time I was 21 years old I realized that nobody had ever said anything optimistic to me – in a lecture, a television program or even a conversation in a bar – about the future of the planet and its people, at least not that I could recall. Doom was certain.”51 And Ridley’s list does not even include slumping economic growth, rising unemployment, turmoil in monetary markets, escalating inner-city crime rates, political violence in Italy, Spain, West
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Germany, and Northern Ireland, Palestinian terrorism (including recur- ring skyjackings), and myriad postcolonial and civil wars in Africa and Asia. No wonder, then, that crisis is a leitmotif of many histories of the twentieth century’s last quarter.52 Yet there are also an increasing number of scholars who see in the 1970s not just crisis but also the spawning ground for many ideas that shape today’s world.53 The tectonic shift causing the tremors and releas- ing the force of creative destruction is generally held to be “the shock of the global.”54 Most authors understand this shock to have been first and foremost socioeconomic, shattering the foundations of the Fordist model of industrial society and instigating the transition to a postterritor- ial, digital capitalism dominated by flighty financial markets.55 Yet we may just as well place special emphasis on a different “global” experience, namely the sudden realization that planet Earth was an endangered beauty floating in a black and boundless sea of nothingness – a realization that unleashed what J. R. McNeill has called “global-scale environmentalism.”56 From this perspective the most important legacy of the depressing 1970s might well be a new appreciation of the precarious- ness of the human habitat and the limitations of its natural resources. Patrick Kupper has coined the term “1970s diagnosis” for this profound redefinition of the relationship between human beings and their natural environment.57 Based on a full-fledged revolution in scientific thought that spawned new fields of study like ecology, cybernetics, systems theory, and futurology, the world was now conceived of as a complicated and interdependent configuration of systems wherein everything was con- nected to everything else. Regulatory regimes that had hitherto been by and large autonomous, like air monitoring, water pollution control, or noise protection, were now all assigned to national agencies responsible for the protection of the environment. Formerly single-issue citizens’ groups either followed this trend or banded together in umbrella organi- zations. At the same time, traditional and frequently right-of-center con- servationist groups were either eclipsed by or downright transformed into reform movements with a leftist, or at least alternative, streak.58 Two scholarly conferences and two iconic images encapsulated, iden- tified, and energized the breakthrough to environmentalism in the half- decade between 1968 and 1972. The Intergovernmental Conference of Experts on the Scientific Basis for Rational Use and Conservation of the Resources of the Biosphere (known as the Biosphere Conference) con- vened in Paris in September 1968. Sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), it marked
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the culmination of a spate of smaller conferences emphasizing the inter- relatedness of the environment and presenting the biosphere as a system, the whole of which could be affected by activities in any one part of it.59 Four years later, in June 1972, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment was held in Stockholm. According to historian John McCormick, it was “the single most influential event in the evolution of the international environmental movement.”60 Representatives from 113 countries and more than 400 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) discussed the damage that human mismanagement was doing to the interrelated system sketched out earlier. A statement prepared by the NGOs and read to the conference by Margaret Mead noted, “So great has been the technological thrust of our science and energy, so rapacious our consumption of nonrenewable resources, so rapid our growth in numbers, so heavy the load we place on our life-supporting systems that we begin to perceive the finite qualities of the biosphere of soil, air and water ... This is a revolution in thought fully comparable to the Copernican revolution.”61 The realization that there were limitations to the exploitation of the planet, that depletion at one end or in one area would have repercussions elsewhere, and that humankind therefore had a joint responsibility to safeguard the resources it depended upon, was articulated most forcefully in an unofficial report drawn up as a kind of conceptual framework for the conference and later published as Only One Earth. In it, authors Barbara Ward and René Dubos appealed for a “sense of planetary community” and implored the human race to show some “loyalty to the earth.”62 This empathy for Planet Earth derived much of its vigor from two spectacular photographs that mesmerized terrestrials in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The first had been taken on Christmas Eve 1968 by the crew of Apollo 8 as the spacecraft was orbiting the moon and, suddenly, spotted the Earth appearing over the lunar horizon. As the poet Archibald MacLeish wrote the following day in a much-noticed commentary, “For the first time in all of time men have seen the earth: seen it not as continents or oceans from the little distance of a hundred miles or two or three, but seen it from the depth of space ...To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold.”63 More than thirty years later, Denis Cosgrove has argued with good reason that Apollo’s “most enduring cultural impact has not been knowledge of the Moon, but an altered image of the earth.”64 Joachim Radkau has even suggested that with this change of perspective
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the Copernican revolution has, in a sense, come full circle: Earth is no longer deemed to be just one planet among many but is once again thought of as one of a kind.65 Today the year 1968 might evoke pictures of riots and assassinations but as that year drew to a close, American newspaper editors voted Apollo 8 the story of the year and a special issue of Life magazine, looking back on “The Incredible Year ’68,” put a picture of Earth on the cover, as did – of course – Ward and Dubos’s published report to the Stockholm conference in 1972. The second spectacular photograph, taken in 1972, resulted from Apollo’s final mission and went on to assume an even more iconic status. According to Denis Cosgrove, the famous “Blue Marble” shot of the full Earth upset conventional Western cartographic conventions, primarily by stripping away the graticule. “Thus liberated, and with no signs of naming, boundary marking, or possession, Earth appears to float free as a sui generis organism.”66 The image has become nothing less but ubiqui- tous. In the United States it soon turned up as the logo for Earth Day. Friends of the Earth, an environmental lobby group founded in 1969 in the United States that by 1971 had begun to evolve into an international network, used the image often and effectively. In 1979, James Lovelock put it on the cover of his widely discussed first Gaia book, in which he proposed to see Earth as a single unified and self-regulating organism; more recently Al Gore has used it as a backdrop for his slideshow on climate change that served as the basis for his 2006 book and film An Inconvenient Truth (meanwhile an audiobook edition of Gore’s first environmental bestseller Earth in the Balance finds itself adorned by the Earthrise photograph from the earlier Apollo mission). In fact, the “Blue Marble” has been designated “the most widely reproduced image in human history.” It has been used not only for environmental issues but also for purposes ranging from human and animal rights to global educa- tion, not to mention indiscriminate examples of commercial advertising.67 Apollo’s earlier photographs had shown how small and lonely our planet appeared set against a vast black infinity and had thus evoked feelings of humility and human solidarity. Just a few weeks before the Stockholm conference opened, President Richard Nixon in outlining his environmental program to the US Congress had noted, “We are now growing accustomed to the view of our planet as seen from space – a blue and brown disk shrouded in white patches of clouds ... No matter what else divides men and nations, this perspective should unite them.”68 The “Blue Marble” shot, by contrast, picturing Earth alone and filling the frame, manifested the globe’s vitality and organic unity, generating
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sentiments of home and parental care. As Robert Poole has observed, “Suddenly the image of the Earth was everywhere ... Since then, the phrase ‘blue planet’ has come to be bound up with the idea of caring for the Earth.”69 A good example for this nexus is provided by biologist Lewis Thomas. In 1974 he wrote “Viewed from the distance of the Moon, the astonishing thing about the Earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive.”70 A decade later, he echoed this sensation in his foreword to the proceedings of the Nuclear Winter conference in Washington. Confessing that the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in a photograph in all his life had been “the planet Earth seen from the distance of the moon, hanging there in space, obviously alive,” Thomas urged his readers to consider that – if the nuclear winter thesis was accurate – the two billion people estimated to die as a result of a nuclear war were only part of the story. “Something else will have happened at the same time, in which human beings ought to feel the same stake as in the loss of their own lives. The elaborate, coherent, beautifully organized ecosystem of the Earth – what some people call the biosphere and others refer to as nature – will have been dealt a mortal or near-mortal blow.”71 The Apollo images reinforced and visualized a transformed worldview that simultaneously found expression in Paris, Stockholm, and elsewhere, and that represented the soundboard from which the notion of nuclear winter resonated. Knowing this full well, Carl Sagan had commissioned a film on the climatic consequences of TTAPS’s baseline scenario, which was shown to the press following the Halloween conference. Ted Koppel, anchor of ABC’s Nightline, included the footage in the late-night news program’s coverage of the conference. Extolled one critic, “Koppel, making use of ‘graphics’ that had been created for the conference, displayed a new and arresting image of the peril that threatens us. First, we saw the now familiar picture of the earth in space. Then a dark cap materialized on the top half. It moved down over the bottom half as well, like a shade being pulled down in front of a lighted window at night, until our bright and fair planet was totally dark.”72 Nuclear winter was part and parcel of a larger and powerful concern for the well-being of that newly discovered living organism called Earth. From the very start this concern was accompanied by a chorus of whistleblowers and doomsayers.73 After Rachel Carson had launched her anything but quiescent clarion call against the American pesticide industry in her 1962 bestseller Silent Spring, subsequent premonitions grew increasingly alarming. In 1968 Paul Ehrlich, who would later spear- head the biological side of nuclear winter research, published one of the bestselling eco-political treatises of all time. In The Population Bomb he
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argued that humankind could save itself only if it got a handle on over- population. Barry Commoner, an environmental activist and professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis, disagreed. Instead of population growth he identified as the root problem an economy that was processing and churning out evermore synthetics, disposable pro- ducts, pesticides, and detergents. In his 1971 book The Closing Circle, Commoner set down four laws of ecology, including that there is only one interconnected ecosphere for all living organisms and, most memorably, that there is no such thing as a free lunch.74 British science journalist Gordon Rattray Taylor took these and other concerns and consolidated them in a popular Doomsday Book.75 These Anglo-American debates were increasingly reflected in the media and reverberated in Europe as well. In West Germany, for example, Bernhard Grzimek, the director of the Frankfurt Zoo and immensely popular host of a television series called Ein Platz für Tiere (Wildlife Refuge), encouraged the weekly Der Spiegel to publish a cover story on environmental problems in the fall of 1970. The issue sold half a million copies in no time.76 Grzimek had recently been appointed nature conservation commissioner by Chancellor Willy Brandt, whose center-left coalition had virtually invented environmental politics in West Germany as part of its larger reform agenda.77 The government’s educational work soon found expression in many ways, as in children’s and youth magazines like Der kleine Tierfreund (Little Animal Lover), which in September 1970 devoted an entire issue to “The Endangered Planet.” The inside front cover with the table of con- tents showed Apollo’s Earthrise photograph. Indeed, as Jens Ivo Engels has demonstrated, Grzimek and other nature filmmakers used their popular wildlife documentaries to transform the mental image of nature from a heroic yet distant wilderness into a close and personal but at the same time endangered habitat.78 To be sure, Grzimek also soon annoyed many of his political superiors when he chimed in with the prophets of doom. The voices of gloom and doom reached a crescendo in 1972. In January, British ecologists published A Blueprint for Survival, concluding that “if current trends are allowed to persist, the breakdown of society and the irreversible disruption of life-support systems on this planet, possibly by the end of the century, certainly within the lifetimes of our children, are inevitable.”79 Two months later the Club of Rome published its report on the Limits to Growth, arguing that pollution, population growth, and the exhaustion of resources attendant to exponential growth,
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if unchecked, would bring on certain catastrophe by the end of the century. The report attracted an unprecedented amount of public atten- tion, perhaps because this time the apocalyptic message emanated from one of those modern, cybernetic computer models that had up to now embodied the fantasies of feasibility associated with public management ideas of the 1960s.80 In this regard, that is, in its application of complex computer models, the nuclear winter concept was a worthy successor to the Club of Rome report. If the latter, however, had focused on socio- economic trends, TTAPS tapped into the work of astronomers, climatol- ogists, and geologists and the contingency of sudden climate change that some of their models suggested.81 By the early 1980s, of course, delusions of planning and control had long fallen out of favor. Rather, the things that were out of control dominated public discourse throughout the 1970s and 1980s, in particu- lar when it came to the human habitat. Acid rain, toxic wastes, filthy seas, contaminated landscapes, dying forests, suffocating cities, nuclear night- mares, endangered species, ozone depletion, global warming, and other alarming news commanded the headlines. With reference to a spate of Hollywood disaster movies, Der Spiegel observed that real-life angst was also reflected on the screen. In 1981, with Cold War tensions rising and a progeny of Hollywood in the White House, impending nuclear apoc- alypse achieved pride of place: “The US president’s ‘doomsday’ machine, his airborne command post for ending the world in an atomic blaze, is ready for takeoff,” readers were advised in a slightly crooked account. “Today, the touch of a button is all it takes for the salto mortale into the void.”82 If this widely read weekly is any indicator, angst must have reigned supreme in West Germany. Hardly a month had passed from the 1981 year-end cover story on apocalyptic scenarios when the maga- zine upped the ante with a six-part series on “German Angst,” quickly followed by a four-part series about ‘Unprotected Nature.’”83 This array of topics marks a striking shift in the source of anxiety. For a generation or two, the Russians had dominated German – or, for that matter, Western – angst; now it was rockets and reactors. Ideology took a backseat to ecology. If the world was no longer divisible into protected nature reserves and a vastly greater portion of the planet to be exploited and contami- nated at will, then a similar division into East and West was also mean- ingless and obsolete.84 This new type of anxiety gripped not just Germans, and the prophets of doom freely admitted that they wanted people world- wide to be afraid. In his introduction to a collection of essays concerned with psychological and moral aspects of nuclear winter, psychiatrist
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Lester Grinspoon, a close associate of Carl Sagan, adjured his readers, “We need the courage to be afraid and to make our friends, neighbors, and colleagues afraid – with a fear ...not so much for ourselves as for our children, for civilization, and for this precious world.”85 The fear for “this precious world” is what makes the nuclear winter episode unique in the annals of opposition to the nuclear threat. In fact, with the introduction of nuclear winter the protest against the arms race squarely arrived in the field of environmentalism. Contemporaries made that connection quite casually. In 1984 the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), one of the most powerful environmental groups in the United States, put out a booklet titled “Nuclear Winter, Silent Spring” warning that “biologists predict that a nuclear winter would be followed by a spring more silent than Rachel Carson ever imagined.”86 The following year the SCOPE report foregrounded the close conjunction between nuclear winter and environmental concerns even more forcefully. SCOPE, the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment, was founded in 1969 as a branch of the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU). Its purpose was to study the effects of humanity on the environment. After the problem of nuclear winter came into the open, SCOPE organized a series of conferences on the subject leading to the publication of a nine-hundred-page, two-volume report in September 1985.87 The upshot of the report was that people had to bid adieu to traditional views of nuclear war. As Mark Harwell, one of the report’s authors put it, “Hiroshima is a dangerously misleading example of what the next nuclear war would be like.”88 Forget about blast, heat, and radiation, the report in effect said; stop thinking of billions of casualties and the destruction of cultural assets; instead, start worrying about Earth as the enduring home of the human species and innumerable other species as well. To drive this message home, SCOPE not only hired a public relations agency to tout the launch of the report, but also com- missioned a writer to create an abridged paperback version entitled Planet Earth in Jeopardy.89 Nuclear war, said Harwell, constituted “war waged on the global environment itself.”90 To be sure, many effects of nuclear explosions on the environment were there to see from the very start. One of the iconic pictures of the still young nuclear age was the slow motion footage of some neatly arranged rows of trees being blown back like hassock from a nuclear blast. The sequence has been called “a moment of pure ecological devastation,” and deserv- edly so.91 Moreover, the first truly global environmental issue had indeed been the danger of fallout from nuclear testing. This is what turned Rachel
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Carson and Barry Commoner into activists long before they took on pesticides and synthetics. As early as 1963, Commoner described nuclear weapons tests as “a gigantic experiment in ecology.”92 Yet when the testing went underground, so did the campaigns for nuclear disarmament.93 It took the collapse of SALT II and the Reagan administration’s loose rhetoric about the viability of nuclear war along with its intentions to deploy new weapons systems in the United States and Europe to resuscitate a massive antinuclear movement. By then, however, the unmitigatedly anthropocentric worldview of the 1950s had been effectively challenged by biocentric philosophies put forward by the emerging environmental movement, inscribed in the public mind by the dystopian discourse of the 1970s, and visualized for everyone to see by a pair of spectacular photo- graphs from the Apollo space missions. Consequently, as one contempor- ary observer has noted, “Nationalism and other ‘ethnolocalisms’ are now replaced, for many, with a new identity as planetary citizens, as members of an interdependent species living in fragile grace.”94 Ironically, the Cold War nuclear project itself contributed mightily to this new identity that was grounded in a new vision of the planet as an integrated biosphere. For one, in order to enable the military to gauge the full effects of nuclear explosions, it fostered an extraordinary state commitment to atmospheric and earth sciences.95 As Jon Agar has put it, “It took a global conflict to create the particular conditions to identify global warming as a global phenomenon.”96 On top of that, it also fueled the rise of computer technology to help appraise all the new data and manage command, control, and communications needs.97 And the Cold War, of course, also begot the space race that gave us Apollo’s iconic images.98 At any rate, antinuclear protesters of the early 1980s operated against the background of a radically altered worldview. It encompassed both an attitudinal reversal of the Copernican revolution and what Matthias Dörries has called an “epistemological double transformation”: the environmental side-effects of nuclear weapons were no longer thought of as merely short term, nor as geographically limited.99 Nuclear winter is the site where these profound changes in the history of thought coalesce; where a new environmental awareness and the newly risen opposition to the nuclear arms race join together. The year before TTAPS publicized its nuclear winter concept, an eloquent case for such a confluence had been made by Jonathan Schell in his bestseller The Fate of the Earth. Referring to nuclear conflagration as a “holocaust,” Schell wrote, “The peril of human extinction, which exists not because every single person in the world would be killed by the
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immediate explosive and radioactive effects of a holocaust ...but because a holocaust might render the biosphere unfit for human survival, is, in a word an ecological peril.” Usually seen in isolation from the threats to other forms of life and their ecosystems, nuclear peril, Schell argued, should rather be seen “as the very center of the ecological crisis.”100 Nuclear winter delivered on this proposition.
Conclusion In the end, the newly found nexus between environmentalism and nuclear protest turned out to be rather short-lived. There were several reasons for this. First, as we have seen, nuclear winter lost much of its punch when it was “downgraded” to nuclear autumn in the second half of the 1980s. Simultaneously, the thaw in US–Soviet relations accompanied by undreamed of achievements in arms control negotiations caused the massive peace movement to peter out. The environmental community, for its part, had been hesitant from the start to prioritize the threat of nuclear war, either because of limited resources and the need to stay on message or because arms control issues threatened to shatter its political consensus built around environmental concerns.101 TTAPS’s pivotal insight that large amounts of soot, ash, and smoke carried into the atmosphere could induce a marked decline in tempera- tures on the earth’s surface has, to be sure, never been disproven. In fact, the nuclear winter thesis staged a modest comeback recently when meteor- ologist Alan Robock teamed up with two of the original TTAPS members and others to argue that even a regional nuclear war between emerging Third World nuclear powers using one hundred Hiroshima-size bombs on cities in the subtropics would result in dire climatic consequences.102 This, however, went largely unnoticed by the public, whose fear of nuclear winter had dropped close to zero, which a lone attentive Austrian daily considered among “the most astounding aspects of intel- lectual stupefaction.”103 Nuclear winter shares with other prophesies of doom the dilemma that the catastrophe has (as of this writing) not come to pass, which deludes people – often nudged by vested interests to boot – into ignoring the growing chorus of Cassandras. Quite apart from the (as yet) serendipitously absent fulfillment of nuclear apocalypse, however, nuclear winter did bequeath an important legacy to the post–Cold War world. It “brought the prospect of massive human-caused damage to the planetary atmosphere out of the realm of distant speculation and into the close-at-hand fears of the US public,”104 and – one should add – of others
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as well. It also “framed the consequences of nuclear war in terms of temperature,” thus foreshadowing the subsequent focus on anthropo- genic climate change.105 This lineage is clearly visible in a not entirely serious revisiting of nuclear winter undertaken by military historian Martin van Creveld. He envisages scientists conducting atmospheric nuclear explosions in remote areas in such a way that as much smoke, dust, and debris as possible would be tossed into the atmosphere. “That way and with a little luck,” he writes, “the problem of global warming could be solved ...The arctic ice would stop melting, polar bears would rejoice, and Russia could be prevented from annexing the North Pole...Last but not least, we would secure a beneficial and deeply satisfactory assignment for the particularly eccentric Dr. Strangeloves of this world.”106
Notes
1. Carl Sagan, “The Nuclear Winter,” Parade, Oct. 30, 1983, pp. 4–7. 2. Richard P. Turco, Owen B. Toon, Thomas P. Ackerman, James B. Pollack, and Carl Sagan [hereafter TTAPS], “Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions,” Science 222, no. 4630 (Dec. 23, 1983): 1283–92, here 1290. 3. Owen Greene and Joyce Tait, “The Risk of Nuclear Winter: Scientific Research and Policy Debate,” in Margaret Blunden and Owen Greene, eds., Science and Mythology in the Making of Defence Policy (London, 1989), 13–59, 23. 4. James Gleick, “Less Drastic Theory Emerges on Freezing after Nuclear War,” New York Times, Jun. 22, 1986, p. 1. 5. Sagan, “The Nuclear Winter,” 4–5; Lawrence Badash, A Nuclear Winter’s Tale: Science and Politics in the 1980s (Cambridge, MA, 2009), 54. For an in- depth look at forerunners to TTAPS’s research as well as at the careers and interests of the group’s members, see Matthias Dörries, “The Politics of Atmospheric Sciences: ‘Nuclear Winter’ and Global Climate Change,” Osiris 26 (2011): 198–223. 6. Badash, Nuclear Winter’s Tale, 33–36. 7.Ibid.,41–45;WalterAlvarez,T. Rex and the Crater of Doom (Princeton, 1997). 8. See Lynn Eden, Whole World on Fire: Organization, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca and London, 2004), 221–38. 9. Paul J. Crutzen and John W. Birks, “The Atmosphere after a Nuclear War: Twilight at Noon,” in Jeannie Peterson, ed., The Aftermath: The Human and Ecological Consequences of Nuclear War (New York, 1983), 73–96. 10. TTAPS, “Nuclear Winter,” 1284–86.
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11. Carl Sagan, “Nuclear War and Climatic Catastrophe: Some Policy Implications,” Foreign Affairs 62 (Winter 1983): 257–92, esp. 270–71. An expanded version of the article was published under the same title in Lester Grinspoon, ed., The Long Darkness: Psychological and Moral Perspectives on Nuclear Winter (New Haven, 1986), 7–62. 12. See Badash, Nuclear Winter’s Tale, 58–62. Dörries, “Politics of Atmospheric Sciences,” 218–19, however, points out the imbalance in the composition of the conference’s scientific advisory board. 13. The proceedings are published as Paul R. Ehrlich, Carl Sagan, Donald Kennedy, and Walter Orr Roberts, The Cold and the Dark: The World after Nuclear War. The Conference on the Long-Term Worldwide Biological Consequences of Nuclear War (New York, London, 1984). 14. See Paul R. Ehrlich et al., “Long-Term Biological Consequences of Nuclear War,” Science 222, no. 4630 (Dec. 23, 1983): 1293–300. 15. Paul R. Ehrlich, “The Biological Consequences of Nuclear War,” in Ehrlich et al., The Cold and the Dark, 41–71, 43 (emphasis in original). 16. Ibid., 48. 17. Ibid., 54. 18. Ibid., 59. 19. Robert Jay Lifton, “Imagining the Real: Beyond the Nuclear ‘End,’” in Grinspoon, ed., The Long Darkness, 79–99, esp. 81. 20. “The Talk of the Town: Notes and Comment,” New Yorker, Nov. 21, 1983, pp. 41–42. 21. Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives),” Diacritics 14 (Summer 1984): 20–31, 20. 22. Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (London, 1982), 21. 23. Sagan, “Nuclear War,” 285. 24. Donald Kennedy, “Introduction,” in Ehrlich et al., The Cold and the Dark, xxv–xxxv, here xxxiii. 25. Nuclear Winter and Its Implications. Hearings before the Committee on Armed Services, US Senate, Ninety-ninth Congress, First Session, Oct. 2 and 3, 1985 (Washington, DC, 1986), 143. 26. Starley L. Thompson and Stephen H. Schneider, “Nuclear Winter Reappraised,” Foreign Affairs 64 (Summer 1986): 981–1005, quotes on 993 and 983. See also Badash, Nuclear Winter’s Tale, 290–94; William Poundstone, Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos (New York, 1999), 332–33. 27. Robert C. Cowen, “More Cracks Appear in ‘Nuclear Winter’ Predictions,” Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 2, 1986, p. 33. 28. Quoted in Malcolm W. Brown, “Nuclear Winter Theorists Pull Back,” New York Times, Jan. 23, 1990, p. C1. See also Greene and Tait, “Risk of Nuclear Winter,” 25. Most recently, it has been suggested that these attacks were orchestrated by a handful of industry-related scientists who also tried to sow doubt toward other scientific research related to environmental issues or
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consumer protection. See Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York, 2010), 36–65. For a broader depiction of environmentalism’s critics, see Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (New York, 1987), 287–362. 29. Russell Seitz, “In from the Cold: ‘Nuclear Winter’ Melts Down,” National Interest 5 (Fall 1986): 3–17, esp. 4. 30. James Gleick, “Science and Politics: ‘Nuclear Winter’ Clash,” New York Times, Feb. 17, 1987, p. C6. 31. William J. Broad, “U.S. Weighs Risk that Atom War Could Bring Fatal Nuclear Winter,” New York Times, Aug. 5, 1984, p. A1. 32. See Badash, Nuclear Winter’s Tale, 128–34. 33. Sagan, “Nuclear War,” 285–86. 34. Carl Sagan and Richard P. Turco, A Path Where No Man Thought: Nuclear Winter and the End of the Arms Race (New York, 1990). 35. Joseph S. Nye Jr., “Farewell to Arms Control?” Foreign Affairs 65 (Fall 1986): 1–20, 7. An exhaustive survey of the debate can be found in Badash, Nuclear Winter’s Tale, 229–52. See also Greene and Tait, “Risk of Nuclear Winter,” 30, as well as Theodore Rueter and Thomas Kalil, “Nuclear Strategy and Nuclear Winter,” World Politics 43 (Jul. 1991): 587–607. 36. Quoted in Michael Weisskopf, “Pentagon Says Nuclear Winter Justifies Arms,” Washington Post, Mar. 3, 1985, p. A21. See also Badash, Nuclear Winter’s Tale, 163–67. 37. Greene and Tait, “Risk of Nuclear Winter,” 52. 38. Jake Garn, “Nuclear Winter: The Case for Weapons Reductions,” Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 21, 1984, p. 20. 39. David Alan Coia, “‘Junk Science’ Foes Mull Counteraction,” Washington Times, May 25, 1993, p. A4. 40. On cooperation and conflict between the American and European peace movements, see Wilfried Mausbach, “Vereint marschieren, getrennt schlagen? Die amerikanische Friedensbewegung und der Widerstand gegen den NATO- Doppelbeschluss,” in Philipp Gassert, Tim Geiger, and Hermann Wentker, eds., Zweiter Kalter Krieg und Friedensbewegung: Der NATO-Doppelbeschluss in deutsch-deutscher und internationaler Perspektive (Munich, 2011), 283–304. Paul Rubinson has recently suggested stronger reverberations of the nuclear winter thesis on both sides of the Iron Curtain, perhaps as a result of his focus on a politicization of science. See his “The Global Effects of Nuclear Winter: Science and Antinuclear Protest in the United States and the Soviet Union during the 1980s,” Cold War History 14 (2014): 47–69. 41. Poundstone, Carl Sagan, 305; Mary McGrory, “Biologists Paint an Icy Picture of How the World Could End,” Washington Post, Nov. 1, 1983, p. A3.
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42. For a comparison of these different modes of expressions, see Spencer R. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 358–65. 43. See Daniel Yankelovich and John Doble, “The Public Mood: Nuclear Weapons and the U.S.S.R,” Foreign Affairs 63 (fall 1984): 33–46, 34. 44. See Poundstone, Carl Sagan, 318; Mikhail S. Gorbachev, On My Country and the World (New York, 2000), 174. 45. Paul Lettow, Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (New York, 2005). 46. See Beth A. Fischer, The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War (Columbia, London, 1997), 102–43; “The Able Archer 83 Sourcebook,” The National Security Archive, George Washington University, Nov. 7, 2013, http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ablearcher/ (accessed Sep. 3, 2015). 47. Interview with Bernard Weinraub and Gerald Boyd of the New York Times, Feb. 11, 1985, in John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online]: Public Papers of the Presidents Collection, Santa Barbara, CA. Available from World Wide Web: http://www .presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=38212. On the impact of antinuclear protest in general on the policymaking of the Reagan administration, see Jeffrey W. Knopf, Domestic Society and International Cooperation: The Impact of Protest on U.S. Arms Control Policy (New York, 1998), 221–35; Lawrence S. Wittner, Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford, 2003), 312–33; John Tirman, “How We Ended the Cold War: Peace Activists’ Demand for an End to Nuclear Madness Played a Decisive Role,” The Nation, Nov.1, 1999, pp. 13–21. 48. Philip Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (New York, 2006); Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York, 2001), xvi; Joe Queenan, “The Decade That Won’t Die,” New York Times Book Review, Dec. 2, 2007. Eric Hobsbawm, in his magisterial history of the twen- tieth century, sees the 1970s as ringing in the “crisis decades.” Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York, 1994), 403–32. 49. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York, 2005), 477. 50. William Graebner, “America’s Poseidon Adventure: A Nation in Existential Despair,” in Beth Bailey and David Farber, eds., America in the Seventies (Lawrence, KS., 2004), 157–80, 158. 51. Matt Ridley, “Down with Doom: How the World Keeps Defying the Predictions of Pessimists,” Huffington Post, Jun. 30, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com /matt-ridley/down-with-doom-how-the-wo_b_630792.html. 52. See Frank Bösch, “Umbrüche in die Gegenwart: Globale Ereignisse und Krisenreaktionen um 1979,” Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in
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Contemporary History 9 (January 2012), online edition, www.zeithistorische -forschungen.de/16126041-Boesch-1–2012. 53. See in particular Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton, 2012); Martin H. Geyer, “Auf der Suche nach der Gegenwart: Neue Arbeiten zur Geschichte der 1970er und 1980er Jahre,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 50 (2010): 643–69; Konrad H. Jarausch, “Verkannter Strukturwandel: Die sieb- ziger Jahre als Vorgeschichte der Probleme der Gegenwart,” in Konrad H. Jarausch, ed., Das Ende der Zuversicht? Die siebziger Jahre als Geschichte (Göttingen, 2008), 9–28. 54. Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel J. Sargent, The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2010). 55. See, e.g., Charles S. Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” American Historical Review 105 (Jun. 2000): 807–31; Ulrich Herbert, “Europe in High Modernity: Reflections on a Theory of the 20th Century,” Journal of Modern European History 5 (Mar. 2007): 5–21; Anselm Doering-Manteuffel and Lutz Raphael, Nach dem Boom: Perspektiven auf die Zeitgeschichte seit 1970, 2nd updated ed. (Göttingen, 2010). 56. J. R. McNeill, “The Environment, Environmentalism, and International Society in the Long 1970s,” in Ferguson et al., Shock of the Global, 263–78. 57. Patrick Kupper, “Die ‘1970er Diagnose’: Grundsätzliche Überlegungen zu einem Wendepunkt der Umweltgeschichte,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 43 (2003): 325–48. 58. For a global perspective, see the magisterial tome by Joachim Radkau, Die Ära der Ökologie: Eine Weltgeschichte (Munich, 2011), 124–95; see also John McCormick, Reclaiming Paradise: The Global Environmental Movement (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1989), 125–48. For the United States, see Kirkpatrick Sale, The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement, 1962–1992 (New York, 1993), 11–28; for West Germany, see Jens Ivo Engels, Naturpolitik in der Bundesrepublik: Ideenwelt und politische Verhaltensstile in Naturschutz und Umweltbewegung 1950–1980 (Paderborn, 2006). 59. See Kai F. Hünemörder, Die Frühgeschichte der globalen Umweltkrise und die Formierung der deutschen Umweltpolitik, 1950–1973 (Stuttgart, 2004), 126–47; McCormick, Reclaiming Paradise, 88–90. 60. McCormick, Reclaiming Paradise, 104. 61. Quoted in Anthony Lewis, “Growth and Politics,” New York Times, Jun. 19, 1972, p. 33. 62. Barbara Ward and René Dubos, Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet (London, 1972). 63. Archibald MacLeish, “A Reflection: Riders on Earth Together, Brothers in Eternal Cold,” New York Times, Dec. 25, 1968, p. 1.
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64. Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in Western Imagination (Baltimore and London, 2001), 257. 65. Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment (New York, 2008), 291; Radkau, Ära der Ökologie, 139. 66. Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye, 261. 67. See ibid., 257, 263; Robert Poole, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (New Haven and London, 2008), 185–86, 196 (quote). 68. Richard Nixon, Special Message to the Congress Outlining the 1972 Environmental Program, February 8, 1972, in John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online]: Public Papers of the Presidents Collection, Santa Barbara, CA. Available from World Wide Web: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=3731. 69. Poole, Earthrise, 9. 70. Quoted in ibid, 170. 71. Lewis Thomas, “Foreword,” in Ehrlich et al., The Cold and the Dark, xxi–xxiv, here xxiii–xxiv. 72. “The Talk of the Town: Notes and Comment,” New Yorker, Nov. 21, 1983, p. 42. 73. For the United States, see Borstelmann, The 1970s, 231–47. 74. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston, 1962); Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York, 1968); Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (New York, 1971). On Carson, see Mark H. Lytle, The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement (New York, 2007); Linda Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (New York, 1997); Christof Mauch, “Blick durchs Ökoskop: Rachel Carsons Klassiker und die Anfänge des modernen Umweltbewusstseins,” Zeithistorische Forschungen/ Studies in Contemporary History 9 (Jan. 2012), online edition, www .zeithistorische-forschungen.de/16126041-Mauch-1–2012. On Commoner, see Michael Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival: The Remaking of American Environmentalism (Cambridge, MA, 2007); on the Ehrlich-Commoner debate, see also McCormick, Reclaiming Paradise, 69–73. 75. Gordon Rattray Taylor, The Doomsday Book (London, 1970). See Hünemörder, Frühgeschichte, 212–13. 76. See Engels, Naturpolitik, 222. 77. See Hünemörder, Frühgeschichte, 154–59; Radkau, Ära der Ökologie, 140–43; Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, Tschernobyl, 26. April 1986: Die ökologische Herausforderung (Munich, 1998), 208–10. 78. See Engels, Naturpolitik, 241; Engels, “Von der Sorge um die Tiere zur Sorge um die Umwelt: Tiersendungen als Umweltpolitik in Westdeutschland zwischen 1950 und 1980,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 43 (2003): 297–323. 79. Quoted in Sale, The Green Revolution, 29. See also McCormick, Reclaiming Paradise, 78–79; Hünemörder, Frühgeschichte, 217–19.
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80. See Patrick Kupper, “Weltuntergangs-Vision aus dem Computer: Zur Geschichte der Studie ‘Die Grenzen des Wachstums’ von 1972,” in Frank Uekötter and Jens Hohensee, eds., Wird Kassandra heiser? Die Geschichte falscher Ökoalarme (Stuttgart, 2004), 98–111. See also Fernando Elichirigoity, Planet Management: Limits to Growth, Computer Simulation, and the Emergence of Global Spaces (Evanston, IL, 1999). 81. See Jon Agar, Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (Cambridge, England, 2012), 429–32. 82. “Film: Die letzten Tage der Menschheit,” Der Spiegel 9 (1975): 120–26; “Im Jahre 1999 kommt der König des Terrors,” Der Spiegel 53 (1981): 86–91, 91 (quote). 83. See “Die deutsche Depression (I–VI),” Der Spiegel 3 (1982): 56–70; 4 (1982): 63–79; 5 (1982): 68–79; 6 (1982): 61–79; 7 (1982): 72–83; and 8 (1982): 77–101; “‘Die Erde wird ein öder Stern’: SPIEGEL-Redakteur Jochen Bölsche über das Elend des Naturschutzes (I-IV),” Der Spiegel 13 (1982): 70–87; 14 (1982): 64–79; 15 (1982): 64–80; and 16 (1982): 64–84. 84. Frank Biess has ascribed the proliferation of angst in these years to the emergence of new forms of subjectivity. See Frank Biess, “Die Sensibilisierung des Subjekts: Angst und ‘Neue Subjektivität’ in den 1970er Jahren,” WerkstattGeschichte 49 (Dec. 2008): 51–71. See also Susanne Schregel, “Konjunktur der Angst: ‘Politik der Subjektivität’ und neue Friedensbewegung, 1979–1983,” in Bernd Greiner, Christian Th. Müller, and Dierk Walter, eds., Angst im Kalten Krieg (Hamburg, 2009), 495–520; Judith Michel, “‘Die Angst kann lehren, sich zu wehren’: Der Angstdiskurs der westdeutschen Friedensbewegung in den 1980er Jahren,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 38 (2010): 246–69. 85. Lester Grinspoon, Introduction to The Long Darkness, 3–6, 4. 86. Quoted in Badash, Nuclear Winter’s Tale, 120. 87. Scientific Committee on the Problems of the Environment (SCOPE), Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War, 2 vols. (New York, 1985). 88. Mark A. Harwell, “Sleep Peacefully,” Bioscience 35 (Oct. 1985): 550–51. 89. Lydia Dotto, Planet Earth in Jeopardy: Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War (New York, 1986). 90. Quoted in Richard L. Strout, “Tale of Two Eras: Harding, Nuclear Winter,” Christian Science Monitor, Feb. 8, 1985, p. 20. 91. Joseph Masco, “Bad Weather: On Planetary Crisis,” Social Studies of Science 40 (Feb. 2010): 7–40, 7. 92. Quoted in Toshihiro Higuchi, “Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Debate on Risk Knowledge in Cold War America, 1945–1963,” in J. R. McNeill and Corinna R. Unger, eds., Environmental Histories of the Cold War (New York, 2010), 301–22, 303. On Carson see Ralph H. Lutts, “Chemical Fallout: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Radioactive Fallout, and the Environmental Movement,” Environmental Review 9 (Autumn 1985): 210–25.
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93. Ecological concerns did reverberate with the movement against the Vietnam War, which called the US government’s herbicidal warfare program “eco- cide.” See David Zierler, The Invention of Ecocide: Agent Orange, Vietnam, and the Scientists Who Changed the Way We Think about the Environment (Athens, GA, 2011). However, while this attests to the advancing confluence of antiwar and ecological causes, nobody asserted that the defoliation of South Vietnamese rainforests and mangrove swamps was endangering Planet Earth itself. 94. Steve Breyman, “Were the 1980’s Anti-Nuclear Weapons Movements New Social Movements?” Peace & Change 22 (Jul. 1997): 303–329, 312. 95. See Masco, “Bad Weather,” passim; James Rodger Fleming, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (New York, 2010). While these efforts originated from a fierce confrontation, they also tied academic and administrative experts in an “infrastructural globalism” that bridged the Cold War divide. See Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, Mass., 2010). 96. Agar, Science, 399. 97. And this to such a degree that the computer has, in fact, been put at the center of both Cold War strategy and discourse. See Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA, 1996). See also Donald A. MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: An Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cambridge, MA, 1990) and Arthur L. Norberg and Judy E. O’Neill, Transforming Computer Technology: Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962–1986 (Baltimore, 1996). 98. See Gerard J. DeGroot, Dark Side of the Moon: The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest (New York, 2006). 99. Dörries, “Politics of Atmospheric Sciences,” 199. 100. Schell, Fate of the Earth, 111 (emphasis in original). 101. See Jason Salzman, “Nuclear War as an Environmental Issue,” Environment 29 (Jan./Feb. 1987): 4–5, and 45. 102. See Owen B. Toon, Alan Robock, and Richard P. Turco, “Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War,” AIP Conference Proceedings, vol. 1596 (2014): 65–73; Alan Robock and Owen Brian Toon, “Self-assured Destruction: The Climate Impacts of Nuclear War,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68 (Sep./Oct. 2012): 66–74; Alan Robock, “Nuclear Winter Is a Real and Present Danger,” Nature, May 19, 2011, pp. 275–76. See also Steven Starr, “Deadly Climate Change from Nuclear War: A Threat to Human Existence,” accessible on Starr’s website www.nucleardarkness.org. 103. “Wie kann man das atomare Wettrüsten noch stoppen?,” Die Presse, May 31, 2010.
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104. Paul N. Edwards, “Entangled Histories: Climate Science and Nuclear Weapons Research,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68 (Jul./Aug. 2012): 28–40, 36. 105. Dörries, “Politics of Atmospheric Sciences,” 223. See also Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 142–59. 106. Martin van Creveld, “Klima, Wetter, Krieg,” in Petra Lutz and Thomas Macho, eds., 2° – Das Wetter, der Mensch und sein Klima. Eine Ausstellung des Deutschen Hygiene-Museums Dresden (Göttingen, 2008), 67–71, 71.
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Atomic Nightmares and Biological Citizens at Three Mile Island
Natasha Zaretsky
At 4:00 a.m. on Wednesday, March 28, 1979, the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear power plant, located sixteen miles south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, became the site of the worst accident in the history of nuclear energy in the United States. One of two reactors on the island sustained what nuclear engineers call a “loss of coolant accident.” A relief valve was mistakenly left open, permitting large amounts of water – normally used to cool the plant’s core – to escape. As the containment building lost coolant, temperatures and radiation levels rose. Had the core of the reactor been exposed for too long, it could have overheated and melted, releasing radioactive material into the environment. This feared “meltdown” did not occur. But radiation did leak out of a small rupture in the plant’s auxiliary building. In addition, plant opera- tors released steam into the air that contained detectable amounts of radiation, and they discharged water containing trace concentrations of xenon (a short-lived radioactive gas) into the Susquehanna River. By the third day of the accident, a hydrogen bubble had also developed in the top of the core’s container, making it difficult for workers to bring down the core’s temperature and stoking fears of an explosion. That evening, CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite told viewers that the nation faced “the considerable uncertainties and dangers of the worst nuclear power plant accident of the atomic age.”1 The TMI accident was not the first radiation scare in American history. With the escalation of atomic weapons testing in the 1950s, such scares became a routine, if not unnerving, feature of everyday life. Testing sickened and killed livestock, spread radioactive ash and rain, and depos- ited strontium-90 (a long-lasting isotope that can lodge in the bones) in
55
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wheat and milk. Over the course of the decade, scientists warned that radiation could cause leukemia, bone cancer, and genetic damage. Citizens groups conducted local studies on radiation exposure, and popular maga- zines described radioactive fallout as “the silent killer.”2 The TMI acci- dent revived these earlier fears of radiation and rerouted them to nuclear power plants. In the process, the accident shattered a set of assumptions that underlay the postwar promotion of civilian nuclear energy: that nuclear power plants could be disassociated from atomic bombs; that the destructive nature of atomic power could be transformed into some- thing benign; and that American civilians could somehow be shielded from the dangers of radiation while its military wielded a nuclear arsenal comprised of missiles, submarines, and doomsday devices. The 1979 accident also constituted an illuminating moment in the history of declining public trust in US political culture. Over the prior decade, the infamous “credibility gap” of the Vietnam War – the growing disconnect between official reports about the war and its actual progression – had appeared again and again, as the oil embargo and Watergate raised new allegations of government duplicity. The cumulative effect was a sharp decline in trust in governmental institutions over the course of the 1970s. This decline was apparent at Three Mile Island, where the “official story” about the accident would be met with considerable skepticism by both local residents and outside observers. The suspicion that both the utility company and public officials were downplaying the severity of the accident resonated with public responses to the Vietnam War and Watergate. But the accident departed from these prior crises in that it threatened to trigger a radiological health emergency among American civilians. Within days, state and federal officials flooded the area and began monitoring radiation levels in the air, soil, and water, as well as in the bodies of local residents. Like the other upheavals of the decade, then, the accident constituted a crisis in political trust, but in this case it placed the imperiled human body – indeed, the irradiated human body – at the center of the story. The human-body-at-risk was not just any body. At the time of the accident, scientists agreed that the pregnant body, the child’s body, and the fetal body were especially vulnerable to radiation poisoning. These bodies emerged as powerful symbols of environmental risk throughout the crisis, a symbolism that established continuities between the TMI acci- dent and the earlier radiation scares of the 1950s.3 But fears surrounding fetal health did not emerge from the accident alone. Disasters can function like x-rays, revealing both tears in the social fabric and powerful – if often
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ephemeral – forms of communal solidarity.4 Building on the concept of “disaster as x-ray,” I argue that the local community’s fixation on fetal health in the wake of the accident crystallized larger cultural anxieties surrounding reproduction in the 1970s. These anxieties stemmed from the expansion of abortion rights, a heightened vigilance surrounding fetal health with the advent of new reproductive technologies, and the emergence of a pro-life discourse of fetal personhood in American political culture. At the same time, these apprehensions dovetailed with a question first raised by the 1945 dropping of the atomic bomb: what would be the fate of reproduction now that human beings had acquired the technological capa- city for self-annihilation and mutation? Prior to the crisis at Three Mile Island, that question had focused largely on atomic weaponry, but the accident raised the possibility that a power plant could mimic a bomb attack in its destructive effects. This chapter proceeds in three stages. I first trace the accident’s history, exploring how and why public fears about its radiological effects came to center on reproductive and fetal health. I then show how these fears endured in the years that followed, as local women, many of whom self- identified as conservative and Christian, borrowed from the antiabortion movement a “grammar of life” that they used to condemn the nuclear industry for prioritizing the profit motive over public safety. Finally, I contend that the accident brought into relief several intersecting features of the political culture of the second Cold War: the unstable relationship between atomic weapons and civilian nuclear power; the centrality of biological health and survival to conceptions of atomic citizenship; the significance of the figure of the unborn as a symbol of existential insecurity in the nuclear age; and the ways in which a “grammar of life” infused disparate movements in the 1970s and 1980s, thus blurring schematic distinctions between left and right.
The Building of Trust at TMI The TMI accident was never supposed to have happened. Throughout the 1960s the nuclear industry had waged an ambitious campaign to convince the public that nuclear technology was not only safe but also essentially accident-proof.5 In 1975 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) released the Rasmussen Report, which concluded that a citizen was more likely to be killed by a meteor than by a reactor accident.6 The report reflected a culture of overconfidence that had pervaded the industry in the years before the accident. As the NRC’s Director of Nuclear Reactor
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Regulation Harold Denton recalled, “Within the NRC, no one really thought you could have a core meltdown. It was more a Titanic sort of mentality. This plant was so well designed that you couldn’t possibly have serious core damage.”7 This institutional overconfidence trickled down to the local community near Three Mile Island, where the utility company Metropolitan Edison opened Unit 1 in 1974 and Unit 2 in 1978. Robert Reid, the mayor of nearby Middletown, remembered that in the years before the accident, “Everyone was assured by the federal government and by Met Ed that this plant was safe, and there would never be an accident.”8 The community’s trust in the plant was a product of the nuclear industry’s promotional efforts, but it also emerged out of the political economy of southcentral Pennsylvania. With an economy that combined agriculture with manu- facturing, tourism, and government, the Susquehanna Valley was made up of rural landscapes dotted with small towns. In contrast to other parts of the state, devastated by the precipitous decline of the steel indus- try, the area weathered the deindustrialization of the 1960s and 1970s.9 The largest city in the region, the state capital of Harrisburg, provided a steady source of government employment. Tourists flocked to the chocolate factory in Hershey and to the Pennsylvania Dutch Country. Lancaster County, located south of the reactor, had some of the richest farmland in the nation. Because of the diversity of the economy, the region had lower unemployment rates than the state as a whole, and its popula- tion size was stable. Still, just as in many parts of the industrial northeast, people in south- central Pennsylvania worried about whether the region could maintain its relevance as the country’s economic center of gravity shifted to the Sunbelt. In November 1964 the Department of Defense announced that it was closing Olmsted Air Force Base, a major employer. When Met Ed went public with its plans for Three Mile Island two years later, residents predicted that the plant would help to fill the void left by the closed base. Once in operation, the plant would be a modest employer, providing only about five hundred jobs. But in the short term, the plant required an army of builders and construction workers. The plant was also seen as a cleaner alternative to an old coal-fired plant in Middletown that dumped soot over the town’scarsandfrontporches.Inaddition,MetEd promoted the plant as an antidote to rising energy costs. Although the electricity produced by the plant was actually outsourced to other parts of the state, it directly benefited local residents by keeping utility costs down. Thus as an employer, a source of tax revenue, a nonpolluter, and
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a provider of low-cost electricity, the plant appeared to be a boon for the local community. The community’s faith in the plant could also be traced to the extent to which the area had remained largely – though not entirely – insulated from the social and political upheavals of the era. Dauphin County, where TMI was located, had a predominantly white, rural population.10 Many of the families that lived near the plant could trace their ancestry back to the German and Scots-Irish immigrants who had settled the region in the mid-eighteenth century. Susquehanna Valley was a Republican Party stronghold in the state, and the people who lived there were politically and socially conservative, possessing an already-paradoxical worldview that combined patriotism and respect for authority with suspicion toward “big national government.” One syndicated columnist went so far as to declare the region “the confidence in authority capital of the country.”11 Many local residents were also religious Christians. Dauphin County alone was home to one hundred and thirty Catholic, Evangelical Lutheran, and United Methodist congregations.12 Like any region domi- nated by conservatism, there were pockets of dissent. There had been some organized opposition to the Vietnam War in the cities of Lancaster and Harrisburg, as well as on the college campuses that dotted the region. But prior to the accident, the men and women who lived near the plant considered themselves patriots who were loath to question either the authority of the utility company or the effectiveness of government safe- guards regarding nuclear power. The community’s trust in the plant thus stemmed from several sources: an ambitious campaign to promote the safety of nuclear power, a hope that the plant would secure the region’s economic viability, and a homegrown conservatism that militated against any widespread antinuclear opposition.
The Accident and the Breakdown of Trust The first forty-eight hours of the accident were marked by confusion, as both the Governor’s office and the NRC struggled to gather information from Met Ed. Initially, the company had been overconfident in its state- ments about the accident, first reporting that there had been no rise in radiation outside the plant. But only hours later, the utility conceded that low levels of radioactive gases had been detected beyond the site boundary. When Met Ed’s Vice President Jack Herbein arrived at the plant on Wednesday morning, he told reporters that the problem was only a “minor fuel failure.”13 At a press conference later that afternoon,
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the state’s Lieutenant Governor William Scranton expressed growing frustration with the utility: “This situation is more complex than the company first led us to believe ... The company has given you and us conflicting information.”14 The confusion left some convinced that Met Ed had engaged in a cover-up. One reporter recalled, “The guys from Met Ed looked conniving, looked like people with something to hide. They had the look of Richard Nixon in ’74.”15 For the first time, local residents realized how dependent they were on the company for their safety, and Met Ed’s conduct had not been reassuring. As one man put it, “I believe that we as citizens have been lied to about many things that have happened.”16 A twenty-year-old folksinger who lived near the plant poked fun at Met Ed’s efforts to downplay the crisis, penning a song with the line, “We’re top of the news for the entire week, because of what they call a minor leak.”17 The Watergate scandal loomed over the crisis, as did the political thriller The China Syndrome,afilm released only twelve days before the accident whose plotline bore an uncanny resemblance to the unfolding drama at TMI. The film told the story of a reporter, cameraman, and plant operator who join forces to expose grave safety problems at a nuclear power plant whose owners are decep- tive, reckless, profit driven, and willing to resort to violence to hide the dangers. But if Met Ed had sustained the most serious damage to its credibility, the NRC had not emerged from the accident unscathed. The first days of the accident had been marked by communication problems between the state, the utility, and the federal agency, demonstrating just how weak the NRC was as a command center.18 TMI was, in the words of the NRC’s Harold Denton, “the most serious accident in the life of the reactor program,” and it had taken the commission by surprise.19 The combined causes of the crisis – mechanical malfunction, design flaws, and human error – had also exposed the NRC’s hubristic belief that advanced design could eliminate the possibility of a serious accident. As Denton later recalled, there had been a pervasive belief that machines could be so well designed that they “would not place a lot of demands on operators.”20 By shattering that belief, the crisis provided a paradigmatic example of what Charles Perrow has called “normal accidents”–accidents that emerge out of the multiple failures and vulnerabilities inherent in any complex technological system.21 More broadly, the accident had punctu- red a hole in the carefully cultivated image of nuclear power as a clean, sophisticated technology. One commissioner recalled her shock during a postaccident tour of the plant: “I was rather horrified to find we had
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these large pipes with rags around them and yellow markings on the floor which said ‘Contaminated Water.’ I had had an image of a high, clean technology that was well looked after and well run, and I found something that really, frankly, looked like the underside of a 100-year-old house that I once owned.”22 The accident also revealed something troubling about the post-1945 political order: the extent to which elected officials were dependent on unelected technological experts. From the time he learned of the accident, Governor Richard Thornburgh had sought to create what he called an “island of credibility” to which citizens could look for reliable advice.23 But this proved difficult. The poor communication between the utility and the state and federal agencies meant that Thornburgh was confronted with what he called a “kaleidoscope of signals.” In addition, TMI was emerging as the biggest news story of the year, and some media reports coming into the governor’s office were alarming. The problem, as Thornburgh later described it, was “sifting out fact from fiction, hyper- bole from analysis, cant from candor, and guesswork from solid reporting.”24 But the challenge of distinguishing between credible and erroneous information was compounded by the fact that the governor knew little about nuclear power. Prior to the accident, Thornburgh’s only source of information on the topic was a 1975 book called We Almost Lost Detroit, which detailed a 1966 accident at Fermi-1, the first com- mercial breeder reactor in the United States.25 Thus the three institutions most directly involved in the accident – the utility company, the NRC, and the governor’s office – all faced a series of distinct but overlapping challenges: Met Ed appeared unreliable, the NRC appeared unprepared, and the governor’s office appeared dangerously dependent on these compromised organizations for vital information. But underlying these challenges was something more elemental: no one could see inside the reactor core to assess the damage. Nuclear engineers could rely on instrumentation to gauge the core’s temperature and could analyze water samples to determine approximate radiation levels. But because both temperatures and radiation levels were so high within the core, the containment building was too dangerous for visual inspection. Indeed, it would not be until late July 1980 – almost sixteen months after the accident – that two engineers, clothed in protective gear, would enter the building to get their first look at the core.26 The accident thus con- stituted a crisis of visuality in which engineers, public officials, reporters, scientists, and the public were hungry for information about something that they could not see. The inability to see the evidence – that is, to see
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into the reactor – simultaneously intensified the public’s hunger for objec- tive knowledge and deepened their disappointment in official sources. The accident constituted a crisis of visuality in a second sense. The most serious threat posed by the accident – the release of large amounts of radioactive material into the environment – was not visible to the naked eye. Radiation defied sensory perception altogether. As one NRC official later recalled, “You can’t see radiation, you can’t smell it, you can’t feel it, you don’t know when it’s coming.”27 Unlike floods, fires, and earthquakes that upend the landscape and claim lives, the accident left behind no immediate destruction. This invisibility differentiated the technological crisis at TMI from two hurricanes that hit the region in 1972 and 1975 and flooded the Susquehanna River. Some residents equated the risks of living near a nuclear reactor with those of living near a flood-prone river, but most felt that the dangers posed by the plant were more frightening, in no small measure because the release of radiation provided them no visual or audible warnings. Its invisibility made the task of radiation monitoring especially urgent. Initially, it was Met Ed that was tracking radiation releases, but soon state and federal officials descended on the area. In the process, the land- scape of central Pennsylvania was transformed into the ground zero of the atomic age, and local residents had to confront the possibility that they had sustained radiation contamination. One reporter described the scene as something out of a science fiction story.28 Civil defense coordi- nators handed out yellow Geiger counters to volunteers. The FDA, Met Ed, and the NRC placed approximately two hundred thermal luminescent dosimeters within a twenty-mile radius of the plant. The Department of Energy sent up helicopters to take aerial measurements of radiation; respirators were shipped into the area for everyone coming and going from the Island. The NRC and the state’s Department of Health brought in portable detectors for the full-body scanning of local residents. Officials took samples of soil and milk from farms near the plant and tested them for iodine-131 (a radioactive isotope that can accumulate in the thyroid). Residents traveled to nearby Hershey Medical Center to have their thyroids checked. And the FDA ordered the shipment of 259,000 bottles of potassium iodide, which can block the thyroid’s absorption of iodine-131.29 The accident thus temporarily recast local residents as what anthro- pologist Adriana Petryna has called “biological citizens”–that is, citizens whose relationship to the state is mediated through either a potential or actual assault on health. Biological citizenship revolves around the need
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for information. In the first days of the accident, the men and women who lived near the plant had questions. Both the governor’s office and local radio stations were flooded with phone calls. Should people leave their homes? If they did leave, would they ever be able to come home? What were the symptoms of radiation sickness? If there were a meltdown, would the fallout be as bad as it was at Hiroshima? How long would food and water supplies be contaminated? Some callers wanted to know if the rumors circulating throughout the community were true: Would a meltdown render the area uninhabitable for one hundred years? Would people be able to retrieve money from their savings accounts? Had radia- tion contaminated the gasoline supply?30 The threat of radiation exposure confronted the governor with the essential task of protecting the citizens of central Pennsylvania from bodily injury. On midday Friday, March 30, Thornburgh issued an advi- sory urging (not requiring) all pregnant women and preschool-aged chil- dren within a five-mile radius of the plant to leave the area. He described the decision as a precautionary measure. Radiation monitoring indicated no imminent threat to public health, but if the situation deteriorated, those citizens deemed most vulnerable to radiation exposure – pregnant women, young children, and the unborn – would be outside the immediate vicinity of the plant. The advisory was premised on the scientific consen- sus that fetuses and young children were particularly susceptible to both the teratogenic and carcinogenic effects of radiation. Exposure to high levels of radiation could lead to fetal miscarriage, birth defects, mental retardation, and intrauterine growth retardation. In addition, fetuses and infants were at higher risk for radiation-induced cancers because their thyroid glands were more sensitive to the accumulation of iodine-131. By the late 1970s, these findings were well-established within the medical field, and in the early days of the accident, both scientists and state officials were reiterating them in the public sphere. The governor’s decision placed the reproductive female body, the child’s body, and the fetal body at the center of the TMI story. That decision, combined with extensive news coverage about radiation’s threats to the unborn, alarmed expectant mothers, who began calling local radio stations, state agencies, and hospitals to find out if their fetuses were in danger. The calls were so persistent that one regional NRC administrator quipped, “We have heard from every pregnant woman in the area.”31 Photojournalists documented young mothers and children leaving their homes. Appearing in newspapers and on television screens throughout the country, these images would take on an iconic status:
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mothers holding towels and blankets over their children’s faces in a makeshift effort to protect them from radiation exposure; pregnant women temporarily housed in the Hershey Center, one of the mass care centers established by the Red Cross; and mothers loading their children into station wagons and driving away, with the reactor’s towers omi- nously looming in the background. Why did reproductive female bodies, children’s bodies, and fetal bodies take on such a freighted symbolic role? At one level the reason is obvious: because Thornburgh had directed his advisory toward pregnant women and preschool-aged children, mothers and children were more likely to evacuate the area than men and thus assumed a more prominent role in news coverage.32 In addition, “mothers and children” have often figured prominently in news coverage of modern disasters, reflecting a chivalric ethic that calls for the protection of women and children over able-bodied men during states of emergency. But the bodies of the pregnant and the very young were not the only – or the most – vulnerable bodies throughout the TMI crisis. That distinction belonged to the (overwhelmingly male) operators and engineers at the plant, who were working around the clock as radiation levels inside the reactor soared. So it is worth asking: why some bodies and not others? Why the child’s body and not the worker’s body? Why the woman’s body and not the man’s body? The answer lies in the centrality of reproduction to perceptions of environmental risk. The bodies of mothers and young children have often been used to represent environmental risk, arguably because they capture what is most deeply at stake: the reproduction of the species.33 In the case of TMI, these bodies captured the high stakes of nuclear energy. But if the figure of the reproductive body spoke to the theme of risk, it spoke no less powerfully to the theme of protection. Although the vast majority of evacuees stayed with family and friends during the crisis, photographs of pregnant women and children camping out in the Hershey Center implied that the state was protecting those citizens most vulnerable to the radiation threat.34 As Thornburgh later recalled after touring the center, “This was a stark reminder of the responsibility of governing.” Walking through the stadium, he had seen “young children, mothers carrying babies, and their bewilderment and confusion over a technology they clearly didn’t understand, seeking reassurance that the situation had been handled.”35 The steady reproduction of images of expectant mothers, young children, and babies was thus double-edged: some images indicted the state for endangering public safety while others cast it as a vital agent of protection.
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Bodies at Risk Governor Thornburgh lifted the advisory on April 9, twelve days after the start of the accident. By then the hydrogen bubble had disappeared, temperatures in the core had gone down, and the reactor was in stable condition. But the accident shattered the trust that many residents had placed in the plant. Previously, they had trusted the experts to protect them from harm and had believed them when they had said that there would never be a serious accident at the reactor.36 As one woman looked back on her earlier choice to live near TMI, “I was trusting so I stayed. My faith outweighed my fear.”37 The accident tipped the scale in the other direction, with fear outweighing trust. This fear was often accompanied by a sense of betrayal. As one local woman explained the change, she had always had faith in government leaders, but “after this monster was released on us, all I have is cynicism and mistrust.”38 One father recalled that his children had been playing outside during those first two days, “sucking up radiation – just because those bastards didn’t tell the truth about releases.”39 Friday, March 30, was, as one woman put it, “the last day in my life I’ll ever trust the utility or our government to do the right thing for me.”40 At the heart of this collapse of trust was a single question: had local residents been exposed to levels of radiation that threatened their health? For officials, the answer was no. They were convinced that while radiation levels had soared inside the reactor’s containment building, they had never reached dangerous levels beyond the plant. The full body scanning of over seven hundred citizens had shown no internal contamination. The USDA and the FDA had found only a few minute traces of radiation in the hundreds of food samples they collected throughout April. The Department of Agriculture detected iodine-131 in only a small num- ber of the two hundred milk samples they had taken from nearby farms. The cumulative data was so reassuring that in May 1979 several federal agencies projected that, statistically, offsite radiation exposure would lead to “approximately one” case of fatal excess cancer and “approximately two” cases of excess health effects (including fatal cancer, nonfatal cancer, and genetic damage) among those living within fifty miles of the plant.41 The community’s response to these official findings ranged from accep- tance to skepticism to rejection. On one end of the spectrum were those residents who believed the findings, insisting that they were more likely to be killed by an oncoming car while crossing the street than by living near a nuclear power plant. On the other end were antinuclear activists who
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accused the government of whitewashing the event, contending that radiation exposures had been far worse than what officials were claiming.42 But most residents found themselves somewhere in the middle. Neither wholly dismissive of the radiation threat nor necessarily con- vinced of a sinister government cover-up, most believed something else: that no one was really sure of the accident’s long-term health effects. This uncertainty stemmed from several sources. First, it was a response to the dormant nature of radiation. Because radiation’s damaging effects could remain hidden in the body for decades, it was impossible to assess injury. Local residents thus found themselves confronting an ambiguity surrounding illness that conjured the experiences of veterans who had been exposed to chlorine gas during World War II and Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.43 Residents were caught between two contend- ing claims – those of Met Ed executives who insisted that no one had been harmed, and those of nuclear industry critics like Helen Caldicott, who pointed out that it is the “latency period that allows the industry to say no one died at Three Mile Island. We don’t expect anyone to have died yet.”44 Local residents attempted to chart a path between these two opposing interpretations, an attempt that was captured by the slogan that appeared on kitschy posters and T-shirts after the crisis: “I Survived TMI, I Think.”45 This uncertainty also reflected the lack of scientific consensus about the long-term health effects of low-dose radiation. While some scientists insisted that low levels of exposure posed little health risk, others were convinced that there was no safe threshold. As Harvard biologist George Wald explained at the time, “Every dose of radiation is an overdose. There is no threshold. A little ... radiation does a little harm, more of it does more harm.”46 Finally, the uncertainty was exacerbated by concerns over the state’s response to the accident. The governor’s advisory struck some residents as both inadequate and arbitrary. Why had the governor limited the order to pregnant women and preschool-aged children within the five-mile radius? What if you lived within the five-mile radius but had children who were six, seven, or eight? What if you lived six miles from the plant, but you were pregnant or had children under the age of five? Given the changing wind direction, how could the threat of radiation be contained within a five-mile radius at all? What about women who learned they were pregnant only after the accident? Many of these questions centered on fetal health. During the accident, while officials had been trying to gather credible information about plant conditions, pregnant women were trying to decide whether to have
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abortions. Local obstetricians later reported that throughout late March and early April they had been deluged by phone calls from pregnant women asking whether they should abort their fetuses.47 Although almost all pregnant women had evacuated the area by Friday afternoon (the third day of the accident), they feared that their fetuses had been endan- gered during the early days of the accident, when public officials had not yet grasped how bad plant conditions were. So pervasive were fears about fetal health that the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists and the American College of Radiology felt compelled to issue a joint news release on April 13 advising women in the TMI area not to terminate their pregnancies.48 These fears endured in the years after the crisis. In testimonies they provided at public hearings and in private letters to the Kemeny Commission (appointed by President Jimmy Carter to investigate the accident), local women expressed dread about the accident’s health con- sequences for future generations. Some mothers wondered whether their children would one day get radiation-induced cancer. A mother of an eight-year old boy recalled how her son had asked her if he was going to get cancer and die. “What do I tell him?” she wondered.49 Another mother had decided to have a second child because she wanted to ensure that her son would have a living sibling who could serve as a donor if he eventually developed cancer from the accident.50 Others focused on the accident’s teratogenic effects, fearful that their children had sustained latent genetic damage that might one day cause them to have “defective” babies of their own. One woman instructed her daughter to warn whom- ever she eventually married that she had lived near TMI at the time of the accident. “Isn’t it terrible,” she asked, “to have to worry about damage to unborn children from that monstrous plant?”51 Several women told the commission that the most searing aspect of the accident was the question that had been posed to them by their daughters in its wake: “Will I still have healthy, normal children someday?”52 The National Institute of Mental Health interviewed over three hundred mothers who lived near the plant and found that, despite official reassurances, over 40 per cent of them believed that the accident would cause health pro- blems in future generations.53 These fears about fetal injury harkened back to the radiation scares of the 1950s. By the mid-1950s, the National Academy of Sciences and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation – spurred on by growing public concern over radioactive fallout from weapons testing – were warning that human embryos were more
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susceptible to radiation damage than adults. These studies stressed that unlike somatic injuries, the genetic harms from radiation could stretch indefinitely into the future, ensnaring each successive generation in its web. Taking their cues from this insight, opponents of atomic testing placed the unborn at the center of their efforts to secure a ban. In May 1958 theologian, scientist, and activist Albert Schweitzer published an essay entitled “The Rights of the Unborn and the Peril Today,” in which he singled out radiation’s dormancy as its “most sinister aspect” precisely because of its repercussions on the unborn: “[Y]ears may pass before the evil consequences appear. Indeed, incipient injuries may man- ifest themselves, not in the first or second generations, but in the following cycles. Observers in generation after generation, for centuries to come, will witness the birth of ever-increasing numbers of children with mental and physical defects.”54 The threat of mutation – and the larger radiation scare of which it was a part – receded from public view after the signing of the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 (which halted above-ground testing). But the threat returned in the early 1970s as a burgeoning antinuclear movement insisted on “the malignant connection” between plants and bombs and warned that nuclear power plants emitted low-level radiation that endangered public health. The accident at TMI was thus a vivid dramatization of what activists had been arguing over the previous decade: in the dangers they posed, plants and bombs had more in common than the industry cared to admit. The preoccupation with fetal health during the TMI crisis resonated with the radiation scares of the 1950s, while simultaneously replacing the earlier Cold War specter of the mushroom cloud with a new ominous symbol: the cooling towers. This preoccupation also reflected the ways in which the fetus had been culturally and legally transformed over the prior three decades. Between 1946 and 1953, photographs of the developing fetus were featured in Newsweek, Time, and Life, allowing millions of Americans to visually comprehend it for the first time (previously, human fetuses had been displayed only at museums and world’s fairs). In 1946, the same year that Newsweek printed a photograph of a three-month old fetus, the District Court of the District of Columbia overturned six decades of legal precedent when it determined in the Bonbrest v. Kotz case that “a child en ventre sa mère is regarded as a human being from the moment of conception.”55 The atomic age facilitated the legal transformation: a 1959 volume entitled Atoms and the Law devoted over twenty pages to radiation and prenatal injury. And scientific findings about fetal injury
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sustained at Hiroshima and Nagasaki cast the fetus as vulnerable to external dangers; indeed, the Hibakusha – the Japanese term for the community of bombing victims – included babies who were in utero at the time of the explosions. The postwar cultural, scientific, and legal construction of the fetus, in other words, emerged in a distinctly atomic world. Writes historian Sara Dubow, “[A]tomic sciences and the science of embryology became at least loosely linked in the public imagination.”56 This rendering of the fetus as both visible and vulnerable intensified in the years leading up to the accident. In the early 1960s, ultrasound exams were introduced as a routine obstetrics practice. In April 1965 Life magazine published a sixteen-page photo-essay by Swedish medi- cal photographer Lennart Nilsson that charted the development of the human fetus. The issue sold eight million copies in its first four days on newsstands.57 In 1973 the University of Washington first identified “Fetal Alcohol Syndrome” as a cluster of physical and mental birth defects associated with the expectant mother’sconsumptionofalcohol, and in 1981 the Surgeon General issued its first official warning about the risks of drinking alcohol during pregnancy.58 In 1977 the American Cancer Society used fetal sonogram images to reinforce the idea that smoking endangered public health.59 These transformations in medi- cine, reproductive technology, and public health policy had the cumu- lative effect of casting the human fetus in a historically new light: as a vulnerable body requiring vigilant protection from a range of exter- nal assaults. If the nuclear reactor at TMI was concealed from view, the human fetus occupied the inverse position: hiding in plain sight. During the same period, the struggle over abortion assumed a promi- nent place in American political culture, and nowhere more so than in central Pennsylvania. As early as 1969 local activists in Pittsburgh started People Concerned for the Unborn Child, the state’s first pro-life group. In 1970 the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference launched Pennsylvanians for Human Life, an educational group designed to rally support for abortion restrictions. By the early 1980sseveralorganiza- tions had come together to form the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation, astateaffiliate of the National Right to Life committee. Together, these groups put the state on the vanguard of the fight to outlaw abortion. This was more than a legislative battle; it was a struggle over the question of what constitutes life itself. Activistscultivatedapro-life discourse that put a premium on the preservation of human life from the moment of conception to natural death. This discourse emerged in tandem with the heightened visibility of the fetus. Abortion opponents believed that if the
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fetus could be seen, it could be saved. As one popular pro-life slogan put it, “If there were a window on a pregnant woman’s stomach, there would be no more abortions.”60 Also shaping this discourse was the doctrine of the Catholic Church, the single largest religious body in the state. The state’smainCatholicorganizationadoptedtheSecondVatican Council’s 1965 definition of abortion as the functional equivalent of infanticide. Vatican II contended that human life began at conception, placing that question at the center oftheabortionissueanddispensing with earlier condemnations of the practice on the grounds that it con- cealed sexual transgression.61 Throughout Pennsylvania, antiabortion activists fought to gain a discursive monopoly over a term that appeared to transcend politics altogether. How did the abortion fight shape the community’s response to the accident? Throughout their many letters and testimonies to the Kemeny Commission, local women made no explicit references to the contempora- neous political struggle over abortion. Yet they lived in the midst of it: central Pennsylvania was ground zero of the state’s abortion wars, in part because activists traveled to Harrisburg to protest on the steps of the capitol building and to meet with legislators. The three largest religious denominations in the region all condemned abortion to varying degrees, and the area’s conservative activists were fighting to make abortion a centerpiece of the Republican Party’s agenda. At the same time, it would be wrong to assume that the women who lived near TMI had a consistent position on abortion, especially if one believes obstetricians’ reports that their offices were deluged with phone calls from pregnant women who were considering the procedure after the accident. Indeed, the most direct allusion to an explicitly “pro-life” position during the crisis came from Governor Thornburgh, who appeared on television on April 6 and spoke directly to evacuees: “It’s not easy for a child-bearing young woman to pack up her belongings, in a rush of fear, and move to the floor of a stadium during the most anxious month of her life. Not all the comfort in the world can erase that memory from this woman’s consciousness – nor perhaps even that of her unborn son or daughter.”62 The statement advances a concept of fetal personhood through its remark- able depiction of the unborn as an active subject capable of memory. What is clear is that local women drew upon the pro-life movement – its religious inflection, its valorization of motherhood and reproduction, and its grammar of sanctified human life – in order to condemn the nuclear industry for endangering public health. As one woman who had been pregnant at the time of the crisis explained it, “I never carried a picket sign
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in my life, but TMI has become my cause.” She had come to believe that at the time of the accident, her unborn baby had been imperiled by an industry that was reckless and profit-driven. “Growing inside me was God’s most precious gift,” she recalled, “while growing outside was an industry concerned with profits. I’m motivated now by a concern for the health and safety of others.”63 Her statement evokes what anthropologist Faye Ginsburg has identified as a central pro-life motif: “the violation of the boundary of the impregnated womb by male figures representing the profit motive.”64 Local women insisted that their burgeoning opposition to nuclear power was an extension of – rather than departure from – their Christianity. One woman from Lancaster traveled with her family to Washington, DC, in May 1979 to protest nuclear power: “I have two wonderful children. Jessica is thirteen, and Rick is fifteen. We all marched together in Washington DC in the antinuclear rally. We are a family who shares a belief in God. We feel we are taking a Christian stand on the issue of nuclear power.”65 Another local woman who attended the same march told the commission that this was her first time participating in a political protest: “I marched, as a mother for my children’s children; as an American citizen, because I love America and I would like to see it stop poisoning the land, air, water, animals, etc., by the whole nuclear power cycle; [and] as a Christian, because it is spiritually and morally wrong.”66 A dairy farmer testified at a public hearing that several women who lived near the plant had told her that they were afraid to have children after the accident: “This, to me, is a horrible situation, because I am a woman. I have four children and I know what it means and how a woman feels to reproduce. This is the highest achievement and to be denied this achieve- ment, to me, is a horrendous prospect.”67 These responses combined a dawning awareness of the nuclear threat with a heightened cultural anxiety surrounding the disposability of human bodies. As historian Bethany Moreton observed, the rise of the conservative Christian right during the 1970s was haunted by the image of “vulnerable human life tossed out as refuse.”“Jerry Falwell’s account of his awakening to an active pro-life position,” Moreton writes, “invokes a dumpster in Los Angeles overflowing with the dismembered remains of 1,700 fetal bodies and a trash incinerator in Wichita sending up hundreds more in smoke, like the victims of Auschwitz.”68 This image of vulnerable, disposable human life had its corollary on the political left, and nowhere more so than in the antinuclear movement. There, too, the image of imperiled young life loomed large. Babies and young children served as paradigmatic radiation victims in the movement’s most widely circulated
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posters and signs, and its most prominent spokesperson, Helen Caldicott, carried a baby casket at marches to symbolize the nuclear threat.69 The specter of endangered young life thus established an affinity between two social movements that appeared to occupy divergent ends of the political spectrum: the pro-life and antinuclear movements. The affinity was borne out organizationally and in the lives of activists, as well: an antinuclear pacifist group called Pro-Lifers for Survival was founded in 1971, and the US Conference of Catholic Bishops later linked its support of human life to the nuclear freeze movement. Meanwhile, pacif- ists like Daniel and Philip Berrigan condemned abortion as a form of state-sanctioned murder (Daniel Berrigan even blockaded a Planned Parenthood clinic in Rochester, New York).70 Animating both the pro-life and antinuclear movements, then, was an anxiety that human bodies could be rendered disposable by the state. This was an anxiety that attended all modern wars and that deepened after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But for many Americans, it was the Vietnam War that brought it home. Southcentral Pennsylvania was no hotbed of antiwar mobilization, but its residents – like other citizens throughout both the United States and the globe – had watched as the war seemed to remake bodies into fodder. They had seen Buddhist monks burn themselves alive to condemn the war, college-age protesters on American campuses shot down by the National Guard, Vietnamese men, women, and children massacred in a conflict that obliterated the distinction between soldiers and civilians, and young soldiers brought home in body bags. All the while, they observed a growing disconnect between the official story about the war and its actual progression. Two core insights emerged out of the Vietnam disaster: the government could deceive its own people, and patriots could be rendered disposable. The accident rerouted these insights from the foreign to the domestic realm, from the war front to the home front, and from the martial, mascu- line body to the bodies of pregnant women, the young, and the unborn. Riffing on the antiwar term “cannon fodder,” TMI residents feared they had been remade into the “radiation fodder” of the nuclear age. This was the community’s deepest fear: that its members had been used as “guinea pigs” in a nuclear experiment. Residents feared that their bodies and those of their offspring had been made expendable by a lethal collaboration between a reckless utility company and an ineffec- tual state. They feared that theirs had become – to borrow a phrase from sociologist Eric Klinenberg –“bodies that don’t matter.”71 This theme of human expendability was linked to the imperiled fate of the unborn, as in
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the testimony of one man who told public officials that TMI should be shut down because “an unborn child is more important than those towers over there.”72 But it was also sometimes cast in terms of a broader devaluation of human life. “We can buy other forms of energy,” one woman told local legislators, “but where are we going to buy a human life?”73 If nuclear power continued to spread, another wrote to the Kemeny Commission, then “we are as expendable as German Jews.”74 This theme of human expendability was not new in US history. For those subaltern groups who had been subjected to enslavement, dispossession, forced relocation, and racial violence, it was all too familiar. And the theme was especially acute for African American and Native American women who historically had been subjected to forced sterilization campaigns.75 But it was something of a revelation for a community that prided itself on its loyalty to the nation, and wanted to believe, in turn, that its members’ lives were valued by the state. “I love my country and have tried to show my children how wonderful their country is,” one woman told the commission. She always cried when she heard “God Bless America,” she wrote them. “Don’t make me cry for a different reason as I continue to hear it.”76 The accident at TMI was more than a technological crisis. It was also a political and cultural crisis that raised elemental questions about whether citizens could trust the state to protect them from harm. The accident transformed the largely white, conservative population of central Pennsylvania into biological citizens, and the specific constellation of threats posed by radiation – coupled with the state’s response – located reproductive and fetal health at the center of this new citizenship mode. By placing the right to life itself – what Adriana Petryna has called “the superadded burden of survival”77 – at the heart of citizenship, the accident drew local women into the center of a political struggle, not only over the fate of TMI but also over the future of nuclear power. This marked a departure for many residents who had seen themselves as immune from the social upheavals of the era. Ultimately, the TMI story demands that scholars move their analysis of a “politics of life” beyond the abortion fight and consider it within the context of the second Cold War. The image of an endangered fetus was a distinct creation of the atomic age that revealed the existential insecurity at the heart of the Cold War nation. And while this image proved politi- cally polarizing within the context of the struggle over abortion, at Three Mile Island it had the opposite effect. It compelled local men and women to engage in protest and provisionally ally with the antinuclear movement,
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even while retaining their identities as conservatives. In the process, they questioned a Cold War logic that drew a sharp boundary between power plants and bombs and punctured the fantasy on which that boundary had long relied: that in a nuclear world, American civilians would magically be inoculated against radiological dangers.
Notes
1. On the accident, see J. Samuel Walker, Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective (Berkeley, 2004); and John Kemeny, Accident at Three Mile Island: The Need for Change, The Legacy of TMI (Oxford, 1979). 2. On the history of atomic weapons testing and the radiation scares of the 1950s, see Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994), Fallout: A Historian Reflects on America’s Half-Century Encounter with Nuclear Weapons (Columbus, OH, 1998), and “From Activism to Apathy: The American People and Nuclear Weapons, 1963–1980,” Journal of American History 70:4 (March 1984): 821–44; Robert A. Divine, Blowing on the Wind: The Nuclear Test Ban Debate, 1954–1960 (Oxford, 1978); Milton Katz, Ban the Bomb: A History of SANE, 1957–1985 (Westport, CT, 1986); and Joseph Masco, Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post–Cold War New Mexico (Princeton, 2006), 43–98; and Spencer Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, 1988). 3. On the significance of pregnant women as symbols of environmental risk, see Finis Dunaway, “Gas Masks, Pogo, and the Ecological Indian: Earth Day and the Visual Politics of American Environmentalism,” American Quarterly (Mar. 2008): 67–99. See also Dunaway, Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of Environmental Images (Chicago, 2015). 4. For studies that show how disasters expose social fraying, see Kai Erikson, A New Species of Trouble: Explorations in Disaster, Trauma, and Community (New York, 1994); and Eric Klinenberg, Heatwave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (Chicago, 2002). For a recent study that foregrounds disaster’s communitarian dimensions, see Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York, 2009). 5. Weart, Nuclear Fear, 299. 6. On the Rasmussen Report, see ibid., 335. 7. Quoted in Lee Clarke, Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination (Chicago, 2005), 43. 8. Select Committee’s Report of the Hearings Concerning TMI, Statement by Mayor Robert Reid, Goldsboro Fire Hall, Public Meeting, Jun. 6, 1979, Box 199, Folder 13, Richard Thornburgh Papers, Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library. Hereafter referred to as RT Papers.
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9. On the transformation of the industrial rustbelt, see Judith Stein, Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Decline, and the Decline of Liberalism (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998); Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven, 2010). 10. Dauphin County was almost 85 percent white. See US Census of Population and Housing: 1980 Census Tracts, Harrisburg-Hickory. 11. Robert Del Tredici, The People of Three Mile Island (San Francisco, 1980), 64. 12.AssociationofReligiousDataArchives,http://www.thearda.com /mapsReports/reports/counties/42043_1980.asp (accessed Mar. 26, 2010). 13. Transcript of Press Conference, Mar. 28, 1979, 4:30 pm. Statement by William Scranton, Box 194, Folder One, RT Papers. 14. See Walker, Three Mile Island, 80–84; See Transcript, Press Conference, William Scranton, Incident at TMI, Mar. 28, 1979, 4:30 pm, Folder One, Box 194, RT Papers. 15. Both of these quotes come from Public Information Task Force Interview of Reporters, Interviews with Roger Witherspoon and Curtis Wilkie, Box 472, unnamed folders, RG 220, National Archives II, University of Maryland at College Park. Hereafter referred to as NA II. 16. Letter from Carlton Walls to Health Resources Planning and Development, Box 307, unfiled, RG 220, NA II. 17. Letter from Thomas Busch to Health Resource Planning and Development, Box 307, unfiled, RG 220. Song comes from Gary Punch, “TMI Fallout: Trust in Officials Collapse,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Apr. 19, 1979. 18. See Walker, Three Mile Island. 19. Transcript, Press Conference, Mar. 30, 1979, 10 pm, Part 2, p. 1A, Box 194, Folder 3, RT Papers. 20. “Report by the Democratic Members of the TMI Committee,” Pennsylvania House of Representatives, p. 48, Box 334, Folder 11, RT Papers. 21. See Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies (New York, 1984). 22. Report of the Presidential Commission on the Three Mile Island Accident, Joint Hearing before the Subcommittee on Nuclear Regulation of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, U.S. Senate and the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, House of Representatives, Congress, Ninety-Sixth Congress, Oct. 31, 1979 (Washington, DC, 1980), 20. 23. Transcript of Proceedings, Commission, p. 47, Box 198, Folder 3, RT Papers. 24. Prepared statement by Richard Thornburgh, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Natural Resources and the Environment, the Committee on Science and Technology, US House of Representatives, Ninety-Sixth Congress, Jun. 2, 1979, pp. 49–50, RT Papers. 25. Deposition of Richard Thornburgh, p. 25, Box 30, unfiled, RG 220, NA II. 26. See Walker, Three Mile Island, 228.
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27. Transcript of Kemeny Commission Interview with Karl Abraham, p. 73, Box 466, RG 220, NA II. 28. Interview with Curtus Wilkie, Public Information Task Force Interview of Reporters, Box 472, unnamed folder, RG 220, NA II. 29. On these measures, see the Washington Post Special Report, Box 200, Folder 1, RT Papers; Box 194, Folder 1, RT Papers; Box 194, Folder 16, RT Papers. See also “Population Dose and Health Impact of the Accident at the TMI Nuclear Station,” Box 194, Folder 19, RT Papers. 30. Interview with Tate, Public Information Task Force Interviews of Reporters, p. 2, Box 472, unnamed folder, RG 220, NA II. 31. Ibid, 107. 32. “The Social and Economic Effects of the Accident at TMI: Findings to Date,” prepared for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Box 197, Folder 1, RT Papers. 33. Dunaway, “Gas Masks, Pogo, and the Ecological Indian.” 34. For several examples, see Washington Post Special Report. 35. Quoted in Walker, Three Mile Island, 156. 36. “Neighbors Find TMI a Strain,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Dec. 8, 1982; “TMI Still Frightens Neighbors,” Pittsburgh Press, Mar. 28, 1982; “Fears Caused by Three Mile Island Endure,” New York Times, Nov. 11, 1982. 37. “TMI: Anxiety, Apathy Live Side by Side at Middletown,” Pittsburgh Press, Mar. 25, 1984. 38. Letter from Charlotte Drennen to Kemeny Commission, May 24, 1979, Box 307, unfiled, RG 220, NA II. 39. Quoted in Edward J. Walsh, Democracy in the Shadows: Citizen Mobilization in the Wake of the Accident at Three Mile Island (New York, 1988), 39. 40. Ibid., 47. 41. Walker, Three Mile Island, 207. 42. Ibid., 207. 43. Evelyn Bromet et al., “Three Mile Island: Mental Health Findings,” Department of Health and Human Services, National Institute of Mental Health and the Disaster Assistance and Emergency Mental Health Section, Oct. 1980. Box 218, Folder 12, RT Papers. 44. Transcript, National Nuclear Debate, Pennsylvania State University Capitol Complex, Box 197, Folder 5, RT Papers. 45. See Washington Post Special Report. 46. CBS morning news transcript, Mar. 30, 1979,Box194,Folder3,RT Papers. 47. “Pennsylvania’s Governor Says Area Is Now Safe for Pregnant Women,” New York Times, Apr. 10, 1979; on Three Mile Island Action Alert, see Public Hearing Statement of Michael Klinger, May 24, 1979, Box 307, unnamed folder, RG 220, NA II.
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48. Press Release from American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologist, Apr. 13, 1979, Box 7, unnamed folder, RG 220, NA II. 49. Testimony of Ms. Dominoski, Public hearing, Health Resource Planning and Development, May 24, 1979, Box 307, unnamed folder, RG 220, NA II. 50. Letter from Mitchell Rogovin, Director, NRC/TMI Special Inquiry Group to NRC Chairmen Hendrie, Gilinsky, Kennedy, Bradford, and Ahearne, November 15, 1979, Box 200, Folder 10, RT Papers. 51. Quoted in Walsh, Democracy in the Shadows, 39. 52. See, for examples, letters to commission from Nikki Naumann and Mary M. Wertman, Box 307, unnamed folder, RG 220, NA II. 53. “TMI Mothers Anxiety Still above Normal,” Harrisburg Evening News, Nov. 12, 1982. 54. Albert Schweitzer, “The Rights of the Unborn and the Peril Today: Statement with Reference to the Present Nuclear Crisis in the World” (Chicago, 1958). 55. The case centered on Bette Gay Bonbrest, a girl born in 1939 who had sustained serious injuries during her delivery by forceps. Her father sued the obstetrician for negligence, and the court ruled in her favor, establishing, in historian Sara Dubow’swords,“the right of a child to recover from harm incurred when it was a viable fetus in utero.” The case overturned six decades of legal precedent and was quickly emulated by other courts: by 1960 (only fourteen years later) eighteen states had followed suit by awarding damages for prenatal injury. 56. Sara Dubow, Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America (New York, 2011), 52. 57. The publication of the magazine in Life was timed to come out around the time of Nillson’s book A Child Is Born. On the growing visibility of the fetus during this period, see again Dubow, Ourselves Unborn. 58. “The Weighty Responsibility of Drinking for Two,” New York Times, Nov. 29, 2006. 59. Laury Oaks, “Smoke Filled Wombs and Fragile Fetuses: The Social Politics of Fetal Representation,” Signs 26, no. 1 (autumn 2000): 63–108. 60. Quoted in Faye Ginsburg, Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (Berkeley, 1988), 104. 61. Mary Segers and Timothy Byrnes, Abortion Politics in American States (New York, 1995). 62. Televised Address of Richard Thornburgh, Apr. 6, 1979, Box 194, Folder 10, RT Papers, Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh. 63. “TMI: Anxiety, Apathy Live Side by Side at Middletown,” Pittsburgh Press, Mar. 25, 1984. 64. Ginsburg, Contested Lives, 9. 65. Letter from Charlotte Dennan to Kemeny Commission, Lancaster, PA, RG 220, Box 307, unfiled, NA II. 66. Letter from Carolyn Walborn to Barb Jorgensen, Jun. 14, 1979, Box 7, unnamed folder, RG 220, NA-II.
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67. Testimony of Jane Lee, Public Hearings on the Personal Health Effects of the Three Mile Island Accident, New Cumberland, PA, 24 May 1979, Box 307, unfiled, RG 220, NA II. 68. Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, 2010), 120. 69. “Helen Caldicott’s Many Lives: Pediatrician, Mother, Activist,” New York Times, May 25, 1979. 70. On Pro-Lifers for Survival and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, see Ginsburg, Contested Lives, 45, 263. On the Berrigans, see Murray Polner and Jim O’Grady, Disarmed and Dangerous: The Radical Lives and Times of Daniel and Philip Berrigan (New York, 1998), 344. 71. Eric Klinenberg, “Bodies That Don’t Matter: Death and Dereliction in Chicago,” Body & Society 7, no. 2–3 (2001): 121–36. 72. Public Hearing, Middletown, Pennsylvania, May 22, 1979, Box 9, unnamed folder, RG 220, NA II. 73. Walsh, Democracy in the Shadows, 58. 74. Letter to commission from Mary Wertman, May 20, 1979, Box 7, unnamed folder, RG 220, NA II. 75. On the histories of forced sterilization campaigns in communities of color, see Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley, 2002); Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (Minneapolis, 2011); Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (London, 2010); Lori Umansky, Motherhood Reconceived: Feminism and the Legacies of the 1960s (New York, 1996). 76. Letter to commission from Mary Wertman, May 20, 1979, Box 7, unnamed folder, RG 220, NA II. 77. Adriana Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl (Princeton, 2002), 261.
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Missile Bases as Concentration Camps The Role of National Socialism, the Second World War, and the Holocaust in the West German Discourse on Nuclear Armament
Eckart Conze
At the beginning of June 1983, when the controversy about the imple- mentation of NATO’s Double-Track Decision on nuclear armament was approaching its climax, the German weekly Der Spiegel interviewed two leading members of the German Green Party: Otto Schily and Joschka Fischer, who had been elected to the German Bundestag three months earlier.1 At the heart of the interview was the Green Party’s and the German peace movement’s protest against the deployment of US medium- range nuclear missiles on European – and German – ground. In the inter- view, the two politicians discussed not only the protest’s legitimacy but also the legality of various forms of protest including the blockade of military facilities. Schily and Fischer referred to Article 20 of the German Constitution and to the right of resistance it granted to German citizens. Confronted with the argument that the purpose of this constitutional article was to protect the democratic system and that its meaning could be understood only against the historical background of Nazism and the Holocaust, Schily replied, “When Europe is approaching nuclear war, we are facing a nuclear holocaust. For this reason, nonviolent resistance is justified.” And Joschka Fischer added, “We should certainly be careful not to relativize the singularity of the Nazi crimes against the Jewish people by constructing simple analogies. But I find it morally terrifying that within the systemic logic of modernity [Systemlogik der Moderne] there is obviously, even after Auschwitz, no taboo against further preparing for mass annihilation – this time not driven by an ideology of race, but along the lines of the East-West conflict.”2 Two weeks after this interview, the German Bundestag debated the deployment of nuclear weapons. Heiner Geißler, Minister for Youth,
79
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Family, and Health in the Kohl government and Secretary General of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), took up the Spiegel statements and launched a massive attack especially against Fischer: “It is a confu- sion of language and a confusion of thinking to bring together the mass annihilation at Auschwitz on the one hand and the necessary and legitimate defense of a liberal-democratic state’s nuclear deterrence on the other.” And he went on: “It was the pacifism of the 1930s, which in its moral claim [gesinnungsethische Begründung] was very similar to today’s pacifism, it was the pacifism of the 1930s that made Auschwitz possible.”3 It is not surprising that Geißler’s statement sparked an enormous controversy that did not remain confined to the German parliament. Members of the peace movement and opponents of NATO’s nuclear armament objected to more than just the CDU politi- cian’s insinuation that the interwar pacifist movement contributed to the Holocaust. They themselves felt connected to the murder of the European Jews. As to why Geißler had made such an argument, they had a clear answer. They accused the minister and the governing parties of pursuing a “reinterpretation of German history, because [otherwise] the memory of German crimes and German war creates and strengthens a critical potential in the population against armament and a policy of confrontation.”4 This essay puts references to National Socialism (NS) in general and to the Holocaust in particular as they were used in the years around 1980 within the broader context of the practice of using history, and especially the history of the Third Reich, to help build political arguments in West Germany after 1945. During the 1950s German political rhetoric was full of such references, and the West German peace movement of those years made no exception.5 However, the intensity, the content, and the intention of such references changed over the years and decades. I analyze this change and identify patterns of NS-related historical references used in the debate about nuclear armament around 1980. How can we relate the use of historical arguments to broader developments of remem- bering the history of National Socialism, the Second World War, and the Holocaust? I consider the years around 1980 as an “experimental phase” for a new way of using the German past, not only as a rhetorical strategy but also as a foundation for a political argument of enormous power, a process that did not remain limited to Germany alone, although the focus here is on the German case. It is part of this essay’s argument that the 1980s NS and Holocaust references by the peace movement can be understood only as an expression of a broader perception of modernity in
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which the Holocaust analogy fitted just as well the use of nuclear weapons or even the threat of nuclear annihilation.
Lessons from History In the Federal Republic, the history of the Third Reich has been playing an important part in various political debates since 1949, and in many cases these historical references went far beyond a purely normative dissociation.6 References to National Socialism, to the Second World War, and the Holocaust helped form arguments to substantiate and to legitimize political positions. But they were also used to discredit positions of political opponents. Obviously, there was an expectation that the use of arguments related to National Socialism would have a useful political effect. This expectation was based on the central significance of National Socialism and, increasingly over time, the Holocaust within and for the Federal Republic’s political culture.7 The German constitution, the Grundgesetz, did not only draw lessons from the failure and the destruc- tion of the Weimar Republic, but also erected barriers against political extremism, totalitarian ideologies, and policies of war and genocide. Especially in the Federal Republic’s early decades, a political and social anticommunism against the background of the Cold War, the division of Germany, and the competition between two German political systems contributed to a permanent recalling of National Socialism. This was further enhanced by the paradigm of totalitarianism, whose effects were not limited to academic discourses but extended into the realm of politics. Lessons of history were also drawn in the field of foreign and security policy. It is not surprising that in the controversy about West German rearmament during the 1950s, the opponents of remilitarization bolstered their arguments with references to the Second World War, to past German aggressions, and to the German occupation of many European countries. Didn’t this history of war and violence constitute a moral and political imperative not only for peace in general but also, more specifically, for a renunciation of German armed forces, of a “new Wehrmacht” as these armed forces were called at the time? When, a few years later, the build-up of the Bundeswehr had been agreed upon, its internal structure was developed in order to democratize the new forces. The two principles of Innere Führung (leadership development and civic education) and Staatsbürger in Uniform (citizen in uniform), which governed this process during the 1950s, were conceived and presented in clear dissociation both from the Weimar Republic’s Reichswehr and the Third Reich’s
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Wehrmacht.8 When at the end of the 1950s the Bundeswehr’s equipment with nuclear delivery systems became the rallying cry for a West German peace movement, this movement justified its campaign Kampf dem Atomtod (fighting atomic death) by reminding the public of the experi- ences of National Socialism. In the eyes of the pacifists, a future nuclear war, which the movement wanted to prevent, was not to be separated from the “memory of the past catastrophe,” that being the Second World War.9 The philosopher Günther Anders, one of the leading intellectuals in the camp of the opponents of nuclear armament, called the atomic threat “totalitarian,” because it would turn “the earth into a concentra- tion camp without escape.”10 During the 1960s, political references to National Socialism were con- nected not only with political but also generational conflicts. The student movement, influenced by ideas of the “New Left,” linked capitalism with fascism and, for example, explained the rise of National Socialism with the interests and political actions of German big business. This, however, was not a merely historical debate; it was a view of history aiming to correct present conditions. When in 1967/68 West Germans discussed the introduction of emergency laws into the constitution, references to the Third Reich were omnipresent. Some of its adversaries compared the emergency laws with the Nazi Ermächtigungsgesetz (Empowerment Act) of 1933. They warned about an executive without control and called the laws, adopted by the Bundestag in 1968, “NS laws” (with “NS” standing for both Notstand [emergency] and National Socialism). In broader terms, the political and social debates rising from the student movement of 1968 took place within a framework of assessment and interpretation full of references to National Socialism – and the unrest was deepened by generational conflict, which in Germany during the 1960s was shaped decisively by the question of the older generation’s Nazi past (in many cases the generation of the activists’ parents) and the political, social, and moral deficits in dealing, individually and collec- tively, with this past after 1945.11 Both the environmental movement and, despite its older tradition, the peace movement developed from the student activism of the 1960s. Given the two groups’ connections with 1968, both politically and in terms of the people who supported them, it is hardly astonishing that references to National Socialism were an integral part of their antinuclear positions. But this alone cannot explain why references to National Socialism figured so prominently in the debate about nuclear weapons and nuclear arma- ment in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Members of the peace movement
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and opponents of nuclear weapons were not the only ones trying to substantiate their own position and justify its political and moral ade- quacy by referring to National Socialism; those supporting the deploy- ment of new nuclear missiles also referred to the history of National Socialism, even if only to repudiate the peace movement and its objectives. “We are warning against the use of historical examples taken from the National Socialist dictatorship as a weapon on the political battlefield,” the Council of the Protestant Churches in Germany (EKD) stressed in a “Word on the Occasion of 30 January 1983.”12 The Bundestag debate in June of that same year, in which Heiner Geißler linked the pacifism of the 1930s to the Holocaust, shows that the EKD’s admonition had no effect. But why was it that in the debate about nuclear armament different actors in different ways kept referring to National Socialism and, parti- cularly, to the Holocaust? To answer this question, it is necessary to present and to categorize the different variations of these historical references.
Appeasement and Pacifism of the 1930s The use of history as an arsenal of political arguments on both sides of the nuclear issue was not limited to the years 1933 to 1945. When in 1982 the 150th anniversary of the Hambacher Fest (1832), a protest rally for a liberal German nation-state, was approaching, the Evangelische Studentengemeinde (Community of Protestant Students) argued in favor of linking the peace protest to the tradition of this historical gathering of the German liberal movement, and it stressed “the parallels in fighting policies suppressing the will of the people.”13 At the end of the 1970s, the Aktion Sühnezeichen/Friedensdienste (hereafter Action Sign of Atonement/Peace Services) already had remembered the period preceding the revolution of 1848, and they used Ferdinand Freiligrath’s song “Trotz alledem” (literally translated as “In Spite of Everything”) written over a century ago, as a protest song, even adding a few topical verses.14 Other points of reference for historically minded political leaders and activists were the events surrounding the German Kaiserreich (1871–1918), its foreign policy, and the origins of the First World War. To explain the Federal Republic’s obligation to implement NATO’s Double-Track Decision, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, for example, time and again pre- sented West Germany’s firm integration into the Western alliance and the primacy of alliance solidarity as central requirements of West German foreign policy. He kept warning about German isolation and self-isolation.
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But while Schmidt was evoking the “danger of a reversed German Wilhelminism,”15 the chancellor’s policy reminded his opponents of the dynamics of armament before 1914, which, in their view, had inevitably led to war.16 Had not “all attempts to create peace through armament and deterrence” failed? asked Jutta Ditfurth, a leading member of the Green Party.17 If in 1914 atomic weapons had existed, their deterring effect would have prevented the war, others argued. Political and military decision- makers accorded atomic weapons the power to determine outcomes – as if the very presence of such arms served as a crystal ball in which to foresee the future, a future of nuclear destruction and global devastation. This in turn would prevent leaders from starting a war.18 The argument for the necessity of deterring a potential aggressor was, albeit in a different way, also used with regard to the Second World War and to Nazi Germany’s expansionist and bellicose policies prior to 1939. Had not military weakness and a lack of preparedness to go to war encouraged Hitler in his course? In the 1950s and 1960s, the outcome of the policy of appeasement in the 1930s had been a standard reference used in Western political arguments. When West Germans appealed to US politicians to remain firm vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, for example, in the Berlin question, they were referring quite often to the failure of appeasement. A few days after the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, German students sent an umbrella to President John F. Kennedy: “the symbol of a failed policy” as they pointed out in the accompanying note.19 At the beginning of the 1980s such argumentation, as used by the supporters of NATO’s nuclear plan, changed – or rather, it widened in two directions. First, it was no longer just aiming at government policies, but at the social foundations of these policies and the role of pacifism and peace movements in politics and society. Weeks before Heiner Geißler’s speech in the Bundestag, Alois Mertes, a CDU foreign policy expert, had already stressed, “the great extent to which peace movements and uni- lateral tendencies of disarmament during the 1930s had led to miscalcula- tions on Hitler’s part and that those positions were at least in part responsible for the Second World War.”20 These were arguments that had already been used – more than twenty years before – by the CDU’s Protestant working group (Evangelischer Arbeitskreis) to dissociate itself from the campaign “Kampf dem Atomtod” [Fighting Nuclear Death] of the late 1950s.21 Whereas Mertes (and this is the second point) had been talking about responsibility for the Second World War, his party colleague Geißler changed this argument and exacerbated it in an extreme way:
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The pacifism of the 1930s was not only responsible for the war, but it also had made Auschwitz possible.22 Thus pacifism and the peace movement were linked to the Holocaust. Geißler and all those, including Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who shared Geißler’s position (which even in later years he never really changed or withdrew from) did not merely intend to create a connection between the peace movement of the early 1980s and the policy of appeasement during the 1930s with its negative con- notation through this “historically distorted and contestable analogy.”23 By pointing to the alleged murderous consequences of purely gesinnung- sethische (ethics of mentality) positions, they also wanted to refute the peace movement’s alleged claim of aspiring to a higher morality. It was remarkable, however, that in this political climate a representa- tive of the right attacked the left with an argument related to National Socialism. This departed from the thirty-year trend in West Germany whereby the political left, against the background of its antifascist self- conception and its experiences of the Nazi regime, tried to link the political opponent on the right with Nazi ideas or policies in order to prevail in political or moral arguments. In the early 1980s a case in point were the warnings of an “atomic” or a “nuclear Holocaust” put forward both by members of the environmental movement against the construc- tion of new atomic power stations and by members of the peace move- ment (in the Green Party both movements overlapped in terms of their members and in regard to their basic ideas and convictions).24 The use of the world “Holocaust” was not limited to German protagonists,25 and perhaps we can regard its growing international use as an indicator of the universalization of the Holocaust beginning in the 1980s.26 But in the context of German debates, it had a specific significance.
A Nuclear Holocaust During the 1950s the German peace movement mentioned the lessons drawn from German history between 1933 and 1945 and a specific historical responsibility as one of its motivations. More specifically, its representatives pointed to the murder of the European Jews and a special German responsibility for peace. They stressed that most Germans had remained silent in the face of Nazi crimes, but that they didn’t want to remain silent again in the face of nuclear armament and the threat of mass annihilation. In an appeal to an Easter march to the missile training area of Bergen-Hohne – not far from the former concentration camp Bergen- Belsen – the memory of the concentration camps’ millions of dead was
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linked to the possibility of nuclear annihilation of mankind.27 By the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, however, these arguments became more intense, couched in a new language encompassing such expressions as “nuclear Holocaust” or “atomic Holocaust.”28 In September 1979, forty years after the German attack on Poland and against the background of plans to develop and to deploy the neutron weapon (an advanced nuclear weapon), the prominent Protestant theolo- gian Helmut Gollwitzer evoked the danger of a “Super Holocaust,” because every war waged with atomic weapons would be genocidal.29 Only a few months earlier, German television had shown the American movie Holocaust. It was only then that the word “Holocaust” for the murder of the Jews started to be more widely used in Germany.30 Before this event, other expressions, such as “Auschwitz” or “murder of the Jews,” had been dominant. The new expression implied an important shift of argument, or at least an extension of it. For a long time, especially during the 1960s, the German guilt for the Second World War and the murder of the Jews had been the center of an argument that derived the imperative of peace and disarmament from this guilt and the responsibility for the German crimes. The aim was to prevent Germans from becoming perpetrators again. This argument was still valid around 1980. For example, Volker Deile, a leading member of Action Sign of Atonement/Peace Services, regarded the West German government’s policy of armament and the German consent to the deployment of new nuclear weapons as the historical point “at which guilt for Auschwitz and the possibility of global annihila- tion cross.”31 Beyond these ways of arguing, however, the use of the expressions “Holocaust” or “Auschwitz” became part of a more victim- centered discourse.32 This was related, in general, to the millions of dead that a nuclear war, a “war of extermination” (Ausrottungskrieg), as the author Anton-Andreas Guha put it, would mean.33 But some members of the movement went further when they stressed that given Germany’s location in the center of Europe, at the border between East and West, Germans were facing a special threat. In that sense, Germans were the victims of American policy. At the Evangelischer Kirchentag, a meeting of thousands, mostly younger German Protestants in Hamburg in 1981, Heinrich Albertz, who was a pastor, a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the former Governing Mayor of Berlin, and now an active and influential participant in the peace movement, argued that Germany with its two parts was an “occupied country,” and for this reason, Albertz continued, West Germany was completely at the mercy of America’s
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armament policy.34 The United States was turning the Federal Republic into NATO’s atomic launch ramp argued Rainer Trampert, a member of the Green Party’s left wing.35 In the views of critics like Albertz and Trampert, the Germans were victims of a foreign power’s policy; these views also reflect a strongly national and even nationalist orientation within elements of the West German peace movement, as well as national- neutralist and anti-American patterns of thinking. The German student movement of the 1960s had already shown how anti-Americanism, often referring to the American nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, could further be connected to Nazi references. When German students protested against the war in Vietnam, some carried banners on which was written “USA – SA – SS.” Such slogans reappeared around 1980. In his peace song “Sonne statt Reagan” (Sun instead of Reagan), German artist Joseph Beuys in 1982 attacked US President Ronald Reagan: “He wants the final victory” (Er will den Endsieg).36 A telling story is reported by Dorothee Sölle, theologian, writer, and leading activist in the peace movement. In December 1983 a group of writers to which Sölle belonged had been trying to hand over a letter to the commander of an American missile base in southern Germany after the officer had declined a discussion with the writers, arguing that he didn’t want to get involved in inner-German matters. In their open letter to the American officer the writers replied, “You know our history, and you know that the US Army came to this country in order to liberate us from Hitler’s dictatorship, but not in order to create new dependence and new injustice. You came to our country to end a Holocaust, and you certainly didn’t stay here to prepare a nuclear Holocaust. But that is exactly what you are doing when threatening Eastern Europe with nuclear weapons and when exposing all of us to a deadly danger in this densely populated area.” The security fences around the American missile base reminded Sölle of the most terrible period of German history: “The camp on the one side, the many fences, the barriers, the order to shoot – and German writers on the other side.” Dieter Lattmann, a German author, expressed what, following Sölle, many participants of the meeting thought: “KZ” (Konzentrationslager [concentration camp]). And the author and future Nobel laureate Günter Grass, who was also present, added, “Only this time we on the outside are the inmates.”37 Often members of the peace movement wore the clothing of Nazi concentration camp prisoners thus strengthening by visual means this dimension of protest aimed at turning the memory of Nazi crimes and their victims into a powerful statement against armament and security
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policy around 1980. The pictures of peace activists in concentration camp clothing next to the fences of military installations show the strong and polarizing effect of such imagery, or Bildsprache.38 Grass (whose many literary works include The Tin Drum) character- ized nuclear armament and the strategy of deterrence as “calculated genocide,” and he did not refrain from making completely hypocritical comparisons (in light of later revelations about his membership in the Waffen-SS). “The crime for which we Germans are responsible cannot be compared with the atomic genocide which is definitely threatening,” the writer argued. “But what can be compared is the cynical turning away from the basic values of human ethics, which at the time led to the Wannsee Conference, the decision of the ‘final solution,’ and which today produces military plans taking millions of dead – here 50 million, there 80 million – into account as an unavoidable loss.”39 With this German intellectual authority making such comparisons, and with the theologian Dorothee Sölle calling the Pershing missiles “flying cremation ovens” (fliegende Verbrennungsöfen),40 it is hardly surprising that protest banners soon showed up with the phrase “Pershing macht frei” (Pershing will set you free) – a clear allusion to the words at the gate entrance to Auschwitz: “Arbeit macht frei” (work will set you free). The trend continued with opponents of nuclear armament using these same words as the title of a poem about the nuclear threat, following in the spirit of Paul Celan’s poem “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue,” written in 1947 as an attempt to deal with the Holocaust by lyrical means).41 During the 1950s the West German peace movement, as Holger Nehring has shown, had made frequent references in its antinuclear pro- test to the Nazi concentration and extermination camps to remind the Germans of their historical guilt and to stress their specific moral respon- sibility in the area of contemporary global affairs. West German peace activists deliberately continued a practice started after 1945 by the Allied powers, who confronted the Germans with their responsibility for Nazi crimes by exposing them to pictures of concentration camps.42 Three decades later, at the beginning of the 1980s, references to Nazi camps were directed as much at the German population and the federal govern- ment as at the governments of other states, above all the United States. We can read this change, this practice to hold up the mirror of the German Nazi past and the Nazi crimes to non-German countries as an indicator of a growing German national self-confidence. Against this background, we can no longer read the comparison of missile bases and concentration camps and the more general references
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to the Nazi past in terms of a warning of accidental nuclear war, of an accidental Armageddon. At the peak of the 1980s rearmament crisis, the peace protest in Germany no longer primarily addressed the dangers or risks of the very existence of nuclear weapons or of their accidental, unintended use; rather, they responded to a policy of intentional use of nuclear weapons and of deliberate nuclear warfare, which seemed to find its confirmation and its legitimation in the Reagan administration’s and NATO’s discussions of nuclear strategy (which included such phrases as “winnable war,”“countervailing strategy,”“no early first use,” etc.).
Historical Anniversaries as Occasions for Protest NS-related comparisons and references did not remain limited to peace movement protagonists. When in 1983 tens of thousands of participants of the Protestant Kirchentag in Hannover, a gathering dominated by the peace question, were wearing violet scarves to show their protest against nuclear armament, some church representatives criticized this form of protest because it would be perceived as a political position taken by the church as a whole. Joachim Heubach, a Protestant bishop, spoke out against it this way “to [make] uniform individual convictions.” The violet scarf would exercise pressure on mind and conscience, and those people not marching along would be excluded, he declared in an unambiguous reference. His colleague Armin Boyens, a Protestant military superintendent, shared this criticism, and he talked about the “Protestant Week” (Evangelische Woche)oftheConfessionalChurch (Bekennende Kirche)in1935 when flags with the swastika, the brown shirts, and the black scarves of the Hitler Youth (HJ) had been as much symbols of a political conviction as today’svioletscarves.43 It was difficult for Kirchentag President Erhard Eppler, an SPD politician and himself a prominent member of the peace movement, to tone down the conflict. Earlier, Franz Josef Strauß, chairman of the Christian Social Union (CSU) and one of the most outspoken advocates of NATO’s Double-Track Decision, had called the peace movement’sbigrallyin Bonn in October 1981 a “reverse Reichsparteitag,” referring to the annual rally day of the Nazi Party. And Ludolf Hermann, a radio jour- nalist, told his audience that the peace movement’sprotestrallies reminded him of Joseph Goebbels’s speech in Berlin’s sports arena (Sportpalast) in which Hitler’spropagandaministerhadannounced “total war” in 1943.44
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Grass made his comparison between the 1942 Wannsee Conference and the armament and war plans of the 1980s for the first time in a speech he gave in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche, where Germany’s SPD was commem- orating the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi Party’s coming to power in 1933. Grass’s speech and the event in the Paulskirche both show how quickly the SPD (after it had lost the chancellorship in October 1982) was turning away from the positions taken by former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in the field of security politics. In addition to this commemora- tion, there were numerous other NS-related anniversaries in the late seventies/early eighties that offered occasions to link current political questions or disputes, including the debate about nuclear disarmament, with historical reflections and to draw, time and again, “lessons from history” (Lehren aus der Geschichte): the fortieth anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War (September 1, 1939), the fortieth anniversary of the German aggression against the Soviet Union (June 22, 1941), and the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe (May 8, 1945). Under these circumstances, it was no accident that the peace movement used NS-related anniversaries for its protest. On September 1, 1983 (at 5:45 a.m.), members of the peace movement started a three-day blockade of Mutlangen missile base, and January 30, 1984, was declared an “Action Day.”45 When the fortieth anniversary of Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was approaching, declara- tions of the peace movement did not only claim that Germany was obliged to establish peace in particular with the Soviet Union, but also referred to the memory of the German aggression still alive in the minds of Soviet citizens four decades later and to a Soviet “security trauma” going back to the 1940s. Against this background many voices pleaded to take the Soviet calls for peace and disarmament seriously and to regard the Soviet armament in its defensive character as a consequence of collective experiences going back to the Second World War.46 Compared to earlier decades, public memory of National Socialism expanded enormously during the 1980s. The series of milestone anniver- saries starting in 1983 was one reason for this development. In addition, due to generational change and given the growing chronological distance from National Socialism’s heyday, a group of memory actors gained importance; these cultural interpreters born in the 1930s or later were not linked biographically to the time of the Third Reich and were not personally and directly concerned when it came to the question of indivi- dual guilt or responsibility. This led to a new way of remembering the NS years and, in many cases, to the use of clearer words regarding Nazi
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crimes. Public memory and public debate of National Socialism were, however, further influenced by the change of government in 1982/83, called the Wende (turn). Part of the Wende’s legacy was a noticeable concentration on the German nation and its national history. Among the consequences of this development were intensifying debates about the place and the significance of National Socialism, the Second World War, and the Holocaust in this national history. A few years later these conflicts culminated in the Historikerstreit (historians’ quarrel) of 1986/87.47 During the 1980s, numerous occasions provided opportu- nities to play out these conflicts, and also to treat current political ques- tions with arguments taken from history and, more specifically, related to National Socialism. The question of nuclear armament is a case in point. The history of National Socialism and particularly the Holocaust was instrumentalized politically in a ferocity and often in a rudeness as had not been the case before, and as it would not be the case again after this “experimental phase.”
Resistance Out of Fear “Wehrt Euch, leistet Widerstand gegen die Raketen hier im Land” (Defend yourselves, resist the missiles here in our country), the protesters of the early 1980s were singing. Or they were carrying banners on which was written, “Wo Recht zu Unrecht wird, wird Widerstand zur Pflicht” (Where justice turns into injustice, resistance becomes an obligation). In the context of the peace and environmental movements’ antinuclear protest, the issues of resistance and the right to resist have various dimensions of reference – from the traditions of civil disobedience to Article 20 (4) of the German constitution granting a right of resistance – which don’t have to be treated here. What has to be treated, however, are patterns of argumentation referring to the historical resistance against the Nazi regime. In many cases in which protest was justified historically, resistance against the Nazi dictatorship was used as a supporting argu- ment: not only resistance that had actually taken place, but also resistance that had not taken place. These references to the resistance, for example in Otto Schily’s and Joschka Fischer’s interview with Der Spiegel,48 were part of an argument considering nuclear armament as the preparation of a “nuclear Holocaust” and that, from this perspective, compared resistance against a policy of nuclear armament to resistance against National Socialism. Also the fact that the West’s armament policy was presented as part of a struggle against an aggressive communist ideology
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became part of a historical comparison. As in Weimar Germany, only now on a global scale, politicians would justify policies with the argument “to fight the communist danger,” and this would pave the way for a “creeping seizure of power through so-called factual constraints [Sachzwänge].”49 This would require resistance, and in order to give this resistance a moral foundation, activists would make references to the students’ resistance of the “Weiße Rose”50 or to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christian resistance.51 Petra Kelly, prominent member of the Green Party, didn’t want to accept that the West German government’s security policy had a democratic legitimacy and a majority in parliament. For Kelly “the law of conscience” would break the “law of the state,” because Hitler, too, had legalized his crimes and criminalized people with diverging opinions.52 The Christian peace movement repeatedly stressed a specifically Christian responsibility in this context. It made historical references to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and to the Christian opposition between 1933 and 1945, which had won its power, so they argued, from the conviction that one had to obey God before man. But in addition they justified the necessity to resist in the 1980s by pointing to the lack of resistance on the part of many Christians, to their silence and their passivity during the time of the Third Reich. “The scenarios of global nuclear annihilation,” Heinrich Albertz, born in 1915, stressed in his opening sermon at the Kirchentag 1983, “[ ...] go further than Hitler’s crimes, and I don’t have the intention to remain silent again.”53 That anxiety and fear must not – as had been the case after 1933 – prevent resistance was the implicit message. Anxiety and fear, in general, were important dimensions of antinuclear protest.54 Fear justified protest, and it mobilized people. This was one of the effects of the warnings about an “atomic Holocaust” or of references to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Talking about the threat of a “Euroshima” caused fear, because it could be linked to images and pictures; pictures of destruction and suffering that were printed in the peace movement’s publications. Leading figures of the movement openly conceded that they wanted to frighten people or at least to use people’s fear in order to mobilize them. Walter Jens, for example, did not only warn of a “Holocaust of European scale,” he also stressed that the coming fate of the Europeans could not be presented “clearly and vividly enough.” “The perishing, the evaporation, the fluidation [Versaften] of humans must be shown and not be glossed over [beschönigt]. ... Fear, in the sense of thinking about a threatening disaster, can be a means of cognition and help.”55
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Images and Criticism of Modernity In view of twentieth-century German history, it is hardly surprising that references to National Socialism, the Second World War, and the Holocaust gained a special importance in the debate about nuclear arma- ment in Germany. Both supporters and opponents of nuclear armament were able to charge their political positions morally by linking them to the Third Reich or the Holocaust. References, however, to the Holocaust in particular, but also to the Second World War or the use of the atomic bomb in 1945, always had another dimension of meaning. In 1983 Joschka Fischer in his interview with Der Spiegel talked about “the systemic logic of modernity” (Systemlogik der Moderne), which after and in spite of Auschwitz allowed for the preparation of mass annihila- tion. Fischer’s position underlines a view taken by recent research that is putting the peace and the environmental movements in the broader con- text of a culturally critical and even culturally pessimistic way of dealing with technical-industrial modernity, its certainty of progress, and its feasibility in the years after 1973/74.56 Had not a crisis of this modernity already brought about National Socialism and its crimes? And was not Auschwitz a possible form of this technical-industrial modernity, of its destructive potential, and of its possibilities of mass annihilation as, four decades later, the huge arsenals of atomic weapons, born of the idea to create security through deterrence and continued developments of arms technology? Put in this perspective, the references to National Socialism – including all the words, images, and arguments used in the context of the late 1970s/early 1980s controversy about nuclear armament – take on a significance that goes far beyond the question of deploying nuclear weapons.
Notes
1. I am grateful to Jan Ole Wiechmann for generously sharing documents of the West German peace movement with me, to Martin Klimke and Jeremy Varon for their comments on earlier drafts of this article, and to anonymous reviewers of Cambridge University Press for their critical look at my argumentation. 2. “‘Wir sind ein schöner Unkrautgarten’: Die grünen Abgeordneten Joschka Fischer und Otto Schily über die Auseinandersetzungen ihrer Partei. Spiegel- Gespräch,” Der Spiegel 24 (1983): 23–27. 3. Deutscher Bundestag, 10. Wahlperiode, 13. Sitzung, Jun. 15, 1983, p. 755. 4. Volkmar Deile, “Verfälschung deutscher Geschichte,” zeichen 3/9 (1984): 14–16, here 15.
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5. Cf. Holger Nehring, Politics of Security. British and West German Protest Movements and the Early Cold War, 1945–1970 (Oxford 2013), 171–74. 6. For a general perspective cf. Edgar Wolfrum, Geschichte als Waffe: Vom Kaiserreich bis zur Wiedervereinigung (Göttingen, 2001); for a focus on parliamentary debates, see Helmut Dubiel, Niemand ist frei von der Geschichte: Die nationalsozialistische – Herrschaft in den Debatten des Deutschen Bundestages (Munich, 1999). 7. See Peter Reichel, Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Deutschland: Die Auseinandersetzung mit der NS-Diktatur von 1945 bis heute (Munich, 2001); Reichel, Der Nationalsozialismus – die zweite Geschichte: Überwindung, Deutung, Erinnerung (Munich, 2009). 8. Detlef Bald, Die Bundeswehr: Eine kritische Geschichte 1955–2005 (Munich, 2005); see also Eckart Conze, Die Suche nach Sicherheit: Eine Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland von 1949 bis in die Gegenwart (Munich, 2009), 93–97. 9. Michael Geyer, “Der Kalte Krieg, die Deutschen und die Angst: Die west- deutsche Opposition gegen Wiederbewaffnung und Kernwaffen,” in Klaus Naumann, ed., Nachkrieg (Hamburg, 2001), 267–318, 314. 10. Günther Anders, “Thesen zum Atomzeitalter [1959],” in Karlheinz Lipp et al., eds., Frieden und Friedensbewegung in Deutschland 1892–1992 (Essen, 2010), 285–87, 285; cf. also Holger Nehring, “Die nachgeholte Stunde Null: Intellektuelle Debatten um die Atombewaffnung der Bundeswehr,” in Dominik Geppert and Jens Hacke, eds., Streit um den Staat: Intellektuelle Debatten in der Bundesrepublik (Göttingen, 2008), 229–50. 11. See, for example, Norbert Frei, 1968: Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest (Munich, 2008), 77–88; Conze, Suche nach Sicherheit, 336–47; for a more specific perspective, see Harold Marcuse, “The Revival of Holocaust Awareness in West Germany, Israel, and the United States,” in Carole Fink et al., eds., 1968: The World Transformed (New York, 1998), 421–38. 12. Rat der EKD, “Wort zum 30. Januar 1983,” in Junge Kirche 1 (1983): 21. 13. Evangelische Studentengemeinde in der Bundesrepublik und in Berlin (West), “Protokoll der Darmstädter Konferenz am 9.10.1981 in Bonn-St. Augustin- Mülldorf,” in Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte Stuttgart, Dokumentationsstelle für unkonventionelle Literatur, Ohne Rüstung leben, Folder 1, 1–2. 14. Volkmar Deile and Klaus Geyer, “Leben ohne Waffen – Frieden ist der Weg. 5. Festival der Friedensdienste Pfingsten 1978 in Beienrode,” Junge Kirche 7 (1978): 384–90. 15. Helmut Schmidt, “Kirche – Christen – Politik. Die gefährdete Vernunft,” in Carola Wolf, ed., Kirchentagstaschenbuch Hamburg 1981 (Stuttgart, 1981), 144–52, 147. 16. See, for example, Karl-Heinz Janßen, “Wie war das 1914? Die mehr oder weniger zulässigen Schlussfolgerungen des Bundeskanzlers aus der Zeitgeschichte,” Die Zeit, May 23, 1980.
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17. Jutta Ditfurth, “Die Verführung zur Tötungsbereitschaft. Rede vor der Frankfurter Stadtverordnetenversammlung am 9.6.1983,” in Jutta Ditfurth, Träumen, Kämpfen, Verwirklichen: Politische Texte bis 1987 (Cologne 1988), 31, quoted in, Andreas Wirsching, Abschied vom Provisorium: Geschichte der Bundesrepublik 1982–1990 (Munich, 2006), 85. 18. Cf. Joseph S. Nye, in James G. Blight and David A. Welch, eds., On the Brink: Americans and Soviets Reexamine the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York, 1990), 95. 19. See Eckart Conze, “Cold War Crises and Public Opinion. West European Public Opinion and the Berlin Wall 1961,” in Wilfried Loth, ed., Europe, Cold War and Coexistence 1953–1965 (London, 2004), 80–97, 85. 20. Alois Mertes, “Speech in the Swedish Institute for Foreign Affairs, Stockhol, 18.5.1983,” quoted in Judith Michel, “‘Richtige’ und ‘falsche’ Angst in der westdeutschen Debatte um den NATO-Doppelbeschluss,” in Patrick Bormann et al., eds., Angst in den internationalen Beziehungen (Göttingen, 2010), 251–72, 262. 21. See Lipp et al., eds., Frieden und Friedensbewegung, 284–85. 22. Cf. note 3 of this chapter. 23. Wirsching, Abschied, 97. 24. See Silke Mende, “Nicht rechts, nicht links, sondern vorn.” Eine Geschichte der Gründungsgrünen (Munich, 2011). 25. The warnings of the Archbishop of Seattle Raymond G. Hunthausen of a nuclear Holocaust received wide attention and interest in West Germany’s peace movement. See, for example, “Atomrüstung – schreck- liches Übel: Der katholische Erzbischof von Seattle, Raymond Gerhardt Hunthausen, über seinen Kampf gegen die Rüstung. Spiegel-Gespräch,” Der Spiegel 16 (1982); cf. also Petra Kelly, in Deutscher Bundestag, 10. Wahlperiode, 13. Sitzung, Jun. 15, 1983,p.756 (with references to Hunthausen). 26. Cf. Michael Jeismann, Auf Wiedersehen Gestern: Die deutsche Vergangenheit und die Politik von morgen (Munich 2001), or Wolfgang Hardtwig, “Von der ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ zur Erinnerungskultur: Vom Umgang mit der NS-Vergangenheit in Deutschland,” in Thomas Hertfelder and Andreas Rödder, eds., Modell Deutschland: Erfolgsgeschichte oder Illusion (Göttingen, 2007), 171–89. 27. See, for example, the appeal to found the organization “Aktion Sühnezeichen” by Lothar Kreyssig on Apr. 30, 1958, or the first appeal to an Easter march in Germany 1960. Both documents are reprinted in Lipp et al., eds., Frieden und Friedensbewegung, 282–83, 287–88. 28. Few examples: Anton-Andreas Guha, Die Nachrüstung – Der Holocaust Europas: Thesen und Argumente (Freiburg, 1981); Walter Jens, “Appell in letzter Stunde,” in Walter Jens, ed., Appell in letzter Stunde: Aufruf zum Frieden (Munich, 1982), 7–26, here 8–9 and 19.
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29. Helmut Gollwitzer, “1. September 1939–1. September 1979,” in Junge Kirche 8–9 (1979): 360–65, 361. 30. Susanne Brandt, “Wenig Anschauung? Die Ausstrahlung des Films ‘Holocaust’ im westdeutschen Fernsehen (1978/79),” in Christoph Cornelißen et al., eds., Erinnerungskulturen: Deutschland, Italien und Japan seit 1945 (Frankfurt, 2003), 257–68; Matthias Weiß, “Sinnliche Erinnerung: Die Filme ‘Holocaust’ und ‘Schindlers Liste’ in der bundesrepublikanischen Vergegenwärtigung der NS-Zeit,” in Norbert Frei and Sybille Steinbacher, eds., Beschweigen und Bekennen: Die deutsche Nachkriegsgesellschaft und der Holocaust (Göttingen, 2001), 71–102. 31. Volkmar Deile, “Widerstehen zur rechten Zeit: Dankesrede anlässlich der Verleihung des Gustav-Heinemann-Bürgerpreises an die Aktion Sühnezeichen/ Friedensdienste,” in Titus Häussermann and Horst Krautter, eds., Recht zum Widerstand (Stuttgart, 1983), 107–14, 111. 32. Philipp Gassert even uses the term “Opfer-Mentalität” (“victim mentality”) of some members of the peace movement around 1980. See Philipp Gassert, “Viel Lärm um nichts? Der NATO-Doppelbeschluss als Katalysator gesellschaftlicher Selbstverständigung in der Bundesrepublik,” in Philipp Gassert et al., eds., Zweiter Kalter Krieg und Friedensbewegung: Der NATO-Doppelbeschluss in deutsch-deutscher und internationaler Perspektive (Munich, 2011), 175–202, 195. 33. Guha, Nachrüstung, 49. 34. See Gassert, “Viel Lärm,” 194–95. 35. Die Zeit, Feb. 25, 1983, quoted in Wirsching, Abschied, 91. 36. The lyrics can be found at http://www.elyrics.net/read/j/joseph-beuys-lyrics /sonne-statt-reagan-lyrics.html. 37. Dorthee Sölle, “Wir haben euch nie einen Rosengarten versprochen,” in Klaus Gerosa, ed., Große Schritte wagen: Über die Zukunft der Friedensbewegung (Munich, 1984), 96–102, here 99–100. 38. Cf., for example, the photo in Eckart Conze, “Modernitätsskepsis und die Utopie der Sicherheit: NATO-Nachrüstung und Friedensbewegung in der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” in ZF 7 (2010): 220–39, 233, or various pictures in Volker Nick et al., eds., Mutlangen 1983–1987: Die Stationierung der Pershing II und die Kampagne Ziviler Ungehorsam bis zur Abrüstung (Mutlangen, 1993). 39. Günter Grass, “Vom Recht auf Widerstand,” Die Zeit, Feb. 4., 1983, reprinted in Günter Grass, Essays und Reden III, 1983–1987 (Göttingen, 1997), 63–70. For the argument of this article, it is not important but should nevertheless be noted that at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 the “final solution” of the so-called Jewish question was not decided, but merely coordinated. 40. Quoted in Nick et al., eds., Mutlangen 1983–1987, 6. 41. Pictures of banners with the words Pershing macht frei and the poem “Pershing macht frei” are printed in Nick et al., eds., Mutlangen 1983–1987, 13, 30.
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42. Nehring, Politics of Security, 173. 43. “Natürlicher Rückgang,” Der Spiegel 22 (1983): 52. 44. See Karl-Heinz Janßen, “Sprache des Dritten Reiches,” Die Zeit, Oct. 23, 1981 (all quotes are from this article). 45. “Gruppe Friedensmanifest 83: Gewaltfrei gegen Atomraketen. September- Blockade des Raketenstützpunkts Mutlangen bei Schwäbisch Gmünd,” Junge Kirche 7 (1983): 381–83. 46. See, for example, Volkmar Deile, “Frieden schaffen ohne Waffen – warum?,” in Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste, ed., Frieden schaffen ohne Waffen (Aktionshandbuch 1) (Berlin, 1980), 11–20, 13; or Jochen August, “40. Jahrestag des Überfalls auf die Sowjetunion,” in Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste, ed., Frieden schaffen ohne Waffen (Aktionshandbuch 2) (Bornheim-Merten 1981), 63–68. 47. See Conze, Suche nach Sicherheit, 654–64; Wirsching, Abschied, 466–91; Ulrich Herbert, “Der Historikerstreit: Politische, wissenschaftliche, biogra- phische Aspekte,” in Martin Sabrow et al., eds., Zeitgeschichte als Streitgeschichte: Große Kontroversen seit 1945 (Munich 2003), 94–113. 48. “Wir sind ein schöner Unkrautgarten,” 25. 49. Reinhard Seibert, “Widerstand 1933 – 1943 – 1983,” in Informationen. Ohne Rüstung leben (Arbeitskreis von Pro Ökumene) 24 (May 1983), 1–2. 50. Standing before the Schwäbisch Gmünd law court, accused of coercion (Nötigung), Dorothee Sölle finished her defense with these words: “You can sentence us, but you cannot bring to silence women like my sisters and me, you cannot bring us down. It is as if you wanted to forbid a rose flowering. But today the White Rose of resistance is flowering here in West Germany. As if you wanted to arrest the sun. But the sun is shining.” Quoted in Lipp et al., eds., 379–81, 381. 51. See, for example, Seibert, “Widerstand,” 1. 52. Petra Kelly, in Deutscher Bundestag, 10. Wahlperiode, 13. Sitzung, Jun.15, 1983, p. 761. 53. Heinrich Albertz, “Predigt im Eröffnungsgottesdienst des Kirchentags 1983” (Sermon in the opening service of the Kirchentag 1983), Jun. 8, 1983, reprinted in Hans-Jochen Luhmann and Gundel Neveling-Wagner, eds., Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchentag Hannover 1983. Dokumente (Stuttgart, 1984), 14–17, 16. 54. For more detail, see Michel, “‘Richtige’ und ‘falsche’ Angst,” or Susanne Schregel, “Konjunktur der Angst. ‘Politik der Subjektivität’ und ‘neue Friedensbewegung,’ 1979–1983,” in Bernd Greiner et al., eds., Angst im Kalten Krieg (Hamburg, 2009), 495–520; cf. also Klaus Horn and Volker Rittberger, eds., Mit Kriegsgefahren leben: Bedrohtsein, Bedrohungsgefühle und friedenspolitisches Engagement (Opladen, 1987). 55. Jens, “Appell in letzter Stunde,” 20. 56. Cf., for example, Conze, “Modernitätsskepsis.”
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Popular Culture
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“Will you sing about the missiles?” British Antinuclear Protest Music of the 1980s
William M. Knoblauch
In 1985 New York Times journalist Stephen Holden compared American and British pop charts. He noted a key difference: whereas American artists remained upbeat during a tense Cold War period, British groups seemed more serious. Using pop music as an important “index of the mood of young people,” Holden concluded that in the mid-1980s “British youth are more anxious than Americans about nuclear issues.” The pop charts support his assertion. In mid-1985, for example, American artist Prince had two upbeat singles, “Let’s Go Crazy” and “1999,” which embraced the possibility of apocalypse as a reason to party. By compar- ison, UK artists such as Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Tears for Fears penned songs about the impossibility of winning (“Two Tribes”) or surviving (“Mother’s Talk”) a nuclear war. Holden suggested that from the pop charts “one might conclude that there is a fundamental difference in the American and British outlooks. American youth would seem to feel so powerful and prosperous that its pop culture can afford to be oblivious to real nuclear peril. Less economically robust, and with a far less rosy future, British youth are expressing their sense of vulnerability.”1 Holden was certainly on to something, but in addition to economic inequalities, there were also vastly different perspectives on the nuclear threat. In the mid-1980s, British pop acts created songs laden with atomic tension. These songs, their lyrics, and their accompanying music videos contained an urgency absent in American pop. British examples from the era criticized United Kingdom Civil Defense (UKCD) propaganda under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and frequently leveled critiques at President Ronald Reagan’s arms race initiatives. This chapter is an examination of 1980s British antinuclear
101
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pop. It suggests that 1980s British pop should be included alongside punk, hardcore, and hip-hop as political protest music. Additionally, these British artists were some of the first to utilize MTV as a conduit for transatlantic popular protest. They spread warnings throughout American radio and television that the arms race, and an American president, might trigger an accidental Armageddon.
Cold War Atomic Pop Atomic-themed pop music remains an important reminder of Cold War atomic anxiety. In the 1950s songs like Golden Gate Quartet’s “Atom and Evil” (1947) and Sons of the Pioneers’“Old Man Atom” (1950) revealed an emerging fascination with, and fear of, nuclear weapons. In this era of Cold War consensus, few songs agitated against American nuclear programs.2 That changed in the 1960s, especially after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Many of the decade’s protest songs supported the civil rights movement at home and criticized the Vietnam War abroad; there were only a few exam- ples of antinuclear pop.3 By the 1970s pop music became less political, although scholars are reassessing the decade’s musical importance; even that most maligned of genres, disco, has received revised treatment.4 The subgenre with the most overtly political overtones, however, was punk, which emerged from the cultural malaise of mid-1970s America and took off in an economically depressed Great Britain. With roots reach- ing back to the 1950s – including suburban garage rock, the edgy 1960s posturing of Detroit’s MC5, the proto-punk simplicity of Boston’s Modern Lovers, and the New York scene centered at the club CBGB – the genealogy of punk is complex. What is certain, however, is that in 1970s Great Britain, punk went off like a bomb.5 The Sex Pistols became international stars for their iconic antiestablishment anthems “God Save the Queen” and “Anarchy in the UK.” An increasing body of work suggests that punk’s political and musical impact is still being felt. One thing is certain: punk reminded artists that rock music remained an avenue for meaningful political dissent.6 A number of the pop artists who came to craft 1980s antinuclear pop songs cut their teeth in the late 1970s British punk scene. Softening their sound and polishing their look, these “new wave” artists ushered in a third musical “British Invasion”.7 Unlike the Beatles and Rolling Stones of the first British Invasion, and the punk groups of the second, this third British Invasion owed much to a new cable channel, MTV, which relied on UK New Wave acts to fill its daily playlists.
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While most music videos were simply promotional tools, a look back at MTV during the atomically tense mid-1980s reveals numerous examples of nuclear fear from around the globe. West German artists protested the escalating arms race, most notably Nena, with her international hit “99 Luftballoons.” Canadian progressive rock group Rush penned two nuclear-themed singles: “Manhattan Project” and “Distant Early Warning.” American group Timbuk 3 broke the charts with the ironically titled “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades,” and in the Netherlands the ska group Doe Maar had success with “De Bom.” These are but a few examples of 1980s transnational atomic pop. In this era, British artists stand out for their unique Cold War perspective. Scarred by the bombings of World War II, skeptical of UK civil defense propaganda, and scared of conservatives’ brazen rhetoric at home and in America, these British artists created a unique brand of antinuclear pop.8
The Roots of 1980s British Antinuclear Pop The roots of 1980s British antinuclear pop music date back to the early postwar era. Throughout the Cold War, Great Britain and the United States maintained a “special relationship.” In addition to a common language, both nations shared military intelligence and technology, both worked within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to con- tain Soviet communism, and both took conservative political turns near the end of the 1970s. Despite these connections, their memories of WWII differed drastically. Almost entirely untouched by military violence during the war, Americans civilians for the most part enjoyed domestic and economic security. British citizens were less fortunate. Having lived through the German “Blitz,” Britons knew firsthand the horrors of urban warfare. While it is impossible to quantify the psychological impact of this collective experience, wartime bombing undoubtedly shaped British perspectives in the nuclear age.9 Geographic differences also influenced each nation’s civil defense poli- cies. In the 1950s, Americans embraced President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s sprawling new interstate highway system, which allowed for rapid auto transport, prompted a great suburban migration, and conformed to nuclear strategists’ urban evacuation plans. Yet throughout the Cold War, American policymakers remained wary that federal civil defense programs might too closely resemble Soviet-style central planning. For this reason, US civil defense adopted a do-it-yourself ethos embodied by the iconic backyard bomb shelter.10 Such projects were impractical in
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Great Britain. With more concentrated urban populations and less land, backyard bomb shelters were less of an option. Instead, as it had during the Blitz, the British government constructed communal, urban shelters and recruited civilian volunteers for a public civil defense corps. Put simply, US civil defense became interwoven with individual responsibility and consumerism, while Britons rehashed communal programs from World War II.11 By the 1960s the arms race was in full swing. As American and British nuclear weapon development and testing increased, so did atomic anxiety. In response, both nations engaged in propaganda campaigns to quell unrest and maintain public support. In Great Britain, pamphlets, book- lets, and films downplayed the government’s atomic testing program and instead promoted ways citizens might protect themselves and their families. In January 1963 the British Home Office (or BHO, the ministry responsible for civil defense) published Advising the Householder on Protection against Nuclear Attack. It advised citizens to construct shelters in the innermost rooms of their homes, wear “stout shoes” and “warm overcoats” to shield against radioactive fallout, and “whitewash” win- dows to “greatly reduce the fire risk by reflecting away much of the heat” from an atomic blast. In a thermonuclear age, with weapons’ explosive power in the megatons, these preparations would have had little practical effect, and it is doubtful that most citizens took these suggestions seri- ously. Public reaction to Advising the Householder marks the beginning of citizens’ skepticism of BHO propaganda.12 Civil defense went underground in the early 1970s. It was a decade of détente, a period of superpower arms control treaties and the nadir of antinuclear activism. Détente relied on Cold War accommodations, such as arms limitation treaties and communist diplomatic recognition, both of which infuriated hardline anticommunists. Détente’s most vocal detrac- tors, the neoconservatives, were an important part of a right-wing resur- gence in both Great Britain and the United States. In 1979 the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, a move that seemed to confirm hardliners’ worst fears. By 1981, both Great Britain and the United States had embraced conservative leadership at the highest levels of government. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan both favored increases in military might and a reevaluation of civil defense measures.13 In 1979 Thatcher asked for a modernization of the “United Kingdom Warning and Monitoring Organization” (UKWMO) and the “Wartime Broadcasting Service.” These new civil defense initiatives called for an increase in emergency centers and for updated propaganda. The result was
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Protect and Survive. Released in 1980, this print and film series explained, in detail, the dangers of nuclear weapons, and offered suggestions on how to survive a nuclear attack; it also frightened many British citizens. The Protect and Survive films were especially disturbing. They featured a monotone narration and low-budget effects – such as paper cutouts of houses being destroyed in a nuclear attack – to illustrate the dangers of atomic blasts and radioactive fallout.14 If Protect and Survive propa- ganda aimed to calm the British public, it had the opposite effect. Protect and Survive helped bring together a resurgent British antinuc- lear movement. Critiques of this series appeared in print media, in public demonstrations, and in pop culture. In 1980 the British historian E. P. Thompson issued Protest and Survive as a rebuttal to the BHO publication. At the grassroots level, antinuclear demonstrations, espe- cially the “European Nuclear Disarmament” movement, grew in Great Britain and throughout much of Western Europe.15 In pop culture, car- toonist Raymond Briggs published When the Wind Blows,a1982 graphic novel that satirized British civil defense advice. It tells the tale of Jim and Hilda Bloggs, characters modeled after Briggs’s own parents, who had lived through World War II. As 1980s nuclear tensions escalate, the elderly couple follow UKCD advice: Jim erects a lean-to in his house, bottles drinking water, and stockpiles supplies. The Bloggs survive the initial nuclear attack, but they die slowly from radiation poisoning while dutifully waiting for government help that never arrives.16 Two years after When the Wind Blows, the BBC film Threads provided a similarly bleak depiction of British families who survive a nuclear attack only to perish slowly from radiation poisoning and societal breakdown.17 These exam- ples suggest that in the early 1980s British nuclear fear was heightened.
1980s British Antinuclear Pop British antinuclear pop during the 1980s owed much to MTV. When it launched on August 1, 1981, many in the music industry were hesitant to embrace the new channel. While music promotional videos had been around for decades, few labels were willing to risk putting their top artists on an unproven channel. Instead, as music critic Robert Christgau com- mented, in the early 1980s industry leaders “handed the ball to mostly British ‘new wave’ long shots.” MTV premiered with the prophetically titled “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the British new wave group The Buggles. In its formative years, MTV featured many more Brits, especially “appearance obsessed art-school types who were eager to stake some of
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their Eurodollars on the stateside profits” such as Duran Duran and A Flock of Seagulls. It was MTV that allowed up-and-coming British bands access to middle-American markets. The channel also became an early testing ground for political pop videos. Of course, politically themed videos were a minority on MTV. Yet numerous British artists used MTV as more than a springboard to fame. In the 1980s MTV became a transatlantic conduit through which they delivered a unique brand of antinuclear protest music.18 The earliest examples of 1980s antinuclear pop criticized Protect and Survive. Jethro Tull’s 1980 song “Protect and Survive,” for example, mocks the British Civil Defense propaganda piece: “They said: protect and you’ll survive, but our postman didn’t call / 8 lbs. of over-pressure wave seemed to glue him to the wall / E.M.P. took out the radio, flash blinded by the pretty lights / didn’t see his bottles fall or feel the warm black rain arrive.” These references – to Electro Magnetic Pulses (EMPs), atomic flash, strong winds, and all-clear sirens – are all topics included in the series Protect and Survive.19 In 1983 Scottish act Big Country also criticized Protect and Survive in the song “1000 Stars.” Here singer and lyricist Stuart Adamson sings, “Hypnotized by lies in defensive disguise / some say protect and survive / I say it’s over.” Neither song topped the charts, but both were featured on albums that sold well on both sides of the Atlantic.20 Other antinuclear pop songs conveyed a more general sense of nuclear fear. In 1980, Swindon-based XTC released “Living Through Another Cuba,” asongthat,oneminorerroraside(songwriterAndy Partridge mistakenly cites the Cuban Missile Crisis occurring in 1961, not 1962), astutely assesses Great Britain’splaceinthemiddleofthe Cold War: “It’s 1961 again and we are piggy in the middle / while war is polishing his drum and peace plays second fiddle / Russia and America are at each other’sthroatsbutdon’t you cry / just get on your knees and pray, and while you’re down there, kiss your arse goodbye.” Next, Partridge predicts a future nuclear stare-down: “This phenomenon happens every twenty years or so / if they’re not careful your watch won’tbetheonlythingwitharadioactiveglow/I’ll stick my fingers in my ears and hope they make it up before too late / if we get through this lot alright they’re due for replay, 1998.” Partridge later recalled that “‘Living Through Another Cuba’ [was about] total nuclear-war para- noia,” and that the song was a critique of Great Britain’s reliance on the United States for protection. “Reagan was making all the wrong noises [and I] was concerned that ... mutually assured destruction seemed to
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be getting more and more intensely possible. Britain had no kind of power. I was worried that we were heading toward the nuclear precipice.”21 Partridge was not alone in his wariness of Reagan. Many Europeans viewed the American president as a cowboy figure, a dangerously trigger- happy leader unfit to have the bomb at his disposal.22 Whether or not this appraisal was accurate, these fears were understandable. In his first term, Reagan called the Soviet Union an “Evil Empire,” while his administra- tion talked tough about prevailing in a nuclear war. It wasn’t empty rhetoric. Reagan oversaw the largest peacetime military buildup in American history. He increased spending on conventional military forces, bolstered nuclear weapons programs, and proposed his controversial Strategic Defense Initiative, a vague program for space-based ballistic missile defense. Under Reagan, American militarism around the globe intensified. A terrorist attack on US marines in Lebanon, America’s inva- sion of Grenada, the Soviet shoot down of Korean Air Lines 007 (killing 269 passengers, including sixty-one US citizens, among them a US congressman), all raised fears of world war.23 More than any other event, however, Reagan’s introduction of American nuclear warheads onto British soil exacerbated Europeans’ nuclear fears. The roots of this “Euromissile” crisis date back to 1977, when the Soviets deployed SS-20 Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBMs) throughout the Eastern bloc. After West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt asked NATO for support, US President Jimmy Carter approved a “dual track” response: on one track, the United States would deploy Pershing II ballistic and tactical cruise missiles throughout parts of Western Europe; on another track, they would negotiate to limit IRBMs in Europe. After the 1980 presidential election, Carter’s decision became Reagan’s burden. As the October 1983 deployment approached, nuclear fears elevated.24 It was in response to the Euromissile Crisis that British artists ree- merged in 1984 with a slew of antinuclear songs. That year, London group Ultravox released “Dancing with Tears in My Eyes,” a song that alludes to impending nuclear destruction: “It’s five and I’m driving home again / it’s hard to believe that it’s my last time / the man on the wireless cries again / ‘it’s over, it’s over.’” If these lyrics seem vague, Ultravox’s video clarifies the song’s meaning. It follows a family’s final hours before a nuclear reactor’s failure. Even if it wasn’t a direct critique of nuclear weapons, this video resonated with viewers, especially after the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear reactor incident. “Dancing with Tears in
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My Eyes” became a hit single, and Ultravox performed this song at the 1985 televised concert “Live Aid.”25 XTC provided another Reagan critique with their 1984 song “This World Over.” The song paints a bleak picture of London after a nuclear attack: “Will you smile like any mother, as you bathe your brand new twins? / Will you sing about the missiles, as you dry odd numbered limbs? / Ah well, that’s this world over; ah well, next one begins / Ah well, that’s this world over; you sadly grin.” Next, lyricist Partridge muses that Reagan (a former actor) and his arms buildup would usher in Armageddon: “Will you tell them about that far off and mythical land / About their leader with the famous face? / Will you tell them that the reason nothing ever grows in the garden anymore / is because he wanted to win the craziest race?” Such dark, postapocalyptic imagery details the devastating effects of radioactive mutations and global ecological destruc- tion. Few songs of the era could match this imagining of the nuclear apocalypse.26 Liverpool punk-turned-dance band Frankie Goes to Hollywood – best known for their song “Relax”–lambasted Reagan throughout their 1984 album Welcome to the Pleasuredome. The album features quips from a presidential impersonator who portrays Reagan as a bumbling cowboy ill-suited to lead the free world.27 It was an image reinforced in “Two Tribes,” a single that belittles Reagan (“Cowboy number one / a born- again poor man’s son”) and the futility of the Cold War arms race (“We got two tribes / we got the bomb / when two tribes go to war / a point is all that you can score”). Cover art for the “Two Tribes” single included a photo of Reagan and a brief presidential quote on the value of freedom – juxtaposed with a rundown of the global nuclear arsenal, complete with numbers for superpower land-based ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, strategic bombers, nuclear warheads, and total megatons per nation.28 The “Two Tribes” video is equally critical of British civil defense propaganda and President Reagan. It opens with an air-raid siren and other audio clips from the Protect and Survive film series. Next, a narrator cautions that “you and your family must take cover,” an audio sample based on Protect and Survive. The video continues with a mock battle between Reagan and Soviet Premier Konstantin Chernenko lookalikes; soon, the spectators of the fight (the rest of the world) join in. The video concludes with a globe exploding. This video criticism of Reagan topped the UK charts and helped to propel “Two Tribes” to peak at number three on American Billboard’s dance music charts.29
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With his solo 1985 release, former Police front man Sting crafted one of the era’s most popular antinuclear anthems. Inspired by a Soviet children’s program, “Russians” urges Cold War tolerance and empathy.30 The song features a musical motif from Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev and lyrics that assess rising global nuclear fears in the mid-1980s: “In Europe and America, there’s a growing feeling of hysteria / Conditioned to respond to all the threats in the rhetorical speeches of the Soviets / Mr. Khrushchev said we will bury you / I don’t subscribe to this point of view / It would be such an ignorant thing to do / if the Russians love their children too.” Sting not only attacks Reagan and his administration’s rhetoric (“There is no historical precedent to put the words in the mouth of the President / There’s no such thing as a winnable war / It’s a lie we don’t believe anymore”) but also his Strategic Defense Initiative (“Mr. Reagan says we will protect you; I don’t subscribe to this point of view”).31 Reinforcing these antinuclear messages, the “Russians” music video opens with a ticking “Doomsday Clock,” an image made famous through The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the publication that gauges global nuclear threats. With the clock’s second hand quickly approaching midnight, “Russians” hinted that the superpowers were closing in on Armageddon.32 British progressive rock group Genesis provided another antinuclear song with their 1985 hit “Land of Confusion.” The song sounds hopeful, but there are numerous allusions to Cold War dangers: “There’s too many men, too many people, making too many problems, and not much love to go ‘round’.” Still, the song’s call to activism was an apt description of British artists’ ongoing efforts to warn others about the arms race: “This is the world we live in / and these are the hands we’re given / Use them and let’s start trying / to make this a world worth living in.” Genesis’s accompanying “Land of Confusion” music video reinforced the song’s message. Using puppets from the British television program Spitting Image, the video depicts Reagan’s dreams and features unflattering pup- pet caricatures of Reagan, Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and other iconic 1980s figures. At the video’s conclusion, Reagan awakens from his nightmare and, attempting to summon his nurse, mistakenly hits the “nuke” button. This depiction of Reagan as an aged, dithering, and dangerous president remains an iconic reminder of 1980s Cold War fears. It also earned Genesis a Grammy for “Best Concept Video.”33 Tears for Fears’ 1985 album Songs from the Big Chair featured a number of antinuclear-themed singles. “Shout” was about “making
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your opinions known,” and for singer/guitarist Roland Orzabal that meant rallying against “the installment of American nuclear weapons in England.” Another song from the album, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” was originally entitled “Everybody Wants to Go to War.” Despite the title change, the song still summed up, for many, the Cold War contest for military and ideological hegemony. The album’s most explicit antinuclear song, however, was “Mother’s Talk.”34 A plea for Cold War peace, “Mother’s Talk” suggests that apathy toward nuclear buildup could have disastrous consequences: “Follow in the footsteps of a funeral pyre / you were paid not to listen now your house is on fire / .../ Some of us are horrified, others never talk about it / but when the weather starts to burn, then you’ll know that you’re in trouble.”35 Orzabal later explained that “Mother’s Talk” was about the Euromissile Crisis: “Right about the time I was finishing the lyric, the American nuclear missiles were being brought into England and a lot of people were quite scared about it – I certainly was – and therefore [the song] took on a nuclear flavor.”36 This fear may have led Tears for Fears to release “Mother’s Talk” as the lead single in Great Britain, so as to coincide with the delivery of US warheads; yet in the United States it became the band’s fourth single. After the American chart success of “Shout,”“Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” and “Head over Heels,” the band rightfully anticipated heavy airplay.37 Perhaps that is why in 1986 Tears for Fears not only remixed “Mother’s Talk” but also crafted a new, overtly antinuclear video for an American audience. In the American video for “Mother’s Talk,” a British family attempts to survive a nuclear attack by following the advice of Protect and Survive: The father erects a lean-to in his house and frantically whitewashes windows; the mother halts her ironing to collect canned goods; and their son watches images of mushroom clouds on television. In-video cut scenes include actual Protect and Survive images, making clear for viewers that this family is following civil defense advice with precision. Of course, these steps are futile. At the video’s conclusion, the family smiles and waves as the screen fades to white; the bomb has dropped, incinerating the family.38 “Mother’s Talk” includes the line “when the wind blows,” a reference to Raymond Briggs’s 1982 antinuclear graphic novel. Orzabal was hardly alone in citing Briggs’s antinuclear comic as an influence.39 In 1986 When the Wind Blows became an animated film, one that included a soundtrack featuring British artists. Former Pink Floyd member Roger Waters penned the film’s score, which includes moody instrumental pieces
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“What Have They Done?”“The Russian Missile,” and “The American Bomber.” David Bowie sang the film’s title track, and British pop stars Hugh Cornwall, Squeeze, Paul Hardcastle, and Genesis all contributed to the soundtrack.40 It was one of the last examples of British antinuclear pop of the decade. By 1986, nuclear summits between Reagan and Gorbachev led to a reduction in Cold War tensions.
Conclusion With the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which removed all medium-range Soviet and American nuclear missiles from Europe, British pop artists largely abandoned antinuclear themes. Yet the songs they crafted remain important. They showed British artists that politically themed pop could thrive on American radio and MTV. When Cold War nuclear fears abated, many of these artists shifted their political focus. Ultravox, David Bowie, and Phil Collins (of Genesis) all performed at “Live Aid,” the 1985 televised concert that raised money and awareness to combat hunger in Africa. Other artists sang about Third World inequalities. Sting’s 1987 album Nothing Like the Sun includes “Fragile” (a commentary on death in Contra-conflicted Latin America) and “They Dance Alone” (on the crimes of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet). XTC, the group who in 1983 pondered if future generations will “sing about the missiles,” penned new songs that preached broader themes of peace (“War Dance”), humanitarianism (“King for a Day’), and environmental consciousness (“Scarecrow People”). When the Berlin Wall fell, British artists were some of the first to provide pop song commentary, such as Jesus Jones’s 1990 hit “Right Here, Right Now.” This trend of socially conscious hits suggests that British artists were not simply capitalizing on the 1980s nuclear fears for profit, but held political convictions that continued to shape their output after the Cold War.41 For much of the 1980s, British pop musicians crafted songs and videos that expressed skepticism of UK civil defense propaganda and a wariness of an American president. Through MTV, these musicians spread their messages to an American audience. In doing so, they provided a brief but unique brand of Cold War antinuclear protest music that proved to be politically charged, poignant, and popular. Were these artists right to be so frightened? Recently declassified British government documents suggest yes. Despite a public façade of optimism as offered in Protect and Survive, British civil defense officials were privately less worried that citizens whitewash their windows or wear stout shoes and more
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concerned about a mass “disposal of the dead.” In retrospect, British pop music was arguably less hyperbolic than official UK government pronouncements or Reagan’s hopes for space-based missile defense.42 During the Cold War’s last decade, British pop stars provided a catchy, transnational form of popular protest music that remains largely unrec- ognized as legitimate protest music. As scholars continue to reassess Cold War popular culture, including popular music, they should consider the messages provided by these artists.43 These songs, and their music videos, remain important reminders of late Cold War culture, 1980s atomic anxiety, and the potential of antinuclear cultural activism.
Notes
1. Stephen Holden, “Critic’s Notebook: Rock Music, or Songs on the End of the World,” New York Times, Jan. 17, 1985, p. 16. 2. For other examples of 1950s atomic songs, see the albums Like an Atom Bomb: Apocalyptic Songs from the Cold War Era, Buzzola, Feb. 23, 2004; and Atomic Platters: Cold War Music from the Golden Age, Bear Family, Sept. 6, 2005. On atomic anxiety in popular culture, see Allan Winkler, Life Under a Cloud: American Anxiety about the Atom (Oxford, 1993); Scott C. Zeman and Michael A. Amundson, eds., Atomic Culture: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Denver, 2004); Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York, 1985). 3. On 1950s and 1960s protest music, see David P. Szatmary, Rockin’ in Time: A Social History of Rock-and-Roll (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1999), 169–200; Allan Winkler, To Everything There Is a Season: Pete Seeger and the Power of Song (Oxford, 2010). 4. See Alice Echols, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture (New York, 2010). 5. On British Punk, see Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond (New York, 2001); on 1980s American punk, see Michael Nevin Willard, “Skate and Punk at the Far End” in Beth Bailey and David Farber, eds., America in the 1970s (Lawrence, KS, 2004), 181–207. 6. On punk’s evolution into “hardcore,” see Steven Taylor, False Prophet: Field Notes from the Punk Underground (Middletown, CT, 2003) 71–81; Bradford Martin, The Other Eighties: A Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan (New York, 2011) 95–118. 7. Szatmary, Rockin’ in Time, 97–125, 220–46. 8. On connections between pop music and politics, see John Street, The Politics of Popular Music (Oxford, 1986); Joshua Clover, 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing about (Berkeley, 2009); A. Constandina Titus and Jerry L. Simich,
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“From ‘Atomic Bomb Baby’ to ‘Nuclear Funeral’: Atomic Music Comes of Age, 1945–1990,” Popular Music and Society (Winter 1990): 11–37. 9. John Simpson and Jenifer Mackby, “The Special Nuclear Relationship: A Historical Chronology” in Jenifer Mackby and Paul Cornish, eds., U.S.- U.K. Nuclear Cooperation after 50 Years (Washington, DC, 2008), 3–20; Ian Clark, Nuclear Diplomacy and the Special Relationship: Britain’s Deterrent and America, 1957–1962 (Oxford, 1994); Kristan Stoddart, “British Nuclear Strategy during the Cold War,” in Matthew Grant, ed., The British Way in Cold Warfare: Intelligence, Diplomacy and the Bomb, 1945–1975 (London, 2009), 15–32; Beatrice Heuser, “Britain: Knights, Merchants and Protesters,” in Heuser, Nuclear Mentalities? Strategies in Britain, France, and the FRG (London, 1998), 3–74. 10. On American Cold War culture, see Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, 1999); Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, 1991). On U.S. civil defense, see Dee Garrison, Bracing for Armageddon: Why Civil Defense Never Worked (Oxford, 2006) and Kenneth D. Rose, One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture (New York, 2001). 11. Matthew Grant, After the Bomb: Civil Defence and Nuclear War in Cold War Britain, 1945–68 (New York, 2010), 1–2; Tyler May, Homeward Bound, 3–15; see also Laura McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties (Princeton, 2000). 12. On rationales for government-led British civil defense, see Grant, After the Bomb, 1–9, 176–88; Stoddart, “British Nuclear Strategy during the Cold War,” 15–32; and Heuser, “Britain: Knights, Merchants and Protesters,” 3–74; Tracy C. Davis, Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (Durham, NC, 2007), 31. 13.Thatcher’s determination to maintain a strong nuclear deterrent is suc- cinctly summarized in Robert Self, British Foreign and Defense Policy since 1945: Challenges and Dilemmas in a Changing World (New York, 2010), 207–9. On civil defense, see Davis, Stages of Emergency, 11;on Afghanistan and the rise of neoconservatives, see Richard Rhodes Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (New York, 2007), 130–32, 138. 14. Davis, Stages of Emergency, 31–32; an online archive of British Civil Defense propaganda can be found at http://www.atomica.co.uk/ (accessed Jan. 27, 2015). For a broad analysis of UK Civil Defense, see “Subterranean Britannica” at: http://www.subbrit.org.uk/rsg/features/beyond/ (accessed Jan. 27, 2015); R. W. Kilborn, The Multi-Media Melting Pot: Marketing When the Wind Blows (London, 1986). 15. Lawrence Wittner, Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement (Stanford, 2009), 141–76.
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16. When the Wind Blows was inspired by an episode of the BBC series Panorama, which examined civil defense. Briggs detested the “government optimism that [UKCD] put out on the surface” (Kilborn, The Multi-Media Melting Pot, 37); see also Raymond Briggs, When the Wind Blows (New York, 1982). 17. Threads, produced by BBC and directed by Mick Jackson, 110 minutes, 1985, videocassette; Davis, Stages of Emergency, 32; Kim Newman, Apocalypse Movies: End of the World Cinema (New York, 2000); Jerome Shapiro, Atomic Bomb Cinema: The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film (New York, 2002). 18. E. A. Kaplan, Rocking around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture (New York, 1987), 1–5; Tom McGrath, MTV: The Making of a Revolution (London, 1996), 11–21; Robert Christgau, “Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster: The Music Biz on a Joyride,” Village Voice, February 7, 1984, pp. 37–45. 19. Jethro Tull “Protect and Survive,” A (Gold Rush/Chrysalis Records, Sep. 1980), compact disc. 20. Jethro Tull’s 1980 album A rose to number thirty on the Billboard Hot 200 Album Charts while Big Country’s 1983 album The Crossing peaked at num- ber eighteen. “1000 Stars” became a staple of Big Country’s live shows, even during their 1988 tour supporting the politically themed album Peace in Our Time. Big Country, “1000 Stars,” The Crossing (Polygram Records, Aug. 1983), compact disc. Chart rankings found online at http://www.allmusic .com/album/the-crossing-mw0000189226/awards (accessed Jan. 27, 2015). 21. The XTC album Black Sea, on which “Living through Another Cuba” appeared, reached number forty-one on the Billboard Album Top 200 Charts. Black Sea (Geffen Records, Sep. 12, 1980), compact disc. Interview with Andy Partridge found online at http://chalkhills.org/articles/ XTCFans20091108.html (accessed Jan. 27, 2015). 22. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York, 2005), 216–217; Robert Scheer, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War (New York, 1982), 18–19; Davis, Stages of Emergency, 172–73. 23. Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York, 1991), 318. 24. Samuel F. Wells, Jr., “Reagan, Euromissiles, and Europe” in W. Elliot Brownlee and Hugh Davis Graham, eds., The Reagan Presidency: Pragmatic Conservatism and Its Legacies (Lawrence, 2003), 133–54; Robert Collins, Transforming America, Transforming America: Politics and Culture in the Reagan Years (New York, 2007), 197–99. 25. Ultravox, “Dancing With Tears in My Eyes,” Lament (One Way Records, 1985), compact disc. 26. XTC, “This World Over,” The Big Express (Geffen Records, Oct. 15, 1984), compact disc.
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27. Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Welcome to the Pleasuredome (Repertoire, 1984), compact disc. 28. “Two Tribes,” Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Welcome to the Pleasuredome (Repertoire, 1984). 29. Stephen Thomas Erlewine, “Biography: Frankie Goes to Hollywood,” online at www.allmusic.com/artist/frankie-goes-to-hollywood-mn0000139741/bio graphy; Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Welcome to the Pleasuredome. 30. On Sting’s inspiration for “Russians,” see www.express.co.uk/posts/view/ 187070/Sting-s-Russians-was-inspired-by-illegal-satellite-viewings. 31. Sting, “Russians,” The Dream of the Blue Turtles (A&M, 1985), compact disc. 32. “Russians” peaked at number sixteen on the Billboard Hot 100 charts. Sting’s 80s chart history found at www.billboard.com/column/backwards-bullets- this-week-in-charts-1985-1004006185.story#/artist/sting/chart-history /5763; full chart history online at http://www.billboard.com/artist/1496522/ sting/chart. 33. “Land of Confusion” peaked at number four on the Billboard Hot 100 charts. Genesis, “Land of Confusion,” Invisible Touch (Atlantic Records, June 1986), compact disc. 34. Orzabal quote found in Peter Standish, “Tears for Fears: Big Hits from the Big Chair,” Gavin Report, Jul. 17, 1985, pp. 13–14. 35. Tears for Fears, “Mothers Talk,” Songs from the Big Chair (Polygram Records, Feb. 17, 1985), compact disc. 36. Tears for Fears: Scenes from the Big Chair (Shock Exports, Aug. 2, 2005), DVD. 37. The original UK video can be found online at www.youtube.com/watch? v=R9cS7LaEAYY. 38. The US video for “Mother’s Talk” received heavy MTV rotation and peaked at number twenty-seven on the Billboard Hot 100 charts. Billboard chart rankings can be found at http://allmusic.com/artist/tears-for-fears-p5607/ charts-awards (accessed Jan. 27, 2015); The “Mother’s Talk” video was in “power rotation” on MTV, according to Billboard Magazine Apr. 26, 1986, p. 58. 39. Interview from Tears for Fears DVD. 40. Roger Waters, Original Music Picture Soundtrack: When the Wind Blows (Phantom Sound & Vision, Mar. 11, 1988), compact disc. 41. Joshua Clover, 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing about (Berkeley, 2009), 3–6. 42. On declassified British assessment of nuclear war, see “Nuclear Attack? Wear Stout Shoes” at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3572655.stm (accessed Jan. 27, 2015). 43. Ibid.; Martin, The Other Eighties; David Sirota, Back to Our Future (New York, 2011).
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From Artists for Peace to the Green Caterpillar Cultural Activism and Electoral Politics in 1980s West Germany
Martin Klimke and Laura Stapane
Music is everywhere: Irish folk music with bagpipes, labor songs, chansons. Suddenly it is all drowned out: “Peoples of the world, hear the signals.” The song of the American civil rights movement: “We shall overcome.” Young DKP [German Communist Party] people try to sing along, but they evidently don’t know the words ... Celebrities on folding chairs. [Social Democratic politician] Erhard Eppler; [Nobel laureate in literature] Heinrich Böll; retired general [Gerd] Bastian; military theorist [Alfred] Mechtersheimer, who has been threatened with being kicked out of the CSU [Christian Social Union]; Professor [Helmut] Gollwitzer; actor and singer Harry Belafonte; Coretta King, widow of the murdered Martin Luther King. Petra Kelly, federal chair of the Greens, demands in her talk that Chancellor [Helmut] Schmidt step down, and she declares Eppler, as it were, the new chancellor.1 There has never been anything like this, but the chance that something might change here in this country has never been so close (to being voted in): artists are campaigning, not as a garnish for political shows; rather their topics are the program. Their lyrics and songs actively work for a new, life-affirming [kind of] politics.2
“She should be offered a spot in the diplomatic corps of the Federal Republic: Nicole, with a puny little voice, neither rhetorically trained nor particularly musically gifted, has brought the Grand Prize of the Eurovision de la Chanson to Germany for the first time in the thirty-year history of the competition.”3 With these words, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung commended the victory in April 1982 of the then 17-year-old West German singer Nicole and her song “Ein bisschen Frieden” (also well known in English as “A Little Peace”) in the leading European popular music contest. Acknowledging the low-brow nature of
116
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the competition, the paper bluntly observed, “You can wrinkle your nose at poppy nonsense in general, you can decry the chronic musical medioc- rity of the competition, you can also write the lyrics of the winning song off as the marketing of a desire for peace. All of this is possible. But it is also possible that the first prize for a devout wish betokens a symptom: namely, how very much the danger of a war for Europe, too, has grown.” References to a nuclear crisis were pervasive in European popular music of the first half of the 1980s.4 They reflected not only widespread anxieties about a nuclear Armageddon as a result of an accelerated arms race between the superpowers, but also a deep-seated unease about the dangers and destructive powers of modern technology as represented by atomic energy. A variety of artists sought to come to terms with renewed Cold War tensions and the threat of nuclear extinction through their art, communicating their take on these issues to an ever-growing and receptive audience. Regardless of the commercial nature or artistic quality of some of these works, popular culture thus became yet another space where “politics” could be articulated, debated, and contested. Some artists in the music industry even sought the public platform as a way to become more directly involved in politics. They did so by contesting prevailing positions or party ideologies, by coming together for political events and initiatives such as Künstler für den Frieden (Artists for Peace), or by acting on behalf of the new political parties emerging from the peace movement, such as the West German Greens. This article explores the impact of this interplay of politics and culture during the first half of the 1980s by looking at artists in West Germany who took up the nuclear threat in their music, musician-activists who became advocates for the peace movement and staunch opponents of nuclear rearmament, and finally, artists who committed themselves to campaigning for the newly formed Green Party in the national elections of 1983. Focusing on one of the hot spots of the Cold War and on the country that, due to its geopolitical position, was most directly affected by the missile deployment prescribed by the 1979 NATO Double-Track Treaty, this article illustrates the broader political mobilization of culture in its various forms during the 1980s as well as its utilization in the grassroots and party politics of the Federal Republic.
Pop Goes Politics Inspired by models from cultural and media studies, historians in recent years have firmly established the significance of popular culture for
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political history.5 Focusing on the entanglement of symbolic systems, performative practices, and communicative spaces in the constitution of “political cultures,” their studies have conceptually enriched our understanding of the interactive dimension and changing nature of trans- mitters, receivers, and the medium of “political” messages in different public spheres.6 However, 1970s and 1980s popular music has only very rarely been the subject of scholarly inquiry with this sort of methodologi- cal approach.7 Most scholars agree that after the overtly political messages of much of 1960s music, whether against the Vietnam War or in favor of cultural emancipation, much of the music in the following decade, particularly since the mid-1970s, was marked by escapism into subjectivity and the private sphere. As one historian remarks, “With the escalation of violence at demonstrations and their flight into the underground, or into a psychedelic, other-worldly inwardness, the coalition between political youth movements and rock collapsed.”8 Such scholars suggest that the new generation of singers and songwriters no longer viewed pop music as a platform for advocating social and political change; rather, they made random political references that could be easily overlooked, or they sometimes even toyed with them for purely commercial purposes, steeped their lyrics in deep pessimism about the state the world was in, or bid a conscious farewell to political and social realities in favor of individual liberties and self-realization.9 According to this interpretation, even the subversive potential of the 1980s Neue Deutsche Welle (New German Wave), which rediscovered and repopularized German as the preferred language of artistic expression, exhausted itself in affirmation of the status quo and, especially in its commercialized variant, succumbed to apolitical trifles.10 A brief overview of German popular music from 1979 to 1986 reveals, however, that it was neither removed from nor uninterested in politics, but found a variety of venues and modes of expression to negotiate the political issues of the day, particularly the persistent, looming threat of nuclear annihilation.11 Whether commercially oriented or explicitly political, musicians provided the audience with an opportunity to engage in political debates, inviting them to reflect, for example, on the repercus- sions of nuclear armament and US foreign policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and with regard to Europe and Germany in particular.12 As a result, an astonishing number of songs from this period deal with nuclear war and apocalyptic visions, warn against the dangers of atomic energy, advocate the need for environmental protection, point to the
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potentially catastrophic consequences of the superpowers’ rivalry, or take a principled antiwar and pacifist stance. Already in 1979, the Dutch band bots composed the song “Das weiche Wasser bricht den Stein” (Soft Water Breaks Stone), which for many became the hymn of the peace movement of the 1980s.13 Its lyrics leave no doubt about the threat that stationing Pershing II missiles on European soil posed: Europe has had two wars The third will be the last Just don’t give up, don’t back down Soft water breaks stone The bomb that spares no life Only machines and reinforced concrete, made us join together for a song Soft water breaks stone
... Missiles stand at our door They are supposed to be here to protect us We will do without such protection Soft water breaks stone ....14 Other artists were even more explicit. The band Geier Sturzflug (Vulture Nosedive), for example, took a stunningly satirical, yet none- theless profoundly disturbing, approach to a nuclear Armageddon with its fast-paced song “Besuchen Sie Europa (solange es noch steht)” (Visit Europe as Long as It’s Still Around, 1983): When submarines are moored in the Canale Grande and in St. Peter’s Square in Rome there are missile-defense ramps [When] Ankara is being carpet-bombed and from the hills of Olympus a Pershing II rises then everything will be much too late that’s when nothing will work anymore at all. Visit Europe as long as it’s still around.
Before the old Cologne cathedral a mushroom cloud rises into the air and the sky is filled with the odor of neutron bombs When in Paris the Eiffel Tower bends toward the West in a final farewell and near Big Ben a feathery afterglow appears
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then everything will be much too late that’s when nothing will work anymore at all. Visit Europe as long as it’s still around. In a similar vein, the German synthpop band Alphaville in “Forever Young” (1984) evoked images of nuclear destruction in their lyrics, defiantly singing, “Let’s dance in style, let’s dance for a while / Heaven can wait, we’re only watching the skies / Hoping for the best but expecting the worst / Are you gonna drop the bomb or not?” Even the summer hit of 1983 by the Italian disco duo Righeira, the easygoing “Vamos a la playa” (sung in Spanish) that climbed to third place on the West German charts, frankly – but most likely unbeknownst to many listeners – discussed the explosion of an atomic bomb on the beach.15 Artists frequently combined calls for the survival of humankind with explicit opposition to nuclear energy and support of environmental acti- vism. One example is the 1981 song “We Kill the World (Don’t Kill the World)” by the popular disco group Boney M.: I see mushrooms, atomic mushrooms. I see rockets, missiles in the sky. Day by day, more and more, Where will this lead to and what is this good for? [ ...] And nuclear piles stand like monuments of destruction throughout over the country [ ...] Oceans in despair There’s rubbish everywhere The seaweed chokes in mud Nature’s had her lot With nuclear waste and rot And mushrooms bloom as clouds.16 For the more melancholically minded among West German listeners, the band Gänsehaut (Goose Bumps) in 1983 offered a heart-wrenching hit song about “Karl der Käfer” (Carl the Bug), who lost his natural habitat to deforestation, making way for modern concrete constructions. Along more apocalyptic lines, Peter Maffay’s “Eiszeit” (Ice Age, 1982) and Wolf Maahn’s “Tschernobyl” (1986) illustrated the disastrous consequences of a nuclear meltdown. Yet the nuclear stalemate between the superpowers also inspired a resurgence of a more general antiwar and pacifist trend in popular music. West German singer Hans Wader tried to rekindle the pacifist sentiments of earlier times with his “Es ist an der Zeit” (It’s About
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Time), recorded in 1980, the same year that the New German Wave band Fehlfarben (literally, Color Errors) sang about “Apokalypse.” Also in 1980 Udo Lindenberg and the ten-year-old Pascal Krevitz sang the duet “Wozu sind Kriege da?” (What Are Wars For?), an emotional appeal for peace from the perspective of a child who demands explanations for his existential fears: “Mr. President / I am now 10 years old / and I’m afraid in this forest of nuclear missiles. / Tell me the truth / tell me now / why are you gambling with my life?” Similarly, the seemingly plain and straightforward innocence of Nicole’s prize-winning ballad calling for “A Little Peace” struck a nerve with a wide audience, topping the charts in the Federal Republic, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Austria, Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland. In metaphors that lacked no subtlety, the German singer Hans Harz complained that “Die weissen Tauben sind müde” (The White Doves Are Tired, 1982) and were vastly outnumbered by an ever- growing population of hawks. Only two years later, both the British singer Boy George and the German Schlager star Nino de Angelo chimed in with their respective contributions, “The War Song” and “Jenseits von Eden” (Beyond Eden). To be sure, many of these songs can undoubtedly be considered calcu- lated attempts by an expanding music industry, particularly in West Germany, to cash in on diffuse, popular peace sentiments by dabbling in political messages. When pressed on this matter, Nicole insisted that her song was “about personal rather than political peace.” Asked whether she would participate in peace demonstrations, she replied sardonically, “No, because international politics doesn’t interest me at all. The young people who participate impress me, but I don’t think they can change anything in the world.”17 Yet the fact that such songs resonated among a broad audience across the political spectrum, as well as across national boundaries, indicates the pervasiveness of fear and nuclear anxieties during the 1980s.18 The same is true for the most popular and commercially successful West German musical export during this period: Nena’s “99 Luftballons.”19 Probably the most well-known German antiwar song, it describes an armed overreaction escalating into an international war triggered by balloons mistaken for an enemy attack. It instantly topped the West German charts in 1983.20 The original German version also led the Australian and New Zealand charts, even making it to second place on the American Billboard Hot 100, while the English-language version (“99 Red Balloons”) also topped the UK charts. Given the success of
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both versions, it was clear that the song’s antiwar message had transcul- tural appeal. In addition to being a commercial sensation, Nena’s “fable about nuclear war” also raised international awareness about two things: first, that popular music in West Germany was once again being performed in the country’s native tongue; and second, that this music was heavily infused with criticism of the nuclear arms race, US foreign policy, and the stationing of Pershing II missiles on West German soil.21 As the New York Times phrased it, “There is a new sound around in the land of Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner.” This sound was closely connected to a new identity that German artists helped to forge through their songs and their political activism. As West German singer Udo Lindenberg argued, “We Germans have made two horror wars ...We have a special duty to learn from history. What I find so great in Germany is that groups like me and Bap can have such a great political impact.” For many observers, it was clear that if the music represented by the New German Wave had “a center of political gravity, it is somewhere on the left, not on the right.”22 The Wall Street Journal even went a step further, arguing that this was but a larger expression of West German emancipation from shared interests with the United States and a new German nationalism as embodied in the peace movement.23 Deep concerns about the nuclear threat did indeed mobilize a sizeable number of West German artists to intervene in politics more directly on behalf of the peace movement. In one of the largest peace-related cultural festivals in the Federal Republic of Germany, more than two hundred thousand people came together on September 11, 1982, to participate in the Artists for Peace festival at Bochum’s Ruhr stadium. Newspapers labeled the event an “emotional rollercoaster for peace,”24 alluding to Nicole’s Eurovision song “A Little Peace” with a question about whether “German Schlager are able to bring down missiles” (Können Schlager Raketen schlagen?).25 Numerous musicians, filmmakers, movie and stage actors, artists, and writers responded to the call of the Krefeld Initiative and offered to take part in the festival, the third out of four events openly dedicated to peace and nuclear pacifism and organized by Artists for Peace, a group founded in 1981.26 This group and its festival became, as a German newspaper declared, the “Loudspeaker of the peace movement”27 or, more precisely, of the Krefeld Initiative. In November 1980, this initiative had launched a campaign entitled “Nuclear Death Threatens All of Us – No Nuclear Missiles in Europe.” Activists had collected signatures for a call (the Krefeld Appeal) against the
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implementation of the NATO Double-Track Treaty and for mutual reductions of nuclear arsenals on both sides of the Iron Curtain.28 Former West German Army General Gert Bastian, Green party politician Petra Kelly, theologian Martin Niemöller, former judge at the Federal Constitutional Court Helmut Ridder, as well as writer Gösta von Uexküll had been, among others, the first to sign the petition, which had garnered more than two million signatures by the time of the festival. Along the lines of the Krefeld Initiative, the Artists for Peace festival in 1982 sought to prevent “the stationing of new American nuclear weapons in our country” that could “through their deployment trigger nuclear doom,” threatening to destroy the planet itself.29 The organizers thus hoped to “celebrate a festival of peace with songs, theater, rock, jazz, classical music, choirs, educational political comedy, and the fine arts: for disarmament in East and West and a world that someday will exist with- out weapons.”30 More than two hundred artists performed simulta- neously on seven stages. They included not only well-known West German artists such as musicians Franz Josef Degenhardt, Gitte, Klaus Lage, Udo Lindenberg, Ulla Meinecke, Marius Müller-Westernhagen, Achim Reichel, Hannes Wader, and Konstantin Wecker, but also inter- national artists such as Fabrizio de Andre, Harry Belafonte, and Miriam Makeba. This broad cross-section of genres represented at the festival was meant to showcase “something of the imagination, diversity and power of the internationally growing peace movement ...which has fused art, politics, and new lifestyles.”31 The artists’ cosmos became a reflection of a social movement whose actors could not have been more diverse, their firm consensus on a pacifist agenda making them a political force to be reckoned with. As the organizer and concert promoter Fritz Rau described it, “As soon as the star leaves the stage and takes his place among the choir in Bochum, where suddenly competing stars such as Maffay, Lindenberg, [and] Marius Müller-Westernhagen are together on one stage ..., the star becomes [part of] the collective; [this is when] the star becomes a human being.”32 Admittedly, the concept of politically engaged artists was neither new nor particularly innovative in the peace movement of the 1980s. The mass demonstration for peace on October 10, 1981, in Bonn, for example, drew more than 250,000 participants, including nationally and internationally known peace activists, writers, musicians, politicians, and artists such as Heinrich Böll, Harry Belafonte, and Coretta Scott King, the widow of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Other events on a smaller scale took place all
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across Europe, often accompanied by concerts and art exhibitions. The unique features of the festival in Bochum were its magnitude and a sophisticated level of organization that allowed it both to focus on and enable artistic intervention into contemporary power politics.33 The necessity of such intervention was made explicit not just in the perfor- mances themselves but also in statements made on stage. Harry Belafonte, for example, asserted that “many of us are taught to believe that we can survive a nuclear war ... We live a life similar to a gigantic Hollywood movie. And the main character of this bad film is an untrustworthy actor named Ronald Reagan.”34 Peace activism thus became a moral imperative for the sake of future generations. As singer and writer Fredrik Vahle claimed, “Whoever works for a world without overkill, without nuclear weapons, without armaments, and without war also does this for our children.”35
Project Green Caterpillar These political stirrings on the cultural front did not escape the attention of party politicians seeking to channel popular sentiments for electoral gains. When the national executive council of the young West German Green Party came together in the town of Mühlheim-Kärlich in the fall of 1982 to discuss its strategy for the upcoming federal elections in March 1983, one proposal struck the delegates as especially creative and, more important, capable of securing the 5 percent of the national vote needed for the party to gain a foothold in parliament. Caroline Dai from a local Green political action group in Giessen had sent in a plan based on the following premises: 1. At the moment, there is a large number of potential supporters who identify, in terms of content, with the aims of the Greens but are put off by prejudicial [labels like] “grain eater,”“Herb Garden Club” ...and who have little confidence in the Greens’ political expertise (in the usual sense). 2. The Greens are not yet fully aware of this potential. One has to assume that ... many voices of protest (e.g., from the left SPD) can be found within [the Green Party] that could easily be lost again ... 3. The Greens have the problem of funding their campaign (organization). 4. An “established” [i.e., traditional] campaign does not have a real chance against the professionals of the SPD and the CDU.
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5. Whatever is and was a good premise for getting people interested in new ideas, goals: it is to be conveyed in both a factual and emotional way (contents also humorous).36 Dai’s conclusion was that the only feasible solution to this dilemma was an extremely attractive cultural program (“ein Spitzen Kulturprogramm!!!!”), which would draw constituents to the party’s agenda. More specifically, Dai envisioned a special train car (Sonderzug) painted green that would travel across the Federal Republic for two weeks before the election. The train with the colorful name Grüne Raupe (Green Caterpillar) was to host artists such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Wolf Biermann, F. J. Degenhart, BAP, and Udo Lindenberg, who were to live in it and travel together through the country, making stops in a variety of cities to hold rallies and concerts and rouse potential voters. This core musical program could then be locally framed by other events or “Green Nights,” where organic sausages, beer, salads, and so on could be sold. The delegates of the executive council were immediately swayed by this idea, just as the party’s national committee had been the week before. They asked Dai to refine and move ahead with the plan.37 She pointed out that the success of Aktion: Grüne Raupe (Campaign: Green Caterpillar) depended on the cooperation of local party affiliates and on the “origin- ality” and “power” that were to be gained from the “Green mood” emanating from such an ambitious program. To solicit hesitant voters, it was essential that this not simply be a “parade of stars carted through the country for an election campaign.” Rather, this idea needed to be repre- sented by an “influential figure, someone who would make people think, ‘If he/she is with them, then there must be something to these GREENS’”; in other words, “prominent persons who embody GREEN politics in their public lives.” To that end, the party invited not only musicians but also writers, scholars, and theologians to board the train.38 Prominent party represen- tatives such as Petra Kelly were actively involved in recruiting potential participants and making appeals to the party’s base to volunteer addi- tional ideas about people and programs under the slogan “Raupe Frisst Birne” (Caterpillar Eats Pear), an allusion to the derogatory nickname of the newly elected, conservative chancellor Helmut Kohl.39 In addition, well-known concert promoter Fritz Rau was enlisted to help coordinate the technical and organizational side of the project. Together with his colleague Horst Lippmann, Rau had risen to fame in the 1960s as a promoter of jazz and of artists such as Joan Baez, the Rolling Stones,
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Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin.40 With his tight network and access to international celebrities and logistical expertise, Rau was well equipped to contribute to this project. He joined the Green Party in December 1982 and turned out to be a major asset in realizing the Grüne Raupe campaign.41 Energized by this idea and with Rau’s nationwide infrastructure for hosting major public events like these on its side, the Green Party suc- ceeded in overcoming most of the project’s organizational hurdles: By mid-January, the Grüne Raupe had a logo; the party had set up regional working groups to prepare for local events whose delegates met weekly in Bonn; it had drafted stickers, flyers, and posters; and it was poised to begin ticket sales.42 In addition, prominent people such as Senta Berger, Michael Verhoeven, Erich Fried, Wolf Biermann, Bettina Wegener, Konstantin Wecker, Margarete von Trotta, Udo Lindenberg, Ludwig Hirsch, Josef Beuys, as well as the editorial staff of the satirical magazine Titanic had agreed to participate in the program alongside a host of regional artists.43 In accordance with the party motto “Culture Is Not Packaging but the Content of Green Politics,” all of these parti- cipants were described as “artists who don’tjustopentheirmouthsfor a fee on stage but also have other things to say: against stationing missiles, environmental destruction, xenophobia, mass unemployment, cuts in social services, employment bans, [and] for different, more life- supporting politics.”44 The idea of a train was eventually dropped in favor of a 19-meter bus, in which movies were shown and a team of Green national representa- tives was present and which could be used to hold press conferences. The bus also boasted a variety of campaign materials, organic food, as well as a portable laboratory to test local water for harmful substances.45 Its planned stops covered a basic set of major cities in the Federal Republic and the proposed locations for stationing Pershing II missiles; it could also be scheduled on demand.46 Requests from local groups soon became overwhelming, so that the end result was an impressive list of stops.47 Considering the positive response and growing excitement about this project, Lukas Beckmann, one of the party’sthree executive directors, argued in a letter to the party’sregionalheadquar- ters that the Grüne Raupe had advanced to become the centerpiece, along with the “Nuremberg Tribunal against Weapons for First Strike and Mass Destruction,” of the Green Party’s election campaign in 1983.48 At the national party convention in January, rising commercial music star Udo Lindenberg, whose latest single “Sonderzug nach
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Pankow” was about to be released at the beginning of February, was equally enthusiastic. Announcing his support for the Grüne Raupe, he proclaimed that he was in favor of “mak[ing] a little music in the Bundestag, as well, after March 6 [the day of the election].”49 But along with its joyful mixture of diverse musical and artistic styles, the program also had its opponents. The leftist newspaper taz called the fast-paced four-hour show interspersed with short political statements of leading Green Party representatives a “sclerotic office party” that promoted in “jaunty FDJ solidarity style” the full range of “peace and apocalypse kitsch.”50 Outraged by these labels, participating artists insisted that the diversity of rock, dance, song, theater, jazz, political comedy, and blues was precisely what kept things fresh and different in each city, gave the project its regional flair, and, above all, connected them to the crowds: “This is not a Green Salvation Army begging for votes; this is what makes us strong: criticism and joy, opposition and fun.”51 The artists rejected this vitriolic attack by their leftist peers and with it, their concept of old-style campaigning through dry discussions at the party booth. And the numbers seemed to justify their claims. Despite an entry fee of fifteen German marks, people flocked to the Grüne Raupe events in the three-and-a-half weeks that it was on the road. On February 14, the series of concerts opened to a sellout crowd of 2,900 in Hamburg. A few days later, about four thousand people attended the evening show in Offenbach and about ten thousand turned out in Dortmund.52 To be sure, attendance fluctuated at the colorful program featuring New German Wave stars such as Spliff and Udo Lindenberg, as well as artists like Gianna Nannini, Wolfgang Niedecken (BAP), Heinz Rudolf Kunze, or Bettina Wegener, both in urban and more rural areas of the country.53 In the end, however, the number of attendees overall was estimated to be about sixty thousand.54 During the concert in Böblingen, Petra Kelly’s speech was even broadcast live on German television.55 Describing this mixture of “Pop Festival and Political Campaign,” which it regarded as more like a “family reunion of leftists, Greens, and the ‘alternative scene,’” the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung remarked, in recognition of its apparent success, that
[a]ll who consider themselves part of the “social movements” seem to gather there: leftist radicals, groups caught up in dissolution, homosexual associations, women’s shelters, environmental activists are all there with their exhibits. Muesli salesmen do a small business ... Thus, the party of the Greens has taken another step forward in this last half year away from the “movement” [and] toward the “party.”56
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On this path to institutionalization, however, the Grüne Raupe was far from a jolly joyride through the West German countryside but a tightly organized project that followed strict guidelines based on the principles of the Green movement. All participating artists had to be supporters of the party; they did not receive any pay apart from a lump sum for travel and accommodation expenses (200 DM). During the show, the artists had exactly the same time as the speakers and representatives of the Green Party (eight minutes), and their songs were supposed to have a connection to the party’s larger ideological agenda. Among the participating artists for each show, 50 percent needed to be local.57 Fritz Rau, the central organizer behind the various concerts who had already provided the logistical support for the events of the Artists for Peace initiative, was not shy about enforcing these rules. When Petra Kelly informed him that the regional branch of the party in Munich rejected the idea of “political speakers” for the local event, for example, Rau wrote to the local organi- zers in shock, insisting that “the festival of the Green Caterpillar is a campaign event and not a consumer-oriented evening of entertainment. The political speakers are just as important in this as the other way around. Consequently, the participating artists and I place great value in political speakers getting a chance to speak at the Munich Festival of the Green Caterpillar, and I would be very pleased if Petra Kelly and Gert Bastian would speak.”58 The reasoning behind this rigorousness was, apart from ensuring the smooth running of the concerts, to demonstrate that the Greens, despite being financially weaker than the established parties, were able to function in a structured and disciplined way and underscore their reliability, while at the same time appealing to the voters’ political and aesthetic sensibilities.59 The media, too, regarded this strategy of connecting to potential voters on an emotional level with an alternative political happening as a success. The project, emphatically labeled by party officials as “a dear monster on tour in the (political) spring,” generated interest: “Emotions are the most powerful campaigners for the Greens. Not only in big cities – also in the countryside – they [the Greens] encounter curiosity and support.”60 Furthermore, the Greens’ alternative agenda and different campaign style created a bond for their constituents, especially when compared to those of the other parties. As the Frankfurter Rundschau wrote,
Ought we to underestimate what such evenings bring about in terms of a sense of community, hope, the ability to motivate, when we know that these are
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precisely the ingredients needed for election successes? ... After a certain point, it doesn’t matter what happens on stage – it has the same euphoric effect on the audience as a speech by [Franz-Josef] Strauss has on his people on a good day in Passau.61 The party’s emotional appeal was particularly crucial when it came to competing against the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which had been pushed into the role of opposition party after Helmut Schmidt’s governing coalition had successfully been forced to step down by a vote of no confidence. Traditionally, it was the Social Democratic Party that tried to recruit artists and intellectuals in the election campaigns of the Federal Republic. A notable example was the writer Günter Grass’s affiliation with Willy Brandt’s election campaigns in 1969 and 1972.62 But, disillusioned, many of these individuals had turned away from supporting politics in general. In an appeal, artists participating in the Grüne Raupe painted a particularly grim picture of the current state of affairs:
The prevailing politics is inhumane and life-threatening: new nuclear missiles are supposed to “secure” peace, but the arms madness is endangering our planet. The forests are dying; food, water, and air are being poisoned; the risks of nuclear power plants cannot be controlled. Mass unemployment is on the rise; new technologies continue ceaselessly to destroy jobs ... The police state is being perfected with laws hostile to democracy and proliferating computer systems; anonymous control structures makes individuals objects of regulatory caprice. With cable, monitoring services, and the introduction of commercial radio and television, citizens are being disenfranchised; the manipulation of consciousness and senses is becoming absolute.63 The artists backing this call frankly admitted their support for other parties in previous elections, but argued that this time these parties would not be able to count on the artists’ short-term memory with regard to disappointments and false promises:
All the parties represented in the Bundestag have to answer for this state of crisis. They do not earn our trust for tomorrow because only a different, life-affirming politics is able to fulfill the hopes, desires, and wishes of the people. This politics needs to have uncompromising courage to tell the truth and to seek utopia; it has to be a politics with imagination.64 For them, the Greens provided precisely such an opportunity outside of institutionalized politics with a fresh alternative: “Hope again has a color; with the ‘Greens’ in Bonn, there can once again be a political spring in the Federal Republic.”65
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The artistic milieu that the Greens had gathered in the early months of 1983 was all the more important since the Social Democrats were gaining steam again in the polls under the new leadership of Hans- Jochen Vogel at the expense of the Greens’ potential electoral aspirations. Moreover, alongside the conservative parties, the SPD was taking up supposedly “green” topics such as environmental issues (e.g., forest decline), nuclear energy, and, above all, peace and disarmament, while at the same time leaving the door open to possibly cooperating with the new party after the election.66 During this temporary low point in the polls, the Grüne Raupe all of a sudden became, in the words of Green press secretary Otto Riewoldt, “the great confidence booster.”67 When the Spiegel debunked specula- tions about Red-Green cooperation on February 7, 1983, even partici- pants on the tour felt the positive repercussions.68 As Rainer Trampert, speaker of the party’s Federal Executive Council, relayed, members of the “Jusos” (an SPD youth organization) were now visiting the tour bus and confiding that they would start to secretly campaign for voters to cast the second (party) ballot for the Greens.69 Rolf Bielefeld, one of the party’s three executive directors and the coordinator of the tour, even amended the slogan “Raupe Frisst Birne” (Caterpillar Eats Pear) to “Raupe Frisst Birne und irritiert Vogel” (Caterpillar Eats Pear and Irritates Bird) in reference to the Social Democratic front runner.70 As an analysis of the election results confirms, the Greens did indeed massively draw their constituents from among former SPD voters as well as first-time voters or previous nonvoters. Despite all the differences between the two parties, 94 percent of Green voters preferred the Social Democrats as coalition partners; in other words, they perceived the SPD as the most appealing party apart from their own. As SPD Executive Director Peter Glotz later stated, the Green voters could thus be consid- ered “flesh of the flesh of the SPD.”71 The life-affirming pose and holistic approach to politics that the Greens put on display, and therefore on the ballot, did, as many observers saw it, “by all means hit a nerve for many voters” and could “in the end, possibly meet with success,” much more than “nuts-and-bolts politics.”72 Journalists observing the campaign during the course of February 1983 saw the Green Party winning between 4 and 8 percent of the vote and predicted that the Green Caterpillar would soon morph into a “colorful butterfly.”73 In fact, the party seemed to be thriving under the pressure of competing with Social Democrats, and had the substantial advantage that the grassroots base mobilized by the antinuclear energy and peace
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movements could be called upon for its election campaign. Lukas Beckmann explained this strategy: “Every demonstration, every blockade, in our understanding, contributes to enlightening the population and, of course, is also part of campaigning.”74 The energy and drive of the peace and antinuclear energy movements was thus partially channeled into electoral politics. As the weekly Das Parlament quipped, “A perpe- tual campaign is therefore taking place in Gorleben, Brokdorf, Kalkar and along the Main-Danube Canal.”75 Next to the Grüne Raupe, the “Nuremberg Tribunal against First Strike Weapons and Mass Destruction” hosted by the party on February 18–20, 1983, was a perfect example of this game plan, since, in the words of Beckmann, it merged “anti-militarism and anti-fascism ... into nuclear pacifism in a highly symbolic way.”76 In the election campaign of 1983, the Grüne Raupe proved to be a major asset for the Green Party. As the party leadership concluded afterwards, the “cultural scene felt at home with the Greens.”77 Despite only two months of preparation time, the project managed to pull the party together and transcend infighting among individual candidates. It exercised a positive influence at the polls and forged a continuity between the campaign events. Criticism only centered on organizational technicalities, such as the “consumer behavior” of the audience, the often poor cooperation between the local organizers and the coordinating team, insufficient facilities, and what some perceived as too many short speeches. However, both financially and strategically, it was considered a success.78 As a consequence, the Greens felt it was vital to maintain the connec- tion with the artistic scene. Wilhelm Knabe, speaker of the party’s federal executive committee, for example, wrote in his thank you note to the artists participating in the Grüne Raupe that he sensed “that we have to appeal to more than just bare [rational] understanding [ ... ] that activism arises not only through insight into necessities but also through an inner emotion that is often triggered by sung and structured lyrics, by music and dance. After such things, we are more open to new ideas and insights.”79 The Grüne Raupe was reactivated for the European elections in June 1984 and subsequent elections on the state level.80 In the national election in January 1987, the Greens continued this strategy with a show called “Winterzauber” [Winter Magic], again featuring a combination of speakers such as Joschka Fischer, Otto Schily, Antje Vollmer, and Petra Kelly with artists such as Wolfgang Niedecken (BAP), Rio Reiser, and
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Matthias Deutschmann, as well as a special program for children.81 At that point, they had not only successfully wooed prominent leftist intellectuals such as Heinrich Böll away from the Social Democrats for good, but also firmly established their hold on artists who had previously been skeptical toward parties and institutionalized politics in general.82
Conclusion Political and social scientists have generally attributed the successful rise of the West German Green Party to the emergence of a new milieu based in the peace and alternative movements of the second half of the 1970s.83 With no coherent political agenda, the members of this sub- culture were deeply skeptical of any comprehensive ideologies or estab- lished political structures, and were generally dissatisfied with the rules and regulations of modern society. Many of them had replaced a belief in revolutionary change with a holistic approach to politics and its evolutionary possibilities. The newly constituted Green Party benefited substantially from this sentiment, which was also conveyed in the popular culture of the early 1980s, especially in popular music. Presenting itself as an “antiparty Party,” the Green Party not only offered a political alternative but also a different cultural choice: From the very beginning, it relied on a “spontaneous anti-aesthetics” characterized by “antiprofessionalism, activism, and a moral call for participation” that was reflected in a different set of visual codes, political and social rhetoric, and appearance (hair, clothing, etc.); in short, the party was enmeshed in a different life- style and protest symbolism.84 In this distinctive visual signification and cultural coding, it followed in the footsteps of the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s. This fusion of cultural distinction and political platform – a funda- mental, grassroots alternative – was what made the Greens so attractive for the artists campaigning on their behalf as part of the Grüne Raupe strategy in the national elections of 1983. Both institutionally and ideo- logically, the party provided them with an outlet for channeling their diffuse political agenda and dissatisfaction. Furthermore, it connected them to a community of interests that actively pursued participatory democracy and peace as a political goal and lifestyle. Combined with the pervasive nuclear discourse in popular culture during the first half of the 1980s and the Artists for Peace initiative, which can be considered both in terms of ideology and participants an immediate precursor of the
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Grüne Raupe, the Green Party platform was thus able to bring together artists from a variety of backgrounds and draw many previously disillu- sioned activists from this alternative milieu back into the realm of elec- toral politics. One of the best examples of this fusion is Joseph Beuys, a West German artist and member of the Green Party, and his song “Sonne statt Reagan” (Sun instead of Reagan), released in 1982 by as part of his party’s national election campaign. In it, Beuys launched a fierce personal attack against the US president, whom he considered a war-mongering B-rate actor-turned politician: From the country that destroys itself and dictates its “way of life” to us Reagan comes bringing weapons and death And if he hears peace he sees red. He says as president of the USA Nuclear war ? – Yes Please Here and there Whether Poland The Middle East Nicaragua He wants the ultimate victory [Endsieg] That much is clear. But we want: sun instead of Reagan [word-play on rain, Regen] To live without armaments! Whether West Whether East The missiles must rust! ... Despite Beuys’ inclusion of the Soviet Union in his criticism, his satirical tirade mirrors the frequent one-sided blame put on the United States within the peace movement, sometimes in combination with an anti- American streak that can be seen in other alternative and popular songs in the Federal Republic of the time.85 It was this interaction between artists and a political movement as evidenced by the case of Beuys, among others, that made possible the Green Party’s success in the national elections of 1983, their entry into parliament and subsequent institutionalization, as well as the eventual fragmentation of this temporary alliance. At the beginning of 1986, when Otto Schily was faced with the complaint of a party member with regard to the Greens’ cultural policies, he made no effort to hide his exasperation
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with his peers: “Most GREENS look at me aghast when I assert that politics must also be judged according to aesthetic criteria. Josef Beuys once told me that there can actually be no cultural policy. I think he was right about that. Culture must evolve autonomously in society and can only sort of infect politics.”86 How the dynamics and mechanisms of the relationship between art and politics played out during this decade – as well as how it has been transformed since then – will remain a task for future scholarship on the cultural history and legacies of the Cold War of the 1980s.
Notes
1. “Bonn, halb Festung halb Festival. Beobachtungen beim Aufmarsch der 250.000 im Hofgarten,” Die Welt, Oct. 12, 1981. 2. In Martin Pannen, Landesverband Nordrhein-Westfalen, “Ein Liebes Monstrum auf Tournee in den politischen Frühling,” Letter to Media Representatives about the Grüne Raupe, Feb. 11, 1983, in CNRW, ZeVo/ ZySto1, 200 (2), Archiv Grünes Gedächtnis, Berlin [hereafter AGG]. 3. “Friedens-Hit,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Apr. 26, 1982,p.23. 4. See also the contribution by William Knoblauch on popular music in the United Kingdom in this volume, Chapter 4. 5. For an introduction and overview, see, Thomas Mergel, “Kulturgeschichte der Politik,” Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, Febr. 11, 2010; Vittoria Borso, Christiane Liermann, and Patrick Merziger, eds., Die Macht des Populären: Politik und populäre Kultur im 20. Jahrhundert (Bielefeld, 2010). See also Jürgen Danyel, Alexa Geisthövel, Bodo Mrozek, “Pop als Zeitgeschichte,” in: Mrozek/Geisthövel/Danyel, eds., Popgeschichte. Band 2: Zeithistorische Fallstudien, 1958–1988 (Bielefeld, 2014, 7–15). 6. Vittoria Borso, Christiane Liermann, and Patrick Merziger, “Transfigurationen des Politischen: Von Propaganda-Studien zu Interaktionsmodellen der Medienkommunikation – eine Einleitung,” in Borso et al., Die Macht des Populären, 7–30. 7. Pioneering studies for earlier periods include, among others, Ute Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley, 2000); Michael Rauhut, Schalmei und Lederjacke: Rock und Politik in der DDR der achtziger Jahre (Erfurt, 2002); Detlef Siegfried, Time Is on My Side: Konsum und Politik in der westdeutschen Jugendkultur der 60er Jahre (Göttingen, 2006); Mark Fenemore, Sex, Thugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll: Teenage Rebels in Cold-War East Germany (New York, 2007); Detlef Siegfried, Sound der Revolte: Studien zur Kulturrevolution um 1968 (Weinheim, 2008); Michael Rauhut and Thomas Kochan, eds., Bye bye, Lübben City: Bluesfreaks, Tramps und Hippies in der DDR (Berlin, 2008);
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Courtney Brown, Politics in Music: Music and Political Transformation from Beethoven to Hip-Hop (Atlanta, 2007); Jessica Gienow-Hecht, Sound Diplomacy: Music and Emotions in Transatlantic Relations, 1850–1920 (Chicago, 2009). 8. Dietrich Helms, “Pop Star Wars,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 11 (2005): 28–34, 32. 9. Ibid. 10. See Sebastian Peters, Ein Lied mehr zur Lage der Nation: Politische Inhalte in deutschsprachigen Popsongs (Berlin, 2010), 218–65. Peters argues that the only politically motivated music to be found in the 1980s was on the right side of the political spectrum, referring to, for example, the two West German bands Endstufe and Böhse Onkelz, among other punk bands that drifted to the right (see 240–41). 11. In this political dimension, the music of this period was in no way different from that of the 1960s. For a contrasting view, see Peters, who interprets the commercial nature and lack of a concise political agenda of 1980s popular music as apolitical, blaming the conservative turn initiated by Helmut Kohl’s chancellorship (Ein Lied mehr zur Lage der Nation, 252). See also, Jan Turowksi, “Jugend ohne Politik,” in Jürgen Stark and Dieter Gorny, eds., Popkultur 2002/2003 (Hamburg, 2002), 82–88, 85. 12. On the role of popular culture as a “proposal for personal investment and intervention opportunities in global and local contexts,” see Borso et al., “Transfigurationen des Politischen,” 19. 13. At the West German Social Democratic Party’s national convention in 1988, the song also became part of the party’s musical repertoire. See Tillmann Bendidowski, “Öffentliches Singen als politisches Ereignis: Die Herausforderung einer historischen Quelle für die Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Bendidowski et al., Die Macht der Tö: Musik als Mittel politischer Identitätsstiftung im 20. Jahrhundert (Münster, 2003), 23–37, 30–31. 14. All of the original German lyrics of the songs cited in this article can be found at www.nuclearcrisis.org/pop. 15.Thelyricsare“Go to the beach, / The bomb exploded, / The radiation burns, / And its flurorescent blue. / .../ Go to the beach, / Everyone wearing hats, / The radioactive wind, / Ruins the [one’s] hair. / .../ Go to the beach, / The ocean is clean, / No more filthy fish, / But fluorescent water.” 16. The members of the group were all Jamaicans (Liz Mitchell, Marcia Barrett, Maizie Williams, and Bobby Farrell) but it was created and managed by West German producer Frank Farian in 1975. 17. “Nicole: Politik interessiert mich nicht,” BRAVO, May 19, 1982. For por- trayals of her small-town innocence, pragmatism, and supposed authenticity, see “Nicole: ‘Ein bisschen Frieden,’” BRAVO 13, Mar. 23, 1982, pp. 18–19; Centerfold, BRAVO, May 6, 1982.
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18. On the connection between musical tastes and political preferences and activity, see Helmut Rosing, “Populäre Musik und ihr Publikum,” International Review of Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 20, no. 1 (Jun. 1989): 11–42, 34–39. 19. If any song has entered and captured the collective memory of this time period (or of what Germans’ have labeled “Generation Golf”)inaunique manner, it is this one. Unfortunately, this song, or any other song that captured the spirit of the first half of the 1980s, is conspicuously missing from Barbara Stambolis andJürgenReulecke,eds.,Good-Bye Memories? Lieder im Generationengedächtnis des 20. Jahrhunderts (Essen, 2007). 20. It was inspired by a Rolling Stones concert in 1982 at Berlin Waldbühne, where colorful balloons went up in the sky as part of the show. On the song’s origins and reception, see “99 Luftballons und das Chaos der Gefühle,” Der Spiegel 13 (1984): 220–26, 221. At the same time, the song has been seen as a critical take on “Kauf Dir einen bunten Luftballon” by Alda Noni from 1944. See Dieter Wrobel, “Zwischen Bürgerschreck und Spasskultur: Die Ausweitung der Sprachzone in Liedern und lyrics/Lyrik der Neuen Deutschen Welle,” in Gregor Ackermann et al., eds., Deutsches Lied, vol. 2 (Bielefeld, 2007), 427–57, 446. 21. James M. Markham, “Youths in West Germany Shake Off the Past,” New York Times, Aug. 14, 1983, p. 1. 22. James M. Markham, “Germany Rocks to a Native Beat,” New York Times, Sep. 25, 1983, p. H23. 23. Frederick Kempe, “Two Strains of German Nationalism,” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 21, 1983, p. 28. 24. “Wechselbäder für den Frieden – Die Friedensbewegung feiert sich selbst,” Der Spiegel 38 (1982): 220–21. 25. “Können Schlager Raketen schlagen?” Stern, Sep. 9, 1982. 26. Initiative Künstler für den Frieden, ed., Weißt Du, was der Frieden ist? Lese- Bilder-Noten für den Frieden (Berlin, 1981); Initiative Künstler für den Frieden, ed., Krieg dem Kriege: Wir erklären den Frieden (Berlin, 1983); Josef Singldinger, ed., Lieder gegen den Krieg: Künstler für den Frieden (Munich, 1983); Aktion Sühnezeichen et al., eds., Der Krieg trifft jeden Herz. Malerei, Graphik und Plakate aus Minsk und Berlin (West) (Berlin, 1985). For recent biographical reflections see Eva Mattes, “Wir können nicht alle wie Berta sein” Erinnerungen (Berlin, 2011), 215–31. 27. “Wechselbäder für den Frieden – Die Friedensbewegung feiert sich selbst,” Der Spiegel 38 (1982): 220–21. 28. Enactment of the Krefeld Appeal (Krefelder Appell), “Der Atomkrieg bedroht uns alle – Keine Atomraketen in Europa,” Nov. 16, 1980. 29. The initiators of the festival were Hans Sanders (guitarist and vocalist from the band bots), Franz Josef Degenhardt (poet, songwriter, lawyer), Katja Epstein (singer, actress), Hansgünther Heyme (theater director, playwright),
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Hanns Dieter Hüsch (songwriter, cabaret artist), Heinar Kipphardt (writer), Dieter Lattmann (writer), Udo Lindenberg (recording artist), Volker Ludwig (dramatist, playwright), Albert Mangelsdorff (jazz performer), Eva Mattes (actress), Marius Müller-Westernhagen (recording artist), Hans Platschek (artist, publicist), Claus Peymann (theater director, playwright), Erika Pluhar (actress, singer), Irmgard Schleier (author, conductor), Dietmar Schönherr (actor, director), Dieter Süverkrüp (artist, songwriter), Margarethe von Trotta (actress, director), Hannes Wader (songwriter), and Peter Zadek (thea- ter director, playwright). See official program “Artists for Peace” (Künstler für den Frieden), Petra Kelly Papers, File 1018, AGG. 30. Appeal “Artists for Peace,” Petra Kelly Papers, File 1018, AGG. 31. Press Statement, “Artists for Peace,” AGG, Petra-Kelly, File no. 1018. Press release “Artists for Peace,” AGG, Petra Kelly Papers, File 1018. 32. “Wir können den Frieden nicht herbeifeiern,” Die Neue, Special Issue, Sep. 1982, p. 12. 33. For example, the entrance fee for the festival was 15 DM, consisting of an admission fee of 10 DM and a 5 DM charge for a mandatory solidarity button. As a result, the organizers had earned the astonishing total of 1.5 million at the end of the eight-hour event, with the performing artists waiving their right to any financial compensation. 34. Harry Belafonte, speech delivered at Artists for Peace festival, Sep. 11, 1982, Bochum, Petra Kelly Papers, File 320 (1), AGG. 35. Fredrik Vahle, statement, “Artists for Peace,” Sep. 11, 1982, Bochum, Petra- Kelly, No. 320 (1), AGG. 36. Caroline Dai, “Idee für den Bundestagswahlkampf der Grünen 83,” undated, in BuVo 10/37, File 2603, AGG. 37. Eberhard Walde, letter to Caroline Dai, Oct. 25, 1982, in BuVo/BGSt, File 1645 BI, 1, AGG. In October 1980, the Free International University, initiated by German artist Joseph Beuys on the occasion of the 1977 documenta art exhibition, put up a tent in front of the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus. Covered with a green cloth and placed next to an even higher handmade “Trojan Horse,” this “Green Tent” was designed to provoke public attention and introduce people to the political platform of the Green Party. Beuys, himself a Green Party candidate in the national elections that year and a direct candidate for the city of Düsseldorf, used the tent to hold discussions and present himself to the electorate. As such, the “Green Tent” can be considered a precursor to the Green Caterpillar, which was employed as a campaign strategy in 1983. See “Gespräch mit Ute Haas,” Grüne Tomate [Journal of Bündnis 90/Grüne, Düsseldorf] 2, no. 1 (Jan. 1995): 2. On the Free International University, see Johannes Stüttgen, Free International University (FIU) – Organ des erweiterten Kunstbegriffs für die soziale Skulptur: Eine Darstellung der Idee, Geschichte und Tätigkeit der FIU (Wangen, 1992).
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38. Caroline Dai, “Idee für den Bundestagswahlkampf der Grünen 83,” revised version, undated, in BuVo 10/37, File 2603, AGG. 39. Petra Kelly, signed letter template, Dec. 21, 1982, in BuVo/BGSt, File 164 BI, 1, AGG; “Raupe Frisst Birne,” in grüner basis-dienst, 7, no. 82 (Dec. 21, 1982). 40. Fritz Rau, 50 Jahre Backstage: Erinnerungen eines Konzertveranstalters, 6th ed. (Heidelberg, 2010). See also Detlef Siegfried, Time is on my Side: Konsum und Politik in der westdeutschen Jugendkultur der 60er Jahre (Göttingen, 2006), 369–75. 41. See Fritz Rau, letter to Petra Kelly, Nov. 3, 1982, File 2305, AGG. His participation was, however, not unanimously welcomed. For critical voices lamenting the “capitalist” influence and greed of gain, see Fritz Rau, telex to Lukas Beckmann, Dec. 28, 1982, in BuVo/BGSt, File 164 BI, 1, AGG. 42. For insights into the organizational background, see Lukas Beckmann, “Zusammenstellung der Protokolle bisheriger Vorbereitungstreffen und organisationspolitisch wichtiger Informationen,” Jan. 7, 1983; Lukas Beckmann, “Mit Volldampf durch eine nun bald GRÜNE Republik,” Jan. 8, 1983, both in Peter Sellin, File 5 (A), AGG. 43. Petra Kelly, signed letter template, attachment, Dec. 21, 1982, in BuVo/BGSt, File 164 BI, 1, AGG. See, for example, Senta Berger-Verhoeven, Letter to Petra Kelly and Fritz Rau, Jan. 9, 1983, in BuVo/BGSt, 165 BI, 1, AGG. 44. Eberhart Walde, “Die ‘Grüne Raupe’ rollt über Land,” undated, in BuVo/ BGSt, File 164 BI, 1, AGG. 45. Rolf Bielefeld, letter, Jan. 12, 1983, in BuVo/BGSt, File 165, AGG; Bielefeld, letter, Jan. 24, 1983, in BuVo/BGSt, File 164 BI, 1, AGG. 46. See Eberhart Walde, “Die ‘Grüne Raupe’ rollt über Land.” For a request to stop at one of the planned locations for stationing the NATO cruise missiles, see K. Mädler, letter to Rolf Bielefeld, undated, in BuVo/BGSt, File 165 BI, 1, AGG. 47. The final route was as follows: Bonn, Wuppertal, Hagen, Unna (Feb. 5), Gütersloh, Detmold, Bielefeld (Feb. 6), Minden, Wölpinghausen, Sulingen, Ülzen (Feb. 7), Gorleben, Paderborn, Warburg, Kassel (Feb. 8), Hanau, Aschaffenburg (Feb. 9), Heilbronn, Schwäbisch-Gmünd, Göppingen (Feb. 10), Pforzheim, Homburg, Neunkirchen (Feb. 11), Trier, Bitburg, Kastellaun, Simmern (Feb. 12), Pinneberg, Brunsbüttel, Husum (Feb. 13), Lübeck, Hamburg (Feb. 14), Neumünster, Kiel (Feb. 15), Kiel, Würzburg (Feb. 16), Kitzingen, Fürth (Feb. 17), Nuremberg, Mainz (Feb. 18), Mainz, Giessen, Offenbach (Feb. 19), Dortmund (Feb. 20), Bochum, Recklinghausen, Marl, Gelsenkirchen, Bottrop, Mülheim, Dortmund (Feb. 21), Nienburg, Celle, Hannover (Feb. 22), Siegen, Cologne (Feb. 23), Saarbrücken (Feb. 24), Ludwigshafen (Feb. 25), Mannheim, Karlsruhe (Feb. 26), Stuttgart, Böblingen (Feb. 27), Ulm, Augsburg, Munich (Feb. 28), Kehlheim, Regensburg, Schwandorf, Schweinfurt (Mar. 1), Berlin, Bonn (Mar. 2). See “Endgültiger
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Fahrplan der Grünen Raupe,” undated [January 1983?], in BuVo/BGSt, File 165 BI, 1,AGG. 48. Lukas Beckmann, Zusammenstellung der Protokolle. 49. Wulf Petzoldt, “Mit grauem Klopapier in den Wahlkampf,” AZ Magazin 2 (Jan. 17, 1983). In terms of political activism, Udo Lindenberg, who fre- quently clashed with fellow musicians such as Peter Maffay and Gotthilf Fischer about the political nature and thrust of their public work, certainly stands out. See, for example, Jürgen Leinemann, “Die Deutsche Depression (IV) [TV debate between Lindenberg and Fischer, ZDF, Apr. 14, 1981],” Spiegel 6 (1982): 61–62; “Udo: ‘Kuchenschlacht statt Raketenkrieg,’” BRAVO, Mar. 8, 1984, p. 15; “Maffay wies Udo die Tür!” BRAVO Jun. 2, 1983, p. 55. 50. “ö,” taz, Feb. 16, 1983. 51. Ulla Meinecke Band, Bernies Autobahnband, Heinz Rudolf Kunze/ Mick Franke, Udo Lindenberg und das Panikorchester, Frank Wolff und das Frankfurter Churorchester, Johnny Tame, “Sklerotische Betriebsfeier,” taz, Feb. 24, 1983. 52. Siegfried Scholz, “Zum Fest der ‘Grünen Raupe’ kamen 4000 Besucher nach Offenbach,” Frankfurter Rundschau, Feb.21, 1983; Roman Arens, “Die ‘Raupe’ kam meist gut an und pünktlich,” FR, Mar. 3, 1983. 53. See, for example, Herbert Riehl-Heyes, “Die Raupe vom anderen Planeten,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, Feb. 18, 1983; Herbert Führ, “Die ‘grüne Raupe’ kommt im Eiltempo,” Nürnberger Nachrichten, Feb. 19/20, 1983; “Lärmend kroch die Raupe durch den Qualm,” Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, Feb. 24, 1983. 54. Arens, Die ‘Raupe’ kam meist gut an. 55. Ibid.; Wolfgang Bok, “Die ‘Grüne Raupe’, die Kohl fressen will,” Stuttgarter Nachrichten, Mar. 1, 1983. 56. Günter Bannas, “Niemand wird sagen können, er habe das alles nicht gewusst,” FAZ, Mar. 2, 1983. 57. See Rau, 50 Jahre Backstage, 127–28. 58. Petra Kelly, letter to Fritz Rau, Jan. 28, 1983, in File 3552, AGG; Fritz Rau, letter to Christian Waggershausen, Jan. 31, 1983, File 2306, AGG. 59. See Rau, 50 Jahre Backstage, 128–29. 60. Jens Gundlach, “Ein Stahlarbeitsplatz ist vom Schmetterling zuviel verlangt.” Undated, press clippings January-March 1983, File 2604, AGG. 61. Riehl-Heyes, Die Raupe vom anderen Planeten. 62. See, for example, Günter Grass, Dich singe ich Demokratie: Loblied auf Willy (Neuwied, Berlin, 1965); Daniela Münkel, Willy Brandt und die “Vierte Gewalt”: Politik und Massenmedien in den 50er bis 70er Jahren (Frankfurt am Main, 2005); Ilka Ennen, “Der lange Weg zum Triumph der ‘Willy- Wählen’-Wahl: Willy Brandt als Wahlkämpfer – 1961–1972,” in
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Nickolaus Jackob, ed., Wahlkämpfe in Deutschland: Fallstudien zur Wahlkampfkommunikation (Wiesbaden, 2007), 176–93. 63. “Aufruf der Grünen Raupe: Die Fantasie nach Bonn – die Grünen in den Bundestag,” Feb. 1983, in BuVo/BGSt, File 165 BI, 1, AGG. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. The Spiegel quoted a participant of a Green conference of candidates for parliament as saying: “Since the SPD has become part of the opposition, it is suddenly even greener than the Greens.” In “Keine Preise,” Spiegel 8 (1983): 33. 67. Arens, Die ‘Raupe’ kam meist gut an. 68. “‘Damit würden wir uns die Beine brechen,’” Der Spiegel 6 (1983): 17–19. 69. Riehl-Heyes, Die Raupe vom anderen Planeten. 70. “Die ‘Grüne Raupe’ machte dieser Tage auch in Hanau halt,” FR, Feb. 10, 1983. 71. Data and quote in Hans-Joachim Veen, “Wer wählt grün? Empirische Ergebnisse (1980–1984) zum Profil der neuen Linken in der Wohlstandsgesellschaft,” in Klaus Gotto and Hans-Joachim Veen, eds., Die Grünen – Partei wider Willen (Mainz, 1984), 123–24. 72. Riehl-Heyes, Die Raupe vom anderen Planeten. On the symbolic political actions of Petra Kelly, for example, see Saskia Richter, Die Aktivistin: Das Leben der Petra Kelly (München, 2010), 245–57. 73. Ekkehard Kohrs, “Nach einem Tief scheinen die Grünen wieder im leichten Aufwind zu segeln,” General Anzeiger, Feb. 24, 1983. 74. Bernd Eichmann, “‘Grüne Raupe’ unterwegs,” Das Parlament, Feb. 26, 1983. 75. Ibid. 76. Lukas Beckmann, Die Grünen: Von der Protestbewegung zur etablierten Partei – Eine Bilanz (Munich, 2010), 118. 77. “Protokoll der BHA-Sitzung,” Mar. 12/13, 1983, p. 2, File 2558, AGG. 78. Ibid. For the financial records, please see Petra Kelly Papers, File 951 and Büro Grün Papers, Files 164–171, AGG. 79. Wilhelm Knabe, “Letter of Gratitude to Participating Artists in the Grüne Raupe,” in BuVo/BGSt, File 165 BI, 1, AGG. 80. See, for example, “Das Fest der Grünen Raupe, 8. Feb. 1984, Stuttgart, Böblingen, Sporthalle,” in BuVo/BGSt, File 165 BI, 1, AGG. The band Ton, Steine, Scherben, at that time professionally represented by Claudia Roth, who would later become the chairwoman of the Green Party, agreed to give a concert for the party’s Saarland branch in the election campaign in 1985. See “Konzertvertrag zwischen Uwe Brennecke und Claudia Roth,” Nov. 23, 1984, in BuVo/BGSt 1979–89, BI1, File 165, AGG. 81. See BuVo/BGSt, File 173/174 BI, 1, AGG. 82. See, for example, Martin Winter, “Es weht der Geist, wohin er will,” FR, Dec. 27, 1986.
. 2565 7 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 2 3 :586 1 : 6 :C /2: 0 2C , , D3 64C C C96 2 3 :586 6 C6 7 D 6 2 2: 23 6 2C 9CC , 42 3 :586 8 4 6 C6 9CC , 5 : 8 From Artists for Peace to the Green Caterpillar 141
83. Hans-Joachim Veen, “Die Grünen als Milieupartei,” in Hans Maier et al., eds., Politik, Philosophie, Praxis (Stuttgart, 1988), 454–76; Frank Schnieder, Von der Sozialen Bewegung zur Institution? Die Entstehung der Partei DIE GRÜNEN in den Jahren 1978 bis 1980. Argumente, Entwicklungen und Strategien am Beispiel Bonn, Hannover, Osnabrück (Münster, 1998); Franz Walter, Gelb oder Grün? Kleine Parteiengeschichte der besserverdie- nenden Mitte in Deutschland (Bielefeld, 2010), 73–74. On the general history and transformations of the Green Party, see Andrei S. Markovits and Philip S. Gorski, The German Left: Red, Green and Beyond (New York, 1993); Margit Mayer and John Ely, eds., The German Greens: Paradox between Movement and Party (Philadelphia, 1998); Dieter Rucht and Jochen Roose, “West Germany,” in Christopher Rootes, ed., Environmental Protest in Western Europe (Oxford, 2007), 80–108; Paul Lucardie and Benoît Rihoux, “From Amateur-Activist to Professional-Electoral Parties? On the Organizational Transformation of Green Parties in Western Democracies,” in E. Gene Frankland et al., eds., Green Parties in Transition: The End of Grass-roots Democracy? (Surrey, 2008), 3–18. 84. Kathrin Fahlenbrach, “Die Grünen: Neue Farbenlehre der Politik,” in Gerhard Paul, ed., Das Jahrhundert der Bilder. Bildatlas 1949 bis heute (Göttingen, 2008), 474–82. The alternative milieu the Greens drew from, of course, had its own musical culture with distinctive groups and singers. One of them, for example, was the band Cochise with songs such as “Wir werden leben” (1981), “Der Henker” (1982), or “Die Erde war nicht immer so” (1984). On the notion of “anti-party Party,” see Interview with Petra Kelly, “Wir sind die Antipartei-Partei,” Der Spiegel 24 (1982): 47–56; Richter, Die Aktivistin, 206–16. 85. See, for example, “Es geht voran” (1980) by Fehlfarben, “Yankee raus” (1982) by Slime, and “Amerika” (1984) by Herbert Grönemeyer. On the anti-American attitudes and tropes discernible in Grönemeyer’s songs in particular as well as the West German peace movement, see also Benjamin Ziemann, “A Quantum of Solace? European Peace Movements during the Cold War and Their Elective Affinities,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 49 (2009): 351–89, 374–78. 86. Otto Schily, letter to Marlies Grüterich, Feb. 25, 1986, in BuVo/BGSt, BI, 1, File 172, AGG. On the Green Party’s cultural self-understanding, see also Jost Hermand and Hubert Müller, eds., Öko-Kunst?: Zur Ästhetik der Grünen (Hamburg, 1989); “Kultur als Lebenselixier,” in Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, 25 Jahre Grüne Geschichte (Berlin, 2004), 114.
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A Tenuous Peace International Antinuclear Activism in the East German Writers Union during the 1980s
Thomas Goldstein
Just months after the East German Writers Union (Schriftstellerverband der DDR or SV) expelled nine dissident writers from its ranks, effectively ending their literary careers in the German Democratic Republic, the NATO Double-Track Decision of December 1979 reignited a European peace movement in which SV writers would have a crucial voice. The expulsions came at the tail end of a particularly repressive phase of East German history, one that began with the 1976 decision by the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) to revoke the GDR citizenship of songwriter and regime critic Wolf Biermann. In the years that followed, an intense debate about the appropriateness of the government’s actions toward Biermann raged within the Writers Union, the professional organization to which all East German authors had to belong. As a result of this conflict several authors left the organization, either willingly or involun- tarily, with some even leaving the country for the West. Others, disillu- sioned by the union’s complicity with government repression, retained membership but withdrew from its activities. Still others supported the SED’s actions, believing Biermann was detrimental to socialism. In this atmosphere of division and discord, union leadership eagerly sought an opportunity to reestablish internal unity by rallying its members around a common cause. Such an opportunity arose in late 1979 when NATO, reacting to the USSR’s installation of intermediate range nuclear missiles in the mid-1970s, pledged to deploy similar missiles in Western Europe if the Soviet ones were not removed. In response, a heterogeneous global peace movement emerged in the early 1980s, dovetailing with earlier antinuclear and disarmament activist movements from the 1970s. While
142
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some Europeans blamed both sides for the elevation of tensions, many politicians, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens, especially on the Left, focused primarily on the Double Track Decision as a reckless act that threatened, by intention or accident, to make Europe the primary battle- ground of a war between the two superpowers, in the process condemning NATO and its chief sponsor, the United States.1 Soviet leadership was only too happy to encourage this outlook, and as a result the Communist governments of Eastern Europe began domestic and international propa- ganda campaigns in the early 1980s to do just that.2 This chapter focuses on the Writers Union’s official “peace” activities directed at foreign audiences,3 actions that brought East German writers to the international stage mere months after the end of one of the most turbulent periods of GDR cultural policy. It traces the activities of SV leaders and members from the 1979 NATO Double-Track Decision through the mid-1980s, a period that saw a flurry of international activism on the part of the union. During this period, three areas of activism were noteworthy: first, international meetings of socialists and/or socialist sympathizers to which the Writers Union sent delegations; second, events organized by the East Germans themselves; and third, attempts to engage the SV’s West German counterpart, the Union of German Writers, in peace-related activities. For each sphere of activity, this chapter asks three main questions: First, how did SV leaders seek to frame the role that writers played in the international peace movement? Second, how did these leaders seek to influence international peace events and to what extent were they successful at creating sympathy for the Soviet perspec- tive? Finally, to what extent did union members seek to use international events for their own purposes and with what consequences? As we will see, union leaders succeeded to a considerable extent in directing writers toward acceptable peace activism in pro-socialist and GDR-sponsored events, but the pursuit of a German-German front against NATO, how- ever enticing from a propaganda perspective, proved problematic as it threatened the very inner-union harmony the peace campaign aimed to achieve and undermined attempts to forge an East German identity distinct from that of the Federal Republic.
A “Peaceful” Union German writers on both sides of the Berlin Wall were among the earliest and most vigorous participants in the peace protests of the early 1980s, both in literature and public activism. As Michael Geyer has observed, the
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“logistics” of the Cold War were particularly obvious to those living in the two German states, who found themselves at the dividing line between East and West, where troop garrisons, air force training exercises, and, of course, the most militarized border in Europe were familiar sights.4 “Peace” consequently became a major preoccupation of writers in both German states, including the leading literary figures of the day such as West Germans Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll, Peter Schneider, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger; East Germans Christa Wolf, Irmtraud Morgner, Stephan Hermlin, and Franz Fühmann; and a handful of GDR exiles in the Federal Republic such as Sarah Kirsch and Rolf Schneider. These authors penned novels, short stories, essays, and newspaper commentaries and gave readings and speeches at mass peace rallies warning of the dangers of nuclear missiles and the threat of accidental annihilation. Their words and deeds helped shape public discourse on the “new Cold War” of the early 1980s, in the process fulfilling a more general sense of obligation among postwar German intellectuals to play a more active public role after the horrors of the Third Reich.5 Writers were particularly important public figures in East Germany. SED bureaucrats often referred to the GDR as a Literaturgesellschaft (literature society), and while this designation was exaggerated, East Germans did greatly value literature. The Party celebrated writers as architects of the “better” Germany’s culture, while many ordinary citizens perceived literature as one of the few avenues for articulating problems in a country without real freedom of speech.6 Occupying this uneasy position, GDR writers were well aware of their public stature, and most carried a sense of responsibility to address issues of pressing importance to state and society alike. Given the importance of writers, the SED created the Writers Union in 1950, less than a year after the country’s founding, as an organization for all who aspired to literary careers. From the beginning its chief task was ideological, charged with “contributing to the development and expansion of national culture” and “fight[ing] with their literature against fascism, for peace and social progress.”7 An important secondary task was to represent the professional interests of its members, such as provid- ing a secure social standing as well as enabling members to act as public intellectuals with a real say in the progress of socialism. However, this latter expectation prompted many authors to demand that the union try to expand their role in improving socialism, a demand that often clashed with the SED’s main goal for the SV as a politically compliant association. The tension between these two visions produced much conflict within the
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union and between authors and the SED throughout its history, especially after Wolf Biermann’s expatriation. In each instance, union leaders typically sided with the Party but still sought compromises to transcend divisions and unite writers behind a common purpose. In the Biermann crisis, the union president (since 1978), Hermann Kant, was no exception, nor was his powerful first secretary, Gerhard Henniger. Both were SED loyalists,8 but both also believed the peace issue could help heal the rifts within their organization and allow East German writers to play a prominent role in an issue of global significance. While West German authors’ peace activism was often influenced by professional organizations and other networks,9 the Writers Union played an arguably larger role for East German authors in facilitating and fram- ing their activism as part of their government’s efforts to champion the moral legitimacy of the Soviet cause to domestic and foreign audiences. “Peace” had been a theme of the union from its creation, assuming a particularly urgent tone during the Vietnam War. Throughout its his- tory, a common rhetorical refrain was discernible within the union: Peace was the imperative of all true socialists, who must strive against Western attempts to derail the peace so bitterly won after World War II.10 Moreover, it was accepted as axiomatic that writers had a special role to play in calling attention to the forces threatening peace, given literature’s truth-teller function.11 Despite the priority such claims placed upon peacemaking, until 1979 peace activism was only one of many tasks facing the Writers Union, many of which took greater precedence. From late 1979 on, however, peace became the most important theme of union activism as it spearheaded a local, national, and international propaganda blitz that saw East German writers participate in dozens of peace-themed readings, rallies, book bazaars, and other events in the GDR and abroad, all with the aim of supporting Soviet “peace” initiatives while denigrating the United States. If writers were to participate in peace activism, it was important to the SED that they said the right things. This was especially the case because of the growth of unauthorized peace groups in the GDR that challenged their country’s militarization as well as the Soviet bloc’s role in fueling global tensions. To this end, the SV became an important tool for molding the public statements of its members. The key figure in this regard was Hermann Kant, whose numerous speeches in the early 1980s made clear which elements to emphasize in peace-related activism. One of the first official SV statements came from Kant at the first meeting of the union’s central steering committee in early 1980, just weeks after the NATO
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decision. Here he declared, “One knows, a great war today would almost unavoidably become a nuclear war, and one knows a nuclear war would almost unavoidably annihilate a gigantic part of humanity or shatter almost the entire earth.”“The world stinks of war,” he added, but thankfully, writers were prepared to speak out against it. In fact, East German literature had always served as “a contribution to securing peace.” Was all of this too much to ask of literature, of writers, of the union? Kant thought not. “We are a part of the alliance,” he intoned, “which defends peace.”12 The speech proclaimed writers’ responsibility to expose the imminence of nuclear war, which threatened large swaths of humanity. For Kant, East German writers had an essential role to play in this process, given the prominence of peace as a theme in GDR literature and, as he emphasized in other speeches,13 given the history of Nazism on German soil. Moreover, East German writers were part of a larger community of like-minded people. International solidarity was required to secure peace, and so international activism would have to become a crucial component of the Writers Union’s peace campaign.
International Socialist Peace Events It was one thing to preach international cooperation, but it was another to carry it out in a way that satisfied the SED and union members. Authors considered important and/or trustworthy enough by the Party and Writers Union leaders earned the privilege of representing East Germany at international peace events in the 1980s. Doing so enhanced the prestige of the author and built solidarity within the international community of writers who supported the anti-NATO peace movement, but union members were often placed in uncomfortable situations at these meetings, especially when Western authors criticized the Soviet bloc. International events were thus double-edged swords – they pro- vided much-coveted publicity for the peace campaign, but the SV could not always control the full message of the meetings. One way to mitigate these risks was to limit participation to meetings comprising only Socialists. In this regard, the Writers Union worked closely with partner organizations in the Communist world on “peace,” issuing numerous joint statements and declarations of support. For instance, Kant and Georgi Markov, president of the Union of Soviet Writers, issued a joint declaration in March 1981 on “the responsibility of writers in the struggle for peace and disarmament.”14 Similar coopera- tion occurred between the Czechoslovakian and East German writers
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associations, which in October 1983 issued a joint statement on NATO’s “acute threat to peace.” Both organizations pledged that should NATO wage war against the Soviets, they would support any countermeasures “in order to protect the life of the people of the Socialist states.”15 Comparable statements sprang from annual meetings of the leadership of writers associations from all Socialist states. For instance, in October 1980 at the first such meeting since the Double-Track Decision (held in Moscow), the first point on the agenda was “[t]he contribution of writers of Socialist countries in the struggle for securing peace, for détente and disarmament.”16 At another such conference in Mongolia in 1982, delegates discussed “[t]he international work of writers unions of Socialist countries and the stake of writers in the struggle for peace.”17 Similar messages emanated from conferences in Prague in 1981 and 1984, and Hanoi in 1983.18 At such meetings, the key point was the repeated call for concerted international action as the basis for safeguarding peace. At the next level up were congresses with socialist authors from across the world. Chief among these events were the Sofia International Writers Meetings, held in Communist Bulgaria typically every other year starting in 1977.19 Peace had become a field of competition with the West, and the Sofia meetings became an opportunity to organize and publicize the global efforts of socialist writers in this competition. Representatives from fifty nations, including the GDR, convened in Sofia in 1980 for the third such meeting, the first since the Double-Track Decision. Here, Gerhard Henniger reported that this meeting “professed anew the deter- mination of many progressive writers from the entire world ...to cham- pion peace and disarmament.”20 Later Sofiaevents(heldin1982, 1984,and1986)featuredsimilar refrains of the necessity of cooperation among peace-minded writers and vilifying the United States. Union officials hoped to use the 1982 meeting to “strengthen the activities of peace and broaden the forces of peace.”21 Several East German authors participated at conference events. For example, the highly regarded Stephan Hermlin joined in apoetryreading,whilenovelist Erik Neutsch spoke at the final plenary session, where he proposed that the delegates write a book in which they described why they wanted peace.22 To further emphasize the connection between the USSR and peace, attendees at the 1984 Sofia meeting received a direct greeting from Soviet premier Konstantin Chernenko. In his statement, Chernenko referenced the fortieth anni- versary of the defeat of Nazi Germany and pledged “to defend peace which has been won in the blood-shedding battle in which millions of
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human lives were lost and at the price of countless privations and sufferings.” Authors, he suggested, had an important place in these endeavors: “the writers, the voice of all men of culture, can contribute to a large extent to mankind’sunderstandingthatpeaceistheonlyhope of the planet and we have to fight for it and fight together at that.”23 Finally, before the Sofiameetingin1986,GDRauthorswereinstructed to declare their full support for the disarmament proposals that Mikhail Gorbachev (leader of the USSR since 1985) was then pushing in Reykjavik and to counter all attempts of those who sought to explain the current tensions by positing arguments that would minimize NATO’sleadingroleinimperilingtheglobe.24 This last Sofia meeting, like the previous ones, was clearly a coordinated affair, and its larger purpose was propagandistic. Yet these meetings served as opportunities for East German writers to be important voices in international settings, arolethatbothbolsteredthelegitimacy of the GDR and expanded the significance of the role of authors in fortifying global socialism. If they could do so abroad, might they carry such international significance back home?
Union-Sponsored International Events In addition to sending delegations to foreign meetings, the SV also hosted several international peace events in the 1980s, usually involving socialist or socialist-sympathizing authors. In May 1983, for example, prominent union members participated in an event commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi book burnings.25 Fifty thousand people gathered at Bebelplatz in East Berlin for the event, entitled “To Peace the Word and Deed.” Participants included members and candidates of the SED Politburo, among them chief ideologue Kurt Hager, East Berlin Party boss Konrad Naumann, and Cultural Minister Hans-Joachim Hoffmann. The program consisted of GDR and foreign authors (mainly from Socialist countries) reading antifascist and peace-themed literature, including East Germans Hedda Zinner, Stephan Hermlin, and Heinz Kamnitzer, all active Communists during the war. Kamnitzer, president of the GDR’s PEN Center, gave the opening remarks, arguing that from the flames of Bebelplatz emerged the horrors of Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Rotterdam, and Coventry, and because of such events, peace must be the “first imperative.”26 In closing, the assembled guests adopted a declaration proclaiming, “We – writers and journalists from European states and the host country German Democratic Republic – remember today [that]
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here in the same location books and publications, which were written for peace, humanism, scientific, artistic, and societal progress, were burned by imperialist Germany under Hitler.” With an eye toward this devastating history, the message for the present was clear: “End the arms race and away with the NATO missile decision.”27 The world’s writers, led by East Germans, declared their commitment to peace, born from abhor- rence of Nazism. In doing so, they implied that the Americans, the pur- ported chief purveyors of aggression, were cut from the same cloth as Hitler’s henchmen. The union sponsored several more international events over the course of the 1980s. In June 1983, the SV staged an event entitled “Writers for Peace” with twenty-five foreign writers invited to read selections so that authors from across the world could unite against “imperialist policies of war and NATO-arms build-up, and advocate for the safeguarding of peace.”28 In April 1985 the union organized an international colloquium on the theme “Literature in the Struggle against Fascism and War” to mark the fortieth anniversary of the defeat of Nazism. The agenda con- cerned “the struggle against imperialism and war,”29 and featured an event at the site of the Potsdam conference, during which the assembled writers issued an appeal “against the arms race and the Star Wars plans of imperialist circles in the USA,” again underscoring the linkage between American and Nazi actions.30 As early as 1985 the Writers Union, responding to an SED instruction to propose a commemoration for Berlin’s 750th anniversary (occurring in 1987), suggested an event with the theme “Writers in the Struggle for Peace and Disarmament” where global authors would discuss the role of literature in ensuring peace.31 In 1986, the propaganda purpose of the meeting became clearer, as the goal shifted specifically to supporting Soviet calls for disarmament by creating an impression of “unanimity in the matter of peace.”32 To further enhance this perspective, the event would take place on a symbolic date – May 8, the anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. The place was also significant: once more, Bebelplatz, site of the Nazi book burnings. Kant would open the event and then thirty foreign authors would read selections from their works, with translations read by East German authors.33 The basic idea was that “[i]n this place the progressive literature should have been burned and annihilated,” now the progressive authors of the world would assemble and “raise their voices for peace and humanity in our times.”34 The event, eventually titled “Berlin – a Place for Peace,” was held in May 1987 and served to lend support to Mikhail Gorbachev’s recent
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suggestions to Ronald Reagan to eliminate all intermediate-range nuclear missiles. Kant opened by reminding the audience of the significance of the place. They stood where the Nazis had burned books; here, where reason and humanity could have been extinguished, “a gathering of reasonable people” had assembled, “and in more than twenty languages the word of ‘peace’ is perceptible.”35 Kant would later reflect that “above all, the meeting was influenced by the Gorbachev disarmament initiatives, and it took place on the soil of a state that understands itself not only as a peaceful state but is also contributing powerfully to that peace.”36 Nonetheless, while the Bebelplatz reading went as planned, controversy emerged during an accompanying meeting of writers, as some East German authors, including Christa Wolf and Günter de Bruyn, wondered aloud why, if the SED praised Gorbachev’s calls for disarmament, they ignored his calls for greater freedom of speech.37 Through this and related events, the SV promoted the prestige of East German literature by building a community of writers around the com- mon cause of peace as defined by Soviet proposals. Moreover, doing so enhanced the importance of the union in East Germany, all in a largely supportive environment surrounded by foreign authors of similar ideolo- gical outlooks. Yet as the 1987 Berlin event showed, disagreement could not be fully stamped out even in events controlled by the Writers Union, including some criticisms of the SED.
Attempted Cooperation between East and West German Authors Not all international events were so predictable, however. One of the more important tasks of the SV in the early 1980s was to seek out sympathetic West German authors and encourage their public opposition to the NATO missile deployments. To this end, the leaders of the East German Writers Union found a partner in the West German Verband deutscher Schriftsteller (Union of German Writers or VS). Created as an interest group for FRG authors in 1969, in the 1980s the VS attempted to play a public role in influencing the debate on Euromissiles. Since many prominent authors such as Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll, and Bernt Engelmann were already inclined to decry nuclear war, the GDR Writers Union’s task was to ensure that the Western authors’ critique was directed at NATO and not the USSR, a task in which the East Germans found only partial success.38 Interestingly, much of the early initiative came from the West. Unlike those participating in the antinuclear protests of the 1950s and 1960s,
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West Germans, including writers, in the early 1980s showed a surprising willingness to forge alliances with Communists so as to transcend Cold War divisions.39 In fact at first, Writers Union officials were wary of Western contacts, especially as many exiled authors were now active in the West German literary scene.40 Thus, when novelist Bernt Engelmann, VS chairman since 1977, wrote to Kant in early 1980 (mere weeks after the NATO decision) about interunion collaboration,41 SV leaders hesi- tated. Given contacts between the VS and other Soviet-bloc writers unions, First Secretary Gerhard Henniger wrote to SED cultural bureau- crats and cautiously proposed engaging Engelmann. “Naturally,” he emphasized, “it can only be about contact directed towards making our association’s clear socialist position and the development of a socialist national literature in the GDR even more explicit.” They would thus oppose all “gesamtdeutsch” (all-German) activities for fear of damaging East Germany’s fragile legitimacy vis-à-vis its more prosperous Western counterpart. Such a strategy would continue SED chief Erich Honecker’s policy of Abgrenzung (demarcation) created in the 1970s as an answer to West German chancellor Willy Brandt’s efforts to forge closer relations between the two German states. At the same time, as Henniger indicated, contact could offer a key advantage: previously, when GDR authors took part in West German events, the Writers Union had little control over who was invited. If such exchanges were placed within the framework of interassociational relations, the SV would now be able to select its own delegation members.42 Caution seems to have won for the moment as it was a year before Kant and Henniger met Engelmann. In February 1981 the duo embarked on a lecture tour in the FRG, invited by the German Communist Party to speak on developments in the GDR, and it was in this context they finally met the insistent Engelmann. To counter skepti- cism, Engelmann quickly sought common ground on the Euromissile Crisis. He impressed them by noting that he had signed the Krefeld Appeal of November 1980,whichcriticizedtheNATOdecision,and echoed Kant in rhetorically asking if “the writers in both German states, from whose soil the last world war emanated, do not have a special responsibility for the maintenance of peace”?TheEastGermanduo agreed that a new testimonial by writers on peace was desirable given recent events, but only if it involved writers from all of Europe; clearly they still worried about “all-German” actions. Engelmann assented, and before long they had drafted an appeal to be signed by prominent European authors.43
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In August 1981 the leaders of the two unions approved the final draft of the “Appeal of the Writers of Europe.”44 “Humanity,” it began, “should now be accustomed to the criminal notion that a circumscribed nuclear war could be waged.” Europe’s writers sharply disagreed, and therefore, “[a]bove all borders of states and societal systems, above all differences of opinion we address to responsible persons the urgent appeal to refrain from the new arms race and once again immediately enter into negotia- tions with each other on further disarmament.” By acting jointly, they could prevent the unthinkable, ensuring that “Europe does not become an atomic battlefield of a new and then final world war.”“Nothing,” it closed, “is as important as the preservation of peace!”45 The appeal refrained from explicitly identifying a specific antagonist, but it did suggest that peace was most threatened by those countries using nuclear weapons as a policy tool. Given the pending Pershing missile deployment, the implied aggressor was apparent, barely concealed by the appeal’s universal language. In any event, the appeal proved successful, and by the following year four thousand people from across the world had signed it.46 From success immediately sprang controversy, however, when in December 1981 Hermlin, a vocal critic of Biermann’s expulsion, initiated a conference in East Berlin entitled the “Berlin Meeting for the Promotion of Peace.” The meeting, attended by nearly a hundred authors and scientists from East and West Germany (and a handful of other countries), including some former GDR writers now living in the West, was the first major public event between writers from the two Germanys in nearly three decades.47 The session was not sponsored by the Writers Union but won SED approval as a chance to build on Kant and Engelmann’s peace appeal.48 Still, their relative lack of involvement was reportedly a source of anxiety among union leaders, especially as the event was scheduled to take place near the fifth anniversary of Wolf Biermann’s expatriation, a choice some believed Hermlin had made deliberately.49 Such concerns proved justified, because at the meeting several speak- ers challenged the SV’s peace narrative. Some West Germans, like Günter Grass, tried to blame both superpowers for current tensions, rejecting a pro-Soviet focus. Others, like Peter Schneider, called for both sides to disarm, while many Westerners urged Soviet bloc govern- ments to permit independent peace demonstrations.50 Several East German authors also made provocative statements. For instance, recent East German exile Rolf Schneider, who had been a member of the Writers Union until his expulsion in 1979,tookhisformercountryto
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task, railing against the GDR media for praising some East German authors who had signed Kant and Engelmann’speaceappealbutignor- ing others. Those not mentioned, he stated, “had been evicted from the GDR Writers Union two years earlier.” By censoring these names, the SED sent the message that the “cultural-political quarrels from ’79” were “more significant than the issue of peace.”51 This open criticism of the GDR inspired other East Germans to call attention to their country’s failings, especially among those who, like Schneider, had supported Biermann. Author Günter de Bruyn noted that the SED “greeted the antiwar struggle of Christians, pacifists, and con- scientious objectors on the other side of the border, but the antiwar struggle of Christians, pacifists, and conscientious objectors within its own borders is impeded,” decrying that “what is acclaimed over there is unwanted over here.”52 Fellow SV member Franz Fühmann, another Biermann supporter, echoed both Schneider and de Bruyn, asserting the need to transcend national interests dividing the peace movement. If one truly believed that peace was the “greatest good,” nothing could be excluded in seeking it, nor could any efforts be used as an “instrument for a different goal than those which it represents itself.”53 Strongly implied in his statement was a critique of the SED’s attempts to instrumentalize the peace movement for its own ends, an insinuation that was not lost on those in attendance. Given such discord, little of substance was accomplished at the high- profile meeting, although in the GDR the impact of the East Berlin session was immediate. For instance, the variety of opinions expressed at an official event encouraged independent peace activists in the GDR to continue to agitate despite the SED’s efforts to stifle them, hopeful their voices might still be heard.54 In the SV, the main consequence of the conference was to expose deep fissures. On the one hand, the conference showed that there existed a vocal minority in the union who were not reconciled to the way in which the Biermann expatriation had been handled, seeing a linkage between the suppression of dissent in the 1970sandthesuppressionofindependentpeaceactivistsinthe1980s. The likes of Christa Wolf, Franz Fühmann, and Günter de Bruyn would thus likely continue to use peace meetings to dredge up earlier events or criticize SED policies.55 On the other hand, such authors provoked the ire of those who had opposed Biermann and who supported the official peace policy. A report for the union’s Berlin SED organization indicated that while many mem- bers agreed with the meeting’s goal, they disapproved of the “invitation
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politics,” as organizers invited authors “with whom disputes were con- ducted years ago and whose dishonest intentions are known.”56 Regime officials like Klaus Höpcke, GDR publishing tsar, told the union that while it was important to build a “wide alliance [of] relationships in the peace struggle,” he chafed at the behavior of certain authors “who sepa- rated themselves from the association years ago.” Children’s book author Peter Abraham agreed with the thrust of the meeting but criticized giving some people “a platform for their erroneous perceptions,”57 an attitude also expressed by author Dieter Noll.58 And as a February 1982 Stasi report indicated, many loyalist writers “felt they no longer receive the necessary recognition and support from the Party leadership, but rather the Party leadership is interested more in the former opposition, such as Stephan Hermlin, Christa Wolf et al., since their ‘words’ are now more significant for the peace campaign than [those of loyal East German writers].” So dissatisfied were some members that there was talk of founding a new Writers Union,59 rumors that must have unsettled the SED. The decision to invite “problematic” authors and not more “dis- ciplined comrades” thus had a disillusioning effect on some members, which did little to calm inner-union tensions. In sum, the fallout from the Berlin meeting, intended as a centerpiece to the GDR writers’ peace campaign, threatened to break the union’s shaky unity forged since the Biermann years.60 As discord was simmering, union leaders continued to work with West German colleagues on peace actions in 1982 and 1983, including writers’ meetings at the Hague (May 1982), Cologne (June 1982), and West Berlin (April 1983).61 Still, as time passed, dissenting voices at West German peace events grew ever louder. By 1982 Western peace activists were increasingly seeking ties to independent GDR peace groups and condemn- ing the SED’s suppression of their activities.62 Consequently, East German writers quickly came under fire for defending their government. Already in May 1982 during a book tour of the Federal Republic, Kant perceived a hostile conspiracy when audience members repeatedly asked about the suppressed peace movement in the GDR, hoping, he surmised, “to contribute to discrediting me.”63 Henniger made a similar observation that same month at the meeting at the Hague: when several authors expressed support for independent peace groups in the GDR, he diag- nosed a “planned and coordinated attempt to slander the peace policy of the GDR and to bend the peace initiative into a ‘civil rights movement’ of anti–socialist character.”64 While cooperation with Engelmann con- tinued to be productive, by 1983 SV leaders were wondering if attending
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West German events, where they could now expect hostile attacks, was worth it. Perhaps because the growing controversy reminded them of the fragi- lity of their alliance with the VS, in January 1982 Kant invited Engelmann to work on a new appeal,65 efforts that bore fruit in August 1983 when the two leaders issued a joint statement from the West German town of Rottach. The text asserted that the threat of nuclear war had only increased since their appeal two years earlier, especially because of the “unaltered intention of the USA in the fall to begin with a new missile generation.” Thus on the forty-fourth anniversary of the Germans invad- ing Poland, the two leaders appealed to all citizens to do everything in their power to prevent a war from occurring, as “it threatens the annihila- tion of our continent.” All who lived in Europe were urged to join them.66 Kant had achieved in this document what was only hinted at in 1981: the West German writers association’s chairman stated clearly that the United States, like Nazi Germany before it, bore sole responsibility for the peril in which the world now found itself, although this change in tone may have owed more to growing anti-Americanism in the international peace movement than to Kant’s persuasiveness.67 Nonetheless, what is striking about this document, released amidst a growing chorus of dissent within both unions, is the tired, almost rote recital of by-then familiar tropes, and the invocation of the forty-fourth anniversary of the invasion of Poland feels a touch forced. Their optimism sinking and their alliance waning, Kant and Engelmann’s 1983 appeal reads more like an epitaph for what might have been the stirring call-to-arms it was meant to be. In fact, shortly after the two unions issued their peace appeal of August 1983,theSEDbegantopressuretheEastGermanassociation to abstain from such efforts. In part this reflected a broader shift in the peace movement, as Soviet bloc governments began abandoning efforts to influence the Western peace movement in the face of increasing criti- cism of their own practices. A more proximate reason for this policy shift was likely an embarrassing incident several months earlier, when mem- bers of the West German Greens, participating in a protest in East Berlin alongside independent peace activists, were assaulted by GDR police and deported, forcing Erich Honecker to offer a public apology. Indeed, by the summer the SED was calculating that prominent nonaligned peace groups were actively seeking to undermine the Soviet bloc with their “imperialist human rights campaign.”68 Thus when Günter Grass sought to organize a conference to protest the NATO missiles in the fall of 1983, Kurt Hager decreed that the SV should not participate
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“in any way, shape, or form” (Honecker even wrote “correct” in the marginalia).69 The end of intense cooperation between the unions came shortly there- after. In November, the installation of NATO missiles began and Bernt Engelmann quit as VS chairman after fifty FRG writers, including Grass, Schneider, and Böll, called for his resignation.70 The missile installation was a failure for the peace movement and removed the issue upon which the two associations had found common ground. Moreover, the fall of Engelmann cost the East Germans their most reliable West German partner. While Hager instructed Kant to keep ties with him, it was clear any further interunion peace action would be a nonstarter. As Hager told Stephan Hermlin, the architect of the first Berlin meeting, in late November, there “was absolutely no purpose to conduct a [future] writers meeting at which a part of those present take positions that are not for peace, but rather against socialism, against the GDR. Such a meeting cannot and should not be.”71 The excellent working relationship between the two unions thus came to an end when author and historian Hans Peter Bleuel replaced Engelmann as VS chair in 1984 and GDR émigré Erich Loest was elected as his deputy.72 Thereafter, the West German association’s relationship with the East German union quickly deteriorated. There were some abor- tive discussions on future peace events and some limited joint initiatives, but mistrust and resignation rendered all such efforts fruitless.73 Engelmann, many Writers Union leaders came to believe, had been unique among West German authors. Bleuel, in contrast, was “another kind of person in relation to politics and literature.”74 In any event the East German government’s peace efforts waned after the Gorbachev-Reagan Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987, which eliminated the kind of nuclear missiles that had provoked the crisis in the first place.
Conclusions Across Europe, writers played a vibrant and multifaceted role in the peace movement of the early 1980s, helping to shape public opinion with their pens and performances. Literary intellectuals in the two Germanys were eager participants in these campaigns; shaped by personal experiences in World War II, many writers on both sides of the border felt a responsibility to their societies and to Europe as a whole to ensure that peace prevailed. Given the added political significance of literature in East Germany, the SED strategically deployed GDR writers to serve as
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prominent public faces for the regime’s official peace campaign, in the process drawing upon authors’ professional organization to help bend their activism to regime-friendly ends. The time between the Double-Track Decision and the INF Treaty was thus of great importance to the Writers Union. Coming at the end of the most fractious period in its history, the East German peace campaign created an opportunity for union members to act as public intellectuals for an issue deemed critical to socialism. For one thing, the SED’s choice of the union to spearhead the peace campaign on foreign soil was an acknowledgment of the crucial role that writers played in advancing socialism at home and abroad. For another, sending delegations to meetings of socialist writers raised the profile of the GDR within the Communist world, and by engaging their West German counterparts, East German authors entered one of the central conflicts of the Cold War. Germany, long a flashpoint of American-Soviet tensions, was ground zero for the Euromissile Crisis, and so joint action on behalf of the most important writers’ organization in each German state was in some ways a victory for the pro-Soviet peace movement, even if the motives for West German collaboration were likely more complicated.75 Clearly it was much easier to find accord with fellow Communists than with authors on the other side of the Berlin Wall, but the SV had some success enlisting West Germans for the GDR’s peace policies. The close cooperation between the unions, thanks especially to Bernt Engelmann and Hermann Kant, attempted to present a united front against NATO missiles, condemning purported American aggression by reminding the world of similarities between the United States and the Third Reich. Yet the front was never quite as united as Kant and Engelmann hoped, and dissenting voices in each camp continued to express heterodox inter- pretations of the crisis. On the one hand, while the official East German peace campaign succeeded in bolstering support for a pro-Soviet peace narrative among some Western individuals and groups, they ultimately failed to steer the peace movement as a whole in a pro-Soviet direction, precisely because there was no unified peace movement in the Federal Republic.76 On the other hand, in attempting to reach across the Iron Curtain, union leaders unintentionally reopened a recent wound. Critics of the Biermann decision (including several former SV members now in the Federal Republic) utilized the public forum created by the peace movement to criticize the SED’s hypocrisy in suppressing independent peace activists at home while celebrating them abroad. Their harsh words struck many colleagues as an unwelcome reminder of the very
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acrimony that the union’s participation in the peace campaign was meant to overcome. Finally, participation in the official peace campaign proved counterproductive to one of the central points of Honecker’s foreign policy – demarcating the GDR as a separate country from West Germany. Union officials were under strict orders to avoid “all-German” activities, and yet by continually asserting a German responsibility for peace stemming from the Nazi past, any collaboration between the two unions inevitably raised the specter of the German question and thus undermined claims of East German distinctiveness. While not as heterogeneous as either the West German or the indepen- dent East German peace movements, the preceding analysis reveals that the official GDR peace movement was anything but a monolithic bloc parroting the party line on peace. East German writers offered alternative perspectives on the nuclear crisis, and while nearly all vilified NATO, increasingly some authors were willing to raise uncomfortable questions about their own country as well. The government-sponsored peace cam- paign was thus internally disruptive in the GDR, not merely in the conflict between the SED and unofficial peace activists but also within establish- ment organizations such as the Schriftstellerverband. Union members achieved some concrete results with their peace initiatives, especially with other socialists, and enhanced their status as public intellectuals at home and abroad. Yet by prioritizing collaboration with West Germans, the SV ultimately forfeited an opportunity to heal the rift created in the 1970s, all but ensuring tensions in East Germany’s literary community – and the wider country – would continue for years to come.
Notes
The research for this chapter was made possible through grants by the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst and the Department of History at the University of Arkansas. I would like to thank Elizabeth Parish Smith, J. Franklin Williamson, J. Laurence Hare, and the participants and organizers of the “Accidental Armageddons” GHI conference for their comments at various stages of this work. 1. Holger Nehring and Benjamin Ziemann, “Do All Paths Lead to Moscow? The NATO Dual-Track Decision and the Peace Movement – A Critique,” Cold War History 12, no. 1 (2012): 4–5. 2. See, for example, Jeffrey Herf, War by Other Means: Soviet Power, West German Resistance, and the Battle of the Euromissiles (New York, 1991); Lawrence S. Wittner, Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford, 2003); and
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Michael Plotz and Hans-Peter Müller, Ferngelenkte Friedensbewegung?: DDR und UdSSR im Kampf gegen den NATO-Doppelbeschluss (Münster, 2004). 3. It lies beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss the role of writers in East Germany’s unofficial peace movement. Some individual writers joined peace- themed groups operating without official sanction, although the extent of their involvement has not yet been examined systematically. For the independent peace and opposition groups in the GDR, see, for example, Anke Silomon, “Schwerter zu Pflugscharen” und die DDR: Die Friedensarbeit der evange- lischen Kirchen in der DDR im Rahmen der Friedensdekaden 1980 bis 1982 (Göttingen, 1999); David Rock, ed., Voices in Times of Change: The Role of Writers, Opposition Movements, and the Churches in the Transformation of East Germany (New York, 2000); Hans-Joachim Veen, Ulrich Mählert, and Peter März, eds., Wechselwirkungen Ost-West: Dissidenz, Opposition und Zivilgesellschaft 1975–1989 (Cologne, 2007); and Detlef Pollack, “Zwischen Ost und West, zwischen Staat und Kirche: Die Friedensgruppen in der DDR,” in Philipp Gassert, Tim Geiger, and Hermann Wentker, eds., Zweiter Kalter Krieg und Friedensbewegung: Der NATO-Doppelbeschluss in deutsch-deutscher und internationaler Perspektive (Munich, 2011), 269–82. 4. Michael Geyer, “Der kriegerische Blick: Rückblick auf einen noch zu beenden- den Krieg,” Sozialwissenschaftliche Information 19, no. 2 (1990): 112–14. 5. Stuart Parkes, Writers and Politics in Germany, 1945–2008 (Rochester, NY, 2009), 1–4, 119–23; Anne Marie Stokes, A Chink in the Wall: German Writers and Literature in the INF-Debate of the Eighties (New York, 1995). 6. Simone Barck, Martina Langemann, and Siegfried Lokatis, “The German Democratic Republic as a ‘Reading Nation’: Utopia, Planning, Reality, and Ideology,” trans. Michael Latham and Devin Pendas, in Michael Geyer, ed., The Power of Intellectuals in Contemporary Germany (Chicago, 2001), 88–112; David Bathrick, The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR (Lincoln, NE, 1995). 7. Richard Mand, Gerhard Opitz, Carola Schulze, Peter Zinnecker et al., Handbuch gesellschaftlicher Organisationen in der DDR: Massenorganisationen, Verbände, Vereinigungen, Gesellschaften, Genossenschaften, Komitees, Ligen (Berlin, 1985), 144. 8. Both served as informants for the Ministry of State Security for years. For Kant, see Karl Corino, ed., Die Akte Kant: IM “Martin”,dieStasiunddie Literatur in Ost und West (Hamburg, 1995). For Henniger, see, for instance, Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, Zentralstelle (hereafter BStU) AP 14872/92. Also see Joachim Walther, Sicherungsbereich Literatur: Schriftsteller und Staatssicherheit in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (Berlin, 1996). 9. Nehring and Ziemann, “Do All Paths Lead to Moscow?” 1–9; Stokes, A Chink in the Wall, 37–83.
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10. See, for example, Schriftstellerverband der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (hereafter SV-DDR), Bezirksverband Berlin, Declaration, April 1, 1977, Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv (Berlin) (hereafter SAPMO-BArch) DY30/IVB2/9.06/63. 11. See, for example, Hermann Kant, “Unsere Worte wirken in die Klassenauseinandersetzung,” VII. Schriftstellerkongress der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik: Protokoll (Berlin, 1974), 31, 35, 47. 12. “Referat von H. Kant auf 1. Vorstandssitzg.,” 1980, SAPMO-BArch DY30/IBV2/9.06/61. 13. See, for example, Kant’s keynote address to the union’s 1983 national con- gress. Hermann Kant, “Rede auf dem IX. Schriftstellerkongreβ der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik,” Neue Deutsche Literatur 32, no. 8 (1983): 7–37. 14.SV-DDR, “Beschlussprotokoll der Präsidiumssitzung vom 4 Mai 1981,” Literaturarchiv: Archiv der Schriftstellerverband der DDR 604, 90,Archivder Akademie der Künste, Berlin (hereafter cited as SV). See also SV-DDR, “Beschlussprotokoll der Präsidiumssitzung vom 8.September1981,” SV 604 50. 15. Declaration, n.d., SV 511, vol. 1, p. 22. 16. Gerhard Henniger, “Bericht über das Leitungstreffen der Schriftstellerverbände sozialistischer Länder in Moskau,” Oct. 29, 1980, Berlin, SAPMO-BArch DY30/IVB2/9.06/64. 17. Marianne Schmidt, “Bericht über das XVIII. Leitungstreffen der Schrifttellerverbände der sozialistischen Länder vom 26.1. bis 2.2.1982 in Ulan Bator,” Feb. 12,1982, Kleinmachnow, SV 950, vol. 1, 100–102. 18. SV-DDR, “Beschlussprotokoll der Präsidiumssitzung vom 21. Oktober 1981,” SV 604, p. 39; “Resolution der Teilnehmer des 20. Treffens der Leitungen der Schriftstellerverbände der sozialistischen Länder,” SV 950, vol. 1, p. 3; Vera Engelke, Report, Mar. 30, 1983, SV 950, vol. 1, p. 56; Press Release, Mar. 11, 1983, Hanoi, SV 950, vol. 1, p. 57. 19. “Sixth World Writers’ Meeting – Press Bulletin No. 3: Human Civilization Must Have a Future,” n.d., SV 947, vol. 2, pp. 54–55. 20. SV-DDR, “Beschlussprotokoll der Präsidiumssitzung vom 9. Oktober 1980,” SV 603, pp. 146–47. See also, “Internationales Schriftstellertreffen in Sofia beendet,” Oct. 1, 1980, SV 947, vol. 1, p. 120. 21. Gerhard Henniger, “Notiz über ein Gespräch mit Bernt Engelmann,” Feb. 8, 1982, Berlin, SV 524, vol. 4, p. 5. 22. “Peace – The Hope of the Planet: Journal of the Fourth International Meeting of Writers,” Sept. 28–Oct. 1, 1982, Sofia, SV 947, vol. 1, pp. 29, 34. 23. “Peace – The Hope of the Planet: Fifth International Writers’ Meeting Press Release,” Oct. 2, 1984, SV 947, vol. 2, pp. 270–71. 24. SV-DDR, “VI. Internationales Schriftstellertreffen in Sofia ‘Der Frieden – die Hoffnung des Planeten,’” Oct. 14, 1986, Berlin, SV 947, vol. 2, pp. 9–10. 25. For the planning of this event, see SV-DDR, “Beschlussprotokoll der Präsidiumssitzung vom 21 Mai 1980,” SV 603, p. 74; SV-DDR,
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“Beschlussprotokoll der Präsidiumssitzung vom 9. September 1980,” SV 603, p. 129; SV-DDR, “Beschlussprotokoll der Präsidiumssitzung vom 21 Mai 1982,” SV 605, p. 77. 26. “50 Jahre nach der faschistichen Bücherverbrennung: Unser Wort und unsere Tat Waffen im Friedenskampf – Lesung mit Autoren aus sechs Ländern auf dem Berliner Bebelplatz, Kurt Hager, Konrad Naumann, Egon Krenz wurden herzlich begrüβt,” Neues Deutschland, May 11, 1983, pp. 1–2. See also “Information über den Stand der Vorbereitung der Veranstaltungen anlässlich der 50. Wiederkehr des Tages der faschistischen Bücherverbrennung,” n.d., SAPMO-BArch DY30/9667. 27. “Willenserklärung der Teilnehmer an der Veranstaltung am 10. Mai 1983 auf dem Bebelplatz in Berlin anläβlich des 50. Jahrestages der faschistischen Bücherverbrennung,” Neues Deutschland, May 11, 1983, p. 1. 28. “Schriftsteller für den Frieden: Manifestation im Maxim Gorki Theater,” IX. Schriftstellerkongreβ, 218. 29. Presidium Meeting, May 15, 1985, SV 511, vol. 3, p. 90; Steering Committee Meeting, December 12, 1984, SV 510, vol. 2, p. 113. 30. “Bemerkungen zur Lage im Schriftstellerverband der DDR,” May 15, 1985, Berlin, SV 552, p. 18. 31. Gerhard Henniger to Kurt Löffler, Komitee der DDR zum 750jaehrigen Bestehen von Berlin, Dec. 7, 1985, Berlin, SV 428, p. 25. See also SV-DDR, “Betr.: Bericht über die Arbeit der Bezirksverbände für die Zeit vom 26.3. bis 24.4.1987,” SV 749, p. 60. 32. “Konzeption des internationalen Schriftstellergespräches anlässlich ‘750 Jahre Berlin,’” n.d., SV 512, vol. 1, pp. 66–67.; Hermann Kant to Kurt Hager, May 26, 1986, Berlin, SV 546, vol. 2, p. 186. 33. Dr. Joachim Hannemann, Report on May 1987 Peace Event, Mar. 27, 1987, SV 428, p. 17. 34. SV-DDR, “Beschlussprotokoll der Präsidiumssitzung vom 13. April 1987,” SV 512, vol. 2, p. 102. 35. “International Schriftstellerlesung ‘Berlin – ein Ort für Frieden,’” May 8, 1987, SV 428, p. 86. 36. Hermann Kant, “Berlin – ein Ort für den Frieden,” Neue Deutsche Literatur 36: 8 (1987): 5. See also SV-DDR, “Beschlussprotokoll der Präsidiumssitzung vom 30. Juni 1987,” SV 512, vol. 2, p. 84. 37. Stokes, A Chink in the Wall, 69–70. 38. Parkes, Writers and Politics in Germany, 82–83, 111–31;Herf,War by Other Means, 130–31, 145–47, 155–56, 175–77. For a detailed history of interactions between the Writers Union and the Union of German Writers, see Sabine Pamperrien, Versuch am untauglichen Objekt: Der Schriftstellerverband der DDR im Dienst der sozialistischen Ideologie (Frankfurt, 2004), especially 87–160.
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39. Nehring and Ziemann, “Do All Paths Lead to Moscow?” 1–15; Frank Trommler, “German Intellectuals: Public Roles and the Rise of the Therapeutic,” in Geyer, The Power of Intellectuals in Contemporary Germany, 46–47; Gerhard Wettig, ‘Die Sowjetunion in der Auseinandersetzung über den NATO-Doppelbeschluß 1979–1983,’ Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 57 (2009): 217–59; Helge Heidemeyer, “NATO-Doppelbeschluss, westdeutsche Friedensbewegung und der Einfluss der DDR,” in Gassert et al., Zweiter Kalter Krieg und Friedensbewegung, 252–67. 40. Heidemeyer, “NATO-Doppelbeschluss, westdeutsche Friedensbewegung und der Einfluss der DDR,” 256–57, 262–63. 41. Bernt Engelmann to Hermann Kant, Jan. 11, 1980, SV 526 vol. 1, p. 34. 42. Gerhard Henniger to Ursula Ragwitz, Jan. 22, 1980, SV 526, vol. 1, 184–85. 43. “Bericht über die Reise der Genossen Hermann Kant und Gerhard Henniger in die BRD (3.-9. Februar 1981),” Feb. 11, 1981,SV524 v. 3, pp. 38–43; “Beschlussprotokoll der Präsidiumssitzung vom 9. Februar 1981,” SV 604, 108. 44. SV-DDR, “Beschlussprotokoll der Präsidiumssitzung vom 8. September 1981,” SV 604, p. 50. 45. “Appell der Schriftsteller Europas,” in Ingrid Krüger, ed., Mut zur Angst: Schriftsteller für den Frieden (Darmstadt, Neuwied, 1982), 20. 46. Henniger, “Notiz über ein Gespräch mit Bernt Engelmann,” 3; Stokes, A Chink in the Wall, 39–40. 47. Stokes, A Chink in the Wall, 41. 48. Dieter Heinze to Kurt Hager, Sep. 10, 1981, Akademie der Künste-Ost- Archiv (hereafter AdK-O) 998, 397. On the role of the East German Academy of the Arts in organizing the meeting, see Matthias Braun, Kulturinsel und Machtinstrument: Die Akademie der Künste, die Partei und die Staatssicherheit (Göttigen, 2007), 335–71. 49. Major Sattler, “Information über ein geplantes ‘Abrüstungskolloquium’ von Schriftstellern in der DDR-Hauptstadt,” BStU ANS AGMS 12448/89 vol. 1, 133–34. 50. Stokes, A Chink in the Wall, 45–46. 51. Rolf Schneider, “Die Angst schüren: Beitrag zur ‘Berliner Begegnung zur Friedensförderung,’” in Krüger, Mut zur Angst, 93. See also “Information über die Lesung des Schriftstellers Rolf SCHNEIDER vom 11.11.1982 in der Gemeindekirche Neuenhagen im Rahmen der Friedensdekade 1982 der evangelischen Kirche,” Nov. 12, 1982, Berlin, BStU HA XX/AKG 3405,p.5. 52. Günter de Bruyn, “Moral wird zur Überlebensstrategie: Beitrag zur ‘Berliner Begegnung zur Friedensförderung.’” in Krüger, Mut zur Angst, 120–23. See also Herf, War by Other Means, 147. 53. Franz Fühmann, “Weltinnenpolitik von untern: Thesen zur ‘Berliner Begegnung zur Friedensförderung,’” in Krüger, Mut zur Angst, 149–52.
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54. Braun, Kulturinsel und Machtinstrument, 361–71. 55. “Information zur gegenwärtigen Situation im Schriftstellerverband der DDR,” Feb. 16, 1982, BStU AIM 2173/70 part 1, vol. 5, p. 405. At the same time, several young East German writers were upset that “old grandpas” had dominated the meeting and had not invited members of the younger generation to voice their opinions. Stokes, A Chink in the Wall, 44. 56. Abteilung Kultur, “Information,” Jan. 5, 1982, Landesarchiv Berlin (here- after LAB) C Rep. 902 5266. 57. Siegfried Wein, Abteilung Kultur, “Information,” Jan. 29, 1982, Berlin LAB C Rep. 902 5266. 58. Dieter Noll, “Zur Diskussion Parteiaktiv 7.4.1983,” Apr. 7, 1983, SAPMO- BArch DY30/32707, p. 3. 59. “Information zur gegenwärtigen Situation im Schriftstellerverband der DDR,” Feb. 16, 1982, 405–7. 60. Joint peace initiatives also sparked controversy in the VS. East German émigrés criticized Engelmann and others at the VS congress in June 1982 for making common cause with Kant, whom they dismissed as an SED lackey and regime apologist. Several authors subsequently resigned from the VS to pro- test the organization’s collaboration with representatives of the SED dictator- ship, while others began to question Engelmann’s leadership. Stokes, A Chink in the Wall, 52–55. 61. Stokes, A Chink in the Wall, 48–52. 62. Wittner, Toward Nuclear Abolition, 240, 245. 63. Hermann Kant, “Bericht über eine BRD-Lesereise vom 21.4.–1.5.1982,” May 5, 1982, DY 30/26310, pp. 1–2. 64. Gerhard Henniger, “Bericht über das ‘Haager Treffen zur Weiterführung der Friedensinitiative Europäischer Schriftsteller’ vom 24.–26. Mai 1982,” SV 524 vol. 4, pp. 22–28. 65. SV-DDR, “Beschlussprotokoll der Präsidiumssitzung vom 19 Januar 1982,” SV 605, p. 104. 66. Hermann Kant and Bernt Engelmann, Appeal, Aug. 4, 1983, Rottach, SV 548, vol. 1, p. 82. 67. Nehring and Ziemann, “Do All Paths Lead to Moscow?” pp. 8–9. 68. Wittner, Toward Nuclear Abolition, 271–72, 284–85. 69. Kurt Hager to Erich Honecker, Nov. 9, 1983, SAPMO-BArch DY30/18932, p. 1. 70. Charges included Engelmann’s refusal to take up the cause of GDR émigrés and his lack of resolve in protesting the dissolution of the Polish Writers Union in 1983 when that government declared martial law. “Lärm um nichts,” Der Spiegel 48 (1983); Stokes, AChinkinthe Wall, 56–57. 71. Kurt Hager to Erich Honecker, Nov. 29, 1983, SAPMO-BArch DY30/18932, pp. 1–4.
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72. “Präsidium am 8.9.1982,” SV 605, pp. 47–48; Stokes, A Chink in the Wall, 57. 73. “Beschlussprotokoll der Sitzung des Präsidiums vom 22. Januar 1986,” SV 512, vol. 1, p. 137. 74. See, for example, SV-DDR, “Beschlussprotokoll der Präsidiumssitzung vom 15. Oktober 1986,” SV 512, vol. 1, p. 35; SV-DDR, “Beschlussprotokoll der Präsidiumssitzung vom 17. März 1987,” SV 512, vol. 2, pp. 105–6; “Präsidium – 17.3.1987,” SV 512, vol. 1, p. 111. 75. Nehring and Ziemann, “Do All Paths Lead to Moscow?” 1–24. 76. Heidemeyer, “NATO-Doppelbeschluss, westdeutsche Friedensbewegung und der Einfluss der DDR,” 249–67.
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Local and Transnational Activism
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The “Example of Wyhl” How Grassroots Protest in the Rhine Valley Shaped West Germany’s Antinuclear Movement
Stephen Milder
In the early morning hours of February 20, 1975, hundreds of police officers descended on a clearing in the woods outside the southwestern German village of Wyhl. A diverse group of approximately 150 people comprising “vintners, students, housewives, priests, and doctors” huddled around a smoldering campfire and braced themselves for the onslaught.1 The police approached the crowd and ordered them to take down their tents, pack up their belongings, and leave the woods. Rather than obeying the officers’ demands, members of the group raised their voices in song.2 Within moments, policemen began wrenching individuals from the group and dragging them away. Still unable to fully disperse the protesters, the police stepped back and bombarded those who remained with a water cannon. As she left the clearing, one woman decried the police action in her thick rural dialect. “This is a disgrace,” she screamed. “If you had hearts in your bodies you would never do anything like this!”3 This brutal confrontation swiftly ended local people’s first attempt to occupy the Wyhl reactor construction site. Unlike previous local anti- nuclear actions, however, this attempted occupation – and more impor- tantly the aggressive police intervention – was filmed and then broadcast during primetime on national television throughout West Germany. Sitting in their living rooms one week later, West Germans watched in horror as middle-aged protesters were manhandled by police and deluged with water. Though the confrontation comprised only the final minutes of an hour-long program that narrated local people’s five-year struggle against nuclear reactors, the incident had an enormous impact on the German populace. Rather than students or long-haired misfits, respect- able middle-aged men and women were being beaten by the police on TV.
167
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In light of the disturbing broadcast, the befuddled mainstream press finally began to investigate the occupation.4 Baden-Württemberg’s Christian Democratic Premier, Hans Filbinger, attempted to explain the situation by announcing that it was not “the local citizenry” who were behind the action at Wyhl, but rather “nationally organized manipulators.”5 Filbinger’s attempt to discount the Wyhl occupation as the work of meddling outsiders actually had things backward. The protagonists of this antireactor struggle were local farmers and vintners, joined by middle-class residents of nearby Freiburg and a handful of students. Regardless of Filbinger’s claim, the protesters’ local provenance was obvious to television viewers. An article in Der stille Weg, the official publication of the staunchly conservative World Federation for the Protection of Life (WSL), noted that the “disappointment in the eyes of the protesters in the representatives that they themselves had elected, proved that the Premier of Baden-Württemberg’s claim that these people were all ‘extremists’ was a bald-faced lie.”6 Another commentator reported that the protest’s local roots were so strong that in many villages “a common front exists against the nuclear industry and the government like that against a foreign enemy.”7 In the aftermath of the Wyhl occupation, however, the sort of “nation- ally organized” activists derided by Filbinger did become increasingly interested in grassroots antinuclear protest. By the time that the brutal conclusion of the first Wyhl occupation had been broadcast on national television, local people had already reoccupied the site. This time, their occupation endured for nine months. In light of this daring action and its clear challenge to government authority, a wide range of individuals and activist organizations began traveling to Wyhl to see for themselves what was going on in the remote southwestern corner of the Federal Republic. Alternative publications carried extensive reports on the occupation for those unable to make the trip. Many who visited or read about the protest were quick to take up the antinuclear banner themselves. In light of the numerous antinuclear protests that succeeded it, scholars have long sensed the important role played by the protests at Wyhl in catalyzing West Germany’s powerful antinuclear movement.8 Yet, they have had difficulty explaining just how this provincial protest drew the interest of a wide range of social activists to antinuclear activism. Understanding why activists from organizations ranging from the Rote Armee Faktion (Red Army Faction – RAF), which issued a solidarity statement, to the WSL converged on the issue of nuclear energy requires both a close look at the local roots of antireactor protest, and also the
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motivations of the many “outside groups” that became involved in the antinuclear project. In somewhat circular fashion, growing popular concerns about nuclear energy are the most frequently cited reason for the expansion of the antinuclear movement.9 Concerns about nuclear energy do not tell the whole story of antinuclear protest in West Germany, however. The very fact that Rhenish reactor opponents’ grievances and actions were per- ceived as legitimate, despite their increasingly radical attitudes and their adoption of illegal protest tactics, played a key role in the rapid expansion of the antinuclear movement after 1975. Though it is not often empha- sized, it was this slowly established combination of legitimacy and radic- alism that allowed grassroots protest in a distant corner of the Federal Republic to interest West Germans in the subject of nuclear energy and to shape the emerging Green coalition. In essence, provincial Wyhl was the site where the diverse generation of “founding Greens” began to coalesce around the struggle over nuclear energy, a subject that had previously been far from mainstream political interests.10
Organizing Opposition at the Grassroots Level The televised clash between protesters and police in the Wyhl forest captured the imagination of people all across the Federal Republic, but it also obfuscated the years of slow and deliberate movement-building that had prepared local reactor opponents for this daring, illegal action. Already in March 1975, just weeks after the broadcast, Freia Hoffmann was concerned about outsiders’ perception of what was going on in southwestern Germany. Her concern arose after she “heard that the example of Wyhl has led to resignation elsewhere.” In other places, she elaborated, “they say, ‘the people of the Kaiserstuhl, those are particularly courageous people, something like that [the Wyhl occupation] wouldn’t be possible here.’” In working to explain the situation at Wyhl to people across the Federal Republic, therefore, Hoffmann was “forced to repeat time and again” that in the Upper Rhine Valley “a few people began the painstaking work of pointing out the dangers of atomic power plants, the patient work of organizing countless informational meetings, passing out umpteen-thousand flyers, collecting signatures, etc.” It was this long history, Hoffmann told anyone who would listen, that had allowed for the successful occupation in 1975.11 Awareness of this patient and painstaking work was important not only for those who at the time sought to re-create the Wyhl occupation,
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but also for those who today seek to understand the spread of antinuclear activism during the 1970s. An examination of the years before the Wyhl occupation reveals the Rhenish movement’s grassroots nature and its diversity. It also sheds light on the way that local people came to perceive of the construction of a reactor near their homes as a threat to “their own situations” and thus a matter of what Michael Foley has described as “front porch politics.”12 That the movement can be described as “grass- roots” and “diverse” is important since these attributes help to explain how people in the Rhine Valley succeeded in creating a powerful protest movement that was deemed legitimate by many outside observers. This feat, of course, appeared particularly impressive so shortly after the dis- solution of the student movement, which had caused many left-leaning activists to consider the possibilities for radical social action diminished.13 Thus, understanding how Rhenish protesters organized themselves is the key to understanding their ability to interest so many others in anti- nuclear activism. The grassroots movement that led up to the occupation of the Wyhl reactor site began as early as July 1970 when Jean-Jacques Rettig, a schoolteacher in the Alsatian town of Saales, read in his morning paper that the Eletricité de France (EDF) intended to build a nuclear reactor near the village of Fessenheim. Together with his wife, Inge, Rettig had for several years translated correspondence between German- and French-speaking environmental organizations. Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, groups like the WSL questioned the public consensus that “peaceful” use of atomic energy could be considered a tremendous boon for modern society.14 Familiar with these arguments and thus con- cerned about the EDF’s plans for Fessenheim, the Rettigs discussed the matter with friends. Together with four other Alsatian families, they founded the Comité pour la sauvegarde de Fessenheim et de la plaine du Rhin Valley – CSFR).15 The following April, using the Rettigs’ contacts throughout Alsace and across the Rhine in German Baden, the CSFR organized a strictly regu- lated, silent march of more than one thousand protesters through the village of Fessenheim.16 Though this hushed action did little to foster discussion of nuclear energy among the people of Fessenheim, many of whom shuttered their windows as the marchers passed their homes, the silent protest did succeed in sparking conversations across the Rhine. As rumors of German plans for a reactor of “unimaginable dimensions” on the river’s right bank began to circulate, those who had participated in the CSFR action were among the first to become concerned.17 The model
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of the CSFR’s founding, whereby circles of friends came together as a “citizens’ initiative” against nuclear power, repeated itself time and again in southern Baden. In Freiburg, Margot Harloff, an acquaintance of the Rettigs who had attended the Fessenheim demonstration, brought together a circle of friends from within this university town’s educated middle class.18 Harloff’s group, which called itself the Aktionsgemeinschaft gegen Umweltgefährdung durch Kernkraftwerke (Action Group against Environmental Danger Caused by Reactors), voiced concerns about the lack of operating experience for the massive reactors planned for the region and the total lack of coordination between French and German nuclear planners. The Aktionsgemeinschaft’s most effective tool in its effort to recruit Freiburgers to the antinuclear cause was a poster compar- ing the size of the proposed reactor’s cooling towers to the spire of the beloved Freiburg Minster. As the poster’s caption explained, the cooling towers would be nearly one-and-a-half times the cathedral’s height, and they would have a base circumference equivalent to that of a soccer stadium.19 In the winegrowing villages near the Rhine, personal relationships and shared, specific concerns paved the way toward antinuclear cooperation. By construing the reactor project as a threat to viticulture, the mainstay of the region’s economy, a pair of childhood friends were able to recruit the vast majority of the local population to the antinuclear cause. This duo, comprising the electrician Dieter Berstecher and the vintner Günter Sacherer, visited villages all over the trellised slopes of the Kaiserstuhl, where the region’s prized grapes were grown. They shared meteorological reports with vintners and villagers and explained how the steam dis- charged by the reactor’s cooling towers would create fog, block the sun, and cause local wines to lose their characteristic sweetness.20 As these examples suggest, the “pearl necklace” of reactors planned for the Rhine Valley was initially opposed by a broad cross-section of the region’s population, from Alsatian teachers, to members of Freiburg’s Bildungsbürgertum, to Kaiserstuhl vintners.21 A variety of specific and often technical considerations caused these individuals great concern. By discussing their apprehensions with neighbors and colleagues, the first antinuclear activists in the Rhine Valley recruited others to their cause. It was the process of protesting reactors and being ignored by both the nuclear industry and government officials, however, that knitted disparate pockets of resistance together. Through these interactions, local antireactor initiatives formed a regional movement that opposed nuclear
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energy in a broad sense and advocated a more transparent, more demo- cratic government. As the movement grew together, it became a vehicle for the region’s population to mount a head-on attack against nuclear energy from this rural borderland.
From Local Protests to a Regional Movement After months of patient outreach efforts and countless discussions of nuclear energy, an overwhelming majority of rural people publicly voiced their opposition to the reactor. In Oberrotweil, the hometown of Günter Sacherer, 1,021 of 1,090 eligible voters signed a petition against the reactor. In Dieter Berstecher’s hometown of Burkheim, 889 of the village’s 891 voters signed the petition.22 Throughout the region, activists gathered sixty thousand signatures against the project during the four-week gov- ernment-mandated comment period.23 In September 1972, at the height of this signature drive, rural reactor opponents staged their first public protest against this perceived threat to their livelihoods. Some five hundred vintners and farmers from all over the Kaiserstuhl drove their tractors in a slow procession through their villages and into the town of Breisach, where the reactor was to be built.24 Freiburg’s Bund Kommunistische Arbeiter (Federation of Communist Workers – BKA) was unimpressed by this show of rural strength. In its journal, Klassenkampf, the dogmatic Marxist group criticized the farmers for failing to attack both the government and the nuclear industry. Klassenkampf reported with dismay that the farmers had limited their protests to meek pleas for assistance from Baden-Württemberg’s minister of economics and managed to do no more than send a “moralizing letter” to Breisach’s mayor. Though this article revealed many of the BKA’s presumptions and misconceptions about rural protest, there was a kernel of truth behind some its allegations. The very specificity of anti- Breisach activists’ demands did suggest that a “better reactor,” or at least one placed farther from their homes and vineyards, could have assuaged their opposition to nuclear energy.25 What the BKA failed to understand, however, was that it was precisely these limited and specific demands that had been essential for the recruit- ment of local people to the anti-reactor cause. Stemming from threats to local people’s own situations, specific demands paved the way toward deeper criticisms of government and nuclear energy. It was on account of conversations, protests, and frustrating interactions with government officials that a broad swathe of the rural population, including countless
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loyal CDU (Christian Democratic Union) voters, prepared themselves to illegally occupy an expansive reactor construction site. Rhenish reactor opponents’ immediate and specific concerns were already blossoming into broader critiques of nuclear energy and the state government in late 1972. On September 23 of that year, the government- sponsored Staatsanzeiger newspaper published an article stating that there would soon be no more space for the “functions [of] living and recreation” in the Upper Rhine Valley. As the European Economic Community (EEC) moved closer together and the Rhine became its new industrial axis, this report maintained, such activities would have to be moved to “the pre- mountainous zones” in the Vosges and the Black Forest.26 For many inhabitants of southern Baden’s Rhine villages, the article was a chilling reminder of the Second World War. Early in 1945, villagers had been ordered to abandon their homes and look down from the hills of the Black Forest as their communities were destroyed by Allied artillery.27 The circumstances of the decision to relocate the proposed Breisach reactor to the village of Wyhl were perceived as further evidence of the govern- ment’s disregard for the people of the Rhine Valley. Economics Minister Eberle had admitted that the Breisach project would have to be delayed following a contentious October 1972 public hearing; an apparent signal that reactor opponents’ concerns were being taken seriously by govern- ment officials.28 Yet this brief period of détente ended abruptly with the unexpected announcement in July 1973 that the reactor would be relo- cated to Wyhl, a mere 20 kilometers downriver from Breisach.29 The clearer it became that despite government assurances, the move from Breisach to Wyhl would not resolve any of their concerns, the further reactor opponents’ trust in the government dwindled. In this contentious atmosphere, local circles of reactor opponents continued to discuss their concerns about nuclear power with others throughout the region. Antireactor groups organized information sessions in village pubs and Freiburg lecture halls. Night after night, scientists and vintners, villagers and Freiburgers discussed the problems that reactors would pose for the region in technical and scientific terms. Many meetings addressed the interests of specific subsets of the population, from teachers to vintners.30 Other gatherings brought together diverse groupings. Regardless of the target audience, experts fielded questions and worked with the local population to help them master the antireactor arguments of critical physicists, biologists, and meteorologists. Armed with these arguments – and more importantly – their own knowledge of the region and their agricultural livelihoods, local people
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were not afraid to challenge the experts sent by the government to assuage their fears. Vintners responded with righteous anger when a professor of agriculture from the University of Mainz, who had been invited to a hearing by government officials, told them in a “brash and impertinent manner” that potatoes required more sunlight than did their valuable grapes.31 As a result of such encounters, even the pretense of open dialo- gue soon evaporated. For reactor opponents, the July 1974 public hearing on the Wyhl reactor was the clearest indication to date that government officials had no real interest in discussing the project with them. After the presiding Stuttgart official skipped over several areas of concern and neglected to allow many citizens the opportunity to speak, reactor opponents exited the hearing en masse.32 Before leading these outraged reactor opponents out of the meeting, one activist stood up and denounced the proceedings as nothing more than a “show trial.” Later that afternoon, a band of protesters returned to the meeting hall bearing a wooden coffin labeled “Democracy.”33 Local people could hardly have made the demise of their trust in government officials and state-sanctioned licensing procedures more evident. Word that a lead processing plant was planned for the Alsatian village of Marckolsheim – just two kilometers from Wyhl – spread to the Badensian side of the Rhine within days of the contentious hearing. People in the region had come to know the problems with reactors inside and out over years of protest, but lead plants were even better-known threats to health and the environment. As one activist later recalled, “The names of towns like Stolberg and Nordenham,” where toxic chemi- cals emitted from lead plants had caused cattle to drop dead in the fields, had “become synonyms for contamination of the environment.”34 Given these grave concerns about the dual threats facing their region, represen- tatives of twenty-one local citizens’ initiatives met on August 24, 1974, in the village of Weisweil to plan a common course of action. The groups approved a joint statement articulating their longstanding concerns about agriculture and public health and explaining what they planned to do about it. This statement, which was posted throughout the region, became the movement’s hallmark and provided an enduring roadmap for future protests.35 Most significantly, the statement concluded with a warning that local people were prepared to occupy both project sites as soon as construction began. In two sections entitled “Because we see that ...” and “Because we have learned that ...,” local people justified this call to action on the
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basis of their experiences over four years of antireactor protest. They had seen that the nuclear industry was hell-bent on pushing through its projects despite its awareness of the risks. They had learned that the government was not neutral and that it was keen to promote reactor projects in the region despite the opposition of nearly one hundred thou- sand local people. Such “disrespect for [our] rights will no longer be accepted,” the activists boldly stated. Instead, the twenty-one citizens’ initiatives were determined to defy government authority and to occupy both construction sites.36
Inspiration and Co-optation: The Left Responds to Rhenish Antireactor Protest It was Rhenish protesters’ strong challenge to government officials and the powerful nuclear industry, evinced in the “dynamite conclusion” of their August 1974 statement – and the two site occupations that followed it – that piqued the interest of social activists throughout the Federal Republic.37 It was not a sudden interest in rural life or environmental issues that channeled the attention of activist groups to the remote Rhine Valley. Instead, from nonviolent anarchists to dogmatic Communists, a wide range of West German activists became interested in antinuclear protest because they saw it as a powerful new means of challenging government authority and pursuing their own preexisting goals. A network of nonviolent action collectives were among the first left- leaning groups to see potential in antinuclear activism. In ways similar to those of other groups that would come later to the antinuclear cause, these proponents of nonviolent social change explained their antinuclear stance more in terms of the movement’s revolutionary potential than out of a heartfelt concern for the environment. The anarchist journal graswur- zelrevolution, for example, initially viewed grassroots environmental activism through the lens of the movement against the expansion of the Larzac military base in central France.38 This perspective, which equated the protection of farmland with opposition to militarism, allowed environmentalism to be more easily incorporated into the anarchists’ preexisting antiwar goals and their desire for deep social change. gras- wurzelrevolution’s editors had opined already in 1972 that “environmen- tal protection is only nonrevolutionary at first glance.” In clear reference to Larzac, an editorial statement pointed out that “French pacifists were forced to realize that the upsurge of the environmental movement was also a strengthening of their own movement, because militarism is the
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single biggest destroyer of the environment.”39 This instrumental under- standing seems to have shaped the nonviolent action groups’ initial approach to environmentalism. A 1974 graswurzelrevolution article explained how environmental ideals could be put to use by proposing that the steadily growing net- work of nonviolent action groups associated with the magazine embark on an “ecology campaign.” The article opened with the comment that “one cannot say that the graswurzel groups are unemployed; yet it is just as difficult to argue – at the moment, at least – that they are bubbling with activity.” The article explained that an ecology campaign might be just the answer for the graswurzlers’ search for a “field of political work that can go beyond the small scale of local antimilitarism work and allow for the development of a transregional network.”40 Once graswurzelre- volution’s editorial staff became aware of the Rhenish movement in 1974, antinuclear activism quickly became a special focus of the pub- lication and its associated activist groups. This growing grassroots struggle was an exciting alternative to the graswurzel groups’ own near unemployment. The Young European Federalists (JEF), a group dedicated to the overcoming of the continent’s many borders, may have at first appeared even less likely than the graswurzlers to support Rhenish antinuclear protest. Yet the JEF was interested in the movement’s “links across the Rhine.” Upon hearing of the Alsatians’ and Badensians’ joint struggle against the Wyhl reactor and the Marckolsheim lead plant, editor Jo Leinen seized on the topic as an appropriate theme for a special issue of JEF’s Forum E magazine. Here, he thought, was a prime example of “trans-border cooperation.”41 When the site occupation began at Wyhl in February 1975, the special issue of Forum E was already on its way to press. Within months, the obscure magazine’s “antinuclear issue” had gone to an unprecedented second printing. Local antireactor activists across the Federal Republic were submitting orders to Leinen for multiple copies of the issue for use in their organizing efforts.42 Along with his JEF colleague Petra Kelly, Leinen understood this breakthrough as a long-awaited opportunity to harness grassroots energy toward the creation of a more democratic Europe.43 Antireactor activism had succeeded in bringing Leinen and the JEF far closer to the European people whom they sought desperately to include in their federalist project. Soon, JEF activists stood among West Germany’s most dedicated opponents of nuclear energy. Leinen even organized an antinuclear citizens’ initiative in Bonn.44
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Many social activists, however, did not jump on the antinuclear band- wagon as quickly as did the graswurzlers or the JEF. Professor Theodor Ebert, editor of the journal Gewaltfreie Aktion, and a well-known theorist of nonviolent civil defense, was hesitant to support Rhenish protest as late as September 1974. In a letter to a representative of the Weisweil Citizens’ Initiative, Ebert wrote that he was not certain “that nuclear reactors ought to be unconditionally rejected.” The basis for this professional opinion, he explained, was his concerns about reliance on Persian oil and the fact that he was “unsure that [the village of Weisweil’s] existence [was] truly threatened” by the proposed reactor.45 Opposing nuclear energy was not a worthy end in its own right for Ebert. The successes of Rhenish protesters, made evident to Ebert in the reports submitted to Gewaltfreie Aktion by a group of “action research- ers” (including many of his own doctoral students), soon caused the professor to reassess his initial judgment of antinuclear activism.46 With the Wyhl site occupation, the focus of Gewaltfreie Aktion shifted drama- tically. For the next several years, the magazine’s normal mainstay topics, including civil defense and conscientious objection, gave way to countless analyses of local antinuclear activism in the Rhine Valley and beyond. Ebert himself referred to the movement against the Wyhl reactor as “surely the most significant explicitly nonviolent campaign since the founding of the Federal Republic.”47 It was the very success of Rhenish protest that caused Ebert to overcome his doubts that nuclear reactors actually posed an “existential” threat to their neighbors. Even the dogmatic left overcame its initial dismay with what it per- ceived as meek protests of the conservative rural population on account of the impressive successes of Rhenish protest. A report by the Kommunistische Bund Westdeutschland (Communist League of West Germany – KBW) on an April 1974 Rhine Valley demonstration was similar to the report on the 1972 protests against the proposed Breisach reactor published by its Freiburg predecessor, the BKA. The KBW’s Kommunistische Volkszeitung (KVZ) criticized the citizens’ initiatives behind the 1974 protest because they advocated “negotiations” and failed to really take the government and the nuclear industry to task.48 Yet by September 1974, when the occupation of the Marckolsheim construc- tion site began, the KBW’s coverage of Rhine Valley protest had become markedly more positive:
The workers and farmers, on both sides of the border, have shown that they have the same interests, because they have realized that the capitalists on both sides of
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the border, who are only interested in profits, are their enemies, and that the government is not on the people’s side but is instead doing everything in its power to fight against the interests and needs of the people and put through the capital- ists’ interests. Now that rural activists had adopted a more militant course of action, the KBW had convinced itself that these farmers and vintners were pursu- ing an anticapitalist project. Accordingly, the article concluded with a quote from a Badensian farmer that implied that rural people had reached class consciousness. Under the circumstances, the farmer explained, “You have to become radical.”49 The KBW’snewfoundrespectforthesame rural people whom it had so recently dismissed was a function of those local people’sgrowing militancy and the KBW’sabilitytounderstandtheiractivismaspartof its own political project. Rhenish people’s successes, which they had achieved in spite of the widespread disinterest of nationally organized activist groups, laid the groundwork for a broad antinuclear movement that included these selfsame groups. In fact, shortly after the beginning of the Wyhl occupation, it was hard to find any activist organization that was disinterested in Rhenish protest, let alone opposed to it. Even the RAF declared its full solidarity with the Wyhl protests. Echoing the KBW’sinterpretation,RAFspokesmanHorstMahlersaidthattheleft- wing terrorist group regarded the Wyhl occupation as a “revolutionary mobilization of the workers.”50 As these responses make clear, the growing debate over nuclear energy and the militant tactics employed by Rhine Valley antinuclear campaign- ers appealed to social activists ranging from the graswurzel groups to the RAF. Far from a sudden adoption of environmental ideals, it was the promise of an effective means of furthering their own agendas that inter- ested these preexisting activist groups in antinuclear activism. By creating “two, three ... many Wyhls,” various nationally organized activist groups hoped to reignite the dormant class struggle, promote nonviolence and antimilitarism, work towards a federal Europe, and even foster a revolution in the FRG.
Conclusion Activist groups quickly made good on their newfound interest in anti- nuclear politics. Already in the summer of 1975, the JEF organized an antinuclear demonstration outside the Federal Ministry for Research in Bonn. By bringing antinuclear activism to the West German capital, Jo
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Leinen hoped to foster “widespread public interest” in atomic energy and thus develop a trans-local “network of citizens initiatives.”51 The KBW soon involved itself in antireactor protests in the northern German town of Brokdorf, where it clashed repeatedly with local protesters and also the Kommunistische Bund (Communist League – KB). Both Communist groups, but particularly the KB, sought to turn the antireactor campaign at Brokdorf into a militant struggle against state authority by organizing battles against the police units protecting the site.52 The graswurzel groups had little patience for such violence, but they too sought to harness antinuclear activism to their political project. They attempted to organize a nonviolent campaign against the Grohnde reactor as a counterweight to the pitched battles at Brokdorf. Even after a failed occupation attempt, the graswurzlers congratulated themselves for having stuck to their nonviolent principles and thus for having created “a successful example of our action form next to Wyhl, Larzac, etc.”53 In each of these cases, activist groups declared their will to emulate the protests against the Wyhl reactor. Yet, each group also interpreted the “example of Wyhl” as it saw fit, tailoring the antinuclear struggle to its own ends. Initially, at least, the perceived successes of the Rhenish movement and the possibility of addressing antireactor activism toward their own political ends motivated these activists to take up the cause. Following in the footsteps of farmers and vintners from a conservative region, nation- ally organized activist groups hoped to stake a claim to the legitimacy their antinuclear predecessors claimed by describing their protests as a struggle for their very survival. Yet the struggle against the Wyhl reactor was also imbued with radicalism by its protagonists’ powerful challenges to gov- ernment authority. This unique combination of legitimacy and radicalism made antinuclear protest the convergence point for a new political coali- tion in West Germany. As Andrei Markovits and others have shown, the antinuclear coalition was one of the most important forerunners of the Green party, which brought together West Germans of many political backgrounds during the late 1970s.54 While supporting this analysis, Silke Mende also acknowledges that “the environment was only one topic among many” for the activists who formed the founding Greens. Nonetheless, ecological problems played a “decisive role” in the way that the new party was conceived – both by its members and by outside observers.55 It is this understanding of environmental concerns, which allows them to be important in their own right and simultaneously to be instrumentalized for a diverse array of political purposes and interests,
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that is so essential for explaining the impressive resonance that struggles against nuclear energy found in West Germany during the late 1970s; this understanding also challenges recent scholarly analyses that interpret the antinuclear movement and other so-called “single issue” movements as evidence of the disaggregation and “fracturing” of Western societies since the 1970s.56 Even the development of the struggle at Wyhl reveals the complex relationship between specific environmental concerns and other issues like economic interests and the upholding of democracy. The increasingly radical antigovernment positions taken up by antinuclear activists in the Upper Rhine Valley reveal the extent to which the environment “was only one topic among many” not only for the founding Greens but for pioneering antinuclear activists as well. Sometimes, as was the case at the 1974 Wyhl licensing hearing, concerns about democracy actually eclipsed nuclear issues in terms of their importance for the movement. This inter- twining of environmental issues with economic concerns and growing distrust in government officials allowed people with varied interests and goals to work collaboratively against the use of nuclear energy. It also evidenced the importance of traditional “material” concerns for the emergence of Green politics. The same sorts of connections explain the nexus that activists saw between nuclear concerns and other political projects, from European federalism to proletarian revolution, which made the example of Wyhl so powerful. Belinda Davis has shown the significance of such “manifesta- tions of political expression ...occurring outside of formal channels and involving broad populations.”57 In her view, since 1945 a wide range of protests seemingly devoted to single issues have “confronted the prevail- ing limits of legitimate political participation, and served more broadly to redefine ‘politics’ and democratic participation.”58 Not only were antinuclear protesters in the Upper Rhine Valley well aware that they were pushing up against these democratic limits, it was also readily evident to outside activists that Rhenish protests had ramifications far beyond the construction of the Wyhl reactor. In viewing the national antinuclear movement that emerged in West Germany after Wyhl, it is important to keep these broader dimensions of antinuclear politics in mind. Connections established at the grassroots level allowed for the growth of a wide antinuclear network. While it was held together by nuclear concerns, this network’s members were inter- ested in many other issues as well. Yet once this loose framework had been established, and as activists began to devote their energies to the
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antinuclear struggle – whatever their initial motives – nuclear and envir- onmental matters became increasingly important in their own right as the lynchpin of this diverse coalition. In articulating their varied concerns in terms of nuclear issues, West Germans created a new political conver- gence space and also harnessed the legitimacy of grassroots antireactor campaigns toward radical goals. The coalitions that grew out of antireac- tor protests during the seventies and the widespread discussions of nuclear energy that those protests initiated became the basis for the mass antinuclear weapons movement of the early eighties; a movement that mobilized so many Europeans in part because it circumvented the Cold War order by linking radical political demands with the sort of basic concerns about survival articulated so convincingly by grassroots reactor opponents.59
Notes
1. Annemarie Sacherer, “Panik erfaßte unsere Herzen,” in Bernd Nössler and Margret de Witt, eds., Wyhl: Kein Kernkraftwerk in Wyhl und auch sonst nirgends. Betroffene Bürger berichten (Freiburg, 1976), 94–98. 2. Frederic Mayer, “Ein Elsässer fühlt sich wie im Dritten Reich,” in Nössler/de Witt, Wyhl, 91. 3. Thomas Schmitt (director), “Bürger gegen Atomkraft in Wyhl,” Vor Ort, Feb. 26, 1975. 4. Freiburg’s Badische Zeitung had trouble understanding the occupation. It misreported on February 19, 1975, that the protesters had left the site the previous day. “Demonstranten erzwingen Abbruch der Arbeit,” Badische Zeitung, Feb. 19, 1975. Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart (hereafter HSAS) EA 1 / 107 Bü 766. Outside Baden-Württemberg, there was almost no coverage of the occupation or the police intervention. A page seven article in the FAZ remained the only article on the brutal police intervention in a national newspaper. Even the Stuttgarter Zeitung did not report on the occupation until February 25. It was during the first week of March, just after the primetime broadcast of footage from the occupation, that the Wyhl protests finally received wide- spread coverage in the national press. In the week of March 3, ten reports appeared throughout the country. Zeitungs-Index 2, no. 1 (1975): 152. 5. “200 Mann stoppen Reaktorbau in Wyhl,” Stuttgarter Nachrichten, Feb. 20, 1975. HSAS EA 1 / 107 Bü 765. 6. “Signal Wyhl,” Der stille Weg 27, nos. 5–6 (1975): 20. 7. Walter Mossmann, “Die Bevölkerung ist hellwach!” Kursburch 39 (Apr. 1975): 129–54.
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8. Most obviously, this idea is put forward in Dieter Rucht’s landmark study of the antinuclear movement, Von Wyhl nach Gorleben: Bürger gegen Atomprogramm und nukleare Entsorgung (Munich, 1980). 9. Such explanations rely on Ronald Inglehart’s “value change” hypothesis, which posits that the generation that came of age in the 1970s focused on “post-material” issues, such as environmental concerns, because its material needs had been met by the postwar economic boom. Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton, 1977). 10. On the diverse currents that made up the “founding Greens,” see Silke Mende, “Nicht rechts, nicht links, sondern vorn.” Eine Geschichte der Gründungsgrünen (Munich, 2011). 11. Freia Hoffmann, “Was bedeutet das Beispiel Wyhl?” Mar. 21, 1975, Freiburg. Archiv Grünes Gedächtnis – Petra Kelly Archiv (hereafter AGG – PKA) 2264. 12. See Michael Foley’s essay on American “front porch politics” and the anti- nuclear movement in this volume, Chapter 8. See also Foley, Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s (New York, 2013). 13. Tilman Fichter and Siegward Löwendecker, Kleine Geschichte der SDS (Berlin, 1977), 143. 14. See, for example, the spring 1966 edition of the WSL’s official publication, Der stille Weg, which features four articles on nuclear power. 15. Jean-Jacques Rettig, Marie Reine-Hauge, and Walter Mossmann, interview with author, Freiburg, Mar. 8, 2010. 16. The shape of this action was strongly influenced by three members of Lanzo del Vasto’s Community of the Ark, who assisted Rettig with the planning. Rettig et al., interview. 17. “Erst beim Wein sprang der Funke über,” Badische Zeitung, Jan. 26, 1977. 18. Harloff’s initial contact with the Rettigs was due to a shared interest in Waldorf education. Beate de Barry, interview with author, Strasbourg, Mar. 3, 2010. 19. Of course, because the reactor was to be built more than twenty kilometers outside the city, it would not even be visible from downtown Freiburg. Nevertheless, the comparison was a powerful one. “Alarm am Oberrhein,” Badische Zeitung, May 25, 1974 (HSAS EA1/107 Bü 764). 20. Dieter Berstecher and Günter Sacherer, interview with author, Oberrotweil, Feb. 18, 2010. 21. On the transnational dimensions of European antinuclear activism during the 1970s, see Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and Jan-Henrik Meyer, eds., “Global Protest against Nuclear Power. Transfer and Exchange in the 1970s and 1980s” in Historical Social Research 39, no. 1 (2014): 165–276. See also Andrew Tompkins, “‘Better Active Today than Radioactive Tomorrow!’
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Transnational Opposition to Nuclear Energy in France and West Germany, 1968–1981,” Ph.D. diss. (Oxford, 2013). 22. “50 000 Unterschriften gegen das Kernkraftwerk Breisach,” Badische Zeitung, Oct. 2, 1972. Archiv soziale Bewegungen (hereafter ASB) “Wyhl- Die Anfänge,” 18500. 23. “Fast 60 000 Unterschriften gegen Kernkraftwerk Breisach,” Badische Zeitung, Oct. 3, 1972. ASB “Wyhl-Die Anfänge,” 18499. 24. Ernst Schillinger, “Breisach – Der Kampf beginnt,” in Nössler/de Witt, Wyhl, 29–33. 25. “500 Kaiserstühler Bauern demonstrieren gegen Kernkraftwerk,” Klassenkampf. Extra Blatt, Sep. 19, 1972. 26. “Meinungen zur Landespolitik,” Staatsanzeiger für Baden-Württemberg 21, no. 76 (Sep. 23, 1972). 27. See Gerd Auer and Jochen Reich, “Gebrannte Kinder: Vorgeschichten vom Kampf gegen das Atomkraftwerk Wyhl,” S’Eige zeige 15 (2001): 87–112. 28. “Atomkraftwerk Breisach in der Diskussion,” Freiburger Wochenbericht, Nov. 9, 1972, p. 5. 29. Bernd Nössler, “Die Auseinandersetzung um das Kernkraftwerk Wyhl,” in Nössler/de Witt, Wyhl, 34–44. 30. See, for example, “Energielücke – Umweltgefährdung löst Kernenergie das Problem?” Aktionsgemeinschaft gegen Umweltgefährdung durch Kernkraftwerke (undated flyer). ASB “Wyhl-Die Anfänge,” 17580. 31. Berstecher and Sacherer, interview. 32. “Erörterungstermin endete mit Eklat,” Lahrer Zeitung, Jul. 12, 1974. 33. “Weil die Wyhler kein Atomkraftwerk wollen,” Lahrer Zeitung, Jul. 12, 1974. 34. Walter Mossmann, Realistisch sein: das Unmögliche verlangen (Berlin, 2009), 195. 35. Ibid., 193. 36. “Erklärung der 21 Bürgerinitiative an die badische-elsässische Bevölkerung,” Die 21 badische-elsässische Bürgerinitiative (1974). 37. Mossmann, Realistisch sein, 197. 38. For more on the Larzac struggle, see Herman Lebovics, Bringing the Empire Back Home: France in the Global Age (Durham, NC, 2004), and Wolfgang Hertle, Larzac 1971–1981: Der Gewaltfreie Widerstand gegen die Erweiterung eines Truppenübungsplatzes in Süd-Frankreich (Kassel, 1982). 39. “Antimilitarismus, Kritischer Konsum, Umweltschutz, Sozialismus, Dritte Welt,” graswurzelrevolution 0 (1972): 7. This article was presumably written by Wolfgang Hertle, one of graswurzelrevolution’s founders, and an enamored observer of the struggle in the Larzac. Hertle was convinced of the need to bring foreign examples of nonviolent activism into German activist circles, because he believed that German history suffered from a lack of such examples.
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40. “‘Damit wir auch morgen noch kraftvoll zubeißen können ... ’ Notizen zu einer ‘Ökologie-Kampagne,’” graswurzelrevolution 7 (1974): 2. 41. Jo Leinen, “Von der Apfelsinenkiste auf den Ministersessel,” in Karl-Otto Sattler, ed., Im Streit für die Umwelt: Jo Leinen, Basis-Aktivist und Minister: Bilanz und Ausblick (Kirkel, 1995), 47. 42. Jo Leinen to Petra Kelly, Mar. 12, 1975. AdsD Forum Europa Tageskopien Feb. 1974–Dec. 1976. 43. Petra Kelly, “WAS TUN ??? Einige Aktionsmöglichkeiten für die Westeuropäischen Sozialisten!” (Brussels, 1975). AGG–PKA 534, p. 2. 44. Christa aus Offenburg, “Unsere Demonstration in Bonn,” Was Wir Wollen, Aug. 15, 1975. 45. Theodor Ebert to Heinz Siefritz, Sep. 3, 1974. Archiv der Badisch- Elsässischen Bürgerinitiativen Haag Lore 8HL/8. 46. Foremost among these were Wolfgang Sternstein and Roland Vogt. See Gewaltfreie Aktion nos. 24–25 (1975). 47. Theodor Ebert, “Als Berliner in Wyhl: Friedensforschung und Konfliktberatung vor Ort,” Gewaltfreie Aktion 24–25 (1975). 48. “Mit Traktoren gegen Kernkraftwerk,” Kommunistische Volkszeitung, May 15, 1974. 49. “Der Widerstand gegen das Bleiwerk wächst,” Kommunistische Volkszeitung, Oct. 2, 1974. 50. “Besetzer wehren sich gegen Missbrauch ihrer Aktion,” Badische Zeitung, Mar. 3, 1975. 51. Josef M. Leinen, “Wyhl und was dann ...?” Forum E 3–4 (1976): 2. 52. “30.000 im Wilster Marsch,” Arbeiterkampf, Feb. 21 1977, p. 1. Roger Karapin explains the KB’s interest in the anti-reactor struggle at Brokdorf as a product of the group’s having been “ejected from local trade unions and [seeking] a new sphere of activity.” Roger Karapin, Protest Politics in Germany (University Park, PA, 2007), 135. 53. In sticking to their nonviolent values, the graswurzlers peacably left the site just hours after they occupied it because police asked them to do so. Jean, “Mauerblümchen Grohnde,” graswurzelrevolution 27–28 (winter 1977): 1–3. 54. Andrei S. Markovits and Philip S. Gorski, The German Left: Red, Green, and Beyond (Oxford, 1993), 99. 55. Mende detailed the impressive ideological breadth and diversity of personnel that characterized the nascent West German Green party during the late 1970s and early 1980s in Mende, “Nicht rechts, nicht links,” 2, 298. 56. Daniel Rodgers makes this case most clearly for the United States in his important monograph Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA, 2011). Tony Judt makes similar arguments regarding Western Europe in Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York, 2006), and Thinking the Twentieth Century (New York, 2012).
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57. Belinda Davis, “What’s Left? Popular Political Participation in Postwar Europe,” American Historical Review 113, no. 2 (Apr. 2008): 363. 58. Ibid., 370. 59. If the peace protests of the late 1950s and 1960s were, as Holger Nehring has argued, in part a search for a third way between the two poles of the Cold War, then the 1970s protests that targeted civil nuclear technology allowed West Germans to realize this third way in a manner that they could not when their protests remained focused solely on the issue of nuclear weapons – a topic so essential to the Cold War world order that it could hardly be dissociated from it. See Nehring, The Politics of Security: British and West German Protest Movements and the Early Cold War, 1945–1970 (Oxford, 2013), 242. On the ways that antinuclear weapons activists deployed local rhetoric against the global threat of nuclear energy, see Susanne Schregel’s essay in this volume. See also Schregel, Der Atomkrieg vor der Wohnungstür. Eine Politikgeschichte der neuen Friedensbewegung in der Bundesrepublik, 1970–1985 (Frankfurt, 2011).
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No Nukes and Front Porch Politics Environmental Protest Culture and Practice on the Second Cold War Home Front
Michael Stewart Foley
In the late 1970s, grassroots battles over energy and the environment often dominated American headlines. On occasion, two subsets of the environ- mental movement – the campaigns against nuclear power and on behalf of communities poisoned by toxic waste – engaged in dramatic forms of protest at almost exactly the same time. The public came to know the battlefields in this new environmental war – places like Seabrook, Diablo Canyon, Love Canal – thanks to the actions of grassroots activists. This essay examines the No Nukes movement’s strategies and tactics at the national and local levels. It takes a comparative approach, measuring the relative effectiveness of No Nukes against the relative effectiveness of contemporaneous local campaigns against toxic waste dumping in the United States. Here I introduce the concept of “front porch politics” as the critical analytical tool for understanding the reaction of both the American public and of elected officials to environmental crises and the campaigns they spawned. I examine the Clamshell Alliance campaign against the Seabrook, New Hampshire nuclear power plant and the Abalone Alliance campaign against Diablo Canyon in California. These No Nukes protests focused on three issues: 1. the power plants’ environmental impact, especially on marine life; 2. their potential threat to human populations, heightened by their construction on or near tectonic fault lines; and 3. the difficulty of effective evacuation in the event of an emergency. Initially, these concerns mostly fell on deaf ears because, against the backdrop of the 1970s oil crisis and “stagflation,” most Americans wanted cheap energy, nearly irrespective of the risks, and nuclear energy had been billed by proponents as “too cheap to meter.” Predictions of invisible radiation
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disasters – which lacked the ominous symbolic power of the iconic Cold War mushroom cloud – left most Americans unmoved. Only with the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, which made the abstract peril of radiation poisoning appear as a real threat, did polls show support for “further development of nuclear power” dropping from 69 percent to 46 percent. Even so, both Seabrook and Diablo Canyon were built and remain online today. This is where the front porch politics distinction is helpful.1 At exactly the same time that the No Nukes campaigns were unfolding, Americans could, in fact, sit on their front porches and see (or otherwise sense) real evidence of pollution all around – in the air, on the ground, and in the water. The ordinary citizens who were driven into organizing because of toxic waste dumping in places like Love Canal, New York, had the comparative advantage of not having to fight an abstract foe like radia- tion. The antitoxics campaign succeeded, ultimately, because no congres- sperson or senator wanted to go back to his or her district and explain about voting against helping families with sick children. This terribly political reality – largely overlooked in scholarship on the antinuclear and environmental movements – was a great catalyst of regulations, payouts for cleanup operations, and compensation for victims.2 The front porch, the voting booth, and the halls of power, in short, were all linked. Where defense of home and family was concerned, moreover, conven- tional political labels counted for little. Among “front porch” activists, it mattered not at all if one considered oneself a Democrat or Republican, a liberal or conservative. What mattered was that people experienced certain threats to the environment as highly local and personal, and demanded that government intercede directly on their behalf. Proximity to the perceived threat and a sense that no help was forthcoming were, therefore, the keys to sparking local activism and, often, to waging a successful campaign. To take one quick example, the greenlighting of the Alaska pipeline showed the front porch nature of Americans’ percep- tions of the oil crisis: gas in the tank was more important to the family, most people thought, than possible environmental damage in a distant Alaskan wilderness. And their representatives in Congress knew it.3 The implications of this calculus in which Americans weighed economic benefit versus health and safety later had profound implications for movements against nuclear power and toxic waste dumping. Both the No Nukes movement and the antitoxics movement developed out of a public awareness of environmental issues that had been growing
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since the late 1960s.4 To be sure, a new ecological consciousness, typified by the advent of Earth Day in 1970, was developed and proliferated by the 1960s counterculture. But most pundits attributed that apparent turn in public opinion in the 1970s to several high-profile environmental disas- ters. These included Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, into which a dangerous mix of chemicals had long been dumped, spontaneously bursting into flames in 1969; the Santa Barbara oil well blowout, also in 1969, which brought harrowing images of seabirds dripping in oil to American televi- sions; and several serious air pollution alerts in New York City. More important, however, is that many Americans could find evidence of eco- logical breakdown all around them. Businessmen in steel and coal cities like Pittsburgh had to bring an extra white shirt to work because their morning shirt turned gray from the soot by noon. People near polluted lakes or streams literally saw dead fish in the water. Anyone driving the country’s highways could see the piles of trash, tossed without a thought from passing cars. As to nuclear power, the first high-profile battles took place between experts and professional advocates, with people like Ralph Nader, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and various whistle blowers squaring off against the industry.5 The industry reacted with Nixonian dirty tricks, forming the Atomic Industrial Forum (AIF) and budgeting $1.4 million for public relations. The AIF generally succeeded in using economic experts to convince the public that stopping atomic power would cost America jobs and raise energy bills.6 A largely unquestioning media often repeated such claims and itself ratcheted up the fear of job loss and energy shortages. In a 1975 broadcast commentary, ABC Evening News anchor Howard K. Smith predicted that “the day will come, probably in the early 1980s, when the home will grow cold, auto traffic [will turn] to a trickle, and industries will go on two days a week, with lots of unemployment, for lack of fuel.”7 By the mid-1970s, however, the groundwork had been laid for mobi- lizing grassroots opposition to nuclear power. Scholars who have written about Seabrook and Diablo Canyon tend to emphasize the way in which No Nukes activists nurtured an ecological consciousness, born out of a “prefigurative, utopian approach to politics” more commonly identified with the movements of the Sixties.8 But the movement also spoke a language of practical resistance to illegitimate authority. As one partici- pant noted, No Nukes activists “found the same kinds of coverups, lies, vested corporate interests and inhumanity involved in nuclear power as in the war issue.”9
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In the tiny coastal town of Seabrook, New Hampshire (population 5,700), one of the nation’s fiercest fights over nuclear power was prompted by corporate deceit. A 1972 statewide poll showed that the state’s residents approved of nuclear power. Seventy percent, however, indicated that they would choose environmental protection over eco- nomic growth. Despite Seabrook residents voting 55 percent to 45 percent against building a nuclear power plant in their community, Public Service of New Hampshire (PSNH) pressed ahead with its plans to build two 1150 megawatt reactors there.10 From the start, the Seabrook Station faced opposition from locals. The Seacoast Anti-Pollution League argued three key points: 1. that the cooling tunnels, which would daily pull more than one billion gallons of ocean water into the cooling towers and then return the water thirty to forty degrees warmer, would affect the marine life on which local fisher- man depended for their livelihood; 2. that evacuation in case of emergency seemed impossible in an area where one hundred thousand people visited the beaches in Hampton and Salisbury every weekend during the summer, and where motorists could drive up the coast or due west only on two-lane roads; 3. that Seabrook is located near the Boston-Ottawa earthquake fault lines, and the plant’s initial designs did not take into consideration the threat of a serious earthquake. PSNH either downplayed or ignored such concerns. In June 1976, after the town voted against the plant, PSNH never- theless received permission from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to begin construction. The opposition quickly crystallized. Within weeks, a coalition of fifteen groups committed to stopping the plant from being built – even if it meant breaking the law – formed the Clamshell Alliance, named for the clams that are a staple of the seacoast diet and that would be threatened by thermal pollution. About fifty people came together at the first meeting and represented a range of constituencies: Guy Chichester, a builder and Seacoast Anti-Pollution League (SAPL) activist who grew tired of the League’s timidity; Sam Lovejoy, who had sabotaged a power company’s weather tower in Montague, Massachusetts, two years earlier; Elizabeth Boardman of the American Friends Service Committee in Boston; a mix of local people who had been involved in trying to stop the plant by referendum; and erstwhile anti–Vietnam War activists who had moved to northern New England.11 The mass of people who would, over the next two years, occupy the Seabrook construction site in several major No Nuke actions did not really represent the front porch ethos of the times; that is, they did not
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mobilize because of their own proximity to the perceived dangers of the plant, nor had they experienced such dangers personally. Consequently, they drew suspicion from locals and even a mocking critique of their sincerity from otherwise liberal journalists. “We appreciate you kids coming up here,” one longtime resident of Seabrook said to a younger activist, “but some folks wonder just what kind of people have the time and money to come up here for four days.” Tracy Kidder, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, focused on the “countercultural crazies” within the Alliance and the divide between them and the seacoast locals. Kidder attended one of the Clamshell Alliance’s nonviolence training sessions and skewered the role-playing exercise in which one activist played a demonstrator and another played a police German shepherd. These were easy targets.12 The series of occupations staged by the Clams (as members of the Alliance were known) starting in August 1976 took as their inspiration the 1975 protests in Wyhl, West Germany, on the Rhine, where twenty- eight thousand people occupied a proposed nuclear reactor site. That plant was never built. In New Hampshire, on August 1, eighteen activists went to the Seabrook site to plant pine and maple saplings where the reactors would be built. Police arrested and charged them with criminal trespass, disturbing the peace, and resisting arrest. Four days later, a dozen elderly Seabrook residents held up groundbreaking ceremonies by sitting in chairs spread across the road to the site.13 A second Seabrook occupation occurred on August 22, when a group marched from a rally of fifteen hundred people on the Hampton Falls town commons to the Seabrook construction site. Police again swept in, and this time arrested 180 – ten times as many as they arrested at the first occupation. This incredible growth in the number of people prepared to risk arrest electri- fied nuclear opponents across the country. The Seabrook protest seemed a model that others could follow. Within the Granite State, however, public officials like Governor Meldrim Thomson and some ordinary citizens dismissed the protesters as self-righteous, anti-progress nuts. “Just because there are a few ‘kooks’ around here,” one woman wrote to the NRC, “who want to stop progress so they can have the woods to themselves does not mean we in New Hampshire are all stupid.” Following the lead of William Loeb, editor of the conservative Manchester Union-Leader, some started to label the Clams communists. Others simply saw them as elitists, out of touch with the ordinary Americans struggling to pay their electric bills. In hard economic times, such sentiment spread rapidly. Meanwhile, PSNH was
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equally dismissive of the Clamshell Alliance’s environmental concerns, saying that Seabrook would bring jobs and cheap electricity to the state. Not only that, the PSNH lawyer argued, but the marsh already had a railroad and US Route 1 running through it, all within sight of the ramshackle carnival and amusements lining the seaside – hardly “an unspoiled glade previously populated only by nymphs and leprechauns.”14 The plant’s opponents, however, grew more confident thanks to some small victories. Early in 1977, the EPA’s regional office responded to concerns over thermal pollution by temporarily revoking approval of the Seabrook cooling system. An environmental impact statement would be needed to move forward.15 And by March 1977, all of the surrounding towns had voted against building the nuclear power plant.16 As the utility company stumbled from this unexpected bureaucratic setback at the hands of the EPA, the Clamshell Alliance continued with plans for a massive occupation of the Seabrook site. On Saturday, April 30, 1977, affinity groups approached the Seabrook construction site from six different directions. Word of twenty-four hundred activists meeting and setting up “village” camping areas led to massive press coverage with journalists drawing explicit parallels with the movements of the 1960s.17 By the next morning, the National Guard and police had arrived. Across the marshes, more than four thousand people attended a No Nukes rally at Hampton Beach State Park. The seacoast buzzed with tension. Governor Thomson made a dramatic entrance, arriving by helicopter and, dressed in army fatigues, resembling a New England Yankee version of Fidel Castro. In a prearranged performance – worked out between the Clams and the state police – the governor ordered everyone to disperse; about one thousand demonstra- tors complied. It took the police twelve hours to arrest the remaining 1,414 occupiers. When the Clams, unwilling or unable each to post $1500 bail, could not be released, the state wound up housing them for two weeks, parceled out to five National Guard armories.18 It was a PR catastrophe for the state, as ordinary New Hampshirites questioned the expense – estimated at $50,000 a day – of the mass arrest. For their part, the Clams took advantage of life in “five free conference centers” to continue to organize. As Henry Bedford later wrote, “The state emerged from the contretemps poorer and without much dignity.” Ultimately, the April 30–May 1 occupation came to be regarded by many opponents of nuclear energy as a turning point for the movement. It garnered more media attention than the movement had ever before received. Alliances soon formed all over the country. They organized more than 120
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demonstrations and occupations, including at Diablo Canyon in California.19 Still, despite the Clamshell Alliance occupation, the EPA approved the Seabrook cooling system on month later, and construction moved forward.20 Moreover, the Clamshell Alliance began to fracture over plans for future actions. A June 25–26, 1978, legal rally and energy fair – built by six thousand Clams over eighteen acres at Seabrook – brought out as many as fourteen thousand people, in part to hear Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, and Jackson Brown in concert.21 Even so, construc- tion continued.22 To the everlasting frustration of the Clamshell Alliance, modeling itself after the Germans at Wyhl turned out to be far too ambitious. The occupations at Seabrook never came close to attracting twenty-eight thousand people prepared to break the law by taking over the site. In later years, scholars have credited the Clamshell Alliance with establishing an American model followed by many groups all over the country – one that carried on the tradition of trying to build a “beloved community” within and beyond the movement. “The greatest contribution of Clamshell,” Barbara Epstein has written, “lay not in containing the growth of the nuclear power industry, but in the creation of a mass movement based on nonviolent direct action and infused with a vision of a better world, which it attempted to prefigure in its own practice.”23 It is hard not to judge this as rationalizing defeat. Clamshell activist and writer Anna Gyorgy agreed with Epstein, but blamed that emphasis on community for overshadowing the primary goal of “stopping the nukes.” For a lot of people in the movement, she said, “the process became more important than the product, the means became an end.” In the 1970s, with the economy in the gutter – high prices, high unemployment, high cost of fuel – practicing at or selling utopia did not win political battles. Few in that decade could see utopia from their front porches. Nor could they imagine mushroom clouds, at least not coming from a nuclear reactor. Therefore, while the Clamshell Alliance basked in the glow of the beloved community it was building, PSNH and the investors that backed it settled into a strategy of attrition. They might lose some court battles, and lose in the court of public opinion. But through steady commitment and seemingly endless resources, they could also outlast the opposition. In the 1980s Seabrook Station’s containment domes slowly surfaced over the marshes.24 In California – where Governor Jerry Brown labeled nuclear power “the next Vietnam”–the No Nukes campaign lasted longest thanks to
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Diablo Canyon and the Abalone Alliance. In the 1960s, preservationists had succeeded in protecting most of the coast that lay west of San Luis Obispo, but the Sierra Club – in a move that split the club and caused director David Brower to resign – later traded the preservation of Diablo Canyon for the protection of Nipomo Dunes to the south.25 Pacific Gas and Electric began construction of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in 1968, and installed the first reactor there in 1973. As late as August 1975, 75 percent of San Luis Obispo residents favored building the 2,212 megawatt twin reactor plant, seeing it as more environmentally friendly than fossil fuel plants and essential to meeting the state’s energy needs.26 The opposition soon arrived, however, in the form of Mothers for Peace, a stalwart of the antiwar movement. Led by Liz Apfelberg and Sandy Silver, the Mothers took a front porch approach and shifted the terms of the debate away from environmental preservation to a focus on human health and safety. They introduced a maternal rhetoric to the No Nukes movement. “The Mothers focused not upon the promises of new schools or cheaper electricity, but instead on their own role as protectors of children,” John Wills writes. “Our tag,” Sandy Silver later recalled, “was there’s radiation, radiation hurts children, in particular the fetus and young children, and that was our concern.” They emphasized US Geological Survey’s 1975 finding that an earthquake of as high as 7.5 on the Richter Scale could occur only 2.5 miles from Diablo Canyon at the Hosgri Fault (the plant’s designers had planned for it to be able to withstand only a 6.75 quake). When the NRC still permitted construction to go forward, resentment in the area began to simmer. Mothers for Peace did not stop construction from going forward, but they succeeded in December 1975 in forcing PG&E to at least upgrade its fuel-storage safety plans.27 In June 1977, inspired by the Clams, nuclear opponents (including Mothers for Peace) who had previously named their coalition People Generating Energy renamed themselves the Abalone Alliance in honor of the thousands of abalone that had been killed in the summer of 1974 when the Diablo plant’s cooling system had first been tested.28 The Abalone, like the Clamshell, also took the Wyhl occupation as its ultimate model and planned in stages mass nonviolent direct action pro- tests. On August 7, 1977, as scores of other nuclear energy protests unfolded around the country, fifteen hundred people turned out to hear activists like Barry Commoner and Daniel Ellsberg speak. Afterward, a small group of protesters got onto the plant site, resulting in forty-six arrests. A year later, on August 6 and 7, 1978 – just weeks after the huge
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energy fair at Seabrook brought out 20,000 people – more than three thousand attended another rally, with 487 arrested at the gates. Despite Governor Brown’s sympathy for the cause, prosecutors cracked down: all arrestees received sentences of fifteen days in jail and $300 fines. Meanwhile, the Alliance started to make plans for a third action, to be put it in motion when the NRC granted, as expected, the operating license for Diablo Canyon.29 Then, in March 1979, Three Mile Island happened. In the prevailing popular narrative of the period, Three Mile Island killed the nuclear energy industry, but it is just not so. As Samuel Hays first noted in 1984, the industry and its allies in government “deflected every major effort to restrict it” and “even recovered [the] initiative” going into the 1980s. In the immediate aftermath of TMI, the NRC stopped granting licenses and shut down similar plants around the country. It could do no less. President Carter appointed a blue-ribbon committee to investigate the accident. The Kemeny Commission issued a 2,200 page report that blasted Babcock and Wilcox (the reactor’s manufacturers), MetEd, and the NRC, all of which it said shared the blame for the plant’s operators not being fully trained to avert the human error. The commission recom- mended a tighter licensing process – including more selective siting of plants in areas away from population centers – and more attention to safety and emergency planning.30 Only committed industry pessimists could read it as a death warrant for nuclear power. It is true that Carter canceled the Clinch River breeder reactor out of concern that the plutonium at the site might go astray and wind up in an enemy’s weapon of mass destruction. But prior to Three Mile Island, he also worked to speed up the NRC’s licensing process, negotiated no strike rules at nuclear power plants, and relieved the indus- try of its nuclear waste problem by assigning it to the new Department of Energy for resolution.31 Carter’s stand left the door open for the industry to launch a massive public relations campaign proclaiming the relative safety (compared to smoking, driving, and flying) of nuclear power. Utility executives fanned out to hit the television talk shows, hold press conferences, and make themselves available to the press. Fearing that they may lose homemakers, the industry placed advertise- ments in magazines with a predominantly female readership.32 Despite massive demonstrations following the Three Mile Island accident – an estimated seventy thousand to one hundred thousand gathered in Washington, DC, on May 6, and forty thousand turned out in San Luis Obispo on June 30 – and the high-profile Musicians
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United for Safe Energy (MUSE) concerts suggesting mainstream appeal of the No Nukes message, it proved practically impossible to stop nuclear power plants already under construction from being completed and going online.33 On September 10, 1981, the NRC granted an operating license for the Diablo Canyon plant. Governor Brown, nuclear opponent and Abalone fan, called in five hundred National Guard troops and 270 California Highway Patrol cops to the site. Over the next two weeks, more than nineteen hundred people were arrested at Diablo. In 1983, in reaction to the NRC’s authorization of fuel-loading at Diablo, 537 people were arrested over four months, but this protest paled compared to the 1981 encampment. The Abalone Alliance had lost the initiative. In April 1985,Diablo’sUnit1 went online; Unit 2 went online in August. Three Mile Island’sUnit1 went back online that year, too.34 Even the NRC’s new post-TMI rules on emergency planning and evacuations – which effectively created a new class of opposition in the form of local government officials who were suddenly much more alarmed about the proximity of their towns to proposed nuclear power plants – did not much help the No Nukes movement. Despite Governor Michael Dukakis’s best efforts to stop construction of the Seabrook plant (just miles from the Massachusetts border) by refusing to cooperate in devel- oping an evacuation plan, New Hampshire Governor John Sununu convinced President Ronald Reagan to order the Federal Emergency Management Administration to prepare an evacuation plan so that the plant could go online. Although PSNH went bankrupt along the way, and Unit 2 was left, as a result, to rust onsite, Seabrook’s Unit 1 received its license and went online in 1990.35 By the mid-1980s, Wall Street had largely stopped blaming the No Nukes movement for the industry’s decline and instead took a dim view of the manufacturers and utilities themselves. The critics did not succeed in shutting down the plants in production, after all. Seabrook had been typical in that a significant movement to stop the plant from operat- ing failed, while its demands for safer operation only delayed operation. Instead, experts concluded that “nuclear power was killed, not by its enemies, but by its friends.” Writing in Forbes, James Cook continued, “The failure of the US nuclear power program ranks as the largest man- agerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale.” No one among the manufacturers, utilities or the NRC paid enough attention to the spiraling costs of building these plants. “A company that ties up ‘close to 80% of its capital in a construction project,’ especially
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one that cannot produce income until complete, ought not to blame others for wounds that were self-inflicted,” Cook concluded.36 At exactly the same time the energy wars unfolded in the 1970s, Americans could sit on their front porches and see the concrete evidence of pollution. And they did not have to go far in many places to see the worst kind of pollution: chemical and toxic wastes, accumulating for a good part of the century, poisoning nearby soil and waterways. The No Nukes people may have understood this first. When the revela- tions about toxic waste at Love Canal, New York, broke nationally in 1978, one Abalone Alliance activist said, “The message we’re trying to get across is that if you live at Love Canal it’s related to Diablo Canyon.”37 As we have already seen, that was a tough sell. The danger of poison in one’s yard, in one’s home, on the other hand, prompted a visceral response. The Love Canal story came to national attention amid a growing consciousness of the perils of pollution – visible pollution – and, in time, a sense that the federal government could not be counted upon to put citizen health ahead of industry interests.38 It differed from the No Nukes movement in important ways: first, Love Canal residents sought redress for an existing catastrophe that was already affecting their health; as Lois Gibbs, the unlikely leader of the Love Canal Homeowners Association (LCHA) summed it up, “It’s a survival issue ...People are going to fight like hell because they don’t have a choice.” Second, Love Canal activists did not worry themselves so much with their political process the way the utopian, prefigurative Clamshell and Abalone Alliances did. For work- ing-class communities poisoned by toxic waste, such discussions would likely have seemed a waste of time. Residents wanted, above all, results: cleanup, evacuation, compensation, or any combination of the three. Finally, unlike with the nuclear energy question, which featured powerful forces arguing in favor of nuclear power plants because of jobs and clean energy, few jumped to the defense of corporate polluters. No one tried to articulate an economic upside to dumping. “When such stories involve human health threats, particularly to children,” political scientist Judith Layzer notes, “they appeal to highly consensual values and thus have enormous potential to resonate with the public.”39 That is much more difficult for industry to combat than apocalyptic predictions of meltdowns and radiation clouds. In the early 1970s, the upstate New York neighborhood with the Sixties-sounding name – Love Canal – included about two hundred new homes built mostly in the past ten years for working-class families. Given
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the state of the economy, most of the new residents felt lucky to be there, holding on to their slice of the American Dream, living in a pastoral village in the city of Niagara Falls.40 The Love Canal suburban dream came to a withering end starting in 1977 when, on the heels of drenching rains and the Blizzard of ’77 thaw, basements and yards began to swell with toxic groundwater. Plants and trees died. Caustic vapors stung the noses of children and pets. It seemed unsafe to walk on the grass. Slowly, residents began to realize that they were living in a lethal chemical cocktail not of their own making. And many of them, on one block after another, were physically sick. They soon learned that they were living on top of a trench into which twenty-five thousand tons of chemical waste in one hundred thousand drums had been dumped by Hooker Chemical Co. between 1942 and 1952. In 1953, the company deeded the dump site to the Niagara Falls school board, which built a school there; homes soon followed. The city remained indifferent to complaints in 1977, but jour- nalists and Congressman John LaFalce responded more seriously; when the EPA, at LaFalce’s request, tested the neighborhood’s air quality and found a lethal level of Benzine in the air, residents began to organize.41 Lois Gibbs’s activism of self-reliance began when, on the advice of doctors, she wanted to move her son to a different school (both he and his sister developed blood disorders and other ailments), but school offi- cials would not allow it.42 Exasperated, Gibbs started down her block, door-to-door, with a petition. It turned out that many of her neighbors had their own tales of woe – stories of sick children, miscarriages, birth defects – that formed an immediate bond between everyday folks trying to make sense of something terribly wrong. It was a classic case of how front porch activists are made. The people in Love Canal never aspired to participate in grassroots politics, but as they pieced together the evidence that something sinister was poisoning their landscape and that someone (e.g., the city or Hooker Chemical) knew it – and that they would do nothing about it – they chose to defend their families by taking the fight to those in power. In June 1978 the New York State Health Department responded to LCHA petitions and letters by conducting its own tests. It found evidence of ten carcinogenic substances in the air inside Love Canal homes, ranging in levels from “250 to 5,000 times as high as those considered safe.” It also reported a high proportion of miscarriages and birth defects. “The people who had lived in the area the longest had the most pro- blems,” the department concluded. A series of state government missteps prompted sustained grassroots organizing. First, the health department
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proposed an evacuation only of pregnant women and children under two years old (everyone else could stay and risk cancer); second, Governor Hugh Carey promised to close the school and buy up only the homes in the “inner ring,” nearest the canal, offering no relief to hundreds of “outer ring” families who also had evidence of miscarriages, birth defects, and other various ailments; third, Carey’s plan to knock down the school, tear up the canal, and rebuild it with a tile drainage system that would stop the leaching (and, therefore, make it safe) meant those left behind could look forward to a year of digging up chemicals already proven to pass into the air they breathed every day. When Gibbs realized that the “the government made a decision ...that they did a cost-benefit analysis, and [decided] it was okay to sacrifice us,” she got angry. “That we weren’t worth twenty million dollars really pissed me off.” At every turn, the Love Canal activists felt not only ignored but also deliberately avoided by state and federal officials. “It is time for the government to serve its primary function – the interests of the people,” Grace McCoulf told a US Senate subcommittee on toxic waste. “Our children are sick, our homes valueless.... We can wait no longer.” Then Governor Carey, who had pledged to relocate residents suffering from contamination in their homes or with illnesses in their families, tried wriggling out of his promise by saying people would have to prove that chemicals in the canal had caused their illnesses. Love Canal residents felt betrayed. The genius of the LCHA is that it built its subsequent campaign on that deceit-fueled out- rage – a sense of frustration that so many Americans who had put their faith in their government (only to be let down) could understand. “The only thing you have is your story,” Gibbs later recounted. “But your story is powerful.”43 The LCHA set itself up in an office at the now-closed 99th Street School and quickly showed that it had a gift for winning press attention and staying in the headlines. For one thing, Gibbs and others began to rebut the so-called experts employed by Hooker and the state. The company had consistently said that it had dumped in places like Love Canal because it was the best-known chemical disposal method at the time. That hardly seemed like a good excuse to the families suffering so many health pro- blems, and the LCHA let the press know it. Then Governor Carey’s demand that residents prove the connection between the chemicals and their illnesses implied he believed no such link existed. But Gibbs, with no college credits, stepped forward with a map of the neighborhood and showed that the illnesses clustered along a geographic pattern that followed the swales (the streams that ran through the development).
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Few bought it at first, but by February 1979, when the state expanded its evacuation order to the outer ring, it quietly acknowledged the validity of the swales theory.44 Meanwhile, from December 1978 through the summer of 1979, the LCHA picketed and protested at the vast construction site as the state’s remediation went forward – with workers digging up the canal, and pungent fumes hanging in the air. They also sued the state in court, finally winning a court settlement in which the state agreed to pay for the remaining Love Canal families to stay in motels until crews completed work on the canal’s new drainage ditches. But when the state announced in early November that the work had finished and residents could return, it got an unexpected (to the state, at least) response. Some among those staying at the motels talked of not returning to Love Canal, of staying in the motels until the state agreed to relocate them somewhere other than Love Canal. After a protracted struggle, the New York Assembly approved, nearly unanimously, the purchase of the remaining Love Canal homes and agreed to relocate everyone.45 It took more than a year, but the state seemed to have, at last, come to the rescue. The LCHA had won.46 After Love Canal, working-class and minority citizens came to make up what scholar James Schwab called “America’s newest, most radical, and most committed environmentalists.” Except that the activists did not think of themselves as radical. They thought of themselves as utterly ordinary Americans who, relying on common sense, saw the danger to their families and acted in a way they expected anyone would in the same circumstances. No scientific study ever definitively proved the chemical- cancer connection at Love Canal, but just because no one proved it, did not mean it was not so. Anyone living in that environment day after day could see that seeping toxic waste could not be good for their health. Similar stories played out all over the country. As Lois Gibbs later wrote, people in communities like Love Canal “know when something is wrong. They observe an increase in disease, dead vegetation, chemical smells, and odd tastes in their drinking water.” They did not need experts or extensive studies. When a reporter asked Gibbs why she and the others had to act outside the system, why they had to act like radicals, she replied that “only a person who has never sat with a sick child, tried to work with unre- sponsive government agencies, and faced huge corporate public relations campaigns could ask such a question.” In the end it came down to a basic calculus, one with which Love Canal residents figured everyone could agree: industry is not entitled to make people sick, and if it does, govern- ment is not entitled to ignore it. Finally, the LCHA succeeded in large
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part because women led the charge. No matter how many times officials tried to characterize them as overreacting housewives, the Love Canal women, acting as protectors of home and hearth, won over the media, the wider public, and ultimately even skeptical, stingy government officials. If, as one scholar has written, “women are more likely than men to take on such issues precisely because the home has been defined and prescribed as women’s domain,” they are also more likely to succeed because their stories resonate with a public that easily relates to the maternal instincts at work in Love Canal.47 Despite the best efforts of some – especially Mothers for Peace – to frame the threat of nuclear power in similar terms, No Nukes activists did not get the same results. In large part, this is because their opponents in industry were effective in framing a competing economic message that resonated with the public – enough so that, before the Three Mile Island accident, most Americans favored building more nuclear power plants. As Americans sat on their front porches in the late 1970s and pondered nuclear power, the rising cost of home heating oil posed a greater threat to them and their families than an unlikely, hard-to-imagine radiation leak. And even after Three Mile Island, in those cases in which construc- tion on plants had already begun, even high-profile state officials could not stop their completion. Today, as nuclear power stages a comeback in the United States, the terms of the debate (such as there is one) remain essentially unchanged. When the No Nukes movement revives, organizers will do well to bring the abstract threat of radioactive waste and debris clouds to the front porches of American homes.
Notes
This essay is based on portions of two chapters that have previously been pub- lished in Michael Stewart Foley, Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s (New York: Hill & Wang, 2013) and is published with the kind permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 1. Here my work is influenced by the relatively recent trend in social movement studies that emphasize emotion as an essential mobilizing factor among acti- vists. See, for example, James M. Jasper, “The Emotions of Protest: Affective and Reactive Emotions in and around Social Movements,” Sociological Forum 13 (1998): 397–424; Jeff Goodwin, James Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements (Chicago, 2001); Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta, “Emotional Dimensions of Social Movements,” in David Snow, Sarah Soule, and Hanspieter Kriesi, eds., Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (Malden, MA, 2007); Deborah
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B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS (Chicago, 2009). According to Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, a change in consciousness must precipitate a change in behavior. In what I call “front porch politics,” sensing a threat leads to one’s consciousness being raised, which in turn leads to the impulse to act. “The movement must become defiant, violating the social expectations and even the laws the mem- bers of the movement deem unjust. The defiance must become collective to maximize its effect.” Piven and Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York, 1978), 3–4. The key foundation of “front porch politics” is that the emotion and defiance are driven by the proximity of the threat and by personal experience; the pain suffered in close proximity is a powerful narrative device in winning justice from those in authority. For more, see Michael Stewart Foley, Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s (New York, 2013). 2. Most of the histories of both the No Nukes movement and the wider environ- mental movements provide sympathetic appraisals of each, regardless of levels of effectiveness. They have missed the significance of those movements’ inability to make “real” the dangers facing actual human beings. See, for example, Barbara Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution (Berkeley, 1991); Henry F. Bedford, Seabrook Station: Citizen Politics and Nuclear Power (Amherst, MA, 1990); John Wills, Conservation Fallout: Nuclear Protest at Diablo Canyon (Las Vegas, 2006), 44; Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985; Kirkpatrick Sale, The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement, 1962–1992 (New York, 1993); Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC, 1993); Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement, rev. ed. (Washington, DC, 2005) 3. Lynton K. Caldwell, Lynton R. Hayes, and Isabel M. MacWhirter, Citizens and the Environment: Case Studies in Popular Action (Bloomington, IN, 1976), 228–29; David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America (New York, 1989), 130; “The Alaska Pipeline,” directed by Mark Davis for the American Experience on PBS, 2006. 4. In 1969 public opinion polls showed that only 1 percent of Americans regarded “pollution/ecology as an important national problem”; a year later that number jumped to 25 percent. Similarly, whereas reducing air and water pollution ranked ninth in national priorities in 1965, such concerns ranked second in 1970. Time magazine later noted that between 1969 and 1972, the environment became a “national obsession.” Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes, 60–61. 5. Nader identified nuclear power as the “number one” threat to public safety in the United States. Meanwhile, New York Times reporter David Burnham got his hands on AEC documents that showed the AEC had first checked with nuclear industry executives before it decided not to publish a report critical of
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their safety standards. Such duplicity proved Nader’s and others’ point that the government regulators were more interested in protecting the industry than in protecting the public. J. Samuel Walker, Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective (Berkeley, 2004), 13, 27; Mark Hertsgaard, Nuclear Inc.: The Men and Money Behind Nuclear Energy (New York, 1983), 70; Justin Martin, Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon (New York, 2002), 172–78. 6. Among other things, the AIF ran a ghostwriting campaign to place “articles” directly in press in order to “minimize the filtration factor of the reporters and editors.” Hertsgaard, Nuclear Inc., 71, 73. The industry also did well to educate kids in school. A 1978 survey of business-funded educational materi- als showed that “more than any industry group, the electric utilities provide extensive multimedia materials on energy issues ... These energy education efforts notably target the elementary grade levels through the use of films, comic books, cartoon graphics or simple phrasing.” John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Toxic Sludge Is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry (Monroe, ME, 1995), 38. 7. Walker, Three Mile Island, 18–19, 20; Anna Gyorgy, No Nukes: Everyone’s Guide to Nuclear Power (Boston, 1979), 285. 8. Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution, 8. 9. Gyorgy, No Nukes, 388; Harvey Wasserman, Energy War: Reports from the Front (Westport, CT, 1979), 29–30. 10. Bedford, Seabrook Station, 5–6. 11. Epstein, Political Protest, 10, 84. 12. Stephen Zunes, “Seabrook: A Turning Point,” The Progressive, Sep. 1978, p. 30; Tracy Kidder, “The Nonviolent War against Nuclear Power,” Atlantic Monthly, Sep. 1978, pp. 70, 74. 13. On the same day, in Manchester, the state’s biggest city, presidential candi- date Jimmy Carter reacted to the protests saying that he believed “there’s a place for nuclear power in the future,” but that “it ought to be a last resort.” Wasserman, Energy War, 53–54, 5. 14. Bedford, Seabrook Station, 82–84, 32. 15. Wasserman, Energy War, 62–63. 16. This included the towns of Hampton, Hampton Falls, North Hampton, Exeter, Kensington, Durham, and Rye, according to Wasserman, Energy War, 83. 17. Each group chose a representative to attend “spokescouncil” meetings, which operated on the principle of consensus (not majority rule). Any communication with the authorities would be based on the consensus of the spokescouncil. Gyorgy, No Nukes, 398; Epstein, Political Protest, 65–66. 18. Epstein, Political Protest, 65–66; Gyorgy, No Nukes, 398; Wasserman, Energy War, 69–72.
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19. Epstein, Political Protest, 68; Wasserman, Energy War, 69–75; Bedford, Seabrook Station, 78. 20. In celebration of the EPA decision, three thousand people gathered for a march and rally in Manchester. They marched through the city shouting “Nukes! Nukes! Nukes!” Wasserman, Energy War, 87–89. 21. Wasserman, Energy War, 114–20; Kidder, “The Nonviolent War,” 74–76; Zunes, “Seabrook: A Turning Point,” 29. 22. Over the next couple of years, there were more actions, but they carried less weight. Supporters of the No Nukes cause may have taken comfort that another protest happened at Seabrook, but to outside observers, it looked like the tired act of a mimic. Zunes, “Seabrook: A Turning Point,” 30; Epstein, Political Protest, 80–81. 23. Epstein, Political Protest, 59. 24. Kidder, “The Nonviolent War,” 76. 25. Wills, Conservation Fallout, 44; On David Brower, see Sale, The Green Revolution, 16–17, 22; and Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire, 100–101. 26. Wills, Conservation Fallout, 66, 77. 27. Ibid., 69–77, 82–84; Wasserman, Energy War, 135; Gyorgy, No Nukes, 458. 28. PG&E later replaced the copper pipes in the cooling system – which made the return toxic to the abalone – with titanium. 29. Wills, Conservation Fallout, 88–91; Epstein, Political Protest, 99. 30. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence, 182; David Howard Davis, Energy Politics, 4th ed. (New York, 1993), 221–22. 31. Walker, Three Mile Island, 215; Wasserman, Energy War, 67; Hertsgaard, Nuclear Inc., 87–88. 32. Hertsgaard, Nuclear Inc., 170; Stauber and Rampton, Toxic Sludge, 40. 33. “The history of the nuclear power industry is replete with coverups, decep- tions, outright lies, error, negligence, arrogance, greed, innumerable unre- solved safety questions, and a cost plus accounting system that taxes our citizens as consumers and taxpayers,” Ralph Nader told the throngs. “There has to be a better, safer way to heat water.” Peter N. Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: The Tragedy and Promise of America in the 1970s (New York, 1982), 322; Wasserman, Energy War, 137; Wills, Conservation Fallout, 103; Hertsgaard, Nuclear Inc., 200–202. 34. Wills, Conservation Fallout, 104–10, 115; Epstein, Political Protest, 111, 102–4. 35. The total cost came to $6.4 billion for one reactor, and is still being paid for by New Hampshire rate-payers in their higher-than-average electric rates. Bedford, Seabrook Station, 183. 36. Hertsgaard, Nuclear Inc., 153; Davis, Energy Politics, 241; Bedford, Seabrook Station, 124; Walker, Three Mile Island, 224; James Cook, “Nuclear Follies,” Forbes, Feb. 11, 1985, pp. 82–100. The No Nukes move- ment took some credit for adding to those costs through the interventions that
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dragged out the NRC licensing process for many years, but other structural forces cost the industry, too. Instead of standardizing capacity and design, manufacturers tried to out-muscle each other by building bigger, more power- ful plants, each one more expensive than the last and never with any plan of mass-production. Custom-built plants made the licensing reviews take longer, and that added to the cost. J. Samuel Walker, the NRC historian, agrees that “the great bandwagon market” was a false market set up by companies simply wishing to establish themselves as the main players in manufacturing and operating these plants, even if it meant taking heavy financial losses at first. They expected to just hold on through the losses and make profits later. They turned out to be wrong. Finally, the energy crisis, which many thought would be a boon to the nuclear industry, also contributed to its decline, and did so early on: it drove up the price of oil and uranium; inflation soared and made borrowing more expensive. In 1975, even before the first protests at Seabrook, 122 of the 191 nuclear plants in the works saw construction deferred; nine others were canceled altogether; Hertsgaard, Nuclear Inc., 63–64; Walker, Three Mile Island, 5, 8. 37. Wills, Conservation Fallout, 96. 38. Congress, in fact, passed two key pieces of legislation in 1976. The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act spelled out requirements for recycling waste, though in its final version it cut the “bottle bill” provision that would have mandated bottle recycling. The Toxic Substances Control Act authorized the EPA to do premarket testing and screening of compounds that might prove toxic before they wound up in products sitting under someone’s kitchen sink. Here again, though, the chemical industry fought the provision, claiming that it would lose billions of dollars in profits. And so the Congress passed a compromise act that allowed prescreening while keeping the product and the companies under review secret from the public. It also prohibited the continued manufacture of highly toxic PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), but mandated a phase-out of less than 1 percent of PCBs already in use. Moreover, the EPA pledged that enforcement of the law would be made “as palatable as possible,” by testing no more than two hundred of the more than one thousand chemicals marketed each year; Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence, 194; Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes, 135. 39.Shabecoff,AFierceGreenFire, 234;JudithA.Layzer,The Environmental Case: Translating Values into Policy (Washington, DC, 2002), 53;seealsoLoisGibbs, Love Canal: The Story Continues,rev.ed.(GabriolaIsland,B.C.,1998). 40. Elizabeth D. Blum, Love Canal Revisited: Race, Class, and Gender in Environmental Activism (Lawrence, KS, 2008), 24. 41.RichardNewman,“From Love’sCanaltoLoveCanal:Reckoningwiththe Environmental Legacy of an Industrial Dream,” in Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott, eds., Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization (Ithaca, 2003), 129.
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42. Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire, 234; Blum, Love Canal Revisited, 26. 43. Blum, Love Canal Revisited, 116; Newman, “From Love’s Canal,” 133; Gibbs, Love Canal, 81; Newman, “From Love’s Canal,” 130. 44. Layzer, The Environmental Case, 60; Gibbs, Love Canal, 89. 45. Gibbs, Love Canal, 161. 46. The wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly, particularly when there is a lot of money involved, and the Love Canal battles continued for another year. Only after a number of additional and intense confrontations – including one in May 1980 in which Lois Gibbs briefly took hostage two EPA officials – did President Carter widen the area of his emergency declaration and ordered the temporary relocation of seven hundred families from the outer ring. Eventually, after further protests, Carter went to Love Canal in September to sign a deal in which the federal government agreed to loan the state of New York $7.5 million and granted another $7.5 million so the state could buy the homes. Blum, Love Canal Revisited, 106–8. 47. Jim Schwab, Deeper Shades of Green: The Rise of Blue-Collar and Minority Environmentalism in America, foreword by Lois Gibbs (New York, 1994), xviii; Gibbs, Love Canal, 3–5; Cynthia Hamilton, quoted in Newman, “From Love’s Canal,” 132.
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Global Micropolitics Toward a Transnational History of Grassroots Nuclear-Free Zones
Susanne Schregel
The declaration of everyday spaces as “nuclear-free zones” was a unique form of political action that gained popularity in Europe, Northern America, and the Pacific region in the 1980s. Questioning the legitimacy or effectiveness of national defense strategies based on nuclear deterrence, peace activists across many countries suggested creating nuclear-free zones for peace and disarmament. Not restricted to the sphere of state-oriented and institutionalized politics, the pro- posed nuclear-free zones varied greatly. For instance, a leaflet of the US peace group Nukewatch recommended declaring oneself, one’s home, car, friends, or neighbors nuclear free. Everything and anybody could be made a nuclear-free zone:
Other houses and apartments on your block. Your church. Your school. Your garden club. Any organization to which you belong or have access. Then, work with others for establishment of nuclear free zones by public bodies in your area: The school board, town board, city council, or county commissioners.1 This suggestion was by no means atypical. A list of nuclear-free zones, published by the New Zealand peace initiative Home Base Pacific Pilgrimage in 1980, included the body, home, pets, places of work, places of leisure, clubs, churches, Maori maraes, factories and local government bodies.2 In winter 1983, the Nuclear Free Zone Registry (US) announced “My apartment and cats, Jezebel, Sam, Atie and Char,”“Durfee Street Campus of Bristol Community College,”“[o]ur marriage,”“Pine Ridge Indian Reservation,” a “Grassroots Cultural Center” in San Diego, and the “Otto Hahn School” in Germany as having already been declared nuclear free.3
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While protagonists liked to emphasize the inner diversity and wide spread of nuclear-free zone declarations in nearly endless enumerations, such accentuations of number and variety did not succeed in impressing their critics. Even during the heated debate on (dis)armament and nuclear deterrence that evolved in the 1970s and 1980s, both activists and people from outside the peace movement could disapprove of such declarations as self-centered notions, baubles, and mere tokenism. In a way, such skepticism is reflected in the rather marginal scholarly attention that has been given to the history of grassroots nuclear-free zones so far. Hence, thirty-five years after the first wave of grassroots nuclear-free zone declarations, activists’ publications still dominate the accounts of such practices. Only recently have scholars begun to venture into the details of grassroots nuclear-free zone campaigning. The main interest at the moment seems to be directed at declarations of nuclear-free cities and towns by local authorities and city representatives.4 This essay takes some first steps toward a transnational history of grassroots nuclear-free zones.5 Despite the tendency of scholars and contemporaries to dismiss – whether implicitly or explicitly – the rele- vance of nuclear-free zones on account of their “micro” dimensions and prevalence in everyday life, this essay approaches the movement as yielding a historically significant opportunity to reinterpret political responsibilities through spatial rhetoric and practices. As a strategy of global micropolitics, nuclear-free zones were aimed at opening up alter- native approaches to arms control, disarmament, and environmental protection in a historic timeframe that was shaped by intensifying globa- lization discourse. I first trace the roots of such initiatives across the South Pacific region, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, North America, and Western Europe. Pointing to the historic character of spatial settings and the related ascrip- tion of political responsibilities in the period in question, I then examine the role of the “local” and the “global” in nuclear-free zones’ legitimating rhetoric. Finally, I discuss global–local dynamics in the movement’s spa- tial frames and spatial imageries. While the introduction provides a brief overview of micropolitical antinuclear strategies in the context of grassroots nuclear-free zone initia- tives across the globe, the following sections center on Great Britain,6 the United States,7 and New Zealand.8 The article concentrates on the period from 1970 to 1985. It draws mostly on peace movement sources such as specialized “nuclear-free” journals and contemporary “nuclear-free” publications, culled from collections in the countries under discussion.
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Grassroots Nuclear-Free Zones: The Making of a Transnational Movement As the signing of the Antarctic Treaty (1959), the Outer Space Treaty (1967), and the Treaty of Tlatelolco for a nuclear-free zone in Latin America (1967) indicates, the creation of legally binding nuclear-free zones had already become an established instrument in international pol- itics by the 1960s. However, a broad grassroots declaration of nuclear-free zones did not occur until the 1980s. In this decade, diverse strands of antimilitarist, environmental, health, and indigenous rights initiatives promoting antinuclear activism on a microscale gradually coalesced and, fostered by aggravated Cold War tensions and a new wave of antinuclear protest in the early 1980s, grew to form a new kind of transnational movement throughout Western countries. In nuclear-free zone initiatives, Cold War themes such as the protest against nuclear testing and the arms race merged with broader political tendencies that shaped the period, such as, most remarkably, the emergence of “alternative” movements, the spread of environmental concerns, and generally an increased appreciation of decentralization, the “small scale,” and the local. There are many ways in which a brief history of such grassroots nuclear-free zone initiatives could be narrated. Not only did campaigns for nuclear-free zones surface in various regions of the world. Activists also circulated divergent foundational myths and narratives about the development of nuclear-free zone initiatives. Without trying to construct an authoritative narrative of the movement’s origins, one can at least identify some developments that greatly influenced grassroots activism in the 1980s. We can see one impetus for grassroots nuclear-free zone initiatives in the antinuclear micropolitical and “direct” actions that flourished in the Pacific region in the 1970s. In 1972/73, activists of the newly founded group Greenpeace, for instance, used small-scale interventions to oppose French nuclear testing in Moruroa.9 Groups such as the Peace Squadron in New Zealand protested the entry of US military vessels by trying to block the harbor with ships, yachts, and various floating devices.10 Opposition to nuclear and environmental hazards, nuclear waste dumping, and foreign military land use in the Pacific region in the 1970s came together in the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement. Among other things, this movement campaigned for the establishment of a South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, which was eventually signed in 1985 (Treaty of Rarotonga).11
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While these activities could be narrated as examples that generally reinforced micropolitical interventions, other practices later came to be interpreted as the direct precursors of grassroots nuclear-free zone initia- tives. In March 1975, for example, the city council of the Japanese port city of Kobe demanded that all foreign military ships docking at the harbor be verified as not carrying nuclear weapons.12 Activists’ publica- tions from the 1980s often named this decision as the first grassroots nuclear-free zone declaration. Retrospectively, activists also identified the resolutions against uranium mining that Australian city councils had passed from the mid-1970s onward as an origin of grassroots nuclear-free zone initiatives. Even though these resolutions did not, at first, specifically address the issue of nuclear weapons, they at least focused on the potential dangers of nuclear energy and the nuclear fuel cycle in general.13 Only starting in 1980 did initiatives emerge that were aimed expressis verbis at creating grassroots nuclear-free zones and which were predomi- nantly directed against nuclear weapons. In November/December 1980, the New Zealand–based group Home Base Pacific Pilgrimage published a newspaper that asked “[o]rdinary New Zealand people” to “take a stand to declare New Zealand Nuclear Weapon Free.”14 Explicitly aimed at creating nuclear-free zones in people’s everyday surroundings, the initiative proposed a wide range of such zones, among them “your own body and personal space at home and at work.” In the same vein, the initiative recommended action in the “local church committee, sports club, marae, service club, local body government to declare all its property and facilities a Nuclear Weapon Free Zone.”15 At about the same time, the first grassroots nuclear-free zone initiatives arose in Europe. Most important for this development was the evolution of a movement for nuclear-free zones among local authorities in Great Britain. Mostly Labour-governed cities and towns followed the example of a resolution made by the city of Manchester in November 1980. This resolution opposed the production or deployment of nuclear weapons on local territory and asked other municipalities to join in the initiative.16 These municipal initiatives were soon accompanied by other kinds of nuclear-free zone declarations.17 Nuclear-free zone initiatives were not influential just in Great Britain; the British movement for nuclear-free local authorities also fostered the spread of comparable initiatives on an international scale. Reaching other European countries by such means as town twinning relations, personal contacts, peace conferences, and peace movement publications, nuclear-free zone initiatives became familiar in Western, Southern, and
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Northern Europe. Significant local nuclear-free zone initiatives were taken in the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Norway, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain, Sweden, and the Federal Republic of Germany.18 Initial attempts were made in France and Finland.19 In the United States and Canada, nuclear-free zone initiatives emerged in the early 1980s.20 Besides municipal efforts for nuclear-free zone declarations, a wide range of personal and miniature nuclear-free zones came into existence in the United States.21 Increasing antinuclear protests in Europe and Northern America, in turn, had a positive influence on environmental and antinuclear initiatives in the Pacific region. From 1981 on, a movement to make New Zealand municipalities nuclear-free zones complemented the rather personal approach of Home Base Pacific Pilgrimage.22 Nuclear-free zone initiatives also emerged in Japan23 and in Australia.24 The growth of nuclear-free zone initiatives was accompanied by institutionalizing processes. Meanttointegrateandcoordinatethe grassroots nuclear-free zone campaigns, national steering committees or supporting organizations were founded in many countries.25 Institutionalization also took place on an international scale, for instance, when representatives of nuclear-free local authorities met at international conferences.26 In addition to this institutionalized basis of cooperation, some groups were specifically organized on a transnational basis. This aimed at increasing the movement’sefficiency around asubissue(e.g.,thecreationofnuclear-free ports) and supported exchanges between different world regions (e.g., the “U.S. Nuclear- Free PacificNetwork”, which focused on environmental, anticolonial, and human rights issues).27 Furthermore, activists produced specialized journals that detailed the movement’s latest developments both nation- ally and internationally and helped people to contact each other and to keep in touch.28
Nuclear-Free Zone Campaigning and the Redescription of Everyday Life Across the many nation-states and political contexts in which they emerged, initiatives to declare nuclear-free zones were united by the idea of symbolically “freeing” a particular space of nuclear weapons (and, in some cases, nuclear energy or other influences that were perceived as dangerous). This approach centered on the idea of reinterpreting and redescribing everyday life in an antinuclear sense through verbal
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declarations, ceremonies, the decisions of elected bodies, and other acts of designation and subsequent announcement. For the movement’s protagonists, the processes leading to a declaration of a nuclear-free zone were an integral part of such initiatives. Correspondingly, campaigning material in Great Britain, the United States, and New Zealand often made detailed suggestions about how to proceed with a grassroots nuclear-free zone declaration. Following the instructions provided by Home Base Pacific Pilgrimage, for instance, declarations could be made “in silence, or with just a few others” (“affix a button or sticker or a flag and know inside yourself the significance of your action”). But the group also proposed that interested persons “include other people and encourage them to take the same kind of action.” The group’s newspaper provided a text that could be used for personal declarations. However, the group also encouraged people to express their opposition to nuclear weapons in any way that suited them. (“Design your own ritual using this paper and other printed mate- rial, use silence, use dance, use songs, use some symbolic action.”29) Generally, grassroots nuclear-free zones focused on international poli- cies and defense strategies and called for nuclear disarmament or arms control. Whether nuclear-free zones should also be directed against nuclear energy remained controversial. In Great Britain, for instance, individual nuclear-free municipalities protested against nuclear energy, nuclear waste transports, and nuclear waste dumping. However, opposi- tion to nuclear energy became an official part of the National Steering Committee’s agenda only after the accident in Chernobyl.30 In some cases, nuclear-free zones served as an instrument of alternative, environmental, and spiritual politics in a wider sense. This concern may be illustrated by the nuclear-free zone declaration that an American girl wrote down in the name of the creek behind her house, claiming to have phrased the “first written Nuclear Free Zone declaration from a non- human source”:
I, the Creek, located behind the house at 4831 River Ridge Road, hereby declare myself and the surrounding territory a Nuclear Free Zone. Included in this declaration are the snails, salamanders, minnows, and crayfish who live in me, the beasts who live in the forest around me, my activist representative at 4831 River Ridge Road, and the double rainbow of August 3, 1984, which served as my official proclamation against nuclear weapons to the representative. – The Creek31 This declaration promoted nuclear-free zones as the genuine will of nature and portrayed the people advocating them as legitimate speakers for the
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environment and its species. Interestingly, the rainbow – as a biblical symbol for peace – served as a mode of communication between the environment and the humans trying to find words on its behalf. Besides the close connection between nature and humans that the text aimed to evoke, the example also illustrates activists’ insistence on pub- licly announcing, documenting, and listing declared nuclear-free zones. Initiatives regularly asked activists to write down and send in their nuclear-free zone declarations. Movement publications frequently con- tained enumerations and lists of already declared zones, and sometimes these publications consisted only of listings. Not least, the protagonists themselves made use of enumerations to redescribe their everyday surrounding in an antinuclear sense. It is, therefore, not incidental that, in the declaration cited above, it is an enumeration that unfolds when the creek raises its voice. In listing beasts and humans, the territory around the creek, and celestial phe- nomena in equal measure, the enumerative narration facilitates experi- menting with traditional arrangements of entities. It explores new forms of classifying and ordering the world in a playful, poetic way, and encourages further redescriptions of the world that might be enabled by the art of enumeration.32
Grassroots Nuclear-Free Zones’ Legitimation as “Direct,” “Concrete,” and “Local” The endeavor to create nuclear-free zones, however, was not just rooted in the discursive practice of redescription; it could also be regarded as an inherently spatialized approach. This approach was characterized by two distinct yet mutually related ideas. On the one hand, activists tried to figure out the role of the local for Cold War politics and propagated ideas of direct and concrete political mobilization. On the other hand, the movement’s protagonists used nuclear-free zone campaigning to actively shape ideas and concepts of transnational cooperation, global solidarity, and cosmopolitan politics in their respective national and local political situations. Nuclear-free zone campaigning can thus be conceived of as a special form of contentious politics that combined questions of “the local” and “the global” in a transnational yet localized setting. According to the movement’s legitimating rhetoric, nuclear-free zone–declarations aimed to involve people and give them the opportunity to take a step, autonomously and within their personal setting, “for peace.” Activists welcomed them as “a valuable tool to raise local
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awareness of the arms race, and to offer people a chance to take an independent step toward peace at the local level.”33 Protagonists also valued their perceived ability to “present disarmament in a way that community residents can relate to,”34 and advocated nuclear-free zones as a first but “concrete nonviolent step against the forces of war and environmental destruction on the local level.”35 Even though grassroots nuclear-free zones tied in with political action on a larger scale, their establishment did not seek to directly call upon international law, nor did it necessarily require the involvement of a national government. Rather, nuclear-free zone initiatives were based on the proclaimed pro- ductivity of the small and local in a joint transnational context. With their connotations of community, solidarity, and shared interests, initiatives concurrently highlighted the nearby as a preferred arena of political action. This emphasis on transferring environmental concerns and interna- tional politics to the small scale often (but not always) resulted from anti- establishment, anti-governmental convictions.36 Campaigners insisted that steps against the arms race should and could be made “without waiting for politicians and generals to act on our behalf”;37 they articu- lated the will “to take the nuclear question out of the realm of superpower dealings and bring it home in a clear statement of opposition against the arms race.”38
Transnational Perspectives While nuclear-free zone initiatives basically relied on grassroots actions and political engagement in contexts commonly perceived as local, the transnational character of grassroots nuclear-free zones also had a strategic significance. Activists referred to the movement’s international scope to narrate the movement’s origins, to describe its present situation, and to give reasons for its potential political effectiveness. Activists in the various nation-states did not necessarily narrate the same history, and knowledge about comparable micropolitical antinuclear strategies differed across countries and changed over the years. Nonetheless, pub- lications simultaneously tended to stress the movement’s transnational dimensions, its growth, and the number of nuclear-free zones that had been declared. Again, the typical form of such narratives was the list or the enumera- tion. Sentences such as “The Nuclear Free Zone movement which began in Europe and the Pacific has taken hold in America and is growing
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rapidly”39 combined a statement about the movement’s history and current state with an optimistic view of future prospects. More detailed narratives connected grassroots initiatives with the tradition of legally binding nuclear-free zones.40 Movement publications also insisted that the practice had actually crossed national borders, thereby stressing that it was, in the truest sense of the word, a transnational movement.41 Given that reports of the movement’s spread could be seen as proof of its potential political influence, such references often had legitimizing func- tions; they tried to immunize the movement against mocking reactions.42 Practical steps added to the discursive emphasis on transnational con- nections and interdependencies. Nuclear-free zone activists, for instance, met at international conferences; they contacted campaigners in other countries, sent letters and reports about nuclear-free zone initiatives to activists in other nation-states, and initiated or supported twinning between religious communities and local authorities.
Global–Local Dynamics These “local” and transnational aspects of nuclear-free zones’ legiti- mating rhetoric were brought together by discourses on anticipated global–local dynamics.Inactivists’ accounts, the local, as related to the global, was the preferred place for action; and the global, consti- tuted via diverse transnational relations, was highlighted as the perspec- tive for action and goal of grassroots political practices. The semantics of “thinking globally, acting locally” reflected these spatial relations in an exemplary way. Grassroots nuclear-free zone initia- tives frequently used the slogan, which had been popularized in the environmental debate of the 1970s. For example, the Newsletter New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone Committee stated in 1983,
By declaring their homes, churches, places of business and communities NWFZs [Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zones], people are taking charge of their own environment and future ...They are “thinking globally”–in terms of a peaceful just world, free of nuclear threat – then “acting locally” to declare a specific area a NWFZ.43 As a US activist similarly explained in 1985, “By thinking globally and acting locally, the nuclear-free zone movement is uniting diverse national peace movements and bringing us all closer to the common goal of a nuclear-free world.”44 Illustrations in peace movement publications communicated the same idea of local–global dynamics visually, combining the call for single, local
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figure 1: Nuclear Free America, MAKE YOUR TOWN A Nuclear Free Zone, SCPC.
nuclear-free declarations with images and symbols of a “nuclear-free world.”45 Figure 1 shows a graphic design used by Nuclear Free America. Taking up customary “whole earth” and “one-world” visualizations,46 the invitation to declare one’s town as a “Nuclear Free Zone” appears embedded in the photographic contours of the earth. Also noteworthy is the arrangement of the inscriptions. “MAKE YOUR TOWN A” appears at the top of the globe, whereas the phrase “Nuclear Free Zone” is positioned diagonally on it. This arrangement, which is enhanced by the bigger letters and cursive (and hence more dynamic) print of the “Nuclear Free Zone” inscription, visually suggests a connection between (small) local actions and the potential realization of worldwide nuclear disarmament.47 In their highest ambitions, nuclear-free zone activists anticipated a “cumulative effect” of nuclear-free zone initiatives that would contri- bute to “an emerging global solidarity around the idea of a nuclear-free world.”48 The creation of local, national, and regional nuclear-free zones accordingly could be interpreted as bringing people “one step closer to the greater goal of a nuclear-free world.”49 Depicted as sources of a wider process starting in local contexts, the nuclear-free zones could finally be highlighted as places of a present-day utopia – or, as a religious group from the United States stated,
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To declare a city, a community, a synagogue, church, mosque or home a Nuclear Free Zone and to work towards making this a reality is to reestablish God’s loving dominion over this particular piece of creation. It is an act of faith by which we declare this space to be “holy ground” (Exodus 3:5). In so doing, we are healing the earth by rejecting all the demonic forces which militate against its sacred character.50 In this interpretation, nuclear-free zones realized as well as anticipated a transformation of oneself and of political as well as spiritual commu- nities on a global horizon.
Divergent Globalisms As they put local action into global perspective, grassroots nuclear-free zone campaigns coincided with a certain global rhetoric and with images of the “world” or the “earth” as a “whole.” Activists felt that nuclear-free zone initiatives could enable citizens to apply global perspectives within their local contexts. An activist from New Zealand, for instance, asso- ciated municipal nuclear-free zone campaigning with the commendable effect “that many councillors, for the first time in their lives, rather than just debating potholes, are debating the fate of the earth, in their local community.”51 In a comparable vein, a US publication highlighted the idea that nuclear-free zone campaigning could help people to “adopt the World Citizen world-view.”52 Debates about nuclear risks and envir- onmental problems on a supranational scale reinforced this global perspective.53 The global perspective argumentation also surfaces in illustrations and graphics that portrayed nuclear-free zone activists as promoters of global solidarity and common interests.54 Figure 2 shows the cover design of Disarmament Campaigns in January 1985. In the drawing, a globe is wrapped up twice in a banner with the inscription “Nuclear free zone”; five persons on top of the globe are putting on a third layer of the banner.55 With this, the drawing hints at a joint global goal as well as at the solidarity of people acting together. Simultaneously, the separate layers underline the proclaimed necessity of proceeding incrementally. The drawing hence characterizes nuclear-free zone campaigning as an activity with the potential to relate people in different countries to each other – an interpretation in which each zone could be promoted as “an important global link.”56 At the same time, nuclear-free zone campaigning confirms Michael Geyer and Charles Bright’s observation that “the processes of global
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figure 2: Cover of Disarmament Campaigns, January 1985.
integration have not homogenized the whole but produced continuing and ever-renewing contestations over the terms of global integration itself.”57 On the contrary, “globality” may well have been used as a strategy to justify local thought, and, reversing the popular slogan, “local thinking” might well have motivated actions within a “global” perspective. In fact, we might even identify divergent globalisms, or a specific kind of particularism on a transnational scale, that were none- theless bound together by the idea of global connections and the universal destructiveness of nuclear weapons, thus pointing to the “integrated global space of human practice” as a “condition of globality.”58
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figure 3: “If it is safe ... ” From The New Abolitionist. Newsletter of Nuclear Free America 3 (1984): 7.
This complex interrelation between local and worldwide argumenta- tion can be illustrated by a graphic from the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement (see Figure 3). The graphic, with a black background and white letters, presents two arms holding onto or embracing a globe; the globe is shown from the Pacific Ocean’s perspective. The image’s headline reads, “If it is safe: – Dump it in Tokyo – Test it in Paris – Store it in Washington.” The inscription on the side of the image requests, “But, keep my Pacific nuclear-free.”59 The graphic exemplifies how regional antinuclear movements used frames of the global to point to their specific problems. In this case, activists challenged a tacit distinction between “center” and “periphery” in terms of environmental priorities and indigenous rights; they demanded that the same standards be applied to every region, whether it be the small
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island states of the South Pacific, or the metropolitan regions and capitals of the nations that promoted the use of nuclear energy and relied on nuclear deterrence.
Conclusion This glance at the history of grassroots nuclear-free zone campaigning reveals the strong interconnections between spatial strategies and general assumptions about how to exert political influence during the last decade of the Cold War. In campaigning for nuclear-free zones, activists not only made verbal declarations against nuclear weapons and other issues that they perceived as problematic from a political and religious point of view. They also created hybrid “transnational political spaces”60 that articulated antinuclear sentiments in people’s everyday surroundings. The shared form of the nuclear-free zone integrated the diverse approaches; it enabled a kind of spatialized campaigning that was employ- able in various local, regional, and national situations.61 In this context, the anticipation of emerging global–local dynamics and the notion of campaigning for a nuclear-free world created a joint, albeit differentiated course of action. Based on inherently spatialized rhetoric and practices, grassroots nuclear-free zone campaigning suggested an alternative interpretation of international relations that tried to reclaim responsibilities for defense policies in the name of ordinary citizens. Emphasizing strategies for peace and disarmament in people’s everyday surroundings and thereby “taking peace to pieces,”62 nuclear-free zone initiatives approached peace as a fragile equilibrium that could be stabilized by a variety of local-global interrelations. The framing of these micropolitical practices in a global rhetoric facilitated a reading of international relations in which defense strategies evolved as the will of local communities joined together in an international perspective. To report the steps they had taken and express the aims they wanted to achieve, activists often resorted to the narrative form of enumeration. Lists and enumerations, ubiquitous in antinuclear activists’ publicity material, linked already-declared nuclear-free zones as varying succes- sions of equipollent elements. At the same time, they called for further additions through the obviously incomplete character of the elements that had already been listed. The enumerations that activists cited to render an account of their activities thus did more than simply repro- duce a process linguistically that was, spatially, described as a recursive
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unfolding of grassroots nuclear-free zones within a global–local dynamics. As creative and imaginative practices, the creation of enu- merations and lists was also able to evocate alternative political realities that found their spatial form in the vision of a “nuclear-free world.” The history of grassroots nuclear-free zone campaigning, then, illustrates how a focus on the construction of space may be used as an “analytical framework for the study of transnational political connections.”63 In particular, the analysis of spatial-political relations in the final years of the Cold War may help us to relate Cold War history to the history of social movements, to describe changing approaches to and interpretations of politics, and to link local, national, and transnational/ global dimensions of Cold War reality to the ongoing transformations of territoriality taking place in the last third of the twentieth century. However, the question of the relevance of transnational spatial rhetoric, local–global oriented political practices, as well as the impact of Cold War transnational spaces on more general societal-political transforma- tions still needs to be integrated into a broader history of Cold War spatial-political interconnections.
Notes
1. “Nuclear Free Zones. What – Why – When – How – Where,” Leaflet, 1983, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, PA. (hereafter SCPC), CDGA Coll. Box (Nukewatch). 2. Home Base Pacific Pilgrimage, Freezonenews (Nov./Dec. 1980): 1, National Library of New Zealand (Alexander Turnbull Library), Wellington (hereafter NLNZ). 3. “More and More and More!” Nuclear Free Zone Registry. News Flash (Winter/Spring 1983/84), SCPC, CDGA Coll. Box (Nuclear Free Zone Registry). 4. On nuclear-free zone campaigning as a part of municipal peace activities, see Susanne Schregel, “Nuclear War and the City: Perspectives on Municipal Interventions in Defence (Great Britain, New Zealand, West Germany, USA, 1980–1985),” Urban History 42 (2015) 4, 564–83. 5. On concepts and the history of transnational social movements, see John A. Guidry, Michael D. Kennedy, and Mayer N. Zald, “Globalizations and Social Movements,” in Guidry, Kennedy, and Zald, eds., Globalizations and Social Movements. Culture, Power, and the Transnational Public Sphere (Ann Arbor, 2000), 1–32; Robin Cohen and Shirin M. Rai, “Global Social Movements. Towards a Cosmopolitan Politics,” in Cohen and Rai, eds., Global Social Movements (London/New York, 2000), 1–17; Donatella Della
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Porta and Sidney Tarrow, “Transnational Processes and Social Activism: An Introduction,” in Della Porta and Tarrow, eds., Transnational Protest and Global Activism (Oxford, 2005), 1–17. 6. The sources used for Great Britain include the London School of Economics (hereafter LSE), Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (hereafter CND) and European Nuclear Disarmament (hereafter END) collections; Manchester Archives and Local Studies, Records of the Nuclear Free Zones Local Authorities and Manchester City Council’s Nuclear Policy and Information Unit, Manchester (hereafter MCC). 7. Information on the United States draws upon SCPC, various collections. 8. Sources for New Zealand include the Macmillan-Brown-Library, University of Canterbury, Christchurch (hereafter MB), Larry Ross Papers (hereafter LRP) (with records of the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone Committee); and NLNZ. 9. On protests against nuclear testing and the formation period of Greenpeace, see Lawrence Wittner, Toward Nuclear Abolition. A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (California, 2003), 14–15. 10. See Tom Newnham, Peace Squadron. The Sharp End of Nuclear Protest in New Zealand (Auckland, 1986); Eleanor Nanette Hodges, David and Goliath in the Ocean of Peace. Case Studies of “Nuclearism,”“Nuclear Allergy,” and “The Kiwi Disease,” Ph.D. diss., University of California, 1990, 136–61. 11. On the emergence of the Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific Movement, see Ronni Alexander, Putting the Earth First: Alternatives to Nuclear Security in Pacific Island States (Honolulu, HI, 1994), 138–57. 12. David Regan, The New City Republics. Municipal Intervention in Defence, Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies, Occasional paper No. 30 (London, 1987), 12f.; Naomi Iwai, Report of Movement in Kobe City against the Entry of Nuclear-Armed Warships (April 28, 1984), LRP, MB 2097, Box 7, item 1 (Japan); The Procedure for Foreign Warships to Enter the Port of Kobe, document of the Kobe municipal government, Port and Harbor Bureau, March 13, 1984, LRP, MB 2097, Box 7, item 1 (Japan). 13. On the movement against uranium mining, see Verity Burgmann, Power and Protest. Movements for Change in Australian Society (Sydney, 1993), 195–99. 14. Home Base Pacific Pilgrimage, Freezonenews (Nov./Dec. 1980), NLNZ; “During the Year ...,” Newsletter Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, N.Z. (Jan. 1981): 1. 15. See “1980–81 Action: What You Can Do,” Freezonenews (Nov./Dec. 1980): 1. 16. See Schregel, “Nuclear War.” 17. For instance parish councils, colleges, student unions, and religious commu- nities, see MCC M 711 1/1/3 Box 1 (Correspondence 1981–1986); Towards
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Nuclear-Free Communities? A Christian CND Discussion Leaflet, LSE CND/ 1993/9/2 (Nuclear Free Zone Bulletin and Publicity Material 1983–1987). 18. Susanne Schregel, Der Atomkrieg vor der Wohnungstür. Eine Politikgeschichte der neuen Friedensbewegung in der Bundesrepublik 1970–1985 (Frankfurt/ Main and New York, 2011), 289–97; Sebastian Haumann and Susanne Schregel, “Andere Räume, andere Städte, und die Transformation der Gesellschaft. Hausbesetzungen und Atomwaffenfreie Zonen als alternative Raumpraktiken,” in Hanno Balz and Jan-Henrik Friedrichs, eds., “All We Ever Wanted”. Eine Kulturgeschichte europäischer Protestbewegungen der 1980er Jahre (Berlin, 2012), 53–72. 19. Disarmament Campaigns 40 (1985), 8–9; International Nuclear Free Zones Listing, MCC M 711 3/55 (Nuclear Free Zones International Action); “NFZs in the World,” The New Abolitionist. Newsletter of Nuclear Free America 3 (1987): 7. 20. On the emergence of municipal nuclear-free zones in the United States, see Schregel, “Nuclear War”: 570–72. 21. These zones cropped up almost everywhere, whether in private contexts and religious communities, or in schools, colleges, and universities. On campus campaigning, see the pamphlet Nuclear Free Zones on Campus, SCPC CDGA Coll. Box (Nuclear Free America, NFZ Organizing Packets, Packet 1). On religious nuclear-free zones in the United States, see “Declared RNFZ’s in the US,” Nuclear Free Zones in the Religious Community Special Newsletter 1986, pp. 7–10, SCPC CDGA, Mobilization for Survival, Box 2 (Religious Task Force, 1982–1986). On present extensions of free zone initiatives in the United States, see the ironic commentary by John Leo, “Zoning Challenges Now Extend to Feelings and Beliefs,” http://townhall .com/columnists/johnleo/2006/08/07/zoning_challenges_now_extend_to_fee lings_and_belief/page/full/, Sept. 29, 2011. 22. See Schregel, “Nuclear War”, 569–70; Maire Leadbeater, Peace, Power and Politics: How New Zealand Became Nuclear Free (Dunedin, 2013), 69–78. 23. See Takao Takahara, “Local Government Initiatives to Promote Peace,” Peace & Change. A Journal of Peace Research 3–4 (1987): 51–58; Masaru Nishida, “Nuclear Free Local Authority Movement in Japan Today,” Newsletter for a Nuclear Free Japan and Pacific Asia (Apr. 1987): 2–8, LRP, MB 396, Box 4, folder 8. The Japanese nuclear-free zones move- ment claimed sixty-three local authorities as nuclear free zones in 1982, eighty-five in 1983, 262 in 1984, and 503 in 1985. By July 1988, 64.5 percent of Japan’s population was governed by nuclear-free local authorities, achiev- ing coverage of 43.5 percent of the country’s total area. See “Nuclear Free Zones in Japan,” The Nuclear Free Zone Information (Engl. ed.) 1 (1988): 8; “Nuclear Free Japan,” The New Abolitionist. Newsletter of Nuclear Free America 2 (1985): 7 (with lower numbers for 1981–84).
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24. In Australia, the agenda gradually widened from environmental and health concerns to include opposition to nuclear weapons. See Australian Nuclear Free Zones Secretariat, Nuclear Free Zones, 1985, leaflet, LRP, MB 2097, Box 12, item 1 (Nuclear Free Zones 2); Letter City of Northcote – Larry Ross (Dec. 31, 1982), Policy Statement (26th Nov. 1979), LRP, MB 2097, Box 14, item 10 (Nuclear Weapon Free Cities); “Nuclear Free Pacific ...,” Disarmament Campaigns 2 (1980): 3–4. In August 1985 the Australian Nuclear Free Zones Secretariat was aware of about ninety-nine municipal nuclear-free zones. See “International NFZs,” The New Abolitionist. Newsletter of Nuclear Free America 7 (1983): 7–8; Nuclear Free Zone Secretariat Committee Meeting Held in the Vestibule, Town Hall, Sydney, on Friday, April 8, 1983, LRP, MB 2097 Box 14, item 10 (Nuclear Weapon Free Cities). 25. For instance, Great Britain (Oct. 1981); New Zealand (Dec. 1981); Australia (Apr. 1983); Japan (Aug. 1984). 26. Schregel, “Nuclear War.” 27. “Introducing the USNFPN,” u.s. nuclear-free pacific network (March 1983): 1–2. 28. USA: The New Abolitionist: Newsletter of Nuclear Free America (1982 ff.), Newsletter Nuclear Free Zone Registry (1983 ff.); West Germany: Informationsdienst der Kampagne für atomwaffenfreie Städte und Regionen (1983 ff.); Great Britain: Nuclear Free Zone Bulletin (1984 ff.); New Zealand: Newsletter New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone Committee (1981 ff., since Dec. 1984 continued as Nuclear Free. Journal of the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone Committee). 29. “Your Declaration Day,” Freezonenews (Nov./Dec. 1980): 4. 30. “Putting the Power into NFZs,” Nuclear Free Zone Bulletin 12 (1986): 1 (“From now on the terms of reference of the local authorities’ National Steering Committee will include a commitment to the phasing out of nuclear power, combined with an equally strong policy to promote alternative energy sources and employment opportunities for displaced nuclear power workers.”) 31. “Fourteen-Year Old Representing Nature Declares NFZ!” Nuclear Free Zone Registry, News Flash Summer/Fall 1984, SCPC; “Nature Declares Nuclear Free Zone,” The New Abolitionist. Newsletter of Nuclear Free America 1 (1985): 4. 32. On the aesthetic potential of enumerations in literary as well as other con- texts, see Sabine Mainberger, Die Kunst des Aufzählens. Elemente zu einer Poetik des Enumerativen (Berlin and New York, 2003), 1–13. 33. Cassandra Dixon, “Dear Friends,” letter (Jan. 1984), SCPC CDGA Coll. Box (Nukewatch). 34. Mobilization for Survival, Moving beyond October: Organizing a Nuclear Free Zone Campaign, 1983, SCPC CDGA, Mobilization for Survival, Box 1.
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35. Mobilization for Survival, Religious Task Force, Nuclear Free Zones in the Religious Community, leaflet, LSE CND/1993/9/2 (Nuclear Free Zone Bulletin and Publicity Material 1983–1987); see also Towards Nuclear-Free Communities? A Christian CND Discussion Leaflet, LSE CND/1993/9/2 (Nuclear Free Zone Bulletin and Publicity Material 1983–1987). 36. On national variations in nuclear-free zone campaigning, see also Schregel, “Nuclear War.” 37. Mobilization for Survival, Religious Task Force, Nuclear Free Zones. 38. Jim Wurst, “Democratic Peace,” Disarmament Campaigns 11 (1982): 2. See also Nuclear Free Scotland. A Campaigners Manual, 1982, 2, LSE CND/ ADD/5/11 (Nuclear Free Zones 1982–1985); David Blunkett, “Nuclear Free Zones – Silly or Sane?” Sanity. Voice of CND 11 (1984): 16–17, 17. 39. Albert Donnay, letter, SCPC CDGA Coll. Box (Nuclear Free America, NFZ Organizing Packets, Packet 2). 40. For example, “This idea takes its inspiration from the international treaties which have established Nuclear Free Zones in South America, Antarctica, outer space and the seabed, and from the adoption by the islands of Belau in Micronesia of a nuclear free constitution. Over one hundred municipal coun- cils in the United Kingdom, along with many more communities in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and now in the United States have followed this precedent.” Mobilization for Survival, Religious Task Force, Nuclear Free Zones. 41. For instance, “The entire continents of Antarctica and South America are Nuclear Free Zones by international treaty. So are outer space and the ocean floor. Many communities in Europe have declared themselves Nuclear Free Zones as a method of opting out of the arms race. In Great Britain alone, more than 140 local governments have declared their territories to be nuclear-free. ... Now the movement has crossed the Atlantic.” Nuclear Free Zones. What – Why – When – How – Where.Leaflet 1983,SCPC, CDGA Coll. Box (Nukewatch). 42. This becomes obvious in statements such as the following: “The continued international interest is a testament to the legitimacy of local nuclear-free zones. In turn, local campaigns can provide an important stimulus to further international initiatives – all part of the task of helping to create a nuclear weapons-free world.” London Borough of Camden, ed., Why Camden Should Be Nuclear-Free (March) 1985, MCC M711 3/10 (London). 43. Larry Ross, “Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zones in New Zealand,” Newsletter New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone Committee (Oct./Nov. 1983): 1. The citation continues, “At the same time many groups and individuals act nationally on their members of Parliament, and internationally by commu- nicating with other groups and other governments.” 44. Albert Donnay, “Our Common Goal: A Nuclear-Free World,” Disarmament Campaigns 49 (1985): 3. See also: “Happy Birthday: The First 30 Years,”
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The New Abolitionist. Newsletter of Nuclear Free America 1 (1988): 6; Bennett, The New Abolitionists, 220; Australian Nuclear Free Zones Secretariat, Nuclear Free Zones, leaflet, 1985, LRP, MB 2097, Box 12, item 1; London Borough of Camden, ed., Why Camden; Nuclear Free Zone Registry, “Let’s Make the World a Nuclear Free Zone!” The New Abolitionist. Newsletter of Nuclear Free America 1 (1982): 3. 45. See, for instance, Peacelink New Zealand (Oct. 1983): 9 (image of a globe with the diagonal inscription “Nuclear free” and the slogan “Think globally act locally” on the side); The New Abolitionist. Newsletter of Nuclear Free America 2 (1988): 3 (logo “Nuclear free Oakland – Think globally act locally”); The New Abolitionist. Newsletter of Nuclear Free America 1 (1988/89): 3 (logo “Marine County – Nuclear free zone. Think globally, act locally”). 46. See Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye. A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in Western Imagination (Baltimore/London, 2001), 257–66, on visual global- isms in the context of the Apollo space photography. 47. Nuclear Free America, Nuclear Free Zones: If Not Now, When? If Not Us, Who? SCPC CDGA Coll. Box (Nuclear Free America, NFZ Organizing Packets); see also The New Abolitionist. Newsletter of Nuclear Free America 5 (1983): 8. 48. Karin Fierke, “Dear Readers,” Disarmament Campaigns 40 (1985): 2. 49. “Happy Birthday”; CND, ed., Nuclear-Free Zone Campaign Manual (London, 1984), LSE CND/ADD/5/11 (Nuclear Free Zones 1982–1985), uses the metaphor of “a giant jigsaw puzzle – as towns, cities and countries become NFZs, gaps in the jigsaw are removed.” 50. Mobilization for Survival, Religious Task Force, Nuclear Free Zones. 51. NZ Nuclear Free Zone Committee, “Interview Chris Johnston/Australian Nuclear Free Zone Secretariat/Larry Ross, NZ NFZ-Committee,” Peace Studies (Nov./Dec. 1985): 39–41, LRP MB 396, Box 3, item 10/45, folder 7. The phrase “fate of the earth” was popularized by Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (New York, 1982). 52. Bennett, The New Abolitionists, 51. This position coincided with certain ideas of nationalism and/or patriotism. As Bennett states (p. 44), “Today our paramount obligation is to our planet. This is not to renounce patriotism – I do not love America less, I love the world more! Nor is it necessarily an appeal for world government, although in the long run some international controls and constraints will be necessary. It is to say that our individual destinies are inextricably bound to that of the human race. It is the conviction that this world does not exist for me alone, nor for Americans alone; there- fore, my nation has no right to threaten others or to impose its will on them.” 53. Activists thus admonished the public about the destructive effects that nuclear war would have for all continents, even for those people who were not directly positioned in a theater of war (e.g., by the outbreak of “nuclear winter”).
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54. See, for example, World Nuclear Free Zones Day, LRP MB 2097 Box 12 (depicting a global wave of nuclear-free zones); Disarmament Campaigns, 49 (1985): 3 (above a list of nuclear-free zones in seventeen countries, an illustra- tion of two people climbing a ladder, reaching out to each other above a globe). 55. Disarmament Campaigns, 40 (1985), front cover. Compare also Disarmament Campaigns 40 (1985), 3 (world map stamped twice “Nuclear free zone”), 8 (cover detail). 56. Nuclear Free America, Nuclear Free Zones: If Not Now, When? If Not Us, Who? 57. Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, “World History in a Global Age,” American Historical Review 100 (1995): 1034–60, 1045 f. 58. Ibid., 1060. 59. The New Abolitionist. Newsletter of Nuclear Free America 3 (1984): 7, and 3 (1983): 5. 60. Mathias Albert et al., “Introduction: The Communicative Construction of Transnational Political Spaces,” in Mathias Albert et al., eds., Transnational Political Spaces. Agents – Structures – Encounters (Frankfurt/Main and New York, 2009), 7–31, 17–19. 61. On the ambivalent spatial character of transnational peace movement mobi- lization, see Benjamin Ziemann, “Situating Peace Movements in the Political Culture of the Cold War. Introduction,” in Benjamin Ziemann, ed., Peace Movements in Western Europe, Japan and the USA during the Cold War (Essen, 2008), 11–38, 32–38. 62. Sara Koopman, “Let’s Take Peace to Pieces,” Political Geography 30 (2011): 193–94. 63. Albert, “Introduction,” 17–19.
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European Nuclear Disarmament: Transnational Peace Campaigning in the 1980s
Patrick Burke
One of the striking things about the Western European peace mobiliza- tions in the 1980s is the number of countries in which there were move- ments, and movements of considerable size. Many campaigns had their own – national or regional – agendas: in the United Kingdom, for example, resistance to the proposed new “independent nuclear deter- rent,” the Trident missile system; in Scandinavian states, the creation of a Nordic nuclear-free zone; in Spain, opposition to NATO membership. But a common denominator of the sustained waves of activism in almost every Western European state from 1979/80 to the mid-1980s, and beyond, was opposition to NATO’s Dual-Track Decision of December 12, 1979: NATO would deploy 572 cruise and Pershing II missiles by the end of 1983 to counter the alleged threat posed by Soviet medium-range nuclear weapons, the SS-20s. (This was one “track”: the other was the offer for the United States to enter into negotiations with the Soviet Union with the aim of removing intermediate-range nuclear weapons from Europe.)1 That these movements had overlapping agendas for a number of years can, evidently, be explained in part by the fact that people in different Western European countries felt threatened, over the same period and in roughly similar ways, by the new missiles (and, underlying this threat, by the decline in superpower détente from the second half of the 1970s, a decline stimulated and symbolized by, among other things, the NATO decision itself and, later in the same month, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan). Yet this explanation by itself would overlook a phenomenon to which social movement scholars are paying increasing attention: direct
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transnational diffusion, that is, campaigners’ active dissemination of ideas and tactics across borders.2 The 1980s West European peace movements provide a rich source for the study of direct transnational diffusion. One of the most rewarding examples to study is that of the – in its origins British – initiative European Nuclear Disarmament (END), whose campaigning consisted above all in helping to create and sustain a “European-wide alliance.”3 This meant trying to influence the British peace movement – above all, the well- established British antinuclear weapons organization, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), and, to a lesser extent, opposition political parties and trades unions; shape the work of other Western European movements; and extend the pan-European alliance above all to indepen- dent activists in the Soviet bloc. END was only one of many Western peace groups whose members actively spread ideas and tactics across borders in the 1980s; and it was only one of a (smaller) number that took its campaigning into the Soviet bloc.4 Yet END can claim to have played an important role in these processes.
Roots Like other Western peace groups, END was brought into being by the Dual-Track Decision. But the END initiative had its own distinctive roots, and these explain, in part, both its nonaligned and internationalist character – markedly different from that of CND, with its demand for unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain – and its founders’ decision to launch a campaign separate from (though overlapping with) CND’s. These roots were in an explicit “Third Way” tradition on the British left. The origins of this tradition can be traced back to the immediate postwar years;5 but it emerged as a significant political force – the New Left – after 1956, when the Communist Party split (as did many of its counterparts in other countries) in the wake of Khrushchev’s “secret speech” and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Edward Thompson, looking back at END in 1990, wrote that, from 1956, “we [ex-Communists] developed in little journals, and then with the first British New Left – in association with friends in West Europe and C. Wright Mills in the USA – a new strategy of ‘active neutrality’ and a third way of peace and human rights.”6 Thompson and his wife, Dorothy, carried their New Left politics through into the 1980s and the founding of END.7 Others who did the
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same included Ken Coates and Tony Topham. In the 1960s and 1970s Coates and Topham had been the main movers behind the Institute for Workers’ Control, one of the “most important and lasting vectors” of the New Left position “against the communists and the fellow-travellers ... and Natopolitan social democrats.”8 Coates was, with Edward Thompson, the main cofounder of END; Topham was an early member. Coates was also the leading figure in the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, another vector of New Left ideas, and the key “movement midwife” of END.9 Others, too, not from this ex-Communist tradition, helped create END; many (like Coates) were either in or close to the Labour Party: Mary Kaldor and Dan Smith, both defense analysts and members of the Labour Party’s Defence Study Group; the economist and Labour Party MP Stuart Holland; Peggy Duff, the founder of an earlier nonaligned group, the International Confederation for Disarmament and Peace. There were “European advi- sors,” too: Ulrich Albrecht of the Free University in Berlin; Claude Bourdet, a veteran of the French independent left; and the exiled Soviet scientist Zhores Medvedev.10 Once founded, END attracted diverse members – Labour Party supporters, Liberals, women’s movement activists, left-wing libertarians, Green activists, and others – who were drawn to its cosmopo- litan “frame.” All these activists shaped END as the decade progressed. But the roots of END’s distinctive nonaligned internationalism lay in the “active neutrality” of the Third Way.
Beginnings The terms “active neutrality” and “Third Way” were not widely used in the 1980s; but their meanings are present in many END documents, most influentially perhaps in the founding END document, the Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament, or END Appeal, which would become a “charter” of the Western European peace movement.11 The Appeal, of which Edward Thompson was the principal co-author, sketches in bleak terms why, in its authors’ views, “[w]e are entering the most dangerous decade in human history, and a third world war is not merely possible, but increasingly likely.” It warns of “the political tensions that fuel a demented arms race,” the growing likelihood of “‘limited’ nuclear war,” and the “increasing probability of some devastating accident or miscalculation.” These passages capture a widespread sense – and not just in the peace movement – that the nuclear arms race was almost beyond control. But though the conjuring up of the possibility of nuclear war,
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brought about by design or mistake, is central to the END Appeal, what really distinguishes this document is its succinct presentation of an expli- citly nonaligned and internationalist “position”: that the responsibility (or “guilt”) for the arms race, indeed for the Cold War, as well as for the internal suppression of civil rights, lies “squarely upon both parties”; and so both sides must be opposed. The Appeal calls for both the production of Soviet SS-20s to be stopped and for the deployment of US cruise and Pershing II missiles to be halted; it asks both superpowers to withdraw nuclear weapons from Europe; and it urges supporters to help create a European nuclear weapons-free zone that extends into both blocs – from “Poland to Portugal.” The END Appeal identifies the key agent of this work as a “transcontinental movement” in which “every kind of exchange takes place” (emphasis added), calling on people – in a much-quoted “utopian” passage – to “commence to act as if a united, neutral, and pacific Europe already exists”; to learn to be “loyal, not to ‘East’ or ‘West,’ but to each other”; and to “disregard the prohibitions and limitations imposed by any national state.” The political dividing line in Europe, then, is not between East and West but between the “citizens of Europe” and the elites – the “statesmen”–in both blocs.12 In an essay written at the same time, Edward Thompson explained why a pan-European movement was needed: each bloc’s “exterminist thrust ...summons up and augments the thrust of its exterminist antago- nist [in the other bloc]”: the “counter-thrust” thus has to come from “within each bloc.” But if this “counter-thrust” is confined to its own bloc, it can be written off as the work of the other side: “only the regeneration of internationalism can possibly summon up a force suffi- cient to the need.”13 As a logical corollary of this position, the END Appeal (having already highlighted the threat that the Cold War poses to civil rights, in West and East) expresses a clear commitment to defend- ing the rights of “citizens, East or West, to take part in this common movement.” The ultimate goals of the campaign that the Appeal envisages are to force the superpowers into détente and to end the Cold War itself: to “dissolve both great power alliances.”14 The nonaligned, internationalist, and political worldview sketched out in the END Appeal framed END’s campaigning from 1980 until the end of the Cold War. END’s aims were ambitious; other early documents also reveal bold intentions. Thompson, in an internal memo, describes END’s role as “first, to continue to coordinate and bring into being a European-wide alliance; second, to provide the political perspective of this movement;
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third, to work out actual events, symbolic and effective, which will add a European dimension to the work of national movements.”15 Yet, in the United Kingdom, the organizational form to which the early deliberations gave rise was modest. In Thompson’s words, “END should [not] appear as a distinct organisation in Britain, with its own local branches, membership, &c.”16 As Dan Smith later recalled, the END founders felt there was no point in creating a membership campaigning group when one – CND – was already in place.17 In fact, END as a “distinct organization” in Britain did appear, but it was a small opera- tion. At its largest the END office was staffed by the equivalent of three workers; until 1985 END had no members, only “supporters”; and after 1985, the year in which it became a membership organization, no more than six hundred people joined it. There was only a handful of distinct END groups in Britain. CND, by comparison, had a national membership that grew from just over four thousand in 1979 to roughly fifty thousand in 1982 and, by the end of 1984, to one hundred and ten thousand. In 1982 CND had around one thousand local groups.18 The decision not to compete with CND (and remain tiny) meant that END became a small peace movement pressure group. END supporters were highly educated: writing and publishing – disseminating ideas – would, unsurprisingly, be at the heart of END’s work.19
END and the British Peace Movement There were many persuasive and influential writers in END. The single most important was Edward Thompson.20 From 1980,he used a stream of articles, pamphlets, and books to argue and polem- icize for the peace movement as a whole and for the END approach in particular: the 1980 pamphlet Protest and Survive,publishedand publicized by the Russell Peace Foundation and CND; the 1982 pamphlet Beyond the Cold War;hisexchange,publishedin1981 in pamphlet form and in the weekly left-wing magazine New Statesman, with the pseudonymous Czechoslovak dissident Václav Racek; the 1980 essay, “Notes on Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization,” published in the austere left-wing periodical New Left Review,which stimulated a book-length debate on the Marxist left about the nuclear arms race and the Cold War; his essay collections Zero Option (1982)andThe Heavy Dancers (1985)andthebookDouble Exposure (1985); and frequent pieces for The Guardian,theTimes; and many more.
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Thompson’svisibilityandintellectual prominence compensated – to some extent – for END’s size. He publicized END ideas in the rapidly growing British peace movement and brought activists into both END and CND. For Bruce Kent, the then-CND General Secretary (and END co-founder), “[n]o-one played a greater part” in getting the British peace movement off the ground “than Edward Thompson, the historian,” who “gave us international vision as well as indignation.” Mary Kaldor later described the END Appeal and the pamphlet Protest and Survive as “inspirational documents.” James Hinton, an early END activist and a leading figure in CND, wrote that Protest and Survive “served to unlock the imagination of at least one inert activist (myself).”21 In a 1982 survey of END supporters, in response to the question about how they had become interested in END, 14 percent mentioned newspaper articles and 15 percent books, in both categories often those by E. P. Thompson; 32 percent mentioned Thompson specifically.22 Thompson’s arguments (and those of other END campaigners) were diffused through already existing media and media organizations: news- papers, magazines, and publishing houses, both mainstream and on the left. But END was also able – despite having slender resources – to create its own media. These included its magazines, first the END Bulletin (1980–83), then the END Journal (1982–89); pamphlets, which focused on such subjects as independent peace groups in the GDR, Hungary, and the Soviet Union, as well as on the dialogue between Western peace groups and the human rights group Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, and the peace debate in France; and books – on, among other topics, “Star Wars” (the popular name for the Strategic Defense Initiative), the US raids on Libya, and the Chernobyl disaster and its aftermath.23 Through these publica- tions END diffused around the British peace movement (and to English readers elsewhere) information about and analyses of many issues, includ- ing other Western European movements, Western European politics, and opposition groups in Central Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. END tried to influence opposition political parties and trade unions to take up its cause. The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, for example, helped to lobby successfully for the Labour Party to adopt at its 1980 conference a resolution that pledged “support for the European Nuclear Disarmament Campaign” and called on “the next Labour Government to take the necessary initiatives for the establishment of a European nuclear free zone”;24 and in 1987 END submitted a detailed contribution to the Labour Party’s policy review process.25 But, above all, END was active in the peace movement. As a separate organization, it was a pressure group
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on CND. Its supporters were also a (small) current within the broader British peace movement: peace groups that explicitly promoted the END idea included, in Oxford, Campaign Atom, in the West Midlands, Leamington END, and, in Yorkshire, West Yorkshire END;26 and some CND groups had END supporters in them (most END supporters were also members of CND).27 And it was also an active presence at the top of CND – some activists participated simultaneously in the leaderships of both organizations: Edward Thompson, Dan Smith, Meg Beresford, among others. Because END was closely intertwined with CND, END supporters could make use of CND’s central bureaucratic and decision- making apparatus, its publications, and its huge national network of local and regional groups to promote an “internationalist” perspective.28 Did END influence CND? To an extent, yes. END supporters orga- nized, with local peace/CND groups, successful events with a strong European character – for example, the Easter 1981 Trans-Pennine March that fed into an international demonstration in Brussels; and international speaker-tours in 1983 (“Five Nations”) and 1984 (“Beyond the Blocs”).29 END activists helped inform the “active internationalism” of the anti-cruise missiles campaign in 1980–83, in which CND worked together with peace movements in other Western European countries;30 helped push, with some success, for opposition to Soviet nuclear weapons to be more explicit in CND’s work; and promoted contacts between CND and independent activists in the Soviet bloc. END supporters in the CND leadership were among those who prevented CND from making British withdrawal from NATO a campaign priority; helped ensure that CND joined, and remained in, the Western European peace movement’s two main nonaligned fora, the International Peace Coordination and Communication Centre (IPCC) and the END Convention/Liaison Committee (see below); and were an important counterweight to members of the important CND International Committee, and to others elsewhere at the top of CND, who were strongly anti-American, or pro-Soviet, or just skeptical about working with independent activists in the East.31 One could thus argue that END’s being intertwined with CND, combined with British END’s work as a distinct organization, helped push CND in an END-ish direction. Yet there were limits to END’s influence on CND. After the “defeat” of the anti-cruise missile campaign in1983/84, CND chose as its new focus the “Basic Case” campaign, the point of which was to argue for British unilateral nuclear disarmament. This campaign, a historian of the British peace movement has argued, “failed to connect effectively with those
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changes in the international context which increasingly appeared to be making an anachronism precisely of unilateralism.”32 Moreover, though CND supported the “peace rights” of Eastern (and other) campaigners, it could not be persuaded of the relevance of close cooperation with Soviet bloc activists –“détente from below”–for CND’s core program. By contrast, it invested considerable effort in its relations with Soviet bloc officials.33 Why was END’s influence limited? To begin with, it was difficult – in a system of nation-states, in which political decisions are, or appear to be, taken by individual states – for END to persuade CND activists to think of themselves as part of a transnational entity. Nor did END have the resources with which to make a big impact on CND. But the ideological differences between CND and END were crucial, too. END and CND agreed on the need to stop deployment of US cruise missiles in Britain (and elsewhere), and many ENDers would probably have shared the dominant CND view that the United States was more responsible for the nuclear arms race than the Soviet Union.34 But there were deep disagree- ments between many CND supporters and END activists about the role of the Soviet Union in the Cold War. And the END argument that a “transcontinental movement”–necessarily composed in part of inde- pendent, even “dissident,” forces in the East – would have to emerge if the arms race and the Cold War were to be opposed successfully: this made almost no headway in CND.
Into Western Europe From the beginning, END activists communicated, and traveled abroad to meet and work, with like-minded campaigners in Western Europe and North America. The END founders circulated their appeal widely: it attracted many thousands of signatures in Western Europe, as well as a handful in the East, including those of the former Hungarian prime minister András Hegedüs and the Soviet dissident Roy Medvedev. The END Appeal was disseminated along channels established by the Russell Foundation’s earlier work. Ken Coates wrote later that, as a result of his “skirting around the question of a European peace move- ment” in the 1970s, he had a “small network of well-placed Europeans who could pick up on the END Appeal as soon as we were ready to circulate it.”35 Many of these contacts were in Social Democratic, Labour, and “Euro-Communist” parties, as well as in trades unions. The signatories of the END Appeal ranged from Italian and Spanish
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Eurocommunists and Portuguese, Belgian, Dutch, and Greek Socialists and Social Democrats (including the later Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou) to peace researchers (among them Johan Galtung), writers, artists, and filmmakers (Joseph Beuys, Joan Miró, Costa-Gavras, among others), trade unionists, exiled Soviet bloc “dissidents” (such as Artur London and Rudolf Bahro), academics, theologians, and a host of “ordinary” citizens.36 Some small groups emerged whose work was based on the END Appeal: in West Berlin, for example, the Arbeitskreis Atomwaffenfreies Europa; in West Germany, the END Group in Bremen; and in Austria, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Unabhängiger Friedensinitiativen (ARGE-UFI).37 Edward Thompson’s works, too, were published abroad: “Notes on Exterminism” and the debate it prompted, for example, appeared in West Berlin in 1983 as Exterminismus – Das Ende der Zivilisation?38 END and other peace organizations with a similar outlook came to form a network of “like-minded” groups within the broader peace movement. Some of these, like END, were small: ARGE-UFI, founded in 1982; in France, CODENE, also established in 1982; in West Berlin, the East-West Dialogue Initiative, founded in 1983. By contrast, in the Netherlands, the Inter-Church Peace Council (IKV) was the Dutch equiva- lent of CND. These groups met in bilateral encounters; but arguably the most significant meetings took place in two multilateral fora. The IPCC – founded in Copenhagen on September 5–6, 1981, at a conference of nonaligned peace groups and coordinated out of IKV’s offices in The Hague – were small, usually three-monthly, conferences that took place in different European cities, at which these groups discussed tactics, formulated strategies, and coordinated actions. The secret of the IPCC’s success lay above all in the fact that it limited its membership to peace groups – political parties and trades unions were not members; and that its members, all “internationalist” and “nonaligned,” broadly agreed on the importance of dialogue with independent groups in the East as part of a peace campaign. The IPCC was spared the controversies of the END Convention process (see below). It remained in IKV’s offices until 1989, after which it moved to Brussels.39 But “European Nuclear Disarmament” was the name not just of a small, energetic, British peace group. It was another phenomenon, too: the END Conventions and the international body that helped plan them, the END Convention Liaison Committee (together these were often referred to as the “END Convention process”). END Conventions, most of whose participants were supporters of the END Appeal, were the main
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nonaligned multilateral peace movement fora and the most visible pan- European manifestations of the END “idea.” Organized every year from 1982 to 1992, all but twice in different countries, they attracted between seven hundred and three thousand participants.40 The END Convention was a new phenomenon, outside existing organizational frameworks.41 A leading CND and END activist wrote in early 1982 that, up to that point, either peace campaigners from different European countries had met at large demonstrations, where no “serious discussions, sharing of experience, [or] forward planning” were possible; or “small numbers of leaders” had gathered “in more or less successful joint consultation”: the pre- and early IPCC meetings in Frankfurt in March 1981; Copenhagen, September 1981; and Antwerp, December 1981. “The essential novelty of the Convention,” he wrote, “is that it is designed to enable a significant number of peace movement activists to engage in detailed and purposeful discussions with one another.”42 From 1982 until 1990, the END Conventions (and the Liaison Committee) played a key role in creating and sustaining the networks that constituted the transnational peace movement, linking national movements in Europe with each other and these movements with their counterparts in North America, Asia, and the Pacific region. They also played an important role in the Western peace movement’s relations with independent groups in the Soviet bloc.43 The END Conventions were not policymaking or resolution-passing bodies but “forum[s] for discussion,” in which activists in peace groups, political parties, trade unions, and other organizations that broadly supported the aims of the END Appeal could address – in workshops, plenaries, and a host of informal meetings – a wide range of issues related to the Western peace movement’s campaign. The spectrum of groups and organizations represented on the Liaison Committee give an indication of the importance of the “Convention process.” In late 1983, for example, the committee’s membership included, among many others, from Belgium, the two leading peace groups VAKA (Flemish Action Committee against Nuclear Weapons) and CNAPD (National Action Committee for Peace and Development); from Britain, CND and END; the Netherlands, IKV, Stop the Neutron Bomb, and the leading opposition party, the Labour Party; Denmark, No to Nuclear Weapons; Italy, the Communist Party as well as a cluster of peace groups and smaller left-wing parties; West Germany, Women for Peace, the Greens, myriad peace groups, and the BBU (National Association of Citizens’ Initiatives for Environmental Protection); Sweden, the Labour Movement Peace Forum
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and the one-hundred-year-old SPAS (Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society).44 The huge number of themes and workshops at each END Convention produced the (not always complimentary) description of the conventions as “bazaars.” The conventions did not just happen. In their origins they were the achievement of END co-founder Ken Coates and his colleagues at the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. From early 1980, Coates was moot- ing the idea of a “European conference” to fellow ENDers in Britain;45 and taking the idea to contacts and comrades in Western Europe. The circulation of the END Appeal was a key part of this process.46 Out of this work came an initial international meeting in Rome in November 1981, to which signatories of the END Appeal were invited. Then came the international END Liaison Committee, which met for the first time in December 1981 and whose function it became to co-organize the conventions, followed by the first END Convention, held in Brussels in July 1982, timed thus so as to coincide with the second United Nations Special Session on Disarmament. Ken Coates (and his Russell Foundation colleagues) had actively dis- seminated an idea. With the Rome meeting the idea took form: a new, or second, END came into being – the END Conventions and the Liaison Committee, which would now be run and sustained by a range of Western European groups. British END and the END Convention/Liaison Committee had a common origin and political framework – the END Appeal – but they were distinct entities. British END was only one group among many on the Committee and at the Conventions.47 Together, all these groups formed what one might call an END “current” in the Western peace movement, if “END” here is simply shorthand for “nonaligned and internationalist.” As a “space” where representatives of many strands of the Western European peace movement could meet and debate the “Western” aims of the movement, the END Convention process was a success. But as a forum in which these strands could find a common view not just on Western but also on East-West matters, less so, as we shall see.
East-West Dialogue END supporters were, with others, trying to bring together in a transnational movement peace groups, political parties, trades unions, churches, and other campaigners. In the West, this was a difficult and time-consuming task. Across the East-West divide, this work, sometimes
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referred to as the “East-West dialogue,”48 was much more delicate and complex – unsurprisingly, as it entailed dialogue and cooperation with independent groups whose worldviews were shaped by a quite different social system; and relations with often suspicious, sometimes hostile, regimes. For British END supporters, this East-West dialogue had to start almost from scratch: in 1980, END had very few contacts in the Soviet bloc. The dialogue really took off in November 1981 when, in response to approaches from Western peace groups, the Czechoslovak human rights group, Charter 77, published its first document about Western peace campaigning: “Statement on West European Peace Movements.”49 From this point on, END and other Western peace groups intensified their exchanges with already active “dissidents,” above all with Charter 77, but also with individual oppositionists (who included, in Hungary, Miklós Haraszti, György Konrád and János Kis; in Poland, Jacek Kuroń and Janusz Onyskiewicz; and, from 1988, in Slovenia, Tomaž Mastnak). Some END texts circulated in the Soviet bloc: the END Appeal, as we have seen, but also some of Edward Thompson’s writings: “Notes on Exterminism,” for example, which influenced East German activists; and Beyond the Cold War, which appeared in Hungarian samizdat in 1982.50 Another strand of the East-West dialogue began in 1982, when new independent peace groups and “movements” emerged (in part inspired by the Western movements): in the Soviet Union, the Moscow Trust Group; in Hungary, the Peace Group for Dialogue; in the GDR, Women for Peace and the Swords into Ploughshares protests. For END and other Western peace groups, these above all made a “transcontinental move- ment” seem more possible. By 1984, however, these groups and protests had, under pressure from their respective regimes, dissipated (Swords into Ploughshares), broken up (the Peace Group for Dialogue), or simply remained small (the Moscow Trust Group). Nevertheless, END – and other Western peace groups – continued to visit both “dissidents” and independent peace activists in the Soviet Union, the GDR, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Slovenia, and to exchange letters and statements, usually taken to and from the East by courier. After 1985, when it was founded, until 1989, the Polish group Freedom and Peace provided an important focus for END and other Western peace groups. Many of the Eastern bloc participants in this dialogue – from Bärbel Bohley in the GDR and Jiř í Dienstbier in Czechoslovakia, to, in Hungary, the law students who in 1988 formed the political party FIDESZ – went on to play important roles in the revolutions of 1989.
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British END – through its specialist, country-specific working groups and its publications (see above) – became a peace movement center of expertise on independent activism in Central Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union: it was one of the channels along which both Western peace- movement ideas diffused to the East and the ideas and experiences of Eastern groups diffused westward. The fact that Western groups were working with independent activists in the East helped strengthen the nonaligned character of the Western peace movement. Most of the Western participants in “détente from below” were not the large, mainstream, movement organizations: in this sense, the aim of creating a “transcontinental movement” was not rea- lized. But they were linked to, and could thus disseminate the content of the East-West dialogue in, the mainstream movement – either, as in the case of END, because they were intertwined with the dominant peace organization of their country (CND); or because they actually were this dominant organization (for example, IKV in the Netherlands); and/or because they were integrated into key transnational Western European peace movement networks such as the IPCC and the END Convention process. For the Western peace movement as a whole – as for British CND – the dialogue with independent activists was not a key central strategic aim. When it did surface, it could be hugely controversial. No more obviously, perhaps, than in the END Convention process, where arguments about the peace movement’s Ostpolitik loomed large, sometimes dominating proceedings, and helped drive a wedge between different groupings.51 From 1983 onward the conventions and the Liaison Committee were increasingly riven by disagreements about the movement’s relationship with the East. The nonaligned and internationalist (END) “current” had two “streams”: those (mainly peace groups) who prioritized relations with independent activists in the East with the aim of creating an alliance of independent citizens’ initiatives in East and West and who increasingly emphasized the aim of ending the Cold War and creating a Europe “beyond the blocs” (these were the participants in the East-West dialogue);52 and those – mainly political party and trade union activists – who tended to promote contacts with official bodies in the East, were skeptical about the value of “détente from below,” and emphasized more the creation of a European nuclear weapons–free zone. By 1987 British END activists could write that there was a “fundamental divergence of peace movement perspectives” between these “two very differently moti- vated tendencies” on the Liaison Committee53; and that “the Liaison
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Committee is unable to reach a united position on East-West questions.”54 In 1984 some members of the Convention Liaison Committee, disap- pointed by the Committee’s weak support (in their view) for East-West dialogue “from below,” created a new vehicle for East-West exchanges, the European Network for East-West Dialogue.55 The Network ignored relations with “officials” in order to concentrate on the relationship with “independents.” (British END – in a reflection of internal disagree- ments about the peace movement’s Ostpolitik – did not formally join the Network; but, with “observer status,” was a de facto member.) The debates about the movement’s East-West relations continued in the Convention process; yet the Network, though on the margins of the peace movement, became an increasingly central player in the East-West exchanges. In the East, too, there could be strong disagreements within groups about the purpose, and indeed the value, of the East-West dialogue. For some of those who engaged in the dialogue – doubtless holding views held by others not involved in it – the movement did not understand fully (or at all) the threat that the Soviet Union posed; and the movement’s policies threatened to weaken the West in its struggle with Moscow. Charter 77, for example, wrote a letter to END in May 1984 that distin- guished sharply between the values and concerns of Charter 77 and the Western peace movement: “at least some of us,” the three elected spokespeople wrote, “would sooner take the risk (however great) of a firm stand [against the Soviet Union], to the inevitably unhappy consequences of appeasement.”56 A few weeks later, however, a new letter to END expressed a more positive stance: “We consider the emergence of the independent peace movement in the West to be a major watershed for our strivings to obtain freer and more democratic conditions in our part of Europe.”57 The first document, it has been suggested, reflected the views above all of one spokesperson, Václav Benda, who was very critical of the Western peace movement; the second statement a consensus within Charter 77.58 Yet this “reticence” toward the Western peace movement reflected in the May 1984 letter surfaced also in statements by other groups and individuals. Already in 1980, for example, the pseudonymous Czechoslovak oppositionist Václav Racek, writing to Edward Thompson, accused the peace movement of being “a very influential force which works unconsciously in the interest of a totalitarian system whose aim is world domination based on the liquidation of human rights”; while, in 1984, Polish KOS, replying to a letter from British END, wrote that “[w]e
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cannot accept your thesis that “guilt falls squarely on both parties, i.e., the USSR and the West...[T]he alternative is not one of either tyranny or freedom on both sides of the Iron Curtain, but one of either containment or expansion of tyranny from the East into the West.” Even among sympathetic interlocutors, there remained some basic disagreement with mainstream Western peace movement aims: most Soviet bloc activists, for example, had little time for unilateral nuclear disarmament.59 Yet despite the controversies, tensions, and disagreements, the East- West dialogue can mark some achievements. First, an East-West network of independent peace and human rights groups and individuals committed to dialogue and cooperation did emerge. In Poland, for example, the (sometimes testy) exchanges with KOS and individual dissidents gave way, from 1985, to sustained collaboration with Freedom and Peace (WiP). If, as one British campaigner recalled, for WiP the “anti-nuclear [weapons] agenda was always secondary,”60 WiP’s campaigning focus (alternative military service and conscripts’ right to refuse to take the military oath) and style (a practical, “small-steps,” and sometimes spon- taneous, action-oriented approach, and a relative indifference to grand theoretical statements) made for common ground between WiP and Western peace activists. In Czechoslovakia, the “suspicion and near hostility with which the first approaches of British peace campaigners were greeted” at the begin- ning of the decade were replaced, during 1981/82, by substantive exchanges between Charter 77 and Western peace groups.61 At the heart of these exchanges, arguably, was the meaning of peace. The END Appeal (and other END writings) had already stated the link between international peace and internal democracy; Charter 77 offered the stron- ger “indivisibility of peace”: the idea that there can be no peace between states if there is none within states, that is, if there is no justice and respect for human rights.62 One expression of a developing consensus among activists on a range of issues was “Giving Real Life to the Helsinki Accords,” adocument written in 1985/86 by independent activists in East and West. Submitted to the 1986 CSCE Conference in Vienna, the “Helsinki Memorandum” contained proposals – on issues ranging from European security to economic, ecological, and cultural cooperation – for overcoming the division of Europe within the framework the 1975 Helsinki Final Act. The “indivisible” nature of peace ran through the memorandum, and a key component of the document was the role of “détente from below,”–“citizens’ détente.”63
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Shortly after this – in even more public demonstrations of a basic con- sensus and commitment to dialogue – independent public seminars on détente, disarmament, and human rights in Warsaw and Budapest (1987) and in Prague (1988) brought together activists from Western Europe, the United States, the host state, and even some from other Central Eastern European countries.64 END co-founder Mary Kaldor has referred to a “growing consensus” that emerged out of the East-West dialogue thus: “democracy in Eastern Europe was the best strategy for ending the Cold War but, at the same time, democracy could best be achieved within the framework of a détente process and a wind down of the arms race.”65 The East-West dialogue was also, arguably, important for the “space” it helped create for Eastern activists. Proceeding alongside the dialogue were relations with official (regime) bodies in the East: British END, for example, maintained bilateral contacts with “peace committees” in Hungary, the Soviet Union, and the GDR, and it had dealings with these and other committees in multilateral fora such as the END Convention. (The pursuit of these relations reflected the position that it was the busi- ness of peace movements to try to influence governments and regimes directly; and, for some END activists, the broader view that talking to “officials,” like the dialogue with independent activists, was part of a larger strategy: challenging the Cold War at all levels by “building bridges” to and “breaking down enemy images” of the East.66) Western peace groups – END, IKV, and others – one prominent Hungarian “dis- sident” argued, created such a “space” for the Peace Group for Dialogue in 1982/83: the Hungarian Peace Council tolerated the group so that the Peace Council “could gain increased recognition from the West” and could “demand from the West full recognition of the sovereignty of the Hungarian authorities.”67 END and other Western groups also organized support campaigns for persecuted activists: these included, in Czechoslovakia, for the Charter 77 signatory Ladislav Lis, the leaders of the Jazz Section, and activists in the Independent Peace Association; in Poland, leading Freedom and Peace activists Piotr Niemczyk and Jacek Czaputowicz; and in the Soviet Union, members of the Moscow Trust Group.68 Some commentators have argued that the relationship with “officials” in the East also contributed – in the words of END founder Mary Kaldor – “to the non-violent nature of the 1989 revolutions” and helped “influence the ‘new thinking’ of the Gorbachev regime.”69 In the view of Tair Tairov, a leading member of the Soviet Peace Committee, “the fact that the most radical changes [in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev] were in foreign
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policy and unilateral reductions in armaments has to be explained in terms of the influence of Western peace movements, especially the principles and spirit elaborated in the END Appeal.” The political commentator Alexei Pankin put it more simply: “Many New Thinking ideas relating to nuclear disarmament and security were coming from the West. A large part of the new thinking is simply borrowed from books and articles by Edward Thompson, Mary Kaldor, George Kennan, etc.”70 In some respects, the work of the peace/human rights network that conducted the East-West dialogue was like that of another transna- tional Cold War–era phenomenon: the “Helsinki network,” for whose role in undermining the Soviet regime and ending the Cold War Sarah Snyder has made a strong case.71 Activists in the peace/human rights network were disseminating information in both directions both as part of the dialogue and in order to influence “bystanders” and authorities (what Snyder, after Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, calls “infor- mation politics”72), and using symbols to highlight not only the impor- tance of the East-West dialogue but also the obstacles in its way. At the 1984 END Convention, for example, a small group of Western activists interrupted the opening plenary to stand in silence on the stage, facing the packed auditorium, with red cloths covering their mouths to sym- bolize the absence of Soviet bloc activists who had been denied visas by their governments (“symbolic politics”).73 These activists also brought prominent people into the dialogue as a way of promoting the cause: for example, British END included the well-known British novelist Ian McEwan in an END delegation to the Soviet Union in 1987,and Hungarian peace activists held a meeting with Edward Thompson in the flat of the prominent, and thus somewhat protected, novelist György Konrád in 1982 (“leverage politics”).74 Furthermore, the acti- vists tried to hold Soviet bloc regimes to their public (and foundational) commitments to “peace”–witness the Greenham Common activist Ann Pettitt and others bringing Olga Medvedkova, a member of the independent Moscow Trust Group, to a meeting with the Soviet Peace Committee in 1983,onthegroundsthatshe,asapeaceactivist,had arighttobetheretoo(“accountability politics”).75 Yet there were also significant differences between these networks. For the “Helsinki network” consisted not just of Soviet bloc activists and Western NGOs but also of a dedicated US Congressional Commission, and, indeed, of successive US governments – and it had behind it the full force of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act and the Helsinki follow-up conferences (the Helsinki “process”). The peace/human rights network,
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by contrast, was an entirely “civil society affair” (and, therefore, in institutional terms, weaker). There was another, crucial, difference between the two networks. The participants in the Helsinki network shared the same goals from the outset: the defense and promotion of the human rights of Soviet bloc citizens. Eastern and Western activists in the peace/human rights network, by contrast, had first to establish common ground. This was, after all, a dialogue.
Conclusion Lawrence Wittner, in his magisterial history of nuclear disarmament move- ments, describes END as having “provided the conceptual glue, the mass base, and the central rallying point for Europe’s popular antinuclear campaign.”76 It is, perhaps, more accurate to say that END was, first, a small British peace group that punched well above its weight. At home, it was unable to involve its much larger sister organization, CND, closely in “détente from below”; but it did help keep CND nonaligned. END also produced the END Appeal, which became an important basis for nonaligned and internationalist peace campaigning throughout Western Europe and beyond: a “charter of the non-aligned Western peace movements.”77 Using the Appeal, END activists initiated the END Convention process, the most important nonaligned forum of the West European peace movements – and one that helped bind the West European movements together. Once begun, the END Convention process became the work of many hands. END also played an important role in the “dialogue” with independent activists in Central Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union – again, alongside other Western groups – a relationship that, among other things, arguably helped enlarge the political “space” avail- able to Soviet bloc activists. Finally one might argue that – to the extent that these East Central European activists played a role in the 1989 revolutions – END and other Western peace groups involved in the East- West dialogue made their own, small, contribution to creating the condi- tions for the revolutions’ success – and thus to ending the Cold War.
Notes
The author would like to thank the editors, Martin Klimke, Eckart Conze and Jeremy Varon; Barbara Einhorn; and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
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1. For more detailed accounts of the 1980s Western European peace move- ments, see April Carter, Peace Movements: International Protest and World Politics since 1945 (London, New York, 1992), 108–57; Lawrence S. Wittner, Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present, vol. 3 of The Struggle against the Bomb (Stanford, 2003). On the Dual-Track Decision and the politics of nuclear arms control under the Reagan administration, see Strobe Talbott, Deadly Gambits (New York, 1984). 2. For example, Rebecca Kolins Givan, Kenneth M. Roberts, and Sarah A. Soule, eds., The Diffusion of Social Movements: Actors, Mechanisms and Political Effects (Cambridge, 2010); Sidney Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism (Cambridge, 2005), chapter 6. 3. E. P. Thompson, “Thinking about the New Movement,” END Bulletin 1 (Jul. 1980): 13. 4. A full account of the myriad transnational diffusion process of the 1980s – within the West and between East and West – that involved peace activists has yet to be written. For a history of the transnational human rights network in the Cold War, see Sarah Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War (Cambridge, 2011). 5. James Hinton, Protests and Visions: Peace Politics in 20th Century Britain (London, 1989), ix. 6. E. P. Thompson, “Ends and Histories,” in Mary Kaldor, ed., Europe from below: An East–West Dialogue (London, New York, 1991), 21. 7. Ibid. Milestones include May Day Manifesto1968, ed., Raymond Williams (Harmondsworth, 1968); “An Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski,” in E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London, 1978); and “The Soviet Union: Détente and Dissent,” in E. P. Thompson, The Heavy Dancers (London, 1985). 8. Dorothy Thompson, “On the Trail of the New Left,” New Left Review 215 (Jan./Feb. 1996): 95; on the IWC, see Geoffrey Foote, The Labour Party’s Political Thought: A History, 2nd ed. (London, 1986), 309–13. 9. On “movement midwives,” see Christian Smith, Resisting Reagan: The U.S. Central America Peace Movement (Chicago, 1996), 109–12. 10.EdwardThompson,“Resurgence in Europe, and the role of END,” in John Minnion and Philip Bolsover, eds., The CND Story (London, 1983), 81–82. 11. Thompson, “Ends and Histories,” 7. 12. “Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament,” 223–25. 13. “Notes on Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization,” in E. P. Thompson et al., Exterminism and Cold War (London, 1982), 29. 14. “Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament,” 224–25. 15. Internal memo later published as E. P. Thompson, “Thinking about the New Movement.” Thompson does not here specify the nature of the alliance. END Bulletin 1 (July 1980): 13–15.
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16. Ibid., 14. 17. Dan Smith, interview with author, August 5, 2003. 18. Many local group members were also national members. For CND member- ship figures in 1979 and 1982, see Minnion and Bolsover, The CND Story, 150. For end-1984 figures, see “CND Conference 1984,” Sanity (Jan. 1985): 4. For local groups, see Minnion and Bolsover, The CND Story, 150. 19. On the educational characteristics of END, see Peter Nias, “END Supporters’ Survey Report,” Dec.18, 1982, END Archive, London School of Economics and Political Science. John Sandford, an END activist from 1980, and himself an academic, recalls that END, which had a “particularly strong constituency in academic and intellectual circles,” was “[v]ariously – and perhaps not entirely fairly – apostrophized as ‘Egghead CND’ and ‘PhD CND.’” See John Sandford, “Mutual (Mis-)Perceptions: The GDR and the British Peace Movement in the 1980s,” unpublished ms., 2001, p. 4. 20. Others included Mary Kaldor, Ken Coates, Dan Smith, and Lynne Jones. 21. Bruce Kent, Undiscovered Ends: An Autobiography (London, 1994), 174. Mary Kaldor, interview with author, Jun. 20, 2002; Hinton, Protests and Visions, 184. 22. Nias, “END Supporters’ Survey Report.” 23. Jean Stead and Danielle Grünberg, Moscow Independent Peace Group (London, 1982); Ferenc Köszegi and E. P. Thompson, The New Hungarian Peace Movement (London, n.d [1982]); John Sandford, The Sword and the Ploughshare: Autonomous Peace Initiatives in East Germany (London, 1983); Jan Kavan and Zdena Tomin, eds., Voices from Prague: Documents on Czechoslovakia and the Peace Movement (London, 1983); Jolyon Howorth, France: The Politics of Peace (London, 1984); E. P. Thompson, Mary Kaldor, et al., Mad Dogs: The U.S. Raids on Libya (London, 1986); Louis Mackay and Mark Thompson, eds., Something in the Wind: Politics after Chernobyl (London, 1988). 24. “Strong Backing for END from Labour Party,” END Bulletin 3 (1980): 24. 25. “Dealignment, Demilitarisation, Democratisation,” END Journal 34/35 (summer 1988): 19–22. 26. Patrick Burke, “European Nuclear Disarmament,” Ph.D. diss., University of Westminster, 2004, 77. 27. The 1982 END survey reveals that 74 percent of END supporters were “paid-up members of national CND”; 85 percent belonged to a local disar- mament group other than END (this was likely to have been affiliated to national CND); and 67 percent of END supporters said they would be members of END and CND if END became a national membership organiza- tion. Nias, “END Supporters’ Survey Report.” 28. Burke, “European Nuclear Disarmament,” 88–89; Paul Byrne, The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (London, New York, Sydney, 1988), 114.
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29.GrahamCarey,“Easter 1981,” END Bulletin 4 (Feb. 1981): 15.TonySimpson, “Brussels – Easter 1981,” END Bulletin 5 (summer 1981): 20–21; Stewart McPhun, “Five Nations,” END Journal 7 (Dec. 1983/Jan. 1984): 28; “Beyond the Blocs Speaking Tour,” END Journal 12 (Oct./Nov. 1984): 32. 30. The phrase is James Hinton’s: see Protests and Visions, 194. 31. Jane Mayes, the coordinator (“linkperson”) of CND’s International Committee from 1981 to 1989, has argued that, by being on the committee, END supporters not only “inspired CND to be more internationalist,” but also helped to keep it “OK”–they prevented CND from being “hijacked.” Janes Mayes, interview with author, Dec. 17, 2002. 32. Hinton, Protests and Visions, 194. 33. Burke, “European Nuclear Disarmament,” 100–117. 34. Hinton, Protests and Visions, 186. 35. Ken Coates, letter to author, Mar. 7, 2001. 36. Gerhard Jordan, “European Nuclear Disarmament. Der ‘END–Prozess’ und sein Beitrag zum Ost–West Dialog der unabhängigen Friedensbewegungen Europas in den 80-er Jahren,” MA diss., University of Vienna, 1997, 43–49. 37. Ibid., 91–15. 38. Ibid., 13. 39. Stephen Tunnicliffe, “Copenhagen Peace Conference, Copenhagen 5–6 September,” END Bulletin 7 (winter 1981/82): 17; Meg Beresford, “Activists’ Gathering, Antwerp,” END Bulletin 8 (spring 1982): 23; Jordan, “European Nuclear Disarmament,” 162–64; Wittner, Toward Nuclear Abolition, 233–34. 40. Brussels hosted the first and last conventions. Half of the 1990 convention took place in Tallinn, the other half in Helsinki; Moscow hosted the 1991 convention. 41. “Talking Peace: The Inside Story of the European Nuclear Disarmament Conventions,” agenor 97 (Jun./Jul. 1986): 2. 42. James Hinton, “European Convention: Thoughts Arising from Brussels Meeting 19/2/82,” Feb. 22, 1982. END Archive, London School of Economics and Political Science. 43. Burke, “European Nuclear Disarmament,” 124–37, 184–99. 44. Jordan, “European Nuclear Disarmament,” 50–52. 45. Letters dated Mar. 28, 1980, and Apr. 17, 1980, END Archive, London School of Economics and Political Science. 46. Ken Coates, Listening for Peace, END Papers Special 2 (Nottingham, n.d [1987]), 12–15; Ken Coates, European Nuclear Disarmament, Spokesman Pamphlet no. 72 (Nottingham, 1980); Jordan, “European Nuclear Disarmament,” 43–49. 47. The British group END was not referred to at the time as British END; I do so here in order to distinguish it from the END Convention and the END Convention Liaison Committee.
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48. Kaldor, Europe from Below; Mary Kaldor, Global Civil Society: An Answer to War (Cambridge, 2003), 63–71. 49. Kavan and Tomin, Voices from Prague, 22–23. 50. Köszegi and Thompson, The New Hungarian Peace Movement, 54. 51. For example, at the 3rd END Convention, held in 1984 in Perugia; and the 6th END Convention, which took place in Coventry. 52. Edward Thompson, “Beyond the Blocs,” End Journal 12 (Oct./Nov. 1984): 12–15; Mary Kaldor, “Beyond the Blocs: Defending Europe the Political Way,” World Policy Journal 1, no. 1 (1983), 1–21. 53. Pat Chilton, report on END Convention Liaison Committee meeting, Apr. 3–5, 1987 (END Archive, London School of Economics and Political Science). Pat Chilton was a member of British END. 54. Mary Kaldor, “From Gloom to Surprise,” END Journal 36 (Oct. 1988/Jan. 1989): 21. 55. Burke, “European Nuclear Disarmament,” 197–205; Patrick Burke, “A Transcontinental Movement of Citizens? Strategic Debates in the 1980s Western Peace Movement,” in Gerd-Rainer Horn and Padraic Kenney, eds., Transnational Moment of Change: Europe 1945, 1968, 1989 (Lanham, 2004), 189–206. 56. “Letter from Charter,” END Journal 11 (Aug./Sept. 1984): 28. 57. “Charter letter to END Convention,” END Journal 12 (Oct./Nov. 1984): 31–32. 58. Jaroslav Šabata, interview with author, Jul. 17, 1998. Šabata was one of the main drivers of Charter 77’s engagement with the Western peace movement. 59. Václav Havel, “An Anatomy of a Reticence,” in Jan Vladislav, ed., Václav Havel or Living in Truth (London, 1986), 164–95; Human Rights and Disarmament; “Letter from KOS,” END Journal 11 (Aug./Sept. 1984): 27. 60. Lynne Jones, “The Process of Engagement in Non-Violent Collective Action,” Ph.D. diss., University of Bath, 1995, p. 223. 61. Kavan and Tomin, Voices from Prague. 62. Ibid., 24. On the transformation of ideas in the course of transnational dialogue, see Kacper Szulecki, “Hijacked Ideas: Human Rights, Peace and Environmentalism in Polish and Czechoslovak Dissident Discourses,” East European Politics and Societies 25, no. 2 (May 2011): 272–95. 63. European Network for East-West Dialogue, Giving Real Life to the Helsinki Accords (Berlin, 1987). The Network launched the idea and coordinated the drafting of the “Helsinki Memorandum.” 64. For the role of the European Network for East-West Dialogue in the Warsaw seminar see Padraic Kenney, Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton, Oxford, 2002), 115. The Network also helped organize the Budapest seminar: “Hungarian Meeting a Success,” END Journal 31 (Dec. 1987/Jan. 1988): 8.
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65. Mary Kaldor, Bringing Peace and Human Rights Together, The Ideas of 1989, lecture series (London, 2000), 7. The historian Padraic Kenney has a different take: the Eastern and Western activists were indeed “united in the struggle for peace and human rights,” but only in “the heat of the moment.” For most activists in Central Eastern Europe, the dialogue was “a means to another end: a free, safe, and democratic future in their own countries” (Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution, 119–20). This echoes the sentiment of a former Hungarian “dissident,” István Rév, at a seminar in Amsterdam in June/July 1990 that discussed possible future collaboration between “civil society” activists in the East and West. To Western participants who insisted that the dialogue and cooperation of the 1980s could continue, Rév replied that the former activists in the East (“[your] old friends”) “have gone into parliament” where “a game whose logic seems inherently different from the logic of the civil movements” is played. Today, he finished, “you will be invited to tea!” See Patrick Burke, Mark Thompson, and Hilary Wainwright, eds., After the Wall: Democracy and Movement Politics in the New Europe (Amsterdam, 1991), 128–29. 66. One section of British END, the Churches Lateral Committee, under the stewardship of Stephen Tunnicliffe, developed close ties with unofficial but “approved” or “tolerated” institutions, the Hungarian Reformed Church and the Christian Peace Conference; together, they organized, in Budapest in 1984 and 1987, two international seminars on the “Theology of Peace.” 67. Miklós Haraszti, “Dialogue: Two Years of Hungary’s Independent Peace Movement,” Across Frontiers 1, nos. 3/4 (winter/spring 1985): 5. 68. Jan Kavan, “Lis Appeal,” END Journal 6 (Oct./Nov. 1983): 4; “Jazz Section Suppressed,” END Journal 25 (Dec. 1986/Jan. 1987): 3–4; “Jazz Section Latest,” END Journal 27 (May/Jun. 1987): 4; Pat Hunt, “Cracks in the Ice,” END Journal 37 (1989): 23; END Czechoslovakia Petition [untitled], END Journal 37 (1989): 24–25; “Polish Peaceniks Held,” END Journal 21 (Apr./May 1986): 3; “Independent Soviet Group: ‘Our aim is to build trust,’” END Journal 2 (Feb./Mar. 1983): 9, 30. 69. Kaldor, Global Civil Society, 69. 70. Tair Tairov, “From New Thinking to a Civic Peace,” in Mary Kaldor, Europe from below; Alexei Pankin, Soviet New Thinking, The Ideas of 1989, lecture series (London, 2000). 71. Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War. For a fascinating account of another transnational network during this period (one that brought Western academics to teach in the “underground univer- sity” in Czechoslovakia between 1979 and 1989), see Barbara Day, The Velvet Philosophers (London, 1989). 72. Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War, 78–79; Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca/London, 1998), 16–25.
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73. Burke, “A Transcontinental Movement of Citizens?” 189–90. 74. “END in Moscow,” END Journal 28/29 (summer 1987): 9–10; Köszegi and Thompson, The New Hungarian Peace Movement, 6–7. 75. Ann Pettitt, “Sitting Down with Both the ‘Official’ and the ‘Unofficial,’” END Journal 5 (Aug./Sep. 1983): 11–13, and Walking to Greenham: How the Peace-Camp Began and the Cold War Ended (Aberystwyth, 2006), 229–55. Some Eastern activists, of course, were in both networks. Moreover, Western peace activists were sometimes doing exactly the same things as the Helsinki activists: standing up for the human rights of harassed Soviet bloc citizens. In February 1989, in Prague, the two networks intersected, when a representative of British END and many Helsinki activists attended the trials of Václav Havel and of independent peace activists – and signed a joint statement condemning the trials. See Hunt, “Cracks in the Ice.” 76. Wittner, Toward Nuclear Abolition, 234. 77. Thompson, “Ends and Histories,” 7.
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A Case of “Hollanditis” The Interchurch Peace Council in the Netherlands and the Christian Peace Movement in Western Europe
Sebastian Kalden
“May I infect you with a disease?” This curious proposal was presented to thousands of Londoners on postcards from peace activists in the Netherlands in January 1982.1 With their postcard campaign, these Dutch activists tried to capitalize on a label first applied to them by American historian Walter Laqueur. In August 1981, Laqueur had used the word “Hollanditis” when referring to the unique role peace activists in the Netherlands played in the European-wide demonstrations against the NATO Double-Track Decision of 1979 to deploy intermediate-range missiles.2 More specifically the term described how their exemplary efforts had a wide impact, spreading throughout the continent like an infectious disease. For Laqueur, the Dutch peace movement was an “anti-NATO move- ment” for unilateral neutralism in Europe.3 He emphasized that in the Netherlands “the most vocal support still comes from the churches,” a situation similar to the one in West Germany, where “one finds sections of the Protestant church giving fervent support to the movement, and expressions of sympathy in the media.”4 Along the same lines, the German weekly Der Spiegel suggested that other NATO states might follow the Dutch example.5 The peace movement in the Netherlands would in fact enjoy substantial popular support. Sixty-eight percent of the Dutch popu- lation rejected the deployment of nuclear missiles, because, as Der Spiegel explained, these “devout Dutch ... trust[ed] the peacemaking power of the churches.”6 Although the influential pillarization (verzuiling) of Dutch society was about to disappear, Christianity still exerted a powerful influ- ence in the Netherlands at the beginning of the 1980s.7 In contrast to the United Kingdom and West Germany, where the peace initiatives were
251
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mainly a direct response to the NATO Double-Track Decision, the Dutch government faced a long-standing, well-organized, and proactive peace movement at home. Exploring the transnational relations of the Interchurch Peace Council (Interkerkelijk Vredesberaad, IKV) in The Hague, this article examines how the Christian peace movement in the Netherlands sought to inspire and impact campaigns for peace and disarmament across Western Europe. Writing about the Christian peace movement means taking into account the context these organizations acted in as well as their Christian self-understanding and faith. Since clear political lines or affilia- tions were extremely blurry and permeable among Western European peace activists during the 1980s, many people held membership in a Christian peace group as well as in other associations. Some were not even registered members in these faith-based organizations, although they were involved in their peace work or donated regularly. In fact, the classification “Christian peace movement” is the result of the heteroge- neous nature and wide spectrum within the West German peace movement.8 The situation in the Netherlands, by contrast, was much clearer. One organization dominated the movement via its campaigns, speeches, and theoretical input: the Interchurch Peace Council, which was, by definition, a Christian peace movement. The IKV is a particularly good example of a social multiplier that expands the range of political actions outside the parliament or traditional political institutions. Its impact on Dutch society and domestic politics was such that the Netherlands even deferred the deployment decision until November 1, 1985, when the parliament finally decided on the deployment for 1988. Due to the 1987 INF Treaty and the elimination of intermediate-range missiles, the Netherlands, however, became the only country that never deployed the cruise missiles as part of NATO- Double-Track-Decision. A purely national perspective on the IKV’s work, however, would not do justice to the far-reaching peace efforts of this organization.9 The key toward understanding its success lies in analyzing its national as well as transnational impact, but not in terms of achieving world peace – a claim its political opponents repeatedly put forward to discredit the peace movement. Rather, the Interchurch Peace Council not only succeeded in changing the discourses that affected political decisions on the governmental and parliamentary level and in serving as a key role model for peace movements, both in terms of organization and campaign strategies, in other parts of Western Europe; it also made a substantial contribution to the institutionalization of peace and its dissemination in
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official church doctrine. The IKV must, therefore, be seen as an important transnational actor in the peace movement of the 1980s.
Establishing and Sustaining Transnational Relations On November 7, 1966, nine Dutch churches founded the Interchurch Peace Council in the Netherlands at the instigation of Pax Christi.10 The organization moved into the public limelight with its 1977 cam- paign “Help rid the world of nuclear weapons, let it begin in the Netherlands,” which became highly successful and politically influential in subsequent years.11 Because of this immediate political impact, the British historian Edward Thompson, author of the antinuclear pamphlet Protest and Survive (1980)andlaterakeyrepresentativeofthecam- paign for European Nuclear Disarmament (END), attributed great significance to the Dutch case. For him, it was because of the activism in the Netherlands that one could characterize the European peace movement “as a major force in political life,” given that “[t]he move- ment in Holland was the first to make this impact.” In Thompson’s view, among dozens of Dutch movements “the most influential are the Interchurch Peace Council (IKV) and ‘Stop The Neutron Bomb’.Both were well-established before 1979.”12 In 1978, a year before the NATO Double-Track Decision, the IKV had already launched a successful petition against the neutron bomb. Although the reasons why US President Jimmy Carter decided to drop previous plans for this new weapon vary,13 many Dutch peace activists felt they had scored an important victory. Furthermore, IKV’s efforts also put the organization on the radar of peace activists in other West European countries. Already in February 1979, for example, the organi- zers of the peace week May 10–20 in Bonn requested the participation of IKV’s representatives, because “[w]e would highly like to know more about the Dutch experiences of peace weeks and about your work; espe- cially because the protest strikes against the neutron bomb in the Netherlands impressed us greatly.”14 The IKV sent its chairman, Ben ter Veer, and distributed flyers and pamphlets translated into German. Shortly after the Bonn peace weeks, IKV General Secretary Mient Jan Faber wrote a letter to the NATO Ministers of Foreign Affairs before the council met at The Hague on May 30–31, 1979. Faber argued that the majority of the Dutch people wanted a nuclear-free armament and that modernizing nuclear weapons meant a new stage of confrontation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Furthermore, he accused the
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ministers of having made irreversible decisions and of not informing the public. In his view, even a majority in the Dutch parliament had doubts about the missile deployment.15 On June 19, 1979, Faber also wrote a pamphlet to German peace groups in which he pointed out that “the Dutch press has paid much attention to the letter” and that it was “tre- mendously important for us that some of our ideas get [circulated] abroad as well.”16 Faber thus actively relied on transnational communication for successful peace work. As will be seen, one of the main mechanisms the IKV used in the following years was to disseminate its ideas and influence through extensive European travels of its representatives and talks with like-minded organizations that asked for the input of their Dutch peers. These activities of the IKV both intheNetherlandsandabroadhad asignificant influence on activists in neighboring countries, especially in Belgium, the United Kingdom, and West Germany – all states where the Pershing II and the cruise missiles were to be deployed.17 Peace groups from West Germany, however, profited the most from the stream of ideas coming from the Netherlands. One of the best examples of this close collaboration across national borders was the Action for Reconciliation Peace Services (Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste, ASF). This organization originally sent West German volunteers abroad to perform peace work in countries that suffered from Germany’s actions during World War II. However, a debate about the renewed nuclear arms race did not take place in ASF, whose understanding of peace work comprised physical rebuilding efforts and/or facilitating intercultural exchange.18 Nonetheless, as we will see, IKV’sliaison with ASF and its active participation in Christian peace work in the Federal Republic at the beginning of the 1980swastopushthisdebate and corresponding campaigns within the German organization. Other Christian peace organizations were also involved in transna- tional outreach. The only peace association represented in all three coun- tries was Pax Christi, although it did not dominate the scene. By its very definition as a worldwide Catholic peace movement, it was already a transnational actor. Bruce Kent, for example, who played a major role in Britain’s peace movement during the 1980s, came to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) via Pax Christi, becoming its general secretary in 1980 when the formerly well-known peace organization had almost been forgotten by the British public. CND’s heyday was in the 1950s and first half of the 1960s, inventing the Easter marches at Aldermaston and popularizing its logo as the globally recognizable peace sign. Even though CND was not particularly influenced by the
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Christian faith, one of its sections, the Christian CND (CCND), contained a large part of its membership. Underscoring the significance of Christian beliefs for the British peace movement, CCND proclaimed in April 1983 that 23 percent of all CND members were practicing Christians.19 Although CND is often portrayed as synonymous with the peace move- ment in the United Kingdom, other groups also played an active role in the campaign. Instead of being a membership organization like CND, the European Nuclear Disarmament campaign was originally founded for the purpose of maintaining contact with the European peace movement outside the United Kingdom, and defined itself as a group of representa- tives who came from several European peace groups.20 Like the CND, END also had a Christian section; the so-called END Churches Lateral Committee (CLC). Stressing the impact of Christian peace organizations, CLC’s magazine Churches Register also took a transnational perspective: “peace movements are often church-originated or actively supported by church members and other Christians. In Holland the Inter-Church Peace Council (IKV) ...now plays a leading role in European nuclear disarma- ment in partnership with END and other organizations.”21 In this context CLC was primarily dedicated to facilitating transnational contacts by connecting people and groups of different nationalities and helping “to unify the Christian peace network throughout Europe.”22 Albeit to a varying degree, Christianity offered these groups a shared platform and channel of communication to coordinate their protest against nuclear missiles in Europe. As Christianity had originally been conceived of in transnational – or rather, universal – terms, many activists believed that this cosmopolitan element had been unduly weakened over time. For example, Kent expressed his frustration about the merely rhetorical phrase of a borderless Christian community in May 1979: “I remember once reading a splendid United Reformed Church report which coined the wonderful phrase ‘the transnational Body of Christ.’ But in practice that turns out to be the language of piety and preaching, far removed from the real world of frontiers, passports, armies and sacred sovereignty.”23 Facing the threat of a nuclear war in Europe, Christian peace groups were thus able to launch their protest referring to an inter- denominational common ground.
Impact of the IKV’s Peace Work The interest of foreign peace groups in the Netherlands increased after the Interchurch Peace Council had started its campaign “Help rid the world of
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nuclear weapons,” in 1977. The 1979 NATO Double-Track Decision accelerated this development and intensified IKV’s international work. The following years saw a comprehensive exchange between the Dutch campaign and its West German partners in particular, as well as British groups. In the Federal Republic, church institutions were actively involved in debates about peace and disarmament well before December 1979. IKV representatives Gied ten Berge and Willem van de Ven, for example, attended a conference held at the Protestant Academy (Evangelische Akademie) in Hofgeismar near Kassel on July 2–3, 1979. From the West German perspective, the Dutch campaign was considered extremely “successful.” Ten Berge and Van de Ven reported that “on the one hand our way of working was thereby strongly idealized, on the other hand ... it was pegged as ‘pragmatism.’”24 A similar first contact between Christian peace activists in the Netherlands and their West German counterparts was established via the Protestant parish of Recklinghausen. On May 26, 1979, Wilke Schram of the IKV accepted an invitation from the parish’s pastor, who had requested more information about IKV’s peace work. These talks between the parish’s working group on the “Testimonial of Peace from the Church” (Friedenszeugnis der Kirche) and the IKV ended with a declaration on disarmament and reconciliation.25 Transferring knowl- edge on peace activity and campaigning through travel to and correspon- dence with organizations abroad formed the pattern of IKV’s work in the early 1980s, which began to extend to more and more parts of Western Europe. In the West German case, the IKV had waited for a reaction from the established churches in the Federal Republic before increasing political pressure at home. On July 6–11, 1980, IKV’s repre- sentatives told Volkmar Deile, secretary of ASF and head of a delegation in the Netherlands, that “one of our greatest problems is the silence of the West German churches.”26 The work of ASF, inspired by IKV’s peace efforts, eventually broke this silence. As early as March 1978 IKV’s chairman, Ter Veer, explained at an event in Frankfurt how church members could work for disarmament via a basic organizing tool: “the most important task undertaken by the IKV is organizing the peace week in September every year.”27 Peace weeks served as a platform for a basic exchange of ideas, for the preparation of events designed to draw public attention, and for recruiting volunteers to be engaged in local peace campaigns. In retrospective, Ter Veer’s descrip- tion sounded like an instruction manual for the first nationwide peace week in the Federal Republic entitled “Create Peace without Arms”
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(Frieden schaffen ohne Waffen), organized by ASF in the fall of 1980.28 Inspired by the Dutch example, the vast majority of the West German Protestant churches strongly supported the next peace week in 1981 and the numbers of peace events rose to three thousand across the country.29 Without the IKV’s organizational know-how and experience, events like these would hardly have taken place in the Federal Republic.30 As a result of visits like Ter Veer’s, ASF even sent one of its volunteers to IKV’s international office in The Hague to serve as a direct and permanent connection to the Christian peace movement in the Federal Republic, thereby institutionalizing this Dutch-German cooperation.31 In addition to this organizational partnership, IKV and ASF established contacts between the four hundred Dutch IKV groups (kernen) and West German parishes by instituting twin parishes (Patenschaften). Peace organizations in other countries, particularly in the United Kingdom, were equally impressed by the Dutch example. After a trip to the Netherlands in July 1981, Stephen Tunnicliffe of END’s CLC pointed out both the strategic and organizational strength of the IKV when he confessed that his own organization had “much to learn from their methods and experience in Holland.”32 In his view, the IKV had a “greater emphasis on the centralised control of local campaigning, leading to less duplication and probably more effective exertion of influence by local groups.” Working on behalf of the Dutch churches provided the IKV with a certain authority, “especially in policy statements and in direct exchanges with people or organisations capable of influencing govern- ment policy.” Finally, it had, Tunnicliffe argued admiringly, “by consis- tent planning and far-sighted leadership, developed into a nationwide organization.”33 In a similar way and under the headline “Learning from the Dutch,” Barbara Eggleston, national organizer of Christian CND, characterized the IKV in an October 1983 article as having “a good network of local, community based ‘peace’ groups which for several years had been con- cerned with issues of justice and development.”34 In the British context, therefore, the reports and draft papers of Christian peace groups often featured expressions such as “expansion needed on Dutch scale e.g. IKV,”35 or “look at IKV techniques.”36 Representatives from the Netherlands were in high demand as speakers for conferences or similar events.37 Nonetheless, the contacts that existed between the IKV and British groups were still sparse in the period from 1977 to 1981. Schram from the IKV, for example, only left for England in spring 1980. A Dutch Quaker peace group initiated the contact that allowed him to participate
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in a Quaker conference in Swanwich and share his experience with peace activity in the Netherlands.38 On September 21, 1981, Christian CND organized a conference on peace and disarmament under the title “Profess and Survive” at Coventry Cathedral, which was also attended by repre- sentatives of the IKV and the ASF; this conference was, in fact, the first rally held by the Christian peace movement in the United Kingdom, a stark contrast to developments in the Netherlands and the Federal Republic at that point. The announcement for the event once more illu- strated the Dutch influence:
We have the example of the work the Dutch Churches have done on disarmament. Through their national peace weeks and local groups’ activities, they have not only gained vast public support but also influenced government policies. ...[W]e can work towards Peace and Disarmament – not only in Britain, but throughout the world.39 In his speech at the conference, Kent underlined the need of waking the still “sleeping giant” of the Christian peace movement in Britain, con- trasting the situation in his country with the active peace work that was already in place in the Netherlands.40 Compared to those in the United Kingdom, Christian groups in the Netherlands and in West Germany (notably ASF) thus had a perceptible impact on the entire peace movement by stimulating a social discourse on disarmament and security. The Dutch press even described IKV’s charismatic general secretary, Mient Jan Faber, for example, as the “Machiavelli of peace,” hinting at the significant role of the IKV in Dutch society and in the international peace movement.41
Coordination within the Peace Movement The massive demonstration at the Hofgarten in Bonn on October 10, 1981, marked a climax of the Western European peace movement and was one of the most impressive examples of transnational coordination among peace activists.42 The idea for the so-called “international demon- stration” in Bonn emerged from the close collaboration between IKV and ASF, which was officially intensified with the joint statement of Groningen from April 23, 1981, entitled “Common Resistance to the Common Threat.”43 As a result of this statement, the Dutch press named the ASF a zusterorganisatie (sister organization) of the Interchurch Peace Council.44 In June 1981, the planning process for this event took a concrete form at the German Evangelical Church Congress (Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchentag) in Hamburg. Representatives of West German
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and Dutch peace groups – Christians as well as non-Christians – met to discuss the rally on October 10, 1981.45 The ASF and the Action Committee Service for Peace (Aktionsgemeinschaft Dienst für den Frieden, AGDF) took on the practical organization of the rally with the aim to present “the European character of the NATO dual-track decision, the resistance against it in the European states, and common perspectives of the European peace movement.”46 This large gathering marked a significant step not only toward Europeanizing peace activities, but also fostered the formation of new organizational structures for the German peace movement. Among the speakers at the rally in Bonn were the famous German writer Heinrich Böll and the Green Party politician Petra Kelly. IKV representative Greetje Witte-Rang proclaimed the European dimension of the peace protest and described “Hollanditis” as an infectious disease: “We, in Holland, are proud that a disease of such importance for the world bears our name ... Europe should denuclearize itself ... that is why all Western European peace movements came to Bonn.”47 Over three hundred thousand people gathered in the West German capital that day to express their protest, triggering a variety of reactions, particularly from the conservative side.48 Although this event had solely been financed and organized by ASF and AGDF at the impetus of the IKV, the parliamentary group of the West German Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU), for example, initiated a minor interpellation in the Bundestag on December 4, 1981,demandingtoexploreanypotential communist influence in the organization of the demonstration.49 Apparently, the conservatives feared the rally could launch massive demonstrations in subsequent years and have hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and in other countries.50 In 1981 the international work of the IKV expanded even further. At a conference in Copenhagen in September 1981, representatives of several Western European peace groups decided to set up an International Peace Communication and Coordination Centre (IPCC), based in The Hague and managed by the IKV. Its main task was to stimulate international cooperation among peace movements: “IKV (Interchurch Peace Council) in Holland was asked to serve as a commu- nication and coordination center (IPCC) of this new network... We have basically chosen to have the main policy-oriented campaigns represented... IPCC is first of all a (West[ern]) European network.”51 Although the IPCC could not be described as a genuinely Christian
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organization, it still had a strong Christian dimension since IKV was in charge of its management. In light of these activities, Edward Thompson anxiously noted the absence of consultations with END: “Meanwhile the IKV commenced to develop its own consultative net- work, primarily with West Germany and in Northern Europe, without us.”52 Thompson’s reaction is indicative of the rivalries among these transnational networks, especially since END and IPCC strongly over- lapped both in terms of ideology and members so that potential synergies often remained untapped.53
Influencing the Churches With increasing social pressure, the national churches in West Germany and Great Britain themselves also became more active in issues of peace and disarmament. Most notably, the 1979 publication of the General Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church (NHK) Kernbewapening (“Nuclear armament”) provided a clear position on the nuclear issue, coining the slogan “Een neen zonder ja’s” (“A no without any yes”) with regard to the use and the deployment of nuclear weapons.54 This decisive phrase proved to be so popular in West Germany (Nein ohne jedes Ja) that the Reformed Church in Germany also published a declaration in June 1982 with that title. This stance stood in stark opposition to the position of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), which was that there were good reasons for either a “yes” or a “no” to nuclear weapons.55 Because of the issue’s importance, the Reformed Church, however, declared the answer to this question a status confessio- nis, a question of faith; those, who agreed with nuclear weapons, denied, in their perspective, the Gospel itself.56 The slogan became the essential theme at the 1983 church congress (Kirchentag) in Hanover where Christian peace groups announced a campaign for a reorientation of Christian ethics and peace politics, entitled “Return to Life: The Time Has Come – For a No without Any Yes to Weapons of Mass Destruction.”57 These words – of Dutch origin – were printed on purple scarves, of which ninety thousand were sold. They became a symbol for nonviolent protest for peace in the Federal Republic even beyond this event.58 In response to the 1979 guide by the Dutch Reformed Church, the Church of England also ordered its Board for Social Responsibility to produce a report about nuclear weapons and Christian conscience, which was released in 1982 with the striking title “The Church and the Bomb.”59
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In November 1981 the NHK, one of the member churches of the Interchurch Peace Council, had sought to exchange ideas and information with the British Council of Churches (BCC) in order to “enter into discussion” with Christians in the British Isles on how together they might more effectively promote peace.60 A delegation from the NHK and IKV met the BCC on March 4, 1982, at the Baptist Church House in London.61 The Secretary of the Methodist Church Conference, Kenneth Greet, explained that the BCC had recently acknowledged the significance of public opinion and that many young people had found a deep meaning in the Christian faith through practical commitment to peacemaking.62 Apparently, the British churches had showed a delayed reaction to the new dynamic peace movement. Both NHK and IKV advised them to foster their support for direct action like the Dutch had done in the demonstra- tions of October and November 1981 in Bonn and in Amsterdam. The consultation ended with the plan to set up a peace forum as a working group within the BCC, which was constituted in September 1983.63 As a purely formal office unsuited for the dynamics of a social move- ment, the peace forum did not, despite this transnational outreach, play a significant role for the British peace movement in the end.64 This illustrates limits of transnational connections and the challenges of trans- fer and adaption of protest ideas into a different sociocultural environ- ment. The British churches did not provide a platform for peace action as was the case in the Netherlands and West Germany. After the deployment of Pershing II and cruise missiles in the United Kingdom and the Federal Republic throughout 1984, the public activities of the Christian peace movement, and with them the internal church discussions, decreased conspicuously. At that point, the peace process had become institutionalized through a variety of organizations and conferences, especially on an international ecumenical level. In keeping with the statement proclaimed at the World Council of Churches (WCC) meeting in Amsterdam in 1948 that “war is contrary to the will of God,” the WCC assembly in Nairobi in 1975 had already featured the theme “Living without Armament.” The 1983 meeting in Vancouver, Canada, from July 24 to August 10, 1983, how- ever, brought a breakthrough for the transnational and transdenomina- tional institutionalization of the peace issue in worldwide ecumenism. Against the background of Western European peace campaigns in 1983, the assembly in Vancouver rejected – without any reservation – the use, the production and the deployment of nuclear weapons, which it defined as a crime against humanity.65 Although the resolution of Vancouver met
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with mixed responses around the world, it was the beginning of the “Conciliar Process of Mutual Commitment Covenant to Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation.” Accordingly, Christians should prepare a council intended to focus on the three main topics of social justice, peace and disarmament, and ecology. Although the Christian peace movement took part in that process, peace activism was fundamentally transformed as a result of this framework and could not affect the public as it did before. The virus of Hollanditis had, in other words, found a natural and harmless antidote.
Conclusion Walter Laqueur’s fear of a new European neutralism did not become a reality. His analysis, however, offers an appropriate metaphor for describing the Dutch influence on the disarmament discourse, particu- larly within the Christian peace movement in Western Europe. In the end, the Interchurch Peace Council’s fight against the deployment of the missiles in the Netherlands was crowned with success, when in combina- tion of the deferment and the 1987 INF Treaty no missiles were stationed in the country. In the beginning of the peace movement, from 1979 to 1981, there was a noticeable need for transnational collaboration. The actors became transnational because the national frame limited their actions and ideas for peace work. Every society had its own tradi- tions of peace action, all with a strongly engaged Christian section. Many traditional peace groups had become irrelevant during the 1970s or simply had members who conceived of peace campaigns in more traditional terms. Yet the common threat of Pershing II and cruise missiles to be stationed on European soil served as a catalyst for protest that would develop into a movement across the continent. The IKV transmitted and facilitated ideas about peace action and consciousness and their implementation in societies outside the Netherlands. Other Christian peace organizations, as well as the churches, followed the Dutch example because of its more developed notions of “lobbying” against nuclear weapons.66 Years after the CND’s and Pax Christi’s heyday, Valerie Flessati, still active for these organizations, reasoned that “the peace movement in the 1980s helped to create a well-informed public debate on matters of defense and a strong political force in Europe which kept up the pressure on politicians to come to some agreement over nuclear weapons.”67 In order to face the political challenge that the NATO Double-Track
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Decision posed for Europe, the activists had to go beyond national boundaries. Transnational cooperation was thus the natural consequence of Dutch, British, and West German activists developing common ideas of peace work. Although they acted independently from each other in most cases, the vision of struggling for the same goal strengthened the whole movement across Western Europe, especially the Christian groups among the peace activists. Over the course of the 1980s, however, it became evident that the Christian motivation for protest was only one part of a larger and extre- mely heterogeneous activist network. The Christian peace movement in Western Europe might have initiated protest in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but it was subsequently only one, nonetheless relevant, part of greater European networks, such as the IPCC at The Hague, which was founded in 1981. Eventually the political situation, the perception of a common, existential threat, and the culture of the Cold War in the 1980s created a path for transnationalization through collaboration and for transnational solidarity among peace activists and their actions. When the INF treaty was finally signed on December 12, 1987, their goal with regard to nuclear weapons had been achieved. When Walter Laqueur wrote in “Hollanditis” about the peace activists in the Netherlands who were “not really well informed about the facts of international relations,” he in fact neglected their contribution toward changing these very rela- tions via the activism of significant transnational actors such as the Interchurch Peace Council.68
Notes
1. Jim Forest and Peter Herby, “Hollanditis: Europe’s Plague of Peace,” IFOR Report, Jan. 1982, p. 3. 2. Recently, the term has also been used by Coreline Boot and Beatrice de Graaf, “‘Hollanditis’ oder die Niederlande als ‘schwaches Glied in der NATO-Kette’? Niederländische Proteste gegen den NATO-Doppelbeschluss 1979–1985,” in Philipp Gassert et al., eds., Zweiter Kalter Krieg und Friedensbewegung: Der NATO-Doppelbeschluss in deutsch-deutscher und internationaler Perspektive (München, 2011), 345–62; and Remco van Diepen, Hollanditis: Nederland en het kernwapendebat 1977–1987 (Amsterdam, 2004). 3. Walter Laqueur, “Hollanditis: A New Stage in European Neutralism,” in Commentary (Aug. 1981): 19–26, 22. Immediately the IKV adapted that term for campaigning purposes, for example, in its pamphlet Achter de IKV- campagne: Hollandse ziekte (Voorburg, 1981). 4. Laqueur, “Hollanditis,” 23.
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5. “‘Schmeiß die Atomwaffen in die Gracht,’ In Nord- und Westeuropa grassiert die ‘holländische Krankheit,’” Der Spiegel 25 (1981). 6. Ibid. 7. See the contemporary analysis by Philip Everts, Public Opinion, the Churches and Foreign Policy: Studies of Domestic Factors in the Making of Dutch Foreign Policy (Leiden, 1983). 8. The classical view of the German peace movement was that it comprised five sections: the Greens, the Christians, the communists, the social democrats, and the independents. See Rüdiger Schmitt, Die Friedensbewegung in der Bundesrepublik: Ursachen und Bedingungen der Mobilisierung einer neuen sozialen Bewegung (Opladen, 1990). 9. Beatrice de Graaf already highlighted a transnational perspective in her dis- sertation, Over de Muur: De DDR, de Nederlandse kerken en de vredesbewe- ging (Amsterdam, 2004). 10. These were by name the Dutch Reformed Church, the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the Old Catholic Church, the Remonstrants, the Religious Society of Friends (Quaker), the Mennonite, and the Moravian Church. Dion van den Berg, ed., IKV 1966–2000: Veertig jaar mobiliseren voor vrede (The Hague, 2006), 10. 11. The original slogan was “Help de kernwapens de wereld uit om te beginnen uit Nederland. “Mient Jan Faber et al., eds., Zes jaar IKV campagne (The Hague, 1983). 12. Edward Thompson, “Eurozone Reality. We Are Not Interested in Intricate Arguments about the ‘Balance’ of Nuclear Terror,” Sanity 5 (Oct./Nov. 1981): 22. 13. See Lawrence Wittner in this volume, Chapter 12. 14. Correspondence between Karl D. Bredthauer of Bonner Friedenswoche and the IKV, Feb. 20, 1979, in International Institute for Social History (hereafter IISH) in Amsterdam, Collection IKV, Box 440. 15. Mient Jan Faber, “Aan de ministers van Buitenlandse Zaken van de 15 NAVO-landen,” May 29, 1979, in IISH, IKV 330. 16. Mient Jan Faber’s note, Jun. 19, 1979, in IISH, IKV, Box 440. 17. For Edward Thompson, three countries were the most important actors in the Western European peace movement in 1981: “[L]ast March the German movement was still low-key. Now it stands beside Holland and Britain and it is perhaps the most influential of the three.” Thompson, “Eurozone Reality,” 22. 18. Gabriele Kammerer, Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste: Aber man kann es einfach tun (Göttingen, 2008). 19. Press statement of CCND, Apr. 27, 1983, in Archives of the London School of Economics and Political Science (hereafter LSE), Collection CND, Box ADD 6-1.
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20. See Patrick Burke in this volume, Chapter 10. 21. END Churches Register 2, no. 2 (Jun. 1982): 2. 22. Ibid. 23. Bruce Kent, “Christian Militarism,” Challenge: Newsletter of the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship 19, no. 3 (May/Jun. 1979): 1–3, 2. 24. “Verslag van het bezoek aan Kassel 2 en 3 juli 1979,” in IISH, IKV Box 330. 25. “Vrede is verzoening en ontwapening,” Vredeskrant 79, 11. 26. Peter Schüttke, “Eines unserer größten Probleme ist das Schweigen der west- deutschen Kirchen,” in Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte in Stuttgart (hereafter BfZ), Collection ORL, Box 1. Later published in the Christian magazine Junge Kirche 41, no. 11 (1980). 27. Ben ter Veer, “Wie können wir innerhalb der Kirche für Abrüstung arbeiten?” Mar. 18, 1978, in Evangelisches Zentralarchiv in Berlin (hereafter EZA), Collection 97, Box 1317. 28. Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste (ASF), ed., Frieden schaffen ohne Waffen: Aktionshandbuch zur bundesweiten Friedenswoche (Bornheim- Merten, 1981). 29. See Sebastian Kalden and Jan Ole Wiechmann, “Kirchen,” in Martin Klimke et al., eds., “Entrüstet Euch!” Nuklearkrise, NATO-Doppelbeschluss und Friedensbewegung (Paderborn, 2012), 247–61, 249. 30. For IKV’s evaluation of the West German peace week 1980, see “Verslag en opmerkingen over de vredesweek in de BRD (landelijke evaluatie. 9 tot 11 februari),” in IISH, IKV, Box 447. 31. See Helmut Rödner’s reports about activities of ASF in the Netherlands, in IISH, IKV, Box 440. 32. “Visit to Holland on behalf of END churches lateral committee by Mark James (Pax Christi) and Stephen Tunnicliffe,” Jul. 18–20, 1981, in LSE, END Collection 20-8. 33. Ibid. 34. Barbara Eggleston, ed., Christian Initiatives in Peacemaking, New Christian Initiatives Series 6 (Birmingham, 1983), 4. 35. “Minutes of Christian CND A[nnual]G[eneral]M[eeting],” Nov. 28, 1981, in Media Research Center at Warwick University (hereafter MRC), Collection Christian CND, MSS.462, Box 1, File 1, p. 1. 36. Ibid., 3. 37. “Minutes/Resume of first meeting of working party of the Christian confer- ence on peace and disarmament,” Apr. 23, 1981, in MRC MSS.462, Box 1, File 1, p. 4. 38. Wilke Schram, “Verslag van een bezoek aan ‘Engeland’,” Mar. 21–25, 1980, in IISH, IKV, Box 711. 39. This leaflet was added among others to the newsletter of the Anglican pacifist fellowship Challenge 9, no. 4 (Jul./Aug. 1981). 40. See Eggleston, Initiatives, 1.
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41. John Jansen van Galen, “Mient Jan Faber: De Machiavelli van de vrede,” Haagse Post, Mar. 19, 1983, pp. 8–15. 42. See Volkmar Deile and Ulrich Frey, “Wie es zur Demonstration vom 10.10.1981 in Bonn kam,” in ASF and AGDF, eds., Bonn 10.10.1981: Friedensdemonstration für Abrüstung und Entspannung in Europa: Reden, Fotos ...(Bornheim-Merten, 1981), 13–20. 43. “Common Resistance to the Common Threat. No new Nuclear Weapons in the Netherlands and in the Federal Republic of Germany,” in IISH, IKV 448. 44. “Conferentie Groningen. V[erenigde] S[taten] stevent af op kernoorlog,” De Volkskrant, Apr. 23, 1981. 45. Despite the mutual preparation of that event, some groups within the German Christian peace movement felt left out. See, for example, the correspondence between the Evangelische Studiengemeinschaft and ASF, Jun. 30, 1981, in EZA Collection 97 Box 1158. 46. ASF and AGDF, “An die Friedensorganisationen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und Berlin (West) und in anderen Ländern Europas,” Jun. 23, 1981, in BfZ, ORL 25. 47. Greetje Witte-Rang, “Die ‘holländische Krankheit’–eine ansteckende Gesundheit,” in ASF and AGDF, Bonn 10.10.1981, pp. 91–93. 48. ASF and AGDF, Bonn 10.10.1981, p. 9. 49. The article “Kommunisten als Drahtzieher,” in Bayernkurier, Jan. 2, 1982, provoked a press statement by ASF and AGDF in which the groups responded to the accusation of being communists, “Antwort der Aktion Sühnezeichen/ Friedensdienste (ASF) und der Aktionsgemeinschaft Dienst für den Frieden (AGDF) auf die ‘Kleine Anfrage der CDU/CSU’ vom 4.12.1981,” Jan. 5, 1982, in IISH, IKV 569. The existence and extent of communist influence in the peace movement was a topic of intense debate, then and now. For the German context, see Holger Nehring and Benjamin Ziemann, “Do All Paths Lead to Moscow? The NATO Dual-Track Decision and the Peace Movement – A Critique,” in Cold War History 12, no. 1 (Feb. 2012): 1–24. 50. See Lawrence S. Wittner, Toward Nuclear Abolition. A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford, 2003), 144–50. 51. “IPCC, an Effort to Stimulate International Communication and Cooperation between Peace-Movements,” in IISH, IKV, Box 516. 52. Edward Thompson, “END at September 1981,” Aug. 27, 1981, in LSE, END 1–4. 53. See April Carter, Peace Movements: International Protest and World Politics since 1945 (London, 1992), 118. 54. Kernbewapening: Handreiking van de generale synode van de Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk voor een nieuw gesprek over het vraagstuk van de kernwa- pens (The Hague, 1979).
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55. “Moderamen des Reformierten Bundes, Das Bekenntnis zu Jesus Christus und die Friedensverantwortung der Kirche, 12. Juni 1982,” printed in Kirchliches Jahrbuch 108/109 (1981/82): 103–5. 56. Ibid., 103. 57. Original title in German: “Umkehr zum Leben: Die Zeit ist da – für ein Nein ohne jedes Ja zu den Massenvernichtungswaffen!,” in EZA Collection 97, Box 1138. 58. See Ulrich Frey, “Kirchentag als Friedensdemonstration: Einschätzung aus der Sicht der Friedensbewegung,” in Tilman Schmieder and Klaus Schuhmacher, eds., Jugend auf dem Kirchentag: Eine empirische Analyse von Andreas Feige, Ingrid Lukatis und Wolfgang Lukatis (Stuttgart, 1984), 233–48. 59. The Church and the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience: The Report of a Working Party under the Chairmanship of the Bishop of Salisbury (London, 1982). 60. Stephen Tunnicliffe, “British Council of Churches Consultation on Disarmament,” END Churches Register 1, no. 1 (Apr. 1982): 8–9, 8. 61. “Churches Seek New Peace Initiative,” Methodist Recorder, Mar. 11, 1982. 62. See Don Black, “Churches in New Peace Thrust,” Baptist Times, Mar. 11, 1982. 63. Stephen Tunnicliffe, “The British Council of Churches ‘Peace Forum,’” END Churches Register 2, no. 3 (Autumn 1983): 9. 64. Barbara Eggleston, national organizer of Christian CND, described it at the end of 1984 as a slow but useful forum for discussion and liaison between the peace groups and the denominations, Christian CND Annual Report, 1984–85, 4. 65. David Gill, ed., Gathered for Life: Official Report, VI Assembly World Council of Churches, Vancouver, Canada, 24 July–10 August 1983 (Geneva, 1983), 136. 66. Richard Taylor and Nigel Young, “Britain and the International Peace Movement in the 1980s,” in Taylor and Young, Campaigns for Peace: British Peace Movements in the Twentieth Century (Manchester, 1987), 287–301, 288. 67. Valerie Flessati, Waking the Sleeping Giant: The Story of Christian CND (London, 1997), 13. 68. Laqueur, “Hollanditis,” 23.
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The Challenge for High Politics
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Peace through Strength? The Impact of the Antinuclear Uprising on the Carter and Reagan Administrations
Lawrence S. Wittner
Most people in Western Europe and the United States appear to believe a Western triumphalist myth which contends that, beginning in the late 1970s, the United States and its allies engaged in a major nuclear buildup that caused the collapse of the Soviet Union and, thereby, secured a Western “victory” in the Cold War. In this version of history, the massive worldwide popular uprising against nuclear weapons is either airbrushed out of the picture or portrayed as a false (and dangerous) diversion. “We didn’t listen to the nuclear freeze crowd,” US President George H. W. Bush boasted during his 1992 presidential campaign. “We said ‘peace through strength,’ and it worked.”1 If, however, one pushes aside self-serving political statements and comfortable myths to look at the evidence, quite a different picture emerges. As I have argued in Toward Nuclear Abolition2 and in a much briefer version, Confronting the Bomb,3 government officials in Western nations – and Eastern nations – did listen to nuclear disarmament groups and to the outpouring of protest they generated. As a result, these officials retreated from their fierce international nuclear confrontation and, with- out a shot being fired, brought an end to the second Cold War. To better understand these phenomena, let us take a look at the popular protest and, then, at its impact on public policy. Although the world nuclear disarmament campaign – knit together by a common revulsion toward nuclear weapons and by a variety of inter- national networks – had been in the doldrums ever since the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963,itbeganasignificant revival in the late 1970s. Behind this revival lay a number of factors, including the end of the Vietnam War (which halted the major drain on peace movement
271
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energies), the 1978 UN Special Session on Disarmament (which called attention to the arms race issue and provided a focus for movement activism), and the public furor over the environmental hazards of nuclear power plants (which renewed deep-seated fears of nuclear anni- hilation). Perhaps most important, Soviet-American détente clearly dete- riorated. The Soviet government, under Leonid Brezhnev, commenced interventionist policies in a number of Third World nations and began deploying modernized intermediate-range nuclear missiles (SS-20s) tar- geting Western Europe. For its part, the US. government, under Jimmy Carter, announced plans to deploy neutron bombs and to use a new generation of intermediate-range nuclear missiles (cruise and Pershing IIs) to target Eastern Europe. In 1979, responding to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Carter administration shelved the major nuclear arms control advance of the era, the SALT II Treaty. Not surprisingly, then, movement activity underwent a renaissance. In Britain, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament staged demonstra- tions against the neutron bomb, Polaris nuclear submarines, and the new generation of Euromissiles, while membership climbed steadily. In the Netherlands, the Interchurch Peace Council took on the task of ridding the world of nuclear weapons, starting in its own country. In the Federal Republic of Germany, church groups, environmental activists, and the new Green Party assailed the nuclear arms race. In Denmark and Norway, No to Nuclear Weapons groups emerged in opposition to plans for Euromissile deployment. Much of the activity in Western Europe was soon promoted by another new organization: European Nuclear Disarmament (END). In early 1980, E.P. Thompson and a group of prominent intellectuals hammered out a proposal to rid Europe of nuclear weapons. This Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament, unveiled that April, called for a people’s movement, in East and West, to save Europe from destruction by constructing grassroots détente and, ulti- mately, breaking down the contending power blocs. Although the END program provided no significant role for North Americans, they developed their own. In Canada, the Voice of Women returned to its demand for nuclear disarmament, while the Canadian churches organized the antimilitary Project Ploughshares. In the United States, a variety of campaigns – among them stopping the B-1 bomber and closing down nuclear weapons facilities – made substantial headway. But a more coordinated venture developed at the end of the decade. Several US peace groups had been promoting the idea of a nuclear moratorium by the United States. Randall Forsberg, a young defense and disarmament
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analyst, suggested widening the appeal of this proposal by making it a bilateral halt to nuclear testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons. This idea appealed to a broad range of peace groups and, in Spring 1980, they issued a “Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race,” the founding statement of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign.4 This trickle of nuclear disarmament activism became a flood in the early 1980s thanks to the heightened perception of nuclear danger inspired by the advent of exceptionally military-oriented governments in the United States and Britain. When Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, millions of people considered him quite bellicose. Reagan, a member of the Committee on the Present Danger – the hawkish group that had ferociously opposed the Carter administration’s arms control measures – had campaigned in 1980 on behalf of a US military buildup and had denounced the arms control treaties of the previous decade. Indeed, he had opposed every nuclear arms control treaty negotiated by his Democratic and Republican predecessors.5 Upon taking office, Reagan staffed dozens of top national security posts in his administration with Committee on the Present Danger members, who disparaged arms con- trols and spoke glibly of fighting and winning a nuclear war.6 END’s Mary Kaldor recalled that Europeans grew upset about cruise and Pershing II missiles “because now an American administration was really talking about fighting ... a nuclear war in Europe. That brought it home very vividly.”7 On top of this, in Britain the disarmament-oriented Labour government had been displaced in 1979 by a Conservative regime headed by the hawkish Margaret Thatcher. Abrasive and uncompromising, she quickly emerged as the keenest supporter of a Western nuclear buildup. Consequently, NATO acquired an unusually belligerent image. Under these circumstances, nuclear disarmament activism surged to unprecedented heights. In Great Britain, CND drew vast throngs of protesters – including four hundred thousand at Hyde Park in October 1983 – and its membership rose from approximately three thou- sand to one hundred thousand. Women’s peace encampments at proposed missile sites grew into long-term, active resistance movements.8 In the Netherlands, under the leadership of the Inter-Church Peace Council, antimissile demonstrations grew to mammoth proportions, with 550,000 people turning out at the Hague in October 1983.9 In West Germany, polls found solid majorities of the public opposed to missile deployment. During 1983, more than a million West Germans protested against it, forming a “human chain” that linked cities and filled their downtown areas with vast open-air meetings.10 In tiny Norway,
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No to Nuclear Weapons grew into an organization with more than three hundred local groups and 130,000 members.11 Responding to the efforts of nuclear disarmament organizations, more than 2.5 million people in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland signed petitions calling upon their governments to turn their countries into a nuclear-free zone.12 Indeed, in nearly every Western European country, nuclear disarmament groups became mass movements, supported by mainstream churches, social democratic parties, and – in the case of missile deployment – public opinion.13 Kaldor estimated that, in the fall of 1983 alone, some five million people took part in Western Europe’s antimissile demonstrations.14 In the United States, the antinuclear campaign burgeoned into the largest peace movement in the nation’s history. The National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (better known as SANE), the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, and Physicians for Social Responsibility grew into mass organizations. In June 1982 nearly a million Americans turned out for a New York City rally against the nuclear arms race – the largest political demonstration up to that time in US history. Meanwhile, the nuclear freeze campaign drew the backing of mainstream religious groups, professional organizations, unions, and the Democratic Party. Although the Reagan administration managed to block a freeze resolution in the US Senate, it was passed by an overwhelming vote in the House of Representatives, endorsed by eleven state legislatures and more than 370 city councils, and – according to the polls – supported by more than seven out of ten Americans.15 In the Pacific, too, the movement reached new heights. Japan’s two rival groups, the Japan Council Against A & H Bombs (Gensuikyo) and the Japan Congress Against A & H Bombs (Gensuikin), drew closer together, and activism flourished. Crowds of hundreds of thousands turned out for antinuclear demonstrations, and twenty-nine million people signed petitions calling for the banning of nuclear weapons, the expansion of nuclear-free zones, and a worldwide disarmament treaty.16 Meanwhile, in New Zealand and Australia, activists blocked the entry of nuclear-armed warships into their harbors, developed nuclear-free zones, and held protest rallies of unprecedented size. Antinuclear sentiment surged through the Pacific island nations, leading to the formation of a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement, which, by 1985, claimed the participation of 185 organizations.17 The movement’s progress was particularly striking in Communist nations. Although government repression prevented the formation of mass movements, smaller antinuclear crusades swept through the
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Communist bloc. In East Germany, a youthful Swords into Plowshares movement developed, as did another daring disarmament group, Women for Peace. In Hungary, a Peace Group for Dialogue emerged in Budapest, where activists conducted an antinuclear campaign and hosted outside speakers like E. P. Thompson. In Czechoslovakia, a human rights group, Charter 77, took the lead against missile deployment, with backing from students and workers. Even in the Soviet Union, antinuclear activism came to the fore through the launching, in June 1982, of the Moscow Group to Establish Trust between the United States and the Soviet Union. Although constantly harassed and imprisoned by the authorities, Trust Group activists managed to replenish their ranks, to set up similar groups in other parts of the Soviet Union, and to conduct press conferences, antinuclear petition drives, art exhibits, and pamphleteering campaigns.18 International organizations pulled together these nuclear disarmament forces into a powerful global alliance. END held feisty annual conven- tions, attracting prominent antinuclear campaigners from East and West. Antinuclear organizations of professionals developed into mass move- ments. By 1985, when International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War received the Nobel Peace Prize, it had affiliates in forty-one countries and approximately 135,000 members.19 Greenpeace, which began in the 1970s with efforts to stop nuclear weapons tests, escalated such efforts around the world in the 1980s and grew into a massive international movement, with millions of members.20 Of course, there was significant resistance to nuclear disarmament activism and to nuclear disarmament measures, especially by hawkish, conservative elements in the United States. As the nuclear disarmament campaign accelerated in the early 1980s, their attacks upon activists grew ever more strident. Writing in Human Events, a leading conservative publication, Phyllis Schlafly declared that “moaning and groaning about the horrors of nuclear weapons ... is a waste of time and is evidence of juvenile immaturity.”21 The Bomb, she maintained, was “a marvelous gift that was given to our country by a wise God.”22 Commentary, a neoconservative magazine, published an article by Vladimir Bukovsky, a defector from the Soviet Union, who, referring to disarmament activists, insisted that there was “not the slightest doubt that this motley crowd is manipulated by a handful of scoundrels instructed directly from Moscow.” In May 1982 the influential Heritage Foundation distributed a “backgrounder” on “Moscow and the Peace Offensive” that called for a massive, heavily funded campaign to undermine the nuclear disarma- ment movement.23
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The Christian Right was particularly active in pronuclear ventures. Identifying nuclear war with the Last Judgment, biblical prophecy zealots eagerly anticipated the arrival of that glorious day. Cruise missiles had appeared, wrote one believer, “just in time for the TRIBULATION!” The Rev. Jerry Falwell, one of America’s most popular evangelical preachers, outlined the approaching nuclear holocaust in his pamphlet Armageddon and the Coming War with Russia. “Blood shall flow in the streets up to the bridles of the horses,” he told an interviewer. Fortunately for true believers, this did not pose a problem, for “if you are saved, you will never go through one hour, not one moment of the Tribulation.” As fundamentalists grew more political during the 1980s, they saw Reagan’s nuclear buildup as part of a divine plan. Hal Lindsey’s bestseller, The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon, argued that the “Bible supports building a powerful military force,” including new nuclear missiles. Falwell’s Moral Majority, the Religious Roundtable, Christian Voice, and the National Christian Action Coalition began distributing “moral report cards” on members of Congress, rating them on their sup- port for military measures. The Rev. James Robison, the premillennialist television preacher who delivered an invocation at the 1984 Republican national convention, proclaimed, “Any teaching of peace prior to [Christ’s] return is heresy .... It’s against the Word of God; it’s Antichrist.”24 Falwell and the Moral Majority launched major efforts to discredit the nuclear disarmament movement. In a six-page fundraising letter dis- patched to his massive following in June 1982, Falwell promised a major campaign against the “freezeniks,” who, he alleged, were “hysterically singing Russia’s favorite song.”25 Launched in the spring of 1983, the campaign included full-page newspaper ads in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and more than seventy other newspapers. The ads denounced the “freezeniks” and called upon “patriotic, God-fearing Americans to speak up” for military might. In addition, Falwell aired a one-hour-long, prime-time television show attacking the nuclear freeze campaign and used his weekly Sunday sermons, broadcast on over four hundred television stations around the nation, to lash out at nuclear disarmament activists. In March 1983 he told listeners, “In the Kremlin, Andropov or somebody decides that we need 300,000 to march in Stockholm or Berlin or New York, and the robots stand up and start marching for a nuclear freeze,” a proposal that he claimed would result in “slavery for our children.”26 But these and other wild attacks failed to halt the momentum of the nuclear disarmament campaign, which, by the early 1980s, constituted
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the greatest upsurge of public protest in modern history. Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau remarked in 1982, “Only the deaf cannot hear the clamor arising all over the world against the arms race.”27 Did this clamor have an effect upon public policy? When Jimmy Carter entered the White House in January 1977, he was already committed to the long-term goal of abolishing nuclear weapons, and he announced this in his inaugural address.28 Even so, in the late 1970s, Carter was perfectly willing to move forward with the production and deployment of the “enhanced radiation weapon” or, as it became known, the neutron bomb. But, as peace groups turned the new weapon into an object of widespread public loathing, leaders of key Western European governments refused to accept the onus for openly requesting it – although they secretly assured the US government that they would be happy enough to have it deployed in their countries. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security advisor, complained to him: “They are terrified by the political consequences of seeming to approve nuclear warfare on their territory and of endorsing a weapon which ... seems to have acquired a particularly odious image.”29 In turn, Carter decided that if allied leaders were going to shirk responsibility and leave him to bear the blame for deploying the neutron bomb, then he would cancel plans for production of the weapon.30 And he did cancel its production – much to their disgust. In other areas, the record was more mixed; but even here there were strong elements of accommodation with Western antinuclear sentiment. Notable among these was NATO’s Double-Track Decision of December 1979. Concerned about the Soviet installation of intermediate-range SS-20 missiles in the East, West GermanChancellorHelmutSchmidt pressed Washington to install cruise and Pershing II missiles in Western Europe. However, as it was clear that this program would inflame Western European antinuclear sentiment, Dutch and German officials insisted upon adding a second track to the NATO deployment plan – a disarmament track. It provided that, during the years that NATO prepared itself for the installation of 572 Euromissiles, negotiations with the Russians would be conducted with the aim of sharply cutting back the numbers of intermediate-range missiles deployed by both blocs.31 US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance recalled that “the arms control aspect of this so-called two-track approach was politically essen- tial to contain expected internal opposition to the proposed deploy- ments.” Years later, when Brzezinski was asked if the disarmament track reflected an attempt to head off Western European opposition to
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missile deployment, he responded, “That’s correct, that’s correct.”32 Thus, even as NATO moved forward with its INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) missile deployment plan, it was forced by antinuclear pressure to open the door to a reversal of its decision. Reducing strategic nuclear arsenals was probably Carter’s highest national security priority, and the administration counted heavily upon peace groups to rally support for the SALT II treaty it was negotiating with the Soviet government. Vance noted, “SALT enjoyed a powerful base of popular support which could be mobilized.”33 But, for a time, the administration made little progress with Kremlin officials, who preferred the less ambitious arms control arrangement they had worked out with the Ford administration at Vladivostok, and who also were suspicious of Carter’s emphasis upon “human rights.” Eventually, a rather watered- down SALT II Treaty – providing for arms limitations rather than reductions – was signed by Carter and Leonid Brezhnev in June 1979. Although the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that December killed any possibility of its ratification by the US Senate during the remainder of Carter’s first term, there is very strong evidence that Carter, if reelected, would have worked zealously not only to secure its ratification but also to negotiate deep cuts in nuclear arms.34 Ah, many observers will say, perhaps that is a fair enough description of NATO policy during the years of Jimmy Carter, “Sunny Jim” Callaghan, and Helmut Schmidt. But what about the turn toward a massive nuclear buildup during the era of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Helmut Kohl? What about the rise of the hawks? And, in response, one must concede: Certainly these NATO leaders and their conservative parties did have more hawkish opinions and plans than did their predecessors. But how much opportunity did they have to implement them? In this connection, Reagan administration officials and their over- seas counterparts faced a major problem, for, during the early 1980s, in response to their publicly expressed enthusiasm for nuclear weapons and nuclear war, a flood of nuclear disarmament activism swept over the political landscape. Numerous nations were convulsed by public protest. Poll after poll indicated overwhelming opposition to the nuclear arms race. And this set limits to what Western leaders could do. Naturally, the Reagan administration was horrified by the antinuclear uprising. Robert McFarlane, one of Reagan’s national security advisors, recalled that the administration viewed the nuclear freeze campaign “as a serious movement that could undermine congressional support for the [nuclear] modernization program, and potentially ... a serious partisan
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political threat that could affect the election in ’84.”35 According to David Gergen, the White House communications director, “[T]here was a wide- spread view in the administration that the freeze was a dagger pointed at the heart of the administration’s defense program.”36 The situation looked just as dangerous in Western Europe. “Tremendous concern” existed within the administration over the demonstrations opposing the Euromissiles, recalled Thomas Graham, a top US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency official of the time. “We realized we were in a real battle ...over this.”37 Not surprisingly, the Reagan administration launched a massive cam- paign to roll back the surging nuclear disarmament campaign. As the freeze movement grew, the Reaganites met secretly to develop what McFarlane called “a huge effort” to combat it. They organized an inter- departmental group that he “chaired in the White House that included representatives from all the relevant agencies – from the CIA, from Defense, from the Joint Chiefs, from the State Department, from the USIA.” To break the antinuclear campaign’s momentum, McFarlane dispatched members of the group to all parts of the country to speak out against it on radio and TV programs, before newspaper editorial boards, and at public events.38 Joining in the effort, Reagan informed a gathering of veterans’ groups in October 1982 that the freeze –“a movement that’s sweeping across the country”–was “inspired by not the sincere, honest people who want peace, but by some who want the weakening of America and so are manipulating honest people.”39 That November, he told a press conference that “foreign agents” had helped “instigate” the freeze campaign.40 The following month, he declared that “the originating organization” for the campaign was the communist-led World Peace Council and that the first person to propose a nuclear freeze was Leonid Brezhnev.41 In addition to making these false charges, the administration censored antinuclear films (e.g. The Day After),42 funded rabidly pro- nuclear organizations,43 and spied on antinuclear activists.44 To dampen the worldwide protest against nuclear weapons, the Reagan administration embarked upon a global program of what was called “public diplomacy.” From 1981 to 1985, the budget of the US Information Agency (USIA) – previously in a long-term decline – was increased by 74 percent.45 Through a special program of worldwide TV broadcasts, massive distribution of propaganda literature, and speeches by government leaders, the USIA’s chieftain, Charles Wick, hoped, as he said, “to mitigate the impact of antinuclear movements on publics and governments abroad.”46 Meanwhile, Reagan, at the request of Western
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European officials, traveled to Europe to deliver speeches justifying US nuclear weapons policy. In his memoirs, he recalled that his trips to Britain and West Germany in 1982 were designed “to demonstrate that I wasn’t flirting with doomsday.” Confusing, as he often did, the European with the American movement, he explained the background: “Several of our European allies ... had their hands full with the nuclear freeze movement, which was being fired up by demagogues depicting me as a shoot-from-the-hip cowboy aching to pull out my nuclear six-shooter.”47 Relentlessly besieged by the nuclear disarmament campaign, the administration also made important alterations in its nuclear weapons policy. Plans for cruise and Pershing II missile deployment in Western Europe underwent a significant change. Numerous NATO officials – such as Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, US Secretary of State Alexander Haig, and US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger – wanted these missiles deployed, regardless of what the Russians did. But they did not dare tell this to the public. Consequently, in the fall of 1981, US officials, facing a growing furor over missile deployment, went beyond the disarmament track of the December 1979 decision and announced the “zero option”: cancellation of the plan for US deployment – if the Russians would with- draw all their SS-20s. As Reagan administration officials later admitted, the zero option was at least in part a clever public relations measure, designed to pacify the irate European public.48 A US State Department official told Mary Kaldor of the END campaign, “We got the idea from your banners!”49 And, of course, many NATO officials assumed that they would not have to honor their commitment, for it seemed very unlikely that the Russians would withdraw their 1,100 missiles already in place for a US promise not to deploy missiles that had not even been built. Even so, NATO officials were now on record as favoring the removal of all intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe – if the Russians were willing to take the plunge. Ironically, NATO’s trumpeting of the zero option failed to appease peace groups and the public, which turned to ever larger and more militant demonstrations against the Euromissiles. Meanwhile, most of Europe’s social democratic parties rallied to the antimissile cause. Consequently, the pressures mounted within NATO to compromise. According to Kenneth Adelman, the director of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Western European officials were “scared to death.” They came to his office asking, “What are we going to do?” And
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they proposed all sorts of alternatives to missile deployment.50 German and Italian leaders demanded a negotiated settlement of the missile issue. The Dutch prime minister, convinced that it was impossible to push missile deployment through his country’s parliament, not only delayed a decision on installation for years, but also convinced his government that, if the Russians would halt further missile deployment, it should reject the NATO missiles.51 In mid-1982, recognizing the growing desperation among NATO’s European leaders, Paul Nitze, the chief arms control negotiator for the United States, went on an informal “walk in the woods” with his Soviet counterpart and proposed canceling the US deployment of Pershing II missiles in exchange for reducing the number of Soviet SS-20s. Although hardliners in Washington and Moscow even- tually scuttled this proposal, by March 1983 US Secretary of State George Shultz convinced Reagan to cut loose from the apparently impossible “zero option” and accept the principle of missile equality.52 Even so, Russian policy remained intransigent, while public protest against nuclear weapons was heightening. To counter the flourishing nuclear freeze campaign in this politically difficult situation, Reagan emphasized his claim that his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) – popularly known as “Star Wars”–would save the United States from nuclear destruction. His March 23, 1983, television address, announcing the SDI program, contained a full paragraph devoted to the freeze, using words that he had substituted for those of his speechwriters. “I know ... that many of you seriously believe that a nuclear freeze would further the cause of peace,” he declared. “But a freeze now ... would raise, not reduce, the risks of war.” By contrast, he argued, SDI would provide “the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.”53 As the antimissile demonstrations in Western Europe grew ever more tumultuous, especially in the context of the US government’s deployment of the cruise and Pershing II missiles in the fall of 1983, Reagan became seriously rattled. “If things get hotter and hotter and arms control remains an issue,” he told Shultz that October, “maybe I should go see [Soviet leader Yuri] Andropov and propose eliminating all nuclear weapons.”54 Shultz was horrified by this idea! But he agreed that “we were feeling political pressure against our continuing INF deployment.... We could not leave matters as they stood.” Reagan recalled, “We were on the defensive.”55 Consequently, in January 1984, against the advice of his increasingly uneasy secretary of state, the US president delivered a major foreign policy address in which he emphasized the “common interests” of the Soviet
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Union and the United States and spoke of his desire to banish nuclear weapons “from the face of the earth.” According to administration offi- cials, Reagan was genuinely ready to move forward with disarmament measures.56 It should be noted that, like his other disarmament initiatives, this speech was given during the Brezhnev-Andropov-Chernenko years, when Soviet leaders did not show any interest in compromising with NATO policy. The assumption to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in March 1985 finally gave anxious Western leaders someone with whom it was possible to work on disarmament issues. Gorbachev was not only a true believer in nuclear disarmament, but also a movement convert. The Soviet leader’s “New Thinking”–by which he meant the necessity for peace and disarmament in the nuclear age – came from a well-known anti- nuclear statement by Albert Einstein in 1946, reiterated in the antinuc- lear Russell-Einstein Appeal of 1955.57 Gorbachev’sadvisorshave frequently pointed to the powerful influence upon Gorbachev of the nuclear disarmament movement. Gorbachev himself declared, “The new thinking took into account and absorbed the conclusions and demands of ... the public and the scientific community, of the move- ments of physicians, scientists, and ecologists, and of various antiwar organizations.”58 Gorbachev met frequently with leaders of the nuclear disarmament campaign, and often took their advice. On the advice of Bernard Lown (founder and co-chair of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War), he initiated and later continued a unilateral Soviet nuclear testing moratorium.59 On the advice of key antinuclear scientists, he resisted the temptation to build a Star Wars antimissile system to counter the one championed by the Reagan administration.60 Furthermore, he split the Star Wars issue from the INF issue, thus taking the crucial step toward the INF Treaty. This, too, was based in large part on the argu- ments made to him by US and Soviet antinuclear scientists.61 His decision also reflected the widespread public opposition to nuclear weapons. At the key meeting of the Politburo in February 1987, he secretly told Soviet party leaders that delinking Star Wars from INF would “be our response to the state of public opinion in the world.”62 When Gorbachev suddenly called the US bluff by agreeing to remove all the Euromissiles from Europe (the zero option), it horrified NATO’s hawks, who never thought they would have to follow through on their cynically contrived proposal. But, as Shultz recalled, “[I]f the United States reversed its stand now ... such a reversal would be political
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dynamite!” Or, as Adelman put it, “We had to take yes for an answer.”63 Thus, in late 1987, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the INF Treaty, which removed all intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe. In the con- text of Reagan’s long-time opposition to arms control and disarmament, the INF Treaty was particularly ironic, for it was the first arms agreement to actually eliminate nuclear weapons. Adelman concluded that Reagan had ended up “giving the kiss of life to the very process he had once deplored.”64 Nor did the hawks show any greater “strength” when it came to the issue of strategic nuclear weapons. Virtually the entire top national secur- ity apparatus of the Reagan administration was staffed by opponents of the SALT II Treaty, negotiated by President Carter. And yet, year after year these officials accepted the weapons limits of this unratified treaty, thanks to pressure from arms control-oriented Democrats in Congress and from NATO’s embattled European leaders.65 The great hope for the Reaganites in their quest for nuclear “strength” was the adoption of the MX missile program, which provided for a dramatic upgrading of the US land-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) system. But Congressional Democrats (who had begun to court disarmament groups) refused to support the administration’s MX missile plan. In the end, after years of exhausting political battles, the administration secured funding for only fifty missiles (25 percent of the number originally requested) – an outcome that cheered peace groups and depressed the Reaganites. Shultz lamented, “Given the poli- tical climate in the United States, we could not keep pace in moderniza- tion, production, and deployment of these deadly weapons.”66 In turn, the resulting US strategic weakness heightened the appeal of nuclear arms controls. Furthermore, the administration found that to secure funding for even this token number of MX missiles, it had to display strong support for nuclear disarmament. Therefore, it opened strategic arms talks in May 1982,dubbedthegoalofthetalksaStrategicArms Reduction Treaty, and adopted more flexible negotiating positions. McFarlane explained, “You had to have appropriations, and to get them you needed political support,andthatmeantthatyouhadto have an arms control policy worthy of the name.”67 Thus, when Reagan left office in early 1989,theSTARTTreaty,althoughnotyet signed, was well underway. Battered by protest against nuclear weapons, US policy under Reagan had undergone a dramatic reversal. Not long afterward, Adelman, who handled arms control and disarmament issues in the Reagan
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administration for most of its eight years in power, highlighted this transformation in a memoir of this period:
Taking office considering Soviet behavior as the world’s prime problem, Reagan came to consider nuclear weapons its main problem. The administration assumed office practically brandishing nuclear weapons. ... Such a nuclear-centered policy ... metamorphosed ... into extreme antinuclear talk that resembled the nuclear bashers of SANE more than the nuclear planners of SAC [the US Strategic Air Command]. ...Taking office believing that Western security rested on an arms buildup, President Reagan came to believe that it rested largely or significantly on arms control.68 Naturally, given the antinuclear climate of the era, whatever impulses US officials had to actually wage nuclear war quickly dissipated. The Reagan administration’s top national security officials – from the president on down – had entered office talking of fighting and winning a nuclear war. But this position quickly changed as the administration came to recognize that its glib talk of nuclear war was a political disaster that played into the hands of its critics. Starting in April 1982, shortly after the introduction of the freeze resolution in Congress, Reagan began declaring publicly that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” He added, “To those who protest against nuclear war, I can only say: ‘I’m with you!’”69 Of course, this adoption of a new public position did not mean that the Reagan administration could not reverse itself. But it certainly made it more difficult to do so. These shifts toward curbing the nuclear arms race and averting nuclear war led, in turn, to ending the second Cold War. This was clear enough toward the end of the 1980s. In May 1988,Reaganwent strolling peacefully around Red Square with his new friend, Mikhail Gorbachev. Addressing a small crowd of people that had gathered, the US president declared, “We decided to talk to each other instead of about each other. It’sworkingjustfine.” When they returned to the Kremlin grounds, a reporter questioned Reagan about the “evil empire” he had denounced just five years before. The old Cold Warrior replied, “I was talking about another time, another era.”70 Speaking to the United Nations in December of 1988,Gorbachevdeclaredthatithad become “obvious ...thattheuseorthreatofforce nolongercan ...be an instrument of foreign policy.” In their place, he said, the world needed the establishment of a strong international security system, under the direction of a revitalized United Nations, as well as a new spirit of Soviet- American cooperation.71 Addressing a secret meeting of the Politburo upon his return to the Soviet Union, Gorbachev explained, “We are
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proposing and willing to build a new world.”72 The following year, with the Soviet Union no longer determined to prop up its East German ally, theBerlinWallcamedownandthesecond ColdWarsputtered toanend. Of course, additional factors played some role in the demise of the second Cold War. These include the immense costliness and destruc- tiveness of modern warfare and the political breakthrough of reformers in the Soviet Union. Without the advent of Gorbachev and his circle, the Soviet-American confrontation might well have dragged on for years. To these factors we can add the common sense of the public and the surprising flexibility of some public officials like Reagan, who – in the face of massive public resistance to nuclear weapons and nuclear war – were willing to scrap their entrenched hawkish positions. As another of Reagan’s national security advisors, Colin Powell, observed, the president “had the vision and flexibility, lacking in many knee-jerk Cold Warriors, to recognize that Gorbachev was a new man in a new age offering new opportunities for peace.”73 Even so, the key factor behind the abandonment of the hawkish drive toward a nuclear Armageddon appears to have been the worldwide revolt by peace and disarmament groups. This revolt roused the public to action, forced the hawks to abandon their militarist plans, and resulted in a peaceful end to the second Cold War. By contrast, there is no evidence that peace was secured by Western nuclear “strength.” Thus, in seeking an explanation for the transformation of public policy in the late 1970sand1980s, scholars, political pundits, and the public should pay much closer attention than they have in the past to the remarkable popular uprising against the looming nuclear Armageddon of the second Cold War. It provides us with a powerful example of the democratization of national security policy, in which widespread public participation supplanted behind-the-scenes-control by a small number of government officials. Furthermore, given the broad, international dimensions of the nuclear disarmament cam- paign, it also symbolizes the new possibilities that emerged during those years for transcending national boundaries and forging a world citizenship.
Notes
1. New York Times, Oct. 12, 1992. 2. Lawrence S. Wittner, Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford, 2003).
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3. Lawrence S. Wittner, Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement (Stanford, 2009). 4. These and other developments of the late 1970s and 1980 are explored in detail in Wittner, Toward Nuclear Abolition, 21–40, 63–89. 5. George W. Ball, “The President’s Nuclear Responsibility,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 40 (Nov. 1984): 5–6; New York Times, Jul. 16, Oct. 2, 1980; Wall Street Journal, Jun. 3, 1980. 6. New York Times, Nov. 23, 1981; Kenneth Adelman, The Great Universal Embrace: Arms Summitry – A Skeptic’s Account (New York, 1989), 24; Nick Kotz, Wild Blue Yonder: Money, Politics, and the B-1 Bomber (New York, 1988), 200–201. 7. “An Interview with Mary Kaldor,” Working Papers 9 (Sep.–Oct. 1982): 47. 8. Peter Byrd, “The Development of the Peace Movement in Britain,” in Werner Kaltefleiter and Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, eds., The Peace Movements in Europe and the United States (London, 1985), 67; Minutes of CND National Council meeting of Mar. 23–24, 1985, Reel 26, CND Records, Harvester Microfilm; Jill Liddington, The Long Road to Greenham: Feminism and Anti- Militarism in Britain since 1820 (London, 1989), 221–86. 9. Maria Margaronis, “Notes from Abroad,” Nuclear Times 2 (Mar. 1984): 10. 10. Hans Rattinger, “The Federal Republic,” in Gregory Flynn and Hans Rattinger, eds., The Public and Atlantic Defense (Totowa, NJ, 1985), 163; Manchester Guardian, Oct. 23, 1983. 11. Ole Kopreitan, interview with author, May 14, 1999. 12. Jon Grepstad, “The Peace Movement in the Nordic Countries,” International Peace Research Newsletter 20, no. 4 (1982): 11. 13. Wittner, Toward Nuclear Abolition, 130–68. 14. Mary Kaldor, “Introduction,” in Richard Taylor and Nigel Young, eds., Campaigns for Peace: British Peace Movements in the Twentieth Century (Manchester, 1987), 1. 15. L. Bruce van Voorst, “The Churches and Nuclear Deterrence,” Foreign Affairs 61 (Spring 1983): 827–52; Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, “Citizens Lobby for a U.S.-Soviet Nuclear Weapons Freeze” (1984) and Gene Carroll to union leaders, Feb. 25, 1985, Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign Records, Western Historical Manuscript Collection, University of Missouri, St. Louis, Mo.; William Schneider, “Peace and Strength: American Public Opinion on National Security,” in Flynn/Rattinger, The Public, 347–48. 16. Hitoshi Ohnishi, “The Peace Movement in Japan,” International Peace Research Newsletter 21 (1983): 26–27; Glenn D. Hook, “The Ban the Bomb Movement in Japan,” Social Alternatives 3 (Mar. 1983): 37. 17. Wittner, Toward Nuclear Abolition, 206–12. 18. Ibid., 214–25, 352–58; Catherine Fitzpatrick and Janet Fleischman, From Below: Independent Peace and Environmental Movements in Eastern Europe and the USSR (New York, 1987).
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19. “Five days of discussion,” END Journal 11 (Aug.–Sep. 1984): 9–10; Peter Zheutlin, “Medicine, Politics and the Nobel Peace Prize,” Physicians for Social Responsibility Records, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, PA. 20. Eric Fersht, interview with author, Sep. 9, 1989. 21. Phyllis Schlafly, “Six Fatal Fallacies of the Nuclear-Freezers,” Human Events, June 25, 1983, p. 17. 22. Henry Schipper, “Some Girls,” Rolling Stone, no. 357, Nov. 26, 1981, p. 23. 23. Frank Donner, “But Will They Come? The Campaign to Smear the Nuclear Freeze Movement,” Nation, no. 235, Nov. 6, 1982, p. 464. 24. Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 126–51; Kotz, Wild Blue Yonder, 212. 25. Jerry Falwell to Dear, June 17, 1982, Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign Records, Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies, Cambridge, MA. 26. Robert Friedman, “The Bomb and Jerry Show,” Nuclear Times 1 (Aug./Sep. 1983): 25; Washington Post, Mar. 7, 1983. 27. Dwight Burkhardt, “Project Ploughshares,” Disarmament Campaigns 18 (Jan. 1983): 5. 28. Carter’s inaugural address of Jan. 20, 1977, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Jimmy Carter 1977 (Washington, DC, 1978), 3. 29. Zbigniew Brzezinski to Jimmy Carter, Jul. 22, 1977, “Weekly Reports [to the President], 16–30:[6/77–9/77]” Folder, Box 41, Zbigniew Brzezinski Papers, Jimmy Carter Library, Atlanta, GA. 30. Vincent Auger, The Dynamics of Foreign Policy Analysis: The Carter Administration and the Neutron Bomb (Lanham, MD, 1996), 84. 31. Thomas Risse-Kappen, The Zero Option: INF, West Germany, and Arms Control (Boulder, CO, 1988), 38, 168; Helmut Schmidt, Men and Powers: A Political Retrospective (New York, 1989), 109, 277–78. 32. Cyrus Vance, Hard Choices: Critical Years in America’s Foreign Policy (New York, 1983), 392; Zbigniew Brzezinski, interview with author, Jul. 21, 1999. 33. Vance, Hard Choices, 351. 34. Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (New York, 1982), 262–65. 35. Robert McFarlane, interview with author, Jul. 21, 1999. 36. Jeffrey W. Knopf, Domestic Society and International Cooperation: The Impact of Protest on U.S. Arms Control Policy (Cambridge, 1998), 224. 37. Thomas Graham, Jr., interview with author, Aug. 23, 1999. 38. McFarlane interview. 39. New York Times, Oct. 5, 1982. 40. Ibid., Nov. 13, 1982. 41. Ibid., Dec. 11, 1982.
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42. David Cortright, Peace Works: The Citizen’s Role in Ending the Cold War (Boulder, 1993), 73–74. 43. Brian Crozier, Free Agent: The Unseen War, 1941–1991 (New York, 1993), 178–86, 245. 44. Washington Post, Jan. 28, 1984; Keenan Peck, “The Take Charge Gang,” Progressive 49 (May 1985): 1, 18–24; Brian Glick, War at Home (Boston, 1989), 1–2. 45. Alvin A. Snyder, Warriors of Disinformation: American Propaganda, Soviet Lies, and the Winning of the Cold War, an Insider’s Account (New York, 1995), xi–xiii; “Charles Wick Completes 4th Year As USIA’s Director” (1985), Case File 325900, FG 006-01, Subject File, White House Office of Records Management Records, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, CA (hereafter WHORM Records). 46. Snyder, Warriors, 38–39, 76–78; Charles Wick to James A. Baker III, Michael K. Deaver, and Edwin Meese III, Dec. 22, 1981, Case File 054032, and Wick to Baker, Mar. 5, 1983, Case File 128779, FG 298, Wick to Baker, June 17, 1982, Case File 86870, PC, Subject File, WHORM Records; Wick to William P. Clark, Jr., Apr. 28, 1982, “Nuclear Freeze (3 of 3)” Folder, Box 90278, Sven Kraemer Files, Reagan Library. 47. McFarlane interview; Ronald Reagan, An American Life: The Autobiography (New York, 1990), 554. 48. Graham interview; McFarlane interview. 49. Mary Kaldor, interview with author, Jun. 7, 1999. 50. Kenneth Adelman, interview with author, Jul. 22, 1998. 51. Ruud Lubbers, interview with author, May 27, 1999. 52. Paul Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost: At the Center of Decision: A Memoir (New York, 1989), 374–77, 386–88; Graham interview; George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York, 1993), 120, 160, 271, 351, 372–73, 375, 463. 53. “NSC/Bakshian/RR” (Mar. 22, 1983), “Address to the Nation: Defense (Bakshian) 3/23/83 [2 of 4]” Folder, and “Address by the President to the Nation” (Mar. 23, 1983), “Address to the Nation: Defense (File #2)[1 of 4]” Folder, Box 80, Special Drafts File, White House Office of Speechwriting Records, Reagan Library. 54. Shultz, Turmoil, 372. 55. Ibid., 464; Reagan, An American Life, 590. 56. Ronald Reagan, The U.S.-Soviet Relationship (Washington, DC, 1984); McFarlane interview. 57. Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists press release of May 22, 1946, Box 57, Albert Einstein Papers, Seeley Mudd Library, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ; Otto Nathan and Heinz Norden, eds., Einstein on Peace (New York, 1968), 632–35. 58. Washington Post, May 22, 1988.
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59. Bernard Lown, interview with author, Jul. 6, 1999; Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Ithaca, 1999), 271. 60. Evangelista, Unarmed Forces, 322–38. 61. Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika (New York, 1987), 153; Evangelista, Unarmed Forces, 329. 62. Anatoly Chernyaev’s Notes from the Politburo Sessions of Feb. 23 and 26, 1987, in Vladislav Zubok, Catherine Nielsen, and Greg Grant, eds., Understanding the End of the Cold War: Reagan/Gorbachev Years: An Oral History Conference, May 7–10, 1998, Brown University (Providence, RI, 1998). 63. Shultz, Turmoil, 984–85; Adelman, Great Universal Embrace, 248. 64. Adelman, Great Universal Embrace, 294. 65. Ibid., 251, 260–61, 266–78. 66. Shultz, Turmoil, 358, 527. 67. McFarlane interview. 68. Adelman, Great Universal Embrace, 126. 69. Radio Address to the Nation on Nuclear Weapons, Apr. 17, 1982, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan: January 1 to July 2, 1982 (Washington, DC, 1983), 487–88. 70. Don Oberdorfer, The Turn: From the Cold War to a New Era: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1983–1990 (New York, 1991), 298–99. 71. New York Times, Dec. 8, 1988. 72. “Minutes of the Meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union” (Dec. 27–28, 1988), Cold War International History Project Bulletin 12–13 (fall/winter 2001): 24. 73. Colin L. Powell, with Joseph Persico, My American Journey (New York, 1995), 341.
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Did Protest Matter? The Influence of the Peace Movement on the West German Government and the Social Democratic Party, 1977–1983
Tim Geiger and Jan Hansen
This chapter will scrutinize how the “establishment” in Germany per- ceived and reacted to peace protests in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Two different but related story lines are to be examined: First, did the federal government – which, up until Fall 1982, was a coalition govern- ment between the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the tiny Free Democratic Party (FDP) – actually ignore the demands of the protest movement or did it instead try to anticipate, defuse, or even exploit their demands?1 Second, how did internal conflicts within the SPD itself affect the party’s policy on nuclear weapons? The SPD’s stance toward rear- mament is essential for understanding the controversy about NATO’s Dual-Track Decision in West Germany, since this group was the backbone of the social-liberal government. At the same time, no other political group in the country was shaken to such a degree by intraparty disputes over nuclear issues.
Prelude: The Neutron Bomb Controversy As early as 1976 German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher pre- dicted that in the wake of Vietnam, disarmament would become the main issue of propaganda of the extreme left.2 At many NATO meetings, ministers agreed on the necessity of better explaining the defense philoso- phy of the Alliance to a public largely disinterested in security policy. Nevertheless, Western governments were caught red-handed when in Summer 1977, fierce protest was triggered off by reports about the devel- opment of the neutron bomb. Whereas military experts welcomed this Enhanced Radiation Weapon (ERW) as an effective weapon to counter
290
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any potential attacks by Warsaw Pact tank forces with reduced collateral damages, a shocked public abhorred the perverse scenario of a “capitalist weapon” that kills people but leaves buildings and infrastructure undestroyed. In the FRG, the campaign against the neutron bomb started a month after US newspapers first reported on this “improvement” of tactical nuclear forces, with an article by SPD party manager (Bundesgeschäftsführer) and mastermind of Ostpolitik, Egon Bahr.3 Bahr’s philippic against the “inhumane” weapon set new benchmarks for the debate of security policy. In Germany, discussion of this issue had hitherto been limited to a small number of experts within the “stra- tegic community”. Now the matter was opened up for a broader public audience. President Jimmy Carter was afraid that the neutron bomb would endanger his disarmament agenda. Confronted with rampant antinuclear protests at home, he told allies that the United States would produce ERW only if the Europeans would deploy the new weapon in their countries. This placed a burdensome key role upon the FRG. As a frontier state, Germany was the natural place of deployment and the most likely theater of war. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt had no inclination to take responsibility for such a grave armament decision. In a conversation with Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Schmidt endorsed the proposal made by the SPD’s parliamentary group that ERW should be used to strengthen the Western position in disarmament talks. He under- lined that for reasons of détente and alliance policy other European countries should also take a due share; the FRG must not be singled out as the only place where the neutron bomb would be deployed.4 In a telephone conversation with Carter, Schmidt arrogantly suggested that things in Europe would go much easier if the debate in the United States was carried out less vociferously. The president made it clear that he did not intend to stand all alone with ERW and that he abhorred the image of an ogre.5 Apparently both politicians hoped to get support from the other side of the Atlantic in order to use this international backing to overcome public unrest in their respective home countries. However, each was obsessed with his own agenda and Schmidt himself had doubts about the neutron bomb. In the National Security Council (Bundessicherheitsrat), he outlined how ERW’s regionalization of destruction would boost the danger of “decoupling”: In case of war, the United States would more than ever be inclined to localize conflict to Europe by relying on ERW
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and restraining from strategic weapons in order to avoid a Soviet strike against America. Second, the precision of ERW would lower the nuclear threshold and make it possible to wage war without escalating each armed conflict into an all-out nuclear Armageddon. Third, an improvement of NATO’s arsenal of “theater nuclear forces” (TNF) could mislead minor allies to further neglect their conventional armament, thus aggravating the burden of the Bundeswehr as the most powerful conventional force in Western Europe. All this would deal a heavy blow for Bonn’s relations with the Eastern bloc and endanger Ost- and Deutschlandpolitik.6 In other words: initially, Schmidt shared an opinion very similar to that of the critics of the neutron bomb. However, important ministers rejected this view. Foreign Minister Genscher (FDP) and Defense Minister Georg Leber (SPD) objected that ERW was militarily desirable because it would improve deterrence; and that was the most important consideration, because it could prevent every kind of war. They argued that the West should use ERW as a bargaining chip in disarmament talks.7 While coalition partner FDP endorsed the ERW as wholeheartedly as did the opposition parties CDU (Christian Democratic Union) and CSU (Christian Social Union),8 resistance to the neutron bomb remained limited to large segments within the SPD and to broad public unrest. Due to alleged transatlantic solidarity and to coalition politics, the Schmidt administration gave a green light to the neutron bomb but linked its approval to a number of conditions: Bonn insisted that the United States make no public use of this pronouncement. This inhibited Carter to countervail protests at home by claiming that Washington had to follow an urgent need of NATO allies.9 The main burden, however, was the German precondition that the new weapon should be stationed in at least one other continental NATO country. The latter objective failed due to fierce protests in the Netherlands and Belgium, and this failure was one of the reasons for Carter’s surprising U-turn against ERW in spring 1978.
Not Yet a Factor: Peace Protest and the Genesis of the Dual-Track Decision The public relations disaster of the neutron bomb damaged Carter’s image. To demonstrate effective leadership, his administration energeti- cally took up the issue of modernizing NATO’s TNF, especially since Germany kept on complaining that the United States would ignore the
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massive Soviet buildup of new improved medium-range nuclear missiles, the infamous SS-20s. In return, the reinforced American efforts caused trouble for the West German federal government. The Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt [AA]) correctly surmised that the German Cabinet (Bundesregierung) had cre- ated a rod for its own back: After constantly complaining that the United States would not care enough about the so-called “grey area systems”, Bonn could now not shrink away from the issue of TNF modernization without damaging its accountability. If the Cabinet, however, agreed to TNF modernization, serious quarrels would ensue within the two coali- tion parties, both of which were still indebted to the objective of fostering détente.10 At the Guadeloupe meeting among Jimmy Carter, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, James Callaghan, and Helmut Schmidt in January 1979,11 the chancellor therefore was anything but enthusiastic about Carter’s propo- sal to deploy new American missiles in Europe as a counterweight to Soviet SS-20s. Schmidt knew this would cause serious domestic unrest. To Callaghan he confessed that a public debate about the secret numbers of nuclear warheads already deployed in the country would unleash serious civil turmoil.12 Nevertheless, in Guadeloupe the course was set for the Dual-Track Decision, including the linkage between TNF modernization and a proposal to limit armament according to the success of previous dis- armament talks. As predicted, soon a public debate started. An article by Herbert Wehner, the leader of the SPD parliamentarian group, caused a stir by claiming that Soviet armament was not part of an aggressive policy but a sign of the historically well-founded Soviet paranoia about surprise attacks.13 West German diplomats were reporting that unwillingness among considerable factions within the FRG to go ahead with TNF moderniza- tion caused doubts abroad about the country’s commitment to the West.14 The federal government had to pay attention to foreign concerns as well as to the opposing demands of the peace camp at home. Therefore, at NATO’s Defense Planning Committee (DPC) meeting on May 15, 1979, Defense Minister Hans Apel (SPD) underscored the official FRG position that TNF modernization was unavoidable because the Soviet threat had increased and NATO had to demonstrate that it was still able to work smoothly (handlungsfähig); the latter would be important because disarmament talks would work only if NATO was strong.15
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The following day, at a meeting of leading foreign policy experts, the SPD was struggling to define the party’s position. Bahr demanded that the government reject TNF modernization because this would destroy détente, and without détente the SPD would lose elections. Brandt and Wehner refrained from commenting, and thus Schmidt and Apel won the day.16 In June a self-confident chancellor told US Secretary of Defense Harold Brown that the Dual-Track Decision would cause so much controversy that in some Western European countries the survival of governments might be at stake. His government, however, would have enough authority to stay in control.17 Three months later, Genscher and Schmidt were telling allied statesmen that they would resign if their parties would not endorse the Dual-Track.18 Probably that was a rhetorical device to demonstrate determination and to strengthen those NATO partners who faced strong domestic resistance. Together with London and Washington, Bonn did much to encourage shaken NATO allies like the Netherlands, Belgium, and Denmark to stay on board with the Dual-Track proposal. A unanimous decision was believed to be politically central. Therefore, the Bundesregierung paid more attention to peace protests in befriended countries than to the one at home. The German Cabinet regarded itself as the main proponent of equal and parallel treatment of both parts of the Dual-Track. On the one hand, Bonn was doing all it could to convince hesitant partners to support a conditioned TNF modernization. On the other hand, it made best use of the public unrest in the Benelux and Scandinavian countries as well as its own intraparty troubles to reinforce the necessity of a serious offer for arms control. Peace protests lent Bonn the support it needed in arguing that a strong disarmament part was needed to sustain détente and domes- tic stability within NATO. Thus Schmidt was pressing to announce the withdrawal of one thousand US nuclear warheads from Europe. He argued that this proposal could appease the nuclear uneasiness and broaden support for the Dual-Track.19 Compared to the extent of protests in the Netherlands, Belgium, Britain, Norway, and Denmark,20 there was surprisingly little unrest in West Germany. An astonished Norwegian foreign minister who won- dered about this was told that the government had consulted with all parliamentary organs a long time ago and that the Dual-Track would be seen as a device to accelerate disarmament talks.21 The tardiness of the West German peace protest can also be seen in the domestic coverage by the influential newspaper Der Spiegel. In December 1979 the ground- breaking Dual-Track Decision did not even once make it onto the
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magazine’s front page, whereas from 1981 onward Spiegel was together with Stern and Zeit spearheading the media front against “rearmament” (Nachrüsung).22 In a nutshell: During the genesis of the Dual-Track, the peace move- ment in West Germany was not yet a factor that government had to reckon with – quite in contrast to the situation in many other NATO countries. The reason for this backwardness can be found in the wide- spread feeling of allegiance toward NATO in a country divided and situated at the fault line of the Cold War, but also in the trust many West Germans placed in their government’s pledge that the threat with rearmament was the best way to force the USSR into real disarmament. The Bundesregierung itself was firmly convinced that NATO’s Dual- Track would not harm détente in the long run.23 However, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan brought détente to a standstill: The United States reacted harshly and adjourned the ratification of SALT II. Thus, the framework for disarmament talks between the superpowers concern- ing intermediate-range missiles collapsed.
Talking in Different Languages: Bundesregierung and the Peace Movement since 1980 The Bundesregierung struggled hard to keep détente alive. It was doing that out of its own convictions, for reasons of Ost- and Deutschlandpolitik.24 The peace movement didn’tneedtogivethe Cabinet any incentives. Bonn tried everything to get the superpowers into disarmament negotiations as planned in the Dual-Track. A central part of these efforts was a projected visit to Moscow by Schmidt and Genscher in order to break the East-West deadlock. However, mistrust about a kind of Soviet-German “Rapallo deal” was widespread. Suspicion grew when in April 1980, at elections caucuses of the SPD, the chancellor unilaterally proposed a moratorium for intermedium- range weapons. Schmidt argued that the time gained should be used for effective disarmament talks. Thehiatuswouldposenorisktothe West. For technical reasons it couldnotdeployPershingIIandCruise Missiles earlier than 1983, whereas such a disruption would effectively stop further Soviet armament.25 Schmidt’s proposal could indeed be read as a moratorium bringing any further deployment of SS-20sto astandstill.Ontheotherhanditcouldbeunderstoodasaproposalfor a mutual freeze, thus cementing the unequal status quo in favor of the USSR.26 Therefore, the Foreign Office, the FDP, and the CDU/CSU
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objected. The American, British, and Belgian governments lodged diplo- matic protests because they feared damaging effects upon Belgium’s final decision about the deployment of its share of Ground-Launched Cruise Missiles (GLCM).27 Schmidt had to specify that he had intended only astopofdeployment,notofINF(Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) production. Thus only Soviet, not American, systems would be concerned.28 In June, Schmidt reiterated his ambiguous proposal.29 The US State Department was told that the chancellor’s speech was given mainly to appease a growing feeling of uneasiness within his party. The SPD was concerned about the deterioration of East-West relations and thus the Bundesregierung was struggling to sustain public support for NATO’sDual-TrackDecision.30 Furthermore, in the FRG, 1980 was a tough election year, and Schmidt was campaigning on the ticket of “peace politics” against the challenger from CDU/CSU, Franz Josef Strauß. However, this explanation of the domestic driving forces behind Schmidt’s proposal came too late. President Carter wrote an unusually blatant letter in order to kill this German Sonderweg once and for all.31 Schmidt felt deeply offended by this rebuke, which was immediately leaked to the press. These events ended in a heated argument at the eve of the Economic Summit in Venice, which Carter described as “the most unpleasant personal exchange I ever had with a foreign leader”.32 However, Schmidt got the go-ahead to visit Moscow – a journey he needed for international and electoral reasons. There the Bundesregierung succeeded in getting the USSR to restart nuclear disarmament talks with the United States.33 However, the US-Soviet preliminary exchanges in Geneva were soon stopped because Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan. It was Reagan’s takeover that immensely pushed peace movements all across the globe.34 In West Germany, the former actor was labeled by the media as a Cold War die-hard, a war-mongering maverick, a trigger- happy “cowboy”, and a very simple-minded man obsessed with anti- communism; in sum, a dangerous man who might spark off an accidental or even an intended Armageddon.35 This widespread distrust could also be found among the SPD-FDP coalition.36 By the end of 1980, the peace movement had become an important political factor in West Germany. The Foreign Office noted that this movement must not be underestimated. As much contact as possible should be sought with the “strategic com- munity” to meet this challenge: “The major burden should be borne by the political parties, but it is necessary to win additional support by civil
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servants, teachers, trade unionists and journalists who should get more engaged in that important issue in order to avoid leaving all up to the followers of an ‘alternative security policy.’”37 The government started to think about how to take the wind out of the peace movement’s sails. As a first measure it tried to improve its public relations policy, first and foremost by delivering more information about the complicated field of security policy and by better explaining these sophisticated issues to the public. In summer 1979 the AA started to plan an information booklet; a short outline of NATO’s defense philosophy should be given as well as an overview of the problems of disarmament. Presenting its arguments at a level easy to understand, the German Cabinet hoped to demonstrate that it did everything to avoid war and keep “peace in freedom” alive. In other words, the government wanted the technical jargon of experts to be kept to a minimum to make the booklet understandable for everyone.38 The well-known journalist Josef Joffe from Die Zeit was commissioned as ghostwriter for this task,39 but a lot of input was given by the Foreign Office. When the booklet Es geht um unsere Sicherheit (It’s about Our Security) was released in October 1980, the free seventy-two-page publication proved to be a bestseller.40 Four months later, the first print run of forty-three thousand copies was exhausted. More print runs were to follow, now cosponsored by the Defense Ministry (Bundesministerium der Verteidigung, BMVg) in order to get it broadly distributed by the Bundes- and Landeszentralen für politische Bildung or as teaching mate- rial in schools. In June 1981, another governmental booklet “Aspects of Peace Politics. Arguments concerning NATO’s Dual-Track” was published.41 In this joint project of the Federal Press Office (Bundespresseamt), BMVg, and AA, the most popular objections and “errors” of the peace camp were “rebutted” or corrected according to the government’s line. Within the administration, there was disagreement over how much space should be given in these materials to the adversaries’ arguments. Such disputes, for example, delayed until the end of 1982 the publication of a booklet specially aimed at schools. However, advocates for a balanced and nuanced approach usually prevailed, since most administrators under- stood that simple propaganda would be counterproductive. Protests on the street led the government to aim for transparency and careful explanations of its policy. Another example of this was the intro- duction in 1982 of an annual report to parliament about disarmament, in which military balances and disarmament had to be outlined publicly.42
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In some cases, pressure from peace activists indeed revealed more infor- mation than initially intended. In November 1980, Chancellor Schmidt told the American ambassador that the German public would go up in flames if it knew that nukes were deployed near most of its cities. Only three months later, however, the magazine Stern revealed the location of these nuclear sites.43 In the end, success of public relations policy remained limited. The main reason was that all lengthy reports and booklets were tough reading. Moreover, these publications were still narrowly focused on military facts and didn’t challenge – as did the peace movement – the axiom of nuclear security policy: the philosophy of deterrence. However, large numbers of peace advocates simply rejected the “inhumane”, alleg- edly weird logic of nuclear defense politics. This focus on deterrence, however, remained the cornerstone of NATO because it was just at the end of the 1980s that the outnumbered conventional forces of NATO were believed to be strong enough to counterbalance the larger Warsaw Pact Forces without “going nuclear”. Thus, disciples and opponents of the Dual-Track kept thinking along totally different lines of logic. Not surprisingly, the Bundesregierung’s information policy found no key to disperse the widespread feeling of angst among the “peaceniks”,44 because its arguments did not pay attention to the important emotional side of their protest. This does not imply that the peace movement was not bringing forward serious arguments, too. Quite to the contrary, peace and conflict studies (Friedens- und Konfliktforschung) got a huge boost, as think tanks for an “alternative defense policy” were either popping up or expanding.45 The emergence of a culture of counterexperts gave the peace movement much of its clout in public debates. Serious doubts were raised when well-known scientists such as Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker and former high-ranking members of the Bundeswehr such as General Gert Bastian, General Wolf Graf Baudissin, and Lieutenant-Colonel Alfred Mechtersheimer were speaking out publicly against the Euromissiles. The common claim made by Dual-Track supporters that their opponents were remote-controlled by Moscow was simply not convincing when applied to esteemed public figures such as these.46 Publications of counterexperts were therefore thoroughly analyzed within the adminis- tration in order to show mistakes and errors of data, judgment, and interpretations.47 However, the Bundesregierung soon realized that it was not very useful to confute ex officio the theses of the counterexperts because that was perceived as crude propaganda. Therefore the Cabinet
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tried to get journalists or scientists with close ties to the government – such as members of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik) and the German Council on Foreign Relations (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik) – to dismantle the counterexperts’ arguments. That proved difficult, because on the one hand simply none of these professionals wanted to be regarded as a spineless mouthpiece of government. On the other hand, the news media were more interested in flashy horror scenarios of those predicting the dangers of accidental Armageddon than those rather “boring” experts of traditional security policy.48 Moreover, the diverging military data that was presented not only by antagonistic experts but also by different national governments or agencies within NATO had devastating effects that soon undermined the reliability of the information and statistics presented – and thus the seriousness of threat scenarios based on those data. In sum, this “loss of credibility” hurt the governmental side of the Dual-Track issue. Additional restrictions to public relations efforts were built up by allied partners. In April 1980 the Bundesregierung wanted to make best use of the fact that the unilateral withdrawal of one thousand US nuclear warheads had begun. By publishing this, Bonn hoped to counterbalance the Warsaw Pact’s fervent propaganda campaign that glorified the with- drawal of some Soviet troops from the GDR. Bonn saw a chance to demonstrate convincingly to the public that NATO was seriously inter- ested in disarmament and that even the deployment of 108 Pershing II and 464 GLCMs according to the Dual-Track would not boost the importance of nuclear weapons in NATO strategy.49 However, Washington vetoed any briefing in time because it feared that this might cause demonstrations or even terrorist attacks. Therefore, the news of the nukes’ withdrawal was buried in a DPC communiqué from December 1980.50 From a public relations’ point of view, this was a complete failure because the substantial nuclear disarmament step did not make any headlines and therefore could not score any points with peace activists. This PR disaster was repeated in October 1983 when NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group decided at its meeting in Montebello, Canada, to withdraw an additional fourteen hundred warheads within the next years.51 Although that meant the dismantling of more than double the number of Euromissiles deployed in November, it was, of course, the Euromissiles that stood in the spotlight of media interest – and not the Montebello decision! At the end of the day, the Bundesregierung tried to overcome peace protests less through PR activities than by pressing ahead with its policy
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inspired by the “Harmel formula” of securing peace by a balanced mixture of détente and defense politics, as it was laid down in the Dual- Track Decision. Knowing that the blossom of the peace movement was also partly due to the Cold War rhetoric of the Reagan administration, Bonn tried hard to cool down its leading ally. In the Cabinet, the chancel- lor asked everyone to mobilize his US contacts in order to push the administration to start disarmament negotiations with the USSR. Only this step would wrest away the protestors’ argument that Washington was only interested in getting the Euromissiles deployed but did not care about the arms control part of the Dual-Track.52 Referring to peace protests and the challenge, it meant for the Bundesregierung’s and other Western European governments’ ability to maintain order would therefore be a helpful tool to move Washington in the direction of a less bellicose policy. In a similar way, Bonn tried hard to convince the other superpower that Reagan’s zero-option proposal was not just propaganda but had to be taken seriously as an offer that was initiated, recommended, and consulted in conjunction with the FRG.53 In November 1981 the federal government outlined to Brezhnev that every future government in Bonn would implement the Dual-Track. Therefore, it would be counterproduc- tive for the Soviet Union to support wholeheartedly the peace protests in the West. Schmidt warned that in case his government should fall, it would get replaced by a conservative, less détente-minded government and not by the “peaceniks” on the street whom the Eastern bloc was counting on.54 This prophecy turned out to be right, but it did not have recognizable effects on Soviet policy. One can say for the record that, first, in West Germany the peace movement did not have to push a resentful government into pursuing a policy of détente and disarmament. Right from the start, it was the aim of the SPD-FDP government to get an East-West military balance at a reduced level of nuclear arsenals. Second, the emerging opposition of peace protests helped the Bundesregierung to present itself as a proponent of a middle-of-the-road approach. Internationally, the peace movement willy-nilly helped to augment the effectiveness of the government’s attempts to boost détente by claiming that a less forthcoming US policy might endanger political stability within European countries. Third, protests forced the Bundesregierung to pay more attention to justifying its own politics in order to refute the peace movement’s arguments. This, however, had nearly no effect on the peace protests.
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Therefore, Chancellor Schmidt who had campaigned as “peace chancel- lor” ended up as a demonized “missiles chancellor”. On the other hand, protests, too, did not fundamentally change the Dual-Track policy that the Schmidt-Genscher administration pursued steadfastly since 1979. So, seen from a mainly foreign policy perspective, peace movements had a rather limited influence on the government’s policy but nevertheless, since 1980, it was definitively a factor that Bonn had to deal with, especially because questions of peace and security heavily shook up the dominant ruling party, the SPD.
Social Democrats between Support and Rejection of the Dual-Track Decision West Germany’s Social Democrats were greatly influenced by the peace movement in determining their stance toward rearmament.55 Whereas the SPD had decided to support the TNF decision in 1979, innerparty opposition grew constantly in the following years. Helmut Schmidt and Hans Apel, who were the most tenacious supporters of the Dual-Track policy in the SPD, found themselves challenged by a rising protest, headed by the party’s youth, women, and many local and regional organizations. As a result of active opposition to the missiles, the once-disciplined ruling party was coming apart, and it soon seemed doubtful that Schmidt would remain in power under such pressure. SPD members voiced numerous objections against rearmament. First, there was a deep concern about détente, which was the key element of social democratic foreign policy. According to Willy Brandt, everything had to be done to make this détente policy “indestructible”.56 Yet, the party’s chairman regarded the alliance’s decision as a threat to the pursuit of his life’s work, Ostpolitik, and less as a means to strengthen the military capabilities of NATO.57 It was the immense buildup of nuclear arms and increasing hostility between the superpowers that led Brandt and many fellow party members to suspect the possibility of war.58 As the arsenals grew, they forecasted nuclear accidents or even preemptive strikes. Most of all, however, they feared the US conception of a limited nuclear war, which, from their perspective, could result only in the devastation of Europe. Thus, they criticized the way in which the Reagan administration negotiated in Geneva and demanded dramatic attempts to avert a new turn of the East-West armament spiral.59 In their opinion, only a negotia- tion outcome between Americans and Soviets was acceptable. Social Democrats in Brandt’s circle supported NATO’s decision as a bargaining
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chip for the reduction of Soviet missiles. Simultaneously, they viewed the stationing of Pershing II and Cruise Missiles skeptically.60 Claiming that their goal was to cut the military budget, they sought to bulk up develop- ment programs in the Third World.61 Otherwise, they aimed to put more money into the welfare state. It was remarkable, too, that Social Democrats started to rethink the official NATO doctrine with its quintes- sential agenda of equilibrium and deterrence. Egon Bahr, for instance, suggested replacing this strategy by the “common security” conception (Gemeinsame Sicherheit) in the long run, which was developed by the Olof Palme commission.62 For some party members, Bahr’s “common security” seemed to offer a suitable way to overcome deterrence while remaining obliged to nuclear armament – at least for the time being. It was part of his conception, he stressed, to withdraw all nuclear weapons from those countries that did not dispose of them.63 Therefore, a nuclear-free corridor could be established in Central Europe. Concerns about the political course of Chancellor Schmidt and his government led to the renegotiation of the party’s stance toward the Dual- Track Decision. In 1979, SPD had decided to follow NATO’s move. A convention in Berlin judged it necessary to start talks on the Soviet SS-20 missiles, stressing more strongly the need for negotiation than for rearmament.64 But opposition increased immediately as US-Soviet rela- tions broke down in early 1980. Even SPD members of parliament raised doubts concerning the official security policy of their government.65 A regional convention in Aalen urged the party to fine-tune its Berlin decision; several Social Democrats signed the so-called Bielefeld Appeal pointing out the danger of the arms race; party members participated in the great peace rally in Bonn on October 10, 1981. It was only with difficulty and the threat of resignation that Chancellor Schmidt did succeed in acquiring the support of his party.66 Obviously, the SPD was on track to reject NATO’s deployment, if negotiations should fail. The watershed in this development was, as is known, the loss of power by Schmidt in September 1982. Back in opposition, more and more Social Democrats voiced their demand for reinforcing détente and disarmament. Just like the government, the party leadership was facing troubles when dealing with the peace movement, partly because many Social Democrats viewed themselves as adherents of the movement.67 It was especially the grass roots of the party (Ortsvereine, Unterbezirke) that searched for cooperation with peace activists.68 A significant number of SPD voters, too, supported or took part in peace rallies. Hence, the party leadership had to apply itself to the movement.69 That became evident in 1983 as
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a publication of the SPD Bundestag group considered the peace movement an associate (Bundesgenosse).70 According to Brandt, it was necessary that the party remain open-minded to new social movements and to their incentives.71 Among other things, this question led to conflicts between Schmidt and Brandt. Whereas the chancellor argued that the peace move- ment’s worries were unjustified and driven by irrational fears, the party’s chairman stressed the likelihood of an actual arms race leading up to nuclear war, a concern that he found well echoed by peace activism.72 Under the influence of Brandt, the SPD got in touch with main prota- gonists of the peace movement such as Gert Bastian, Petra Kelly, and Rudolf Bahro, on such occasions as at a peace convention (Friedensforum) organized by the Erich Ollenhauer Haus, the party’s headquarters.73 Even if this meeting displayed clearly the still-remarkable differences between social democracy and the peace movement in 1981, the networking grew tighter before the protests’ culmination in 1983. An important step toward strengthening the ties was the decision by SPD party manager Peter Glotz to hire Wolfgang Biermann, a leader in the movement’s coordinating committee in Bonn (and not to be confused with the GDR dissident and songwriter), as assistant in the study of arms control and disarmament at the Erich Ollenhauer Haus.74 Biermann came to be a vital figure mediating between the party and the movement in the following years, and he proved to be a driving force on the road to a closer con- vergence with the peace movement. After having lost power in September 1982, Social Democrats at the Cologne convention the next year were prompted by their intraparty quarrels to reject the stationing of Euromissiles after arms control nego- tiations had failed in Geneva. The SPD declared that it was not convinced that all efforts had been taken to achieve an agreement. Therefore, the party argued for the talks’ continuation.75 This move was supported by the overwhelming majority of the party and concluded the long-lasting quarrels on the missiles; only fourteen members kept insisting that the stationing had to be implemented, among them Helmut Schmidt. What is crucial is the fact that large numbers of the SPD members were hardly eager to separate from peace activism.76 This was especially true of Social Democrats such as Erhard Eppler and Oskar Lafontaine,77 whose stance toward nuclear armament sheds light upon the widespread uneasi- ness concerning the TNF decision in the SPD as well as in many corners of German society. Whereas Schmidt and Apel perceived security to be improved by NATO’s Dual-Track Decision, these Social Democrats saw Western rearmament as a factor of uncertainty. Eppler and Lafontaine
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opposed nuclear weapons on the grounds that they jeopardized European security. Stressing the hazard, they argued that the stationing of weapons capable of eliminating Moscow, without any warning, could force the Soviet Union to initiate a first strike against Western Europe.78 In their view, the accelerating production of new weaponry seemed to make nuclear warfare possible and thus more likely.79 Eppler and Lafontaine understood people’s general living conditions to be highly imperiled by the missiles. Insofar, their reasoning was fueled by the widely discussed Armageddon scenario. Seeing it from a historian’s perspective, their cri- tique on atomic weapons has to be analyzed as an integral part of the history of risk societies in the Western world. Antinuclear protests in the SPD were driven by the perception of a loss of security, which had a far-reaching impact on the party’s world of thought.80 Along with these arguments, the stance against nuclear weapons even gained an ethical dimension, at a juncture where the views on atomic weapons in the SPD and the peace movement coincided. Although the party’s Godesberger Programm postulated that nuclear weapons should be abandoned in the future,81 nuclear or general pacifism never was the consensus among party members. There was a widespread pragmatic attitude that atomic armament does exist and will not disappear overnight. Nevertheless, Eppler and Lafontaine articulated a deep and profound scepticism on nuclear (but not explicitly on conventional) warfare. Starting from a fundamental critique of nuclear technology, they identified the existence of nuclear weapons as the core problem of contemporary security policy.82 Eppler held, as did the peace movement, that it was morally not justifiable to link conventional war to its nuclear version since he did not regard nuclear weapons as an appropriate means for warfare. According to him and to many peace activists, nuclear armament could only annihilate mankind. He subsequently judged it to be ethically illegitimate to maintain nuclear weapons.83 Following Lafontaine, the only way to overcome the “psychological stunting”84 that resulted from think- ing in the categories of deterrence and victory was to choose a life without any form of violence. In his book Scared by Our Friends (Angst vor den Freunden), he argued that humankind had to learn to act nonviolently and to dismiss nuclear power if human life was to endure.85 The emotionally uttered speech not to endanger humankind by menacing it with nuclear weapons was closely related to the demand to protect the planet, both driven by the morally justified fear of an annihilation of humankind. It is remarkable how close nuclear pacifism and ecological concerns were con- nected – the latter having been the other important impetus for Eppler.86
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To sum up the sketched paradigm, one can stress that peace activists within the SPD perceived atomic technology to be ethically unjustifiable. The fact that one incident could result in the often cited “accidental Armageddon” was repeatedly pointed out by Eppler, Lafontaine, and the peace movement in general.87 They doubted, in short, the moral integrity of a defense resting on nuclear weapons, capable of rendering humankind extinct.
Nuclear Anxieties and the Skepticism on Modernity To broaden the perspective from the elite to the whole social democratic spectrum, it seems obvious that the discourse on Euromissiles, besides stirring up moral reservations, was driven by nuclear fears. One can even go so far as to argue that anxieties over nuclear extinction were the innerparty opposition’s gist in arguing against NATO’s decision.88 This has to be seen as part of the aforementioned discourse about the risk to society. Some folders in the party’s archive in Bonn bear witness to these contemporary fears. During the “nuclear crisis”, thousands of letters, cards, and petitions were sent to the central office in Bonn. In one of them, a young woman wrote the simple words: “I am afraid” (Ich habe Angst). She was “fearing for my life which I started 25 years ago. As my life and the lives of all other people in the Federal Republic are in great danger of being annihilated. [ ... ] You are able and you are obliged to avoid this danger. The government and therewith the SPD is responsible for the lives of the citizens and not for the military strategies of the USA calculating on Europe’s extinction. I am urging you to withdraw your consent to NATO’s ‘dual-track’ decision”.89 This letter was one of the more comprehensive mailings. Others were shorter in content and stron- ger in explicitness. For instance, some party members sent plain postcards to Bonn, which showed awful looking human bodies distorted by nuclear radiation. Another card, without return address, illustrated in capital letters the stark sentence “I am afraid of nuclear death” (Ich habe Angst vor dem Atomtod). An SPD member from Bavaria announced that he was afraid of the “destruction of our planet by madmen! Please help stop this madness. Behave like Social Democrats!”90 What is more important than all these many slips of paper, which were sent to the SPD headquarters and which encapsulated this one sentence “I am afraid of nuclear death”, is the fact that it was an astonishing number of party members who did not only oppose NATO’s decision but also feared atomic weapons in a very general way. Nuclear anxieties,
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therefore, shattered extended branches of the German Social Democratic Party.91 The political and cultural discourse on atomic armament can be seen as centering around the phenomenon of nuclear fears that arose from skepticism toward modernity and progress and that reflected a deep distrust of the modern age. As Eckart Conze has observed, the peace movement articulated a new and profound critique of the postwar indus- trial and technological modernity that had emerged since 1945.92 This was also true for widespread views in SPD circles. From policymakers like Eppler and Lafontaine to simple sympathizers who participated in peace demonstrations, many party members no longer shared faith in progress, but questioned the assumptions of modernity in a sometimes radical way. The discourse on nuclear weapons catalyzed the Social Democratic dis- comfort with respect to the accelerating production of new weaponry that made nuclear warfare possible and thus more likely. Whereas scientific and technological progress once had been a source of security and prosperity, it was now seen as a factor of uncertainty. Opponents to nuclear rearmament perceived “modernity” and “progress” as a threat to their own security. In this way, nuclear fears are explainable as the con- crete manifestation of a changing mentality, including deeper worries culminating in the early 1980s. Expressing nuclear fears meant, therefore, to encapsulate anxieties over culture.
The Establishment’s Response and Differing Protest Cultures The apocalyptic terminology of SPD members centered on the views of Lafontaine as well as the head of the party’s Young Socialists, Gerhard Schröder, who expressed anxieties over an anticipated nuclear extinction of humankind, and contrasted sharply with the political rhetoric on fear offered by proponents of rearmament. In their discourse, the establish- ment milieu referred to the past and their war experience. In the Bundestag parliamentary meeting preceding the great 1981 antinuclear demonstra- tion in Bonn, Chancellor Schmidt explicated his view of the matter in an impressive speech addressing the protesting youth: “I would like to reas- sure those who fear for peace in our times: Last year I was afraid, too, after the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan ... and the contacts between the world powers had broken down. I was deeply frightened”.93 Schmidt continued by emphasizing that it was not enough to confess anxieties. He stressed it to be necessary to make tangible efforts to secure peace. Furthermore, he asked the “younger people” to respect his government’s struggle for peace and to trust the experience of those (himself included)
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who had suffered through World War II, who had witnessed air-raid shelters at home and battles abroad, who were dispelled or survived concentration camps. “We request that you take our worries seriously too, our anxieties that are leading us to consequences today ... that our undeniable life experiences of fifty and sixty years is taken seriously”.94 Drawing upon memories of personal wartime experiences and more than thirty years of Cold War in the international political arena, Schmidt and other leading Social Democrats uttered a special form of fear that was driven by anxieties over an insecure system of balance and deterrence. Whereas this older generation seemed to be afraid when thinking of war and of Soviet expansionism, thus representing anxieties only to be justified by past individual experiences, the younger articulated fears for the future. Schmidt did not understand these anxieties and thus denied the related mentality its political relevance. In his eyes, a collective expecta- tion of the future, lacking any individually experienced background, was not a reliable political and mental guide.95 Conversely, members of the protest milieu, who did not suffer war and had grown up in prosperity, rejected Schmidt’s representation as stuck in the past and incapable of anticipating actual contemporary dangers. In this way, representations on the part of two different generations clashed. However, different stances toward nuclear weapons were not only expressed politically but also emerged in nonverbal, performative manifestations.96 The party establishment, for instance, repeatedly felt betrayed by the protesters’ behavior. Especially by that of the Young Socialists, whose very choice of clothing offended the sensibilities of proponents for rearmament. Frequently, the young activists behaved in a lenient and lax manner that drastically contrasted from the ways of SPD statesmen. Schmidt and Eppler embodied these conflicting symbolic implications best – wearing different styles of clothes and showing con- trasting physical cultures. Since the chancellor attached importance to a serious and sophisticated appearance, dressing in business suits, he highlighted his reliability and credibility. By choosing a distinguished pronunciation, supported by his salubrious Hamburg accent, he expressed steadiness and an ability to assert himself. Therefore, he created the public image of an experienced, sapient, and reliable politician able to lead the country. Eppler, on the other hand, embodied the public image of an honest party underdog by regularly wearing turtleneck sweaters and blue jeans. Speaking in a melodious South German dialect, he appeared to his adherents as autochthonous and trustworthy. By referring to his Christian belief, he tried to gain credibility, too. Even the political staging
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of Schmidt and Eppler’s physical self-representation contrasted sharply. While Schmidt was accustomed to attending the Great Tattoo (Großen Zapfenstreich) with impeccable posture, Eppler was prone to taking part in sit-ins in front of military barracks and being carried away by police forces. To sum up, the contrasts between the two protagonists were obvious: on the one hand, the establishment man from the North, arguing in favor of international security needs and, on the other hand, the under- dog from the South, trying to get in touch with street demonstrations and sit-ins and thus articulating the demands of an antiestablishment protest milieu. Besides expressing dissent in terms of physical self-presentation, SPD dissidents often chose new protest forms that had their origins in the 1968 movement’s activities. Participation in street demonstrations, massive sit-ins, and spectacular actions at party conventions guaranteed enormous publicity for the protesting Social Democrats. Peace demonstrations therefore developed a very particular dynamic that was supported by media coverage. Vast segments of the population became politicized. The phenomenon of antinuclear protest in social democracy is not comprehensible without taking into account the fact that people with antiestablishment attitudes – of every age – were carried along by demonstrations. German political and social groups came together to prevent the deployment of Euromissiles, driven by nuclear fears and anxieties over culture. In struggling against nuclear rearmament, groups from left-leaning, Christian, and ecological backgrounds found their “minimal consent”.97 Everyone who wanted to participate in this alternative trend and who perceived the contemporary standards as unsatisfactory had to get involved in peace activism. Peace activism, therefore, occurred because of a movement that gathered aston- ishing momentum. For that reason, the dispute over nuclear rearmament was much more than an ordinary conflict of competing political goals within the Social Democratic Party, the SPD-FDP-Bundesregierung, and West Germany’s politics and society overall. Rather, it should be interpreted as a cultural discourse that deeply touched a protest milieu’s awareness of life, policy comprehension, and future expectation.
Conclusion How can we finally assess the peace movement’s impact on West Germany’s establishment? Whereas the government of Helmut Schmidt
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and, in just the same way, the one of Helmut Kohl, was on the road of a steadfastly pursued policy of détente and defense, the strong wakeup by millions of people actually did not change this course in principle. At the same time, Schmidt’s own party got traumatized by the protest against the anticipated Armageddon. During the debate, the SPD was thus read- justing its stance toward the dislocation of Euromissiles considerably. In trying to estimate the protests’ tangible influence on the political estab- lishment in Bonn, it is crucial to take seriously the complexity and inconsistency of the historical process. Accordingly, we cannot come to adefinitive conclusion on either the peace movement’s vigor or its fruit- fulness. Its impact was multifaceted enough to deserve further thoughtful evaluation.
Notes
1. Due to the German “thirty years” rule for national archives, this part will first and foremost concentrate on the years 1977 to 1981. Further work remains to be done because mass protests against NATO’s Dual-Track Decision started belatedly in the FRG and really took off after the Krefelder Appell from November 1980 and Evangelischer Kirchentag in Hamburg from June 1981. 2. Conversation of Foreign Minister Genscher with US Senators Nunn and Bartlett, Nov. 4, 1976, Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (AAPD) 1976 (Munich, 2007), Doc. 319. 3.Cf.EgonBahr, “Ist die Menschheit dabei, verrückt zu werden? Die Neutronenbombe ist ein Symbol der Perversion des Denkens”, Vorwärts, Jul. 21, 1977, 4;BahrtoSchmidt,ArchivdersozialenDemokratie(AdsD),Dep. Egon Bahr, 1/EBAA000954;HartmutSoell,Helmut Schmidt, Vol. 2:Machtund Verantwortung (Munich, 2008), 713.Forthefollowing,cf.Kristina Spohr Readman, “Germany and the Politics of the Neutron Bomb, 1975–79”, Diplomacy and Statecraft 21 (2010): 259–85. 4. Cf. Conversation Schmidt – Brzezinski, Sep. 27, 1977, AAPD 1977, Doc. 257. 5. Conversation Schmidt – Carter, Sep. 16, 1977, Politisches Archiv of Auswärtiges Amt (PA/AA), B 150/376. 6. Cf. meeting of Bundessicherheitsrat, Oct. 6, 1977, AAPD 1977, Doc. 275. 7. Cf. meeting of Bundessicherheitsrat, Nov. 9, 1977, AAPD 1977, Doc. 318. 8.JürgenMöllemann,Klartext. Für Deutschland (Munich, 2003), 73;Helmut Kohl and Franz Josef Strauß, in Union in Deutschland Nr. 16/1978,pp.5–6, http://www.kas.de/wf/doc/kas_25874-544-1-30.pdf?110826092418. 9. Cf. for the following AAPD 1978, Doc. 23; Thomas Risse-Kappen, Null- Lösung. Entscheidungsprozesse zu den Mittelstreckenwaffen 1970–1987 (Frankfurt/Main, New York, 1988), 41.
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10. Cf. memorandum of Ministerialdirektor (MD) Kinkel, Oct. 12, 1978, AAPD 1978, Doc. 308. 11. Cf. AAPD 1979, Doc. 1–5; PREM 16/2049, The National Archives, Kew (UK); Helmut Schmidt, Menschen und Mächte (Berlin, 1991), 231–34; Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Le pouvoir et la vie. Vol. 2:L’affrontement (Paris, 1991), 368–85; James Callaghan, Time and Change (London, 1987), 541–50; Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (Toronto, New York, 1982), 234–35; Zbiegniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser 1977–1981 (New York, 1993), 279–80. See also Kristina Spohr, “Helmut Schmidt and the Shaping of Western Security in the Late 1970s: the Guadeloupe Summit of 1979”, International History Review 37 (2015): 167–92. 12. Conversation Schmidt – Callaghan, Mar. 13, 1979, AAPD 1979, Doc. 79. 13. Herbert Wehner, “Deutsche Politiker auf dem Prüfstand”, Die Neue Gesellschaft 24 (1979): 92–94. 14. Cablegram 384 Gesandter Pfeffer, NATO, Mar. 28, 1979, AAPD 1979, Doc. 93. See also ibid., Docs. 87, 100. 15. Memo of Vortragender Legationsrat I. Klasse (VLR I) Hofmann, May 16, 1979, PA/AA, Ref. 201, Bd. 120224. 16. Cf. Hans Apel, Der Abstieg. Politisches Tagebuch eines Jahrzehnts 1978–1988 (Stuttgart, 1990), 82–83; Horst Ehmke, Mittendrin. Von der Großen Koalition zur Deutschen Einheit (Berlin, 1994), 308; Egon Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit (Munich, 1996), 508–9; Bahr to Schmidt, Jun. 2, 1979, AdsD, Dep. Egon Bahr, 1/EBAA000953. 17. Cablegram 2166, Ambassador von Staden, Washington, DC, Jun. 11, 1979, AAPD 1979, Doc. 175. Similarly Conversation Schmidt – Belgian Prime Minister Martens, Jun. 12, 1979, ibid., Doc. 176. 18. Cf. conversation Genscher – Dutch Leader of CDA parliamentary group, Lubbers, Sep. 6, 1979, PA/AA, Ref. 201, Bd. 120235; Schmidt – Italian President Pertini, Sep. 19, 1979, AAPD 1979, Doc. 272; Schmidt – Greek Prime Minister Karamanlis, Oct. 20, 1979, Doc. 300. 19.TelephoneconversationCarter– Schmidt, Oct. 30, 1979,AAPD1979,Doc.312. 20. Cf. Lawrence Wittner, Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford, 2003), 64–71. 21. Conversation Genscher – Frydenlund, Nov. 21, 1979, AAPD 1979, Doc. 340. 22. Cf. http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/index-1979.html; memo VLR Citron, Nov. 17, 1981, PA/AA, Ref. 220, Bd. 123096. 23. Cf. conversation Schmidt – Polish Foreign Minister Wojtazek, Dec. 19, 1979; conversation Genscher – Soviet Ambassador Semyonov, Dec. 21, 1979, AAPD 1979, Doc. 386, 388. 24. Cf. Oliver Bange, “‘Keeping Détente Alive’: Inner-German relations under Helmut Schmidt and Erich Honecker, 1974–1982”, in Leopoldo Nuti, ed.,
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The Crisis of Détente in Europe (London, New York, 2009), 230–43; Tim Geiger, “Die Regierung Schmidt-Genscher und der NATO- Doppelbeschluss”, in Philipp Gassert, Tim Geiger, Hermann Wentker, eds., Zweiter Kalter Krieg und Friedensbewegung. Der NATO-Doppelbeschluss in deutsch-deutscher und internationaler Perspektive (Munich, 2011), 114–20. 25. Cf. Schmidt’s speeches in Hamburg, Apr. 11, 1980, http://library.fes.de/cgi- bin/digibert.pl?id=002414&dok=26/002414, and Essen, Apr. 12, 1980, AAPD 1980, Doc. 111. 26. Cf. Soell, Schmidt, 750; Klaus Wiegrefe, Das Zerwürfnis. Helmut Schmidt, Jimmy Carter und die Krise der deutsch-amerikanischen Beziehungen (Berlin, 2005), 355–56. 27. Memo of Ambassador Ruth, Apr. 16, 1980, and Memo of VLR I Citron, Apr. 22, 1980, AAPD 1980, Doc. 113, 126. 28. Schmidt’s press conference, Apr. 17, 1980, memo of Ref. 220, Apr. 18, 1980, PA/AA, B 150/477. 29. Cf. speech in Essen, Jun. 9, 1980, AAPD 1980, Doc. 175. 30. Cf. Conversation Staatssekretär van Well – Deputy Secretary of State Christopher, Jun. 16, 1980, AAPD 1980, Doc. 172. 31. Cf. memo VLR I Citron, Jun. 13, 1980, AAPD 1980, Doc. 170; Carter, Keeping Faith, 536. 32. Carter, Keeping Faith, 537. German memo of conversation in AAPD 1980, Doc. 182;fortheAmericanone,http://www.margaretthatcher.org/docu ment/1C6C76656BC34ADCA3217AF1D80097DF.pdf. 33. For the Moscow talks, see AAPD 1980, Docs. 192–95. 34. Cf. Wittner, Toward Nuclear Abolition, 130–54. 35. Cf. e.g. “Reagan: Wir dürfen nicht zimperlich sein”, Der Spiegel 7 (1981): 100–109. 36. Cf. Cablegram 1756 ambassador Ruhfus, London, Nov. 6, 1980, PA/AA, Ref. 204, Bd. 115970; Memo MD Blech, Nov. 5, 1980, PA/AA, B 150/490. 37. Memo VLR I Citron, Dec. 22, 1980, PA/AA, Ref. 222, Bd. 123134. 38. Memo VLR I Ellerkmann, Jun. 25, 1979, PA/AA, Ref. 220, Bd. 124475. 39. Memo VLR von Jagow, Aug. 16, 1979, PA/AA, Ref. 221, Bd. 116913. 40. Cf. Memo MD Hansen, Dec. 15, 1980, PA/AA, Bd. 220, Bd. 124475. 41. Federal Press Office, ed., Aspekte der Friedenspolitik: Argumente zum Doppelbeschluß des Nordatlantischen Bündnisses (Bonn, 1981). 42. Report of the Foreign Relations Committee, Mar. 12, 1982, Dt. Bundestag, 9. Wahlperiode, Drucksache 9/1464, http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/09/ 014/0901464.pdf. 43. Memo MD von Staden, Nov. 17, 1980, PA/AA, B 150/491; “Die versteckte Atommacht”, Stern 19 (1981): 26–34. Former members of Stasi, the Secret Service of the GDR, claim that they gave this intelligence information to the magazine, cf. Günter Bohnsack and Herbert Brehmer, Auftrag Irreführung: Wie die Stasi Politik im Westen machte (Hamburg, 1992), 118.In1981, the
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American counterexpert Admiral La Rocque was supposed to be a source of the article, cf. conversation Schmidt – Secretary of State Haig, Apr. 11, 1981, AAPD 1981, Doc. 106. 44. Judith Michel, “‘Die Angst kann lehren, sich zu wehren.’ Der Angstdiskurs der westdeutschen Friedensbewegung in den 1980er Jahren”, Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 38 (2010): 246–69. 45. Corinna Hauswedell, Friedenswissenschaften im Kalten Krieg: Friedensforschung und friedenswissenschaftliche Initiativen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in den achtziger Jahren (Baden-Baden, 1997). 46. Ironically, this was not completely wrong either. Bastian and Baudessin took part in the campaign “Generals for Peace”, which was inspired by the GDR. Cf. Jochen Staadt, “Die SED and die ‘Generale für den Frieden,’” in Jürgen Maruhn and Manfred Wilke, eds., Raketenpoker um Europa: Das sowjetische SS-20-Abenteuer und die Friedensbewegung (Munich, 2000), 270–80. 47. E.g., the AA dismembered the flawed use of data in studies of deputy director of Hamburger Institut für Friedens- und Konfliktforschung, Dieter S. Lutz. Cf. Memo VLR I Hofmann, Dec. 19, 1979, PA/AA, Ref. 201, Bd. 120241, memo VLR I Citron, Nov. 9, 1981, PA/AA, Ref. 012-9, Bd. 125988. 48. Cf. Memo VLR I Citron, Jul. 20, 1981, PA/AA, Ref. 220, Bd. 123097. 49. Cf. Memo Ministerialdirigent Dröge, May 5, 1980, AAPD 1980, Doc. 135. 50. http://www.nato.int/docu/comm/49-95/c801209a.htm. 51. http://www.nato.int/docu/comm/49-95/c831027a.htm. 52. Cf. “Memo Häber, Jun. 29, 1981”, in Die Häber-Protokolle: Schlaglichter der SED-Westpolitik 1973–1985 (Berlin, 1999), 286. 53. Cf. Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Erinnerungen (Berlin, 1995), 424. 54. Cf. Schmidt, Menschen und Mächte, 126; AAPD 1981, Docs. 334–41. 55. Cf. Jan Hansen, “Making Sense of Détente. German Social Democrats and the Peace Movement in the early 1980s”, in Zeitgeschichte 40 (2013): 107–21; Hansen, Abschied vom Kalten Krieg? Die Sozialdemokraten und der Nachrüstungsstreit (1977–1987) (Berlin/Boston, 2016). 56. Willy Brandt, Die Entspannung unzerstörbar machen: Internationale Beziehungen und deutsche Frage 1974–1982, ed. Frank Fischer (Bonn, 2003). 57. Cf. Willy Brandt to Leonid Brezhnew, Oct. 13, 1982, AdsD, Dep. Egon Bahr, 1/EBAA000951. 58. Cf. Bundesvorstand der Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Jungsozialisten (Jusos), “Resolution des Bundeskongresses vom 26. bis 28. Juni 1981 in Lahnstein”, Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 26 (1981): 882–83. 59. Cf. Hermann Scheer, “Verhandlungsdogmatismus überwinden”, Die Neue Gesellschaft 30 (1983): 396–99. 60. Cf. Egon Bahr, “Zehn Thesen über Frieden und Abrüstung”, in Hans Apel et al., eds., Sicherheitspolitik contra Frieden? Ein Forum zur Friedensbewegung (Bonn, 1981), 10–17.
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61. Cf. Willy Brandt, Introductory Speech at the Socialist International’s Congress in Madrid, Nov. 13, 1980, AdsD, Willy-Brandt-Archiv (WBA), A10.1 Rosen, 186. 62. Cf. Egon Bahr, “Gemeinsame Sicherheit: Einführende Überlegungen”, in Egon Bahr and Dieter S. Lutz, eds., Gemeinsame Sicherheit. Idee und Konzept: Zu den Ausgangsüberlegungen, Grundlagen und Strukturmerkmalen gemeinsa- mer Sicherheit (Baden-Baden, 1986), 15–27. 63. Cf. Egon Bahr to Horst Ehmke, Jan. 11, 1983, AdsD, WBA, A10.1 Rosen, 188. 64. Minutes of the Social Democratic Party Congress in Berlin, Dec. 3–7, 1979, Vol. 2: Applications and Decisions (Bonn, 1979), 1228–44. 65. Cf. Karsten D. Voigt, Written Record of a Speech delivered to the SPD Bundestag Group, Feb. 20, 1981, AdsD, Dep. Karsten D. Voigt, H 58. 66. Cf. Main Motion at the SPD Baden-Württemberg Party Convention in Aalen, Mar. 24, 1981, AdsD, Dep. Egon Bahr, 1/EBAA000838; “Bielefelder Appell”, Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 26 (1981): 118–20. 67. Cf. Wolfgang Biermann to Peter Glotz et al., “Von SPD und Gewerkschaften getragene Aktivitäten in und gegenüber der Friedensbewegung”, Jun. 25, 1982, AdsD, Dep. Karsten D. Voigt, H 39. 68. Cf. for instance the board’s circular letter to the members of the SPD organization in Bonn, Oct. 1, 1983, AdsD, Dep. Horst Ehmke, 1/HEAA000875. 69. Wolfgang Biermann to Peter Glotz et al., “Strategie der SPD gegenüber der Friedensbewegung”, Mar. 10, 1983, AdsD, Dep. Karsten D. Voigt, H 120. 70. “Beschluss des SPD-Bundesvorstandes zu friedenspolitischen Aktivitäten vom 27. Juni 1983”, in SPD-Bundestagsfraktion, ed., Vor der Genfer Entscheidung: Friedenspolitische Aktivitäten der SPD im Herbst 1983 (Bonn, 1983), 22–23. 71. Willy Brandt, Die Partei der Freiheit: Willy Brandt und die SPD 1972–1992, ed. Karsten Rudolph (Bonn, 2002), Doc. 79, pp. 354–63; for further reading, cf. Judith Michel, “Dissociation and Cooperation: Willy Brandt, the United States and the New Social Movements”, in Jan Hansen, Christian Helm, and Frank Reichherzer, eds., Making Sense of the Americas: How Protest Related to America in the 1980s and Beyond (Frankfurt, 2015), 293–310. 72. Cf. Meeting of SPD Präsidium, Sep. 29, 1981, AdsD, Helmut-Schmidt-Archiv (HSA), 1/HSAA006324. 73. Cf. the published contributions in Apel, Sicherheitspolitik contra Frieden? 74. Cf. Peter Glotz to members of SPD Präsidium, Oct. 9, 1981, AdsD, HSA, 1/HSAA009872. 75. Cf. Minutes of the Social Democratic Party Congress in Cologne, Nov. 18–19, 1983 (Bonn, 1983), 196–200. 76. According to Thomas Leif, there was a distinct Social Democratic spectrum in the peace movement. Cf. Thomas Leif, Die strategische (Ohn-)Macht der
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Friedensbewegung: Kommunikations- und Entscheidungsstrukturen in den achtziger Jahren (Opladen, 1990), 46–50, 188. 77. Eppler was chairman of the SPD organization Baden-Württemberg. Lafontaine was mayor of Saarbrücken. 78. Cf. Erhard Eppler, Die tödliche Utopie der Sicherheit (Reinbek near Hamburg, 1983), 18–25; Oskar Lafontaine, “Die Begriffe der heutigen Sicherheitspolitik stimmen nicht mehr: Über Null-Option, Gleichgewicht und die unterschiedli- chen Sicherheitsinteressen von Amerikanern und Europäern”, Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 26 (1981): 1323–27. 79. Erhard Eppler, “Referat auf dem Bundeskongress der Jusos vom 26. bis 28. Juni 1981 in Lahnstein”, in Lutz Plümer, ed., Positionen der Friedensbewegung: Die Auseinandersetzung um den US-Mittelstreckenraketenbeschluss. Dokumente, Appelle, Beiträge (Frankfurt/Main, 1981), 46–59; Oskar Lafontaine, Angst vor den Freunden: Die Atomwaffenstrategie der Supermächte zerstört die Bündnisse (Reinbek near Hamburg, 1983), 31, 68, 86. 80. Cf. Eckart Conze, Die Suche nach Sicherheit: Eine Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland von 1949 bis in die Gegenwart (Munich, 2009), 502–3, 536–44. 81. Cf. The Social Democratic Party’s Godesberger Program (Bonn, 1959), 12, http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bibliothek/retro-scans/fa-57721.pdf. 82. Cf. Eppler, Utopie der Sicherheit, 101; Eppler did not perceive himself as a nuclear pacifist: Eppler, Wege aus der Gefahr (Reinbek near Hamburg, 1985), 212; Lafontaine, Angst vor den Freunden, 116–17. 83. Eppler, Utopie der Sicherheit, 101; Eppler to US Christians, Aug. 20, 1983, AdsD, Dep. Erhard Eppler, 1/EEAC000187. 84. Lafontaine, Angst vor den Freunden, 116. 85. Ibid., 116–17. 86. Cf. for instance Eppler, Utopie der Sicherheit, 156. 87.Cf.theresolutionbythecongressoftheArbeitsgemeinschaft sozialde- mokratischer Frauen (AsF) in Bonn, Jun. 10–12, 1983, AdsD, SPD- Vorstandssekretariat [without call number]. 88. Cf., for instance, Eppler, who substantiated his fears by arguing that the US government was willing to wage war over Europe. See Eppler, Utopie der Sicherheit, 63. 89. Ingeborg Bohnert to SPD Parteivorstand, Apr. 16, 1982, AdsD, Kommission für Sicherheitspolitik beim SPD-Parteivorstand, 2/PVAD0000018. 90. Ibid. The Bundesregierung was addressed by these letters, too. Cf. memo MDg Dröge (i.V.) Aug. 7, 1981, PA/AA, Ref. 012-9, Bd. 125988. 91.See the analysis with respect to the peace movement by Susanne Schregel, “Konjunktur der Angst: ‘Politik der Subjektivität’ und ‘neue Friedensbewegung,’ 1979–1983”,inBerndGreiner, Christian Th. Müller, and Dierk Walter, eds., Angst im Kalten Krieg (Hamburg, 2009), 495–520.
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92. Cf. Eckart Conze, “Modernitätsskepsis und die Utopie der Sicherheit: NATO-Nachrüstung und Friedensbewegung in der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik”, Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 7 (2010), http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/16126041- Conze-2-2010. 93. Minutes of Plenary Proceedings of the Bundestag, Oct. 9, 1981, http://dip21 .bundestag.de/dip21/btp/09/09057.pdf 94. Ibid. Cf. the memoirs of the chancellor’s speechwriter Jochen Thies, Helmut Schmidt’s Rückzug von der Macht: Das Ende der Ära Schmidt aus nächster Nähe (Stuttgart, 1988), 148. 95. Cf. Hartmut von Hentig, “Befund und Befinden – oder: Über den rationalen Umgang mit dem Irrationalen”, in Klaus Michael Meyer-Abich, ed., Physik, Philosophie und Politik: Festschrift für Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker zum 70. Geburtstag (Munich, 1982), 65–88, esp. 70–74. 96. Cf. Hansen, “Zwischen Staat und Straße”, 532–40. 97. Ulrike Wasmuht, Friedensbewegungen der 80er Jahre: Zur Analyse ihrer strukturellen und aktuellen Entstehungsbedingungen in der Bundesrepublik und den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika nach 1945: Ein Vergleich (Gießen, 1987), 131–32.
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Why Was There No “Accidental Armageddon” Discourse in France? How Defense Intellectuals, Peace Movements, and Public Opinion Rethought the Cold War during the Euromissile Crisis
Katrin Rücker
The “Euromissile” crisis led to a strong polarization of public opinion among Western Europeans, who began to question the effectiveness of nuclear dissuasion. Refusing to take sides in the Cold War, the European nuclear disarmament movements expected the end of the bloc system in Europe. In the beginning of the 1980s, huge demonstrations took place against the deployment of the NATO Euromissiles (Pershing IIs), rallying up to seven hundred thousand people in Bonn, Madrid, Rome, London, Brussels, Paris, Milan, and Amsterdam. Thus, in Western Europe, the United States, and Japan, powerful peace movements were born, reuniting not only spontaneous movements but also well-established organizations such as churches and left-wing parties. In France, the nuclear protest had a different character. While hundreds of thousands of people in Western Europe demonstrated against the missiles, the French antinuclear movements were marginal. The non- aligned left – that is, the anti-Communist left-wing movements refusing to take sides in the East-West conflict – which carried the antinuclear protest wave everywhere else, did not exist in France. The French press was in surprisingly close alignment with the Reagan administration.1 François Mitterrand, the French Socialist president, was committed to supporting a true “international crusade”2 in favor of the deployment of Pershing and cruise missiles. Since the official go-ahead for the building of French nuclear weapons in 1958, the Socialists and the non-Gaullist parties first came out against the independent force de frappe (strike force, or the combination of land-, air-, and sea-based nuclear weapons intended for deterrence – what Americans call the nuclear triad). However, the French left took an
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ambiguous stance on the nuclear issue as early as July 1959, when a Socialist National Congress voted in favor of France’s development of the force de frappe. But in 1972, a common Socialist-Communist program was adopted that foresaw the abandoning of French nuclear weapons once the parties came into power. In another about-face, the Socialists under the first left-wing president of the Fifth Republic, sharing power in the French government with the Communist Party (1981–84), joined Mitterrand’s hawkish nuclear line.3 Whereas the Communist Party in power was closely related to the Mouvement de la Paix,4 which exercised a quasi monopoly on France’s pacifist agenda after 1945, its officials tried hard to avoid taking sides in the nuclear conflict of the 1980s. Scholars such as Sudhir Hazareesingh have already attributed the general lack of a widespread peace movement in France to the strength of the Communist movement, even as a less than monolithic political party. Since the 1920s, the French Communist Party (PCF) was able to transform and ground the debates about peace and war on a national level and link them to social revolution, which it considered as superior to peace.5 However, French historian Marc Lazar does not share Hazareesingh’s thesis that the PCF remained a party of intellectuals (“parti d’intellectuels”) from the 1970s onward that was able to signifi- cantly influence discussions about war and peace.6 This article therefore avoids the debates about the high points of power or the decline of the PCF, instead viewing French peace movements from a nonaligned angle, theoretically free from strong and systematic Communist influence, which was in any case not monolithic, a fact highlighted by both Hazareesingh and Lazar since the 1990s. Why was there no controversial discourse on “accidental Armageddons” in the French public sphere? How did France – in contrast to its neighbors – rethink the Cold War during the Euromissile crisis? This question can be answered by analyzing the actions of three groups: France’s defense experts, popular press, and leftist organiza- tions. First, what sort of discussions took place among French experts as they considered NATO’s Double-Track Decision of 1979? Were these talks open and representative of differing viewpoints? While the military experts of the Socialist Party were obviously well-controlled by President Mitterrand, there seemed to be little controversy at all in France. Second, French journalists and opinion pollsters charted a public opinion that seemingly followedthepro-missileandantipacifist attitude of its own government. Why didn’t popular news media interject alter- native views into the news coverage? Lastly, how does one explain the
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behavior of the one segment of French society most likely to sympathize with the other European Friedensbewegungen or peace movements – the CFDT (French trade union) and the CODENE (Committee for the Denuclearization of Europe, created in 1981 and linked to the European Nuclear Disarmament movement), which protested against the deploy- ment of the Euromissiles only with great moderation and little success? According to the French constitution, the president has large preroga- tives in foreign and security politics – called “domaines réservés.” Opposing or welcoming Soviet or American missiles on European soil seemed therefore a mere presidential diplomatic and foreign policy deci- sion. However, the more France’s neighbors, such as Germany, discussed and criticized the deployment of American Pershing IIs and cruise missiles in response to the Soviet SS-20s, the more it became a national question. The more the Euromissile crisis dominated the attention of the Western public, the more French security experts, journalists, peace activists, and citizens in general analyzed it through internal, national, and specifically French social and cultural lenses.
The “Euromissile” Crisis Seen through the Eyes of Western Defense Experts The opinion on the deployment of medium-range nuclear weapons in Europe – called “Euromissiles” or Soviet and American INF (Intermediate- Range Nuclear Forces) deployed on European soil – often depended on the perception of the threat. How did military experts and scientists throughout Europe perceive and judge the Euromissiles’ destructive power? We will find that the evaluation of their threat was far from unanimous, except perhaps for the case of France. Two points of view, admittedly schematic and largely simplified, were defended in France at the time of the Euromissile crisis.
The International Controversies over the SS-20 Threat and the French Consensus in Favor of the Deployment of Missiles One the one hand, some analysts decidedly viewed the SS-20s as a strategic threat for the West; this was the opinion widely predominant in France. Among French military experts warning of the Soviet danger – we may call them “defense intellectuals”–were generals, admirals, diplomats, politicians, journalists, researchers, and philosophers such as Général Pierre-Marie Gallois, one of the fathers of the French atomic
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bomb during Charles de Gaulle’s presidency,7 and Raymond Aron, phi- losopher and right-wing intellectual. However, in the beginning of the 1980s, few debates took place in France, and even fewer controversies surfaced, regarding the Euromissiles. Between 1979 and 1982, this “French” debate was dominated by foreigners such as German Lothar Rühl, who published several articles in French journals.8 Rühl, a journalist who specialized in security matters and later became Staatssekretär (Under-Secretary of State) (1982–89) to the conservative German defense minister, was also one of the first to draw French atten- tion to the challenge that the Soviet missiles in particular raised for Europe.9 According to Rühl, the director of the American Bureau of Arms Control at that time, Fred Iklé, was the first to give his opinion on the SS-20s, which he saw as instruments of blackmail on the part of the Soviets.10 By insisting on the “counterforce” capacity and “surgical” character of these weapons, Iklé led some to surmise that the Soviet Union would henceforward have the means to crushingly defeat the NATO forces, so long as they acted by surprise and hit NATO’s fortifications accurately. The French government later called the Soviet missiles the “weapon of over-armament,”11 referring not to it existing in excessive numbers, but to the fact that in an over-armed world, and in the hands of a determined power, the INF could be the weight that tipped the scales. Throughout the year 1983, the Euromissiles debate in France became more and more “national” and less dominated by foreign defense intel- lectuals. A number of security and defense specialists expressly declared themselves in favor of the Pershing II missiles and warned against the Soviet threat: Raymond Aron in L’Express; Pierre Lellouche in Le Point; the ambassador François de Rose in Le Monde and in his book Contre la stratégie des curiaces (European Security and France, published in the United States in 1984); Michael Tatu, a journalist working for Le Monde and specializing in the Euromissile crisis, in his book La bataille des euromissiles (published in 1983); Léo Hamon, former minister under Pompidou, in Le Monde; as well as Général Gallois in various newspapers from as early as 1979. In 1983, former president Valéry Giscard began to defend the official silence over the Euromissiles at the time he was in office by saying that he had been afraid of the USSR comparing the French nuclear strike force to NATO’s arsenal. On the other hand, there are those among the experts who took the opposite stance and put particular emphasis on the “modernization” aspect of Soviet Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons. Admittedly, in a first
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step, the USSR simply claimed the right to the “modernization” in and of itself; but this claim was also backed by neutral experts both from the West and from NATO.12 According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the modernization and transformation of SS-4 and SS-5 missiles were part of an “automatic military and bureaucratic pro- cess,” and General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev’s team had not worried too much about its impact on international relations. NATO should have expected the renewal of the fifteen- and twenty-year-old SS-4 and SS-5 missiles.13 Another argument against the American Euromissiles was that they were far more powerful than was necessary, especially given the inaccu- racy of the existing Soviet arms. With their explosive force of 150 KT TNT (ten times the force of the Hiroshima bomb) the Soviets’ SS-20s did not seem to be accurate enough to act as a “counterforce” weapon against the Pershing missiles. With a circular error probability of 30 m, the Pershing proved to be far more efficient than the Soviet INFs (CEP of 300 m). For this reason some critics, such as the German Social Democrats (SPD) during the “Euromissile” crisis, spoke out against the Pershing II missiles as very efficient “counterforce” weapons that seriously threatened both the USSR and stability in Europe. In France, criticism against the missiles was scarce. In the nonaligned press, Ambassador Gabriel Robin and Admiral Antoine Sanguinetti, who corresponded with the American admiral and peace activist Gene LaRocque, founder of the Center for Defense Information upon his retire- ment from active duty in 1972, were some of the few experts in 1983 criticizing the comparison of SS-20s to Pershing II missiles. And neither Frenchman was on active duty during the crisis: Robin was on sabbatical leave, Sanguinetti was retired. In a somewhat ironic article, Robin showed himself to be surprised by a France “where normally everything is subject to debate,” but where “everything which governs, speaks, or writes, keeps repeating with one voice: without the Pershing missiles, there is no salvation.”14 The ambassador was not convinced that SS-20 missiles, whose force was described as neither accurate nor disarming, were a threat. These critical voices were hardly picked up on. The daily paper Le Monde published a single article by Robin throughout the whole Euromissile crisis. By nature, the crisis was a political problem rather than a military one, and therefore sparked controversial debates in Europe and the United States. From a military and strategic perspective, it was possible to embrace two different points of view. However, in France, defense experts
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were left out of the “debate,” if one could say that there was one. Dispute was also restricted within the French Socialist Party, which was the lead- ing force in the government.
The Restricted Debate within the Government Party Compared to the French Fifth Republic, with its presidential control over foreign and security policy, other Western countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and Great Britain tended toward open and controver- sial debates about the missiles. The European left in these countries participated in raising public awareness of nuclear power through an open debate within their parties, which also continued in the press. In the FRG, public opinion would become a major factor in the country’s position regarding the Euromissile crisis: the electoral cam- paigns of 1980 and 1983 seem to be strongly dominated by security topics. There were several party congresses on the missiles question, of which four were held by the SPD; oneofthemwasanextraordinary party congress devoted solely to this particular issue. In addition, the Bundestag featured several debates, of which the most famous was that of November 1983. In contrast, the French National Assembly was given the opportunity to debate the missiles only after the French Communist Party’svoteofnoconfidence on December 20, 1979. In the National Assembly, the technical aspects of the missile question were never debated; instead, there was talk of pacifism, and this in rather emotional terms. The French Socialist Party even disapproved of the German SPD, most likely because the Germans included technical aspects in their debate and didn’tfocussolelyonphilosophical arguments.15 In this matter, the vast majority of the French Socialist Party seemed entirely under the control of their president. As a party, the Socialists avoided taking an official stance on the NATO decision, but all of the Socialist delegates rejected the Communist Party’svoteof no confidence. Whereas Mitterrand’s pro-NATO line was promoted as soon as the Double-Track Decision was published,16 some of the impor- tant Socialist experts on security matters did not fall in line with his opinion until the seizure of power in 1981. But as soon as they were in power, the Socialists seemed to align themselves with Mitterrand. During the Euromissile crisis there were critical voices, such as that of Didier Motchane, but he hardly repre- sented the party’s majority. Generally, only the party leadership, that is, the president, the ministers, and other important party figures such as
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Secretary-General Jacques Huntzinger, publicly expressed their views on the crisis. A direct assessment of the balance of the two great powers’ military forces was normally avoided in public statements; at the same time, discussion of retaliation for an SS-20 missile attack with the Pershing II missiles was acceptable. In reaction to the antinuclear pro- test movements, the Socialists insisted that nuclear deterrence was pacific and that “pacifism” did not necessarily mean peace. The defense minister highlighted the “particularly German nature”17 of the peace movements and thus made it look like the missile question was an issue alien to France. Therefore there existed in French politics a certain “consensus” con- trolled by Mitterrand in the missile controversy. It was supported by both left-wing and right-wing experts, and they carried important weight within the French public sphere. But they were not the only important force that failed to instigate debate on the issue: the popular media and opinion pollsters, the groups most capable of informing the public and/or expressing its views, had to be taken into account.
The Press and Opinion Polls Surveys At first, in 1981–82,themissilecrisisdidnottakeupalotofspacein the French daily and weekly press. Compared with the wave of articles in Britain, the United States, and Germany, the French press refrained from discussing the topic at any great length. But 1983 is considered to be the “year of the Euromissiles” and of “the German dispute.”18 President François Mitterrand, celebrating with Chancellor Helmut Kohl the twentieth anniversary of the Franco-German Elysée treaty, gave an official address to the German Bundestag on January 22 of this so-called Euromissiles year. In his discourse the Socialist Mitterrand openly supported Kohl’sChristianDemocraticPartyand his pro-missile policy and indirectly criticized the German left. Most French citizens, experts and laypersons alike, agreed with their presi- dent on this “global and solemn repetition of France’salreadyknown position.”19 Left-wing paper Le Monde even condemned the German SPD of having “betrayed” the French Socialists in opposing the deploy- ment of the Euromissiles.20 Not all newspapers went so far in their editorializing as did Le Monde in 1983. But during the 1980s, the press generally expressed passive support for the Double-Track Decision on the one hand, and distrust of pacifism on the other.
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The Press: Passive Support for the Double-Track Decision, Distrust of Pacifism In October and November 1981 there were important demonstrations all over Europe against NATO’s missile deployment. Large numbers of pro- testers, ranging from fifty thousand to three hundred thousand, crowded the streets, first in Bonn, then in Madrid, Rome and London, Brussels and Paris, Milan and Amsterdam. The French papers, however, covered these events only moderately, and above all negatively. Both the Communist and the conservative press shared the same opinion in that they mistakenly considered the European peace move- ments to be primarily sympathizing with Communist thought. However, while the Communist press praised them, the conservative press con- demned the demonstrations as events organized by the Kremlin and described the participants as “the new men of Munich.”21 It is noteworthy that the non-Communist left-wing papers also condemned the “pacifists,” atermthat,intheirview,waspejorative. Libération referred to “agenuineEuropeananti-defense community, the pacifist one” and denounced the slogan “Better red than dead” as com- ing from a “pacifist movement carting along neutralist ambitions which are all the more disturbing since they are genuine.”22 Le Point “observed” that “at least every week pitched battles take place in Germany between ultrapacifist protesters and the police.”23 One of the Canard Enchaîné’s cartoonists frankly condemned pacifism by compar- ing the demonstrations in Bonn in 1981 with the “pacifism of Munich” in 1938.24 In short: the French left-wing, non-Communist newspapers tried to distance themselves from the “pacifists,” who may perhaps have been “good children, calm fathers,” but were also “men of Munich.”25 Throughout 1983, the “year of the Euromissiles,” Germany was the French journalists’ prime target. France’s press was particularly mobilized given that the missile question was an essential topic of the FRG federal campaign. After the breakup of the coalition between the Socialists and the small liberal party (SPD-FDP), Helmut Kohl, leader of the Christian Democratic Party (CDU), became chancellor after a constructive vote of no confidence on October 1, 1982. Elections were scheduled for March 6, 1983. The missile crisis was thus described as the “German quarrel” in France (Le Monde, January 14, 1983), which “has put Europe’s future into the hands of the German people, for better or worse” (Libération, February 27, 1983).
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The year 1983 was also an important one for the relatively few anti- nuclear protests that did take place in France. Many newspapers covered and commented on the events surrounding the “Appeal of the 100,” a movement that was close to the French Communist Party, and the joint actions of CFDT (French trade union) and CODENE (Committee for the Denuclearization of Europe), representing the nonaligned left. But the press was generally not in favor of the aligned left’s actions. Only Christian newspapers such as La Croix and Témoignage Chrétien seemed to approve of the French antinuclear movement called CODENE. They published commentaries such as “For a Missile-Free Europe,” written by a CODENE member; “On the Joyful Critique of a Sad Plea” by Alfred Kastler, a Nobel-prize winner in physics opposed to the deployment of Pershing II missiles; and “Pershing, Does It Mean Freedom?” by the priest Jean Toulat, referring to the American bishops’ antinuclear stance. Furthermore, Témoignage Chrétien strongly regretted the council of French bishops’ publications in which they justified the French strategy of deterrence. In regard to the CFDT-CODENE agreement of September 1983, La Croix was delighted at “the important step toward the emer- gence of a pacifist movement independent of the Communist Party in France.” The nonaligned left’s big daily newspaper, Le Monde, reacted to the French antinuclear movements as it had done in the years before: it covered the CFDT-CODENE agreement with several articles and stayed rather neutral in its comments, but never gave the floor to non- Communist critics of the installation of Pershing II missiles.
Public Opinion Expressed through Polls: Between Ignorance and Indifference With regard to the waves of pacifism in Europe at the end of 1981,the opinion polls showed a more tolerant attitude than could be found in the press.26 Fifty-five percent of French people either totally or some- what approved of pacifism, only 25 percent were somewhat or totally disapproving, while 20 percent did not give an opinion. More than half of the French population sympathized to a certain extent with the demonstrations, especially young people (62.8 percent) and Parisians (64.6 percent). Another poll from November 1981 drew a similar con- clusion: 50 percent of the French supported the pacifist demonstrations in Western Europe, 34 percent did not support them, and 16 percent had no opinion.27
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During the year of the crisis, the number of polls conducted on the topics of missiles and pacifism grew and grew. At the same time, the results became more and more ambiguous. Were the French for or against the installation of Pershing II missiles? This question brought quite different results. While 79 percent of the French said they were badly informed on the missile crises in summer 1983, 43 percent considered it to be the most important event to have happened in the world! With 43 percent of the vote, the missile crisis ranked ahead in the polls of any other event such as the rise of the dollar or the South Korean Boeing aircraft that had been shot down by a Soviet fighter plane.28 In 1983, 38 percent declared themselves to be in favor of the installation of Pershing II missiles, but 43 percent said they were somewhat against it.29 Two months later, another poll led to the opposite result: 50 percent were for the deployment of the American missiles in Europe, 35 percent were against it, 15 percent were without an opinion.30 So were the French generally for or against the installation of Pershing II missiles? The year of 1983 does not provide clear answers. The polls’ results contradict each other according to the questions asked. Yet one thing seems crystal clear: in summer, the vast majority of the French were not yet well-informed about the subject. All of the polls on the missile crisis featured a large number of people “without an opinion.” It was only at the end of the year 1983 that their number dropped from somewhere between 20 to 30 percent to about 15 percent. Many factors could have instigated this indecision: for instance, it was not certain that the French clearly knew what the “Euromissiles” were. Perhaps they could link only vague notions to this term – the American missiles, the Soviet mis- siles, all of the missiles stationed in Europe, and so forth. As soon as the US installation of Pershing missiles in Europe began, the French seemed less approving of pacifism. What were the differences between the polls taken in France in comparison to those of other Western countries? We sometimes find the same uncertainties regarding the judgment of the missile question as in France, but other Europeans were more in favor of pacifism and expressed more willingness to take part in activities promoting it. Finally, in contrast to 79 percent of the French who said they were badly informed about the missile crisis in the summer of 1983,the number of other Westerns claiming to be uninformed was much lower. Furthermore, the majority of Westerners abstained from giving their opinion far less than did the French. Surveys showing 30 percent of
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participants without an opinion was practically the rule in France, while in the FRG this figure was rarely more than 5 percent.31 Opinions were divided and fluctuated: the conclusion one can draw from these polls about the French was that if not indifferent, they were at the least uninformed. Therefore if the percentages in the polls seem to indicate general sup- port on the part of the French public, the numbers might be due to a lack of French citizens’ interest in learning more about the topic and about the views of the opposing side.
The Failure of the Nonaligned Movement Amid the inertia of French public opinion, the nonaligned antinuclear movement in France acted in a careful and very modest way.32 The 1983 partnership between CFDT and CODENE, which was, in fact, a “competitor” of the Communist peace movement, constituted a crucial moment during the French protest movement. But this was a very late alliance; the other European movements, or the marginal French ones closer in ideology to the Communists, had already started several years before. To what extent did the CFDT-CODENE partner- ship, the only apparently “credible” French movement, draw upon the example of the other European initiatives as far as the Double-Track Decision was concerned? Did CODENE and CFDT collaborate with Communist circles in their country? It was the Communist peace movement that took up the role of being the French equivalent of other European antinuclear movements; this was after it organized demonstrations in Pantin in October 1981, in Paris on June 20, 1982, following the “Appeal of the 100,” and in the Vincennes Forest on “Peace Day,” June 19, 1983. About 160,000 people took part in the June 1982 event; 300,000 demonstrators gathered a year later.33 As a nonaligned movement, CODENE, however, was officially founded only in February 1982, and the first common declaration between CODENE and CFDT dates from September 1983. CODENE was a disparate entity comprising twenty-five different national organizations such as the Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU); green movements34 such as the Réseau des Amis de la Terre, Verts–Parti Écologiste, Les Verts, and the Christian group Mouvement Rural de la Jeunesse Chrétienne (MRJC); pacifist movements like the Mouvement pour une Alternative Non-violente (MAN)35; as well as Claude Bourdet’s MDPL, which was created in 1960 under the name
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Mouvement contre l’Armement Atomique, and the Mouvement du Larzac. The “Appeal of the Larzac” and the “Appeal of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation” (which was called “Appel END [European Nuclear Disarmament]”) in 1980 most certainly inspired the CODENE activists when they founded their organization in November 1981.36 Meanwhile, Bourdet, dubbed “Mr. Nonaligned Peace,”37 who had taken part in the drawing up of the END appeal, had succeeded in obtaining important signatures in France for an appeal that supported a denuclearized Europe and nonalignment. The END appeal was signed initially by three Socialist politicians who had not been members of the French parliament, however they subsequently withdrew their signatures following the election of Socialist Mitterrand to president in May 1981.38 The MAN included the famous former General de la Bollardière, who had left the French army in a display of opposition to the use of torture in Algeria, and who had campaigned for nonviolence since 1970. What were, then, the concrete principles upon which all the twenty-five members of CODENE could agree during the missile crisis? In order to support the European antinuclear movements, CODENE worked toward the three following goals: against the installation of new NATO Cruise and Pershing II missiles; for the dismantling of the Soviet SS-20s; and to halt the modernization of any French nuclear weapons, in order to dismantle them in a nuclear-free, nonaligned Europe. CODENE’s structure and points of view were therefore similar to those of other Western peace movements, but they were “watered down” in a way: on the one hand, the initiative wanted to be nonaligned, both in regard to its members and aims; and on the other hand, in contrast to the German Friedensbewegungen in particular, it simply did not collaborate either with the “Appeal of the 100” or with the peace movement that was close to the Communist Party, called “Mouvement de la Paix.”39 Compared to the French Communist circles, which focused on their opposition to the NATO missiles, and with the movements abroad, CODENE seemed moderate. Why was it that this moderate attitude did not attract the French public’s interest more? In 1983, CODENE seemed to have convinced the CFDT to join its peace initiatives, albeit with difficulty. The CFDT had in fact abandoned its antinuclear tradition in the early 1980s, approving of the French nuclear strike force and being rather suspicious of nuclear pacifism. The origins of this suspicion seem to lie in the deterioration of the East- West relations, for instance over the Polish coup d’état of 1981, and the country’s solidarity with the French Socialist government.40 This is why
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the CFDT’s participation in the nonaligned movement was – from the start – doomed to fail. Even though the CFDT’s change of attitude was without doubt prompted by some of its leading members, there originally had been pressure that came from other European trade unions, which were often members of the peace movements – and this external pressure may have been what at first prompted the CFDT to partner with CODENE. In the end, however, the CFDT’s top bosses and leaders were never really convinced by the movements. The Larzac meeting of August 6–7, 1983, in particular, was organized by the Larzac farmers, the MRJC, the PSU, and CODENE, and supported by, among others, a regional unit of the CFDT, UR-CFDT Midi Pyrénées. The Larzac meeting addressed the topic “The Suspension of Nuclear Weaponry as a Step toward Real Disarmament” and succeeded in mobi- lizing about fifteen thousand people and getting the attention of the press. As such, the French trade union felt obliged to react to the pressure of one of its regional branches, even more so because the regional CFDT Midi Pyrénées unit referred to the CFDT’s own publications in promoting its antinuclear stance.41 The external pressure coming from the European trade unions seemed to be even stronger than the pressure from within the CFDT.42 In fact, the resolution adopted at the Congress on “Peace and Disarmament” by the European Trade Union Confederation (the ETUC) at The Hague on April 23, 1982, asked the affiliated members to adapt their actions to those of each country. The Congress first declared itself against the instal- lation of new nuclear missiles, and then in favor of the dismantling of already installed ones. It is not surprising that in 1983, the “year of the Euromissiles,” the ETUC was influenced by the majority of its members, who were often close to the peace movements. It is therefore hardly surprising that the ETUC produced a brochure about disarmament and the reconversion of arms industries, even less so as its director was the German Günter Köpke.43 So under these pressures the CFDT allied itself with CODENE in 1983. Following a joint CFDT-CODENE declaration on September 21, a mutual demonstration took place on October 23; during this protest even the most virulent members on the French side turned out to be more moderate than the average protester from the FRG. On that occasion, the CFDT leadership showed hardly any enthusiasm. Of course, the demon- stration was mainly financed by the trade union,44 but the CFDT did not make convincing appeals in its press to mobilize its members: “the CFDT members who wish so may participate” or “[The national protest
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on October 23] may be a contribution to the actions that the CFDT has to carry out alone and on a clear basis, in order to promote peace, security and disarmament.”45 The protests did not rally many more participants as at Larzac, the number turning out to be about fifteen thousand people. This could not compare to the protests in the FRG, which brought together hundreds of thousands of participants. Even the participating organizations gave a mixed assessment of the action. Apparently, the speech given by Jean-Pierre Bobichon, secretary of the CFDT Île de France regional unit, was hardly able to rally the protesters in front of the Bastille. In fact, those who expected a “genuinely pacifist” speech had to be disappointed; but those who were close to the government’s point of view were not. Put under pressure by his European counterparts, he stated that “the CFDT, affiliated with the European Trade Union Confederation, campaigns fervently for disarmament on a European scale”;46 Bobichon above all else expressed his solidarity with the opponents of the SS-20 missiles. An important figure mentioned in his speech was Oleg Radsinski, a Soviet citizen who was condemned to a year’s imprisonment and five years of banishment for having had the courage to demonstrate for the destruction of the SS-20 missiles in Moscow. Meanwhile, dissention was growing stronger within the CFDT. Criticism arose within the ranks of the activists, voices regretting the CFDT’s “sad, even sectarian image” which did not match the genuinely pacifist stance of other peace movements. According to those activists, “[B]y its discourse [Bolbichon’s speech], it [the CFDT] seemed to take the other organisations for a bunch of naive, more or less irresponsible young- sters who unwittingly played along with Moscow’s game!”47 Also, just before the demonstration on October 23, which, it was claimed, was quite different from the one that was to be organized by Communist organiza- tions the previous day, the CFDT trade union section of the Société Générale Bank in Paris declared itself to be in favor of a unified protest bringing together all French movements, even the peace movement, just as in all the other initiatives throughout Europe. The section went as far as to suggest protesting against the French nuclear strike force.48 By the end of 1983, the CFDT leaders had given in to both internal and European pressure, but their “peace initiatives” remained half-hearted compared to those of their other European counterparts. The CFDT seemed genuinely divided between those who suggested joint actions with the Communist currents, and those who were markedly disappointed by CODENE, a “coalition of extreme left-wing and nonmilitaristic
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organizations.”49 Most of the CFDT’s forefront officials such as Bobichon and Albert Mercier did not seem genuinely convinced by the CFDT- CODENE alliance. Only one month after the first (and last) joint demon- stration with CODENE, the CFDT withdrew from the alliance. The organization referred to the problem of deterrence between the two superpowers and asserted that many CFDT activists considered the instal- lation of American missiles to be a security measure.
Conclusion After having analyzed the press, the opinion polls, the interviews led by the author, and the internal documents of left-wing parties and French trade unions, we come to the following conclusions. First, in contrast to a commonly held biased view, the French public did not neglect the “Euromissile crisis” and the debate on pacifism. But it was only in 1983, the “year of the Euromissiles,” according to the French press, that any real attention was devoted to it. Compared to news cover- age by its British and German counterparts, the French press focused on government statements rather than those of grass roots movements: Unlike the British and German press, the French news media hardly conducted any investigations into the matter, relying on government reactions rather than looking at the movements themselves. In general, no French daily paper covered the subject as frankly on the front page as did the Anglo-American ones such as the International Herald Tribune with its November 22, 1983, article “Kohl Defends Missile Policy as Thousands Demonstrate.” Second, the French public was generally anti-Communist and opposed to the pacifist movements, which, in France, were largely Communist initia- tives. This was particularly true for the nonaligned left: Libération and Le Monde diplomatique editors were convinced of Soviet military superiority and therefore of the danger it represented. The trade union CFDT, then, which took part in the demonstrations against the American missiles, was, above all else, afraid of being compared to the Communist peace movements. Third, a lack of information might be at the source of the French public’s reaction. In comparison to many other Western countries, where strategy was no longer a topic reserved for experts, France seemed to be an exception. Only some Christian papers, allegedly left-wing, explained what pacifism meant in the context of the Euromissile crisis, in other words, that it was a disparate antinuclear peace movement that did not have a great deal to do with Communist movements in France.
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The rate of viewless participants in the polls bore witness to this lack of information. As to the political and military aspects of the missile crisis, high-quality papers such as Le Monde often simply referred back to foreign sources. As Claude Bourdet stressed, it was true that in France no strategic institutes for peace studies as developed as the SIPRI in Sweden, the many Friedensforschung institutes in Germany, or the Bradford University School of Peace Studies in the United Kingdom, were in existence.50 Fourth, the French public’s behavior could be explained by French political culture. Michel Winock underlines the “Socialists’ bad con- science about pacifism.”51 Of course, everybody wanted peace, and for a large number of Westerners pacifism was equivalent to the opposition to nuclear weapons, and for them this was a good thing. For the French, this kind of pacifism did not lead to peace. What led to peace, in their minds, was nuclear deterrence, precisely a term harshly criticized by the European peace movements. One gets the impression that in France pacifism as well as the American missiles were above all “a German problem.” The last conclusion focuses on the circumstances of practical politics: as it was in power only from 1981, the nonaligned left’s point of view quickly assimilated the doctrine of deterrence; and it distanced itself more and more from the Communists, although the latter participated in the government. Finally, it seems that François Mitterrand brought the Socialist Party well under control, harnessing the left-wing politics principle. No ennemy inside the left, well-established since the French Third Republic (1870–1940). The top leaders of both the Socialist Party and the CFDT were of the opinion that they needed to differ from the European peace movements. It was the concurrence of these elements that led French public opi- nion to be globally cautious about antinuclear movements. It is even possible to say that its support of US policy let France look like an ally – but an ally who, in the end, was loyal not due to genuine pro-American sympathy but to national fears of “German pacifism.” In other words, nuclear weapons and nuclear energy52 are intrinsically tied to French national identity since World War II.
Notes
1. Katrin Rücker, “Les gauches française et allemande dans la ‘guerre froide’ des euromissiles et la course au pacifisme: entre malentendus et ‘Sonderweg,’” Revue d’histoire diplomatique 1 (March 2003): 35–62. See also Rücker, “La crise des euromissiles et le ‘pacifisme’ allemand au miroir de l’opinion publique française, mémoire de DEA,” a study completed at the IEP in Paris in 2000.
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2. Serge July, Les années Mitterrand (Paris, 1986), 144. According to Mitterrand‘s speech on October 12, 1983, in Brussels, “Pacifism is in the West and the euromissiles are in the East,” http://discours.vie-publique.fr /notices/837174000.html (accessed Jul. 10, 2011). 3. On France’s security and nuclear policy since 1945, see Maurice Vaïsse, ed., La France et l’atome (Bruxelles, 1994); Maurice Vaïsse, Pierre Mélandri, and Frédéric Bozo, eds., La France et l’Otan 1949–1996 (Paris, 1996). For the French left and for security or pacifist issues in the 1980s, see Patrice Buffotot, Le socialisme français et la guerre, du soldat citoyen à l’armée profesionnelle 1871–1998 (Bruxelles, 1998); Jolyon Howorth and Patricia Chilton, eds., Defence and Dissident in Contemporary France (London, 1984); Marc Lazar, “De la crise des euromissiles à la détente gorbatechévienne: PCF, PCI et la lutte pour la paix, 1979–1987,” Communisme 18/19 (1988). 4. Sabine Rousseau, “Les mouvements de paix en France depuis 1945: Un objet de recherche en construction,” in Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen 32 (2004): 49–65. 5. See Sudhir Hazareesingh, Intellectuals and the Communist Party. Disillusion and Decline (Oxford, 1991). See also the more generally: Hazareesingh, Political Traditions in Modern France (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994). 6. Marc Lazar, Maisons rouges. Les partis communistes français et italien de la Libération à nos jours (Paris, Aublier 1992). 7. Maurice Vaïsse, “Le choix atomique de la France, 1946–1958,” in Vaïsse, La France et l’atome, 56. 8. For example Lothar Ruehl, “Le défi du SS-20 et la stratégie soviétique à l’égard de l’Europe,” Politique Etrangère 3 (1979). 9. Ibid. 10. Thomas Risse-Kappen, Null-Lösung: Entscheidungsprozesse zu den Mittelstreckenwaffen 1970–1987 (Frankfurt/Main, 1988), 30. 11. Michel Tatu, La bataille des euromissiles (Paris, 1983), 25. 12. Gabriel Robin, interview with author, Apr. 28, 2000; Antoine Sanguinetti, interview with author, Mar. 30, 2000. 13. Milton Leitenberg, “Die taktischen Nuklearwaffen großer Reichweite der NATO und der WVO,” in Studiengruppe Militärpolitik, ed., Aufrüsten, um abzurüsten? Informationen zur Lage (Hamburg, 1980), 52–53. 14. Gabriel Robin, “Hors des Pershing, point de salut?,” Le Monde, January 18, 1983; Pierre Lellouche, “Réplique à Gabriel Robin,” Le Monde, Jan. 22, 1983. 15. Jean Jaurès Archives, Document 405, RI 15 – RFA (Rencontres PS/ SPD sur les questions de défense et de sécurité en Europe, 1979–1983), dépêche d’actualité de l’Ambassade de France à Bonn, July 1, 1981. 16. François Mitterrand, speech delivered to French National Assembly, on Dec. 20, 1979 in Journal Officiel de la République Française (hereafter JORF), Assemblée Nationale, 2nd meeting, Dec. 20, 1979, pp. 12423–31.
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17. Charles Hernu, speech delivered to French National Assembly, Nov. 3, 1983 in JORF, Assemblée Nationale, 2nd meeting, Nov. 3, 1983, 4780. 18. Cf. The Press Archives of the IEP Paris on the Euromissiles, n°9.210/282/11 and the Press Archives of the Documentation Française on NATO’s Double Decision, n°DE/0122/RFA-OTAN et n°DE/0023/SPD. 19. Bernard Brigouleix, “Les socialistes allemands se démarquent des thèses de M. Mitterrand sur la sécurité européenne. Qui a lâché qui?” Le Monde, Jan. 24, 1983. 20. Ibid. 21. Marc Dufresse, “Les nouveaux Munichois,” Quotidien de Paris, Nov. 19, 1981. 22. Serge July, “Tiens, si on se faisait une petite guerre en Europe,” Libération, Oct. 21, 1981. 23. “Le vertige allemand,” Le Point, no. 479, Nov. 23, 1981. 24.BernardThomas,“Euroshima mon amour,” Le Canard Enchaîné,Oct.14, 1981. 25. Ibid. 26. The majority of polls on the “Euromissiles” and “pacifism” stem from the “Cesem Opinion,” an opinion poll archive, which claims to gather all the polls published in France since 1980. The company has a dozen polls avail- able on the topic, published in different French newspapers between 1981 and 1985. Only two years after the Double-Track Decision, at the same time as press coverage led to more public awareness, were the first polls carried out. 27. Cesem Opinion, poll no. 81.11.35, published Nov. 21, 1981. 28. Cesem Opinion, poll no. 83.12.32, published Dec. 1983. 29. Cesem Opinion, no. 83.12.05 published on Dec. 1, 1983. 30. Cesem Opinion, no. 84.02.35, published on Feb. 24, 1984. 31. Pierre Lellouche, Pacifisme et Dissuasion (Paris, 1983), 223–38. 32. The author adopts a seemingly more cautious and more negative stance on the impact of the French antinuclear movement than Laurence S. Wittner, Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford, 2003). Nevertheless, I am extre- mely grateful for his comments on an earlier version of this paper. 33. Christian Mellon, “Peace Organisations in France today,” in Jolyon Howorth and Patricia Chilton, eds., Defence and Dissident in Contemporary France (London, 1984), 208. 34. But the influence of green movements inside of CODENE was not strong. The nonaligned peace movement in France did not have a distinctive green identity similar to that of movements in other European countries (e.g. West Germany). On French green visions in general, see Michael Bess, The Light- Green Society. Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960–2000 (Chicago, 2003).
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35. For MAN’s Catholic origins, see Catherine Guicherd, “Le Mouvement de paix dans l’Eglise catholique au début des années 1980,” Relations interna- tionals 53 (printemps 1988): 112. 36. Bernard Dreano, interview with author, May 25, 2000; Bertand Ravenel, interview with author, Jun. 6, 2000. 37. E. P. Thompson, France and the European Peace Movement,” in Howorth and Chilton, eds., Defence and Dissident in Contemporary France, 249. 38. Claude Bourdet, “The Rebirth of a Peace Movement,” in Howorth and Chilton, eds, Defence and Dissident in Contemporary France, 197. 39. Sabine Rousseau, “The Iconography of a French Peace Movement: The ‘Mouvement de la Paix’ from the 1950s to the End of the Cold War,” in Benjamin Ziemann, Peace Movements in Western Europe, Japan and the USA during the Cold War (Essen, 2008), 189–208. 40. CFDT Archives, ApcCFDT, Dossier SC 3007, Note de P. Vinaux de juillet–août 1983, Notes pour le débat sur l’armement nucléaire. CFDT 1963-CFDT 1983, p.13. 41. ApcCFDT Archives, SC 3007, Nouvelles CFDT, no.3 du 22 janvier 1982, p. 31. 42. ApcCFDT, SC 3007, note de P. Vinaux de juillet–août 1983, and Bertrand Ravenel, interview. 43. ApcCFDT, SC 4193, brochure du séminaire de l’ISE sur le désarmement et la reconversion des industries d’armement, Berlin-Ouest, 17–18 mai 1983. 44. ApcCFDT, SC 4192, lettre du 10-11-1983 [Nov. 10, 1983] de Pierre Hureau à Albert Mercier, secrétaire national de la CFDT, secteur Société-Libertés. 45. ApcCFDT, SC 3007, Nouvelles CFDT, no. 34, 1983, p.8. 46. ApcCFDT, SC 4190, Intervention de Jean-Pierre Bobichon lors de la mani- festation du 23 octobre 1983. 47. ApcCFDT, SC 4190, lettre d’Odile Gillen et de Bernard Chauvin du 23-10-1983. 48. ApcCFDT, SC 4190, lettre de Gilles Andrivet aux membres de la Commission exécutive du 17-10-1983. 49. ApcCFDT, SC 4192, lettre de J.M. Toulisse à Pierre Autexier du 26-10-1983. 50. Claude Bourdet, “The Rebirth of a Peace Movement,” in Howorth and Chilton, eds., Defence and Dissident in Contemporary France, 198. 51. Michel Winock, “La culture politique des socialistes,” in Marc Lazar and Serge Berstein, eds., Les cultures politiques en France (Paris, 1999), 202. 52. On nuclear energy (but not nuclear weapons), see Gabrielle Hecht’s work recently translated into French and published by La Découverte: Le rayon- nement de la France. Energie nucléaire et identité nationale après la Seconde Guerre Mondiale (Paris, 2004), and warmly received by Vincent Guigueno in his review in Le Mouvement Social 221 (Oct.–Dec. 2007): 116–17.The author regrets that only a few works integrating abundant scientific litera- ture in English in the field of science, technology, and society studies are translated into French.
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Building Trust The G7 Summits and International Leadership in Nuclear Politics
Enrico Böhm
On November 11, 1975, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger gave a keynote speech before the Pittsburgh World Affairs Council in which he laid out the reasons for an extraordinary meeting of the Western heads of state and government, which had originally been scheduled for November 15 in Rambouillet, France: he saw the widely perceived economic and political crisis of Western democracy as a major challenge for the governing elite of the Western economic powers. It was, in his opinion, the “erosion of people’s confidence in their society’s future and a resulting loss of faith in democratic means, in governmental institutions and leaders” that endangered the West. He feared that a new generation, “accustomed to freedom and military security, questions the very values and institutions that have brought these conditions about.”1 Therefore, it was crucial that political leaders react to these changing conditions and do so publicly. Among those in attendance at the World Affairs Council, Kissinger was not alone in making this diagnosis but found international partners whose thinking was similar to his. One of the reactions to the crisis was the establishment of the G7 summits, which became an important communication forum of nuclear politics in the following years. This essay will look at the so-called high politics: the summitry of industrial democracies in the second half of the 1970s and the early 1980s. These meetings of Western heads of state and government emerged as an innovation in international politics parallel to the (renewed) rise of nuclear concerns. In the areas of energy and defense, the G7 became an important communication vehicle, owing its institutionalization, at least partly, to the virulence of the nuclear threat, which put Western
335
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governments under considerable pressure from both the Western public and the Soviet Union. Although the focus of the G7 seemed at first to be on the economy – their meetings, after all, were labeled “economic summits”–the various heads of government used the summits to practice self-assertion and to demonstrate to a critical public the commonality of their positions on a broad range of issues, especially on nuclear politics, which by the end of the 1970s had become highly contested. The nuclear crisis was a commonality for the West and thus a unifying factor that helped to perpetuate the summit meetings. Security-related topics soon supplanted economic ones as the summits’ primary focus, and the main purpose behind these meetings was to build trust among the participants and provide a stage on which they could position themselves as respon- sible and capable leaders in front of their respective constituencies.2
A New Model of Cooperation In the 1970s, developments that had been taking place over a long time led to a climate of change within the realm of international affairs: First, the need for better North-South relations together with the energy ques- tion rose to new importance and gave more weight to the question of a “just” economic world order, as posed by developing and less developed countries. Second, the rise of Western Europe (especially West Germany) and Japan together with the relative economic and political decline of the United States laid the ground for a shift of power within the Western alliance.3 And finally, the implications of détente and the German Neue Ostpolitik somewhat defused the conflict between East and West. Internally, the industrial democracies each witnessed – by varying degrees – the combination of accelerated social, economic, and political change that would lead that nation to its own version of a ”structural Western crisis.”4 For example, the end of the Bretton Woods monetary regime and the oil crisis of 1973 worked as a catalyst for the transforma- tion of the Western industrial democracies,5 shaking the belief in eco- nomic and social progress that had guided these societies during the previous two decades.6 The fear (angst) of economic destabilization became a driver of the development of nuclear energy as a presumably reliable and secure energy source.7 The failure of established steering instruments resulted in a problem of legitimacy and turned the economic crisis into a political one.8 “In a crisis all regulative institutions seem to disappoint at the same time; there is a sense of profound interconnection,” Charles Maier writes.
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“Crises do not always destroy regimes or economic systems, but they do significantly recast institutions.”9 This is particularly true on the interna- tional level. In Henry Kissinger’s terms, the phenomenon of crisis together with the transformation of world order had produced an existential challenge for the Western model of industrial democracy. As the American security adviser put it in his “Year of Europe” speech in April 1973, “These factors have produced a dramatic transformation of the psychological climate in the West – a change which is the most profound current challenge to Western statesmanship.”10 The need for a common approach emerged as a central problem of international politics. The result was a new institution that has endured until today: the Group of Seven (G7).
International Leadership Since the Western economies were stuck in a condition of crisis, ideas and approaches about how to solve the economic and political problems began to circulate among policymakers. Political analysts from academia and within national administrations started to search for new ways of international cooperation and a redefinition and refinement of the Western alliance. A widespread interpretation emerged: Western diplo- macy was in need of a new consultation and cooperation mechanism. The crises of the 1970s triggered a flow of ideas and initiatives for new cooperative instruments. They displayed a tendency toward political leadership through summit-level meetings in contrast to existing, and allegedly bureaucratic, international institutions. The word “interdepen- dence” was used to describe the circumstances in which a new instrument of Western cooperation would emerge. One of the key actors in this quest was the Trilateral Commission. Formed in 1973 by David Rockefeller, the international elite forum of politics, business, and science promoted the idea of sustained cooperation among the “three core industrialized areas” of North America, Europe, and Japan. Their first published paper, “Crisis of International Cooperation,” defined “the inadequacy of present forms of cooperation” together with growing interdependence as the “principal features of the contemporary international order.” They asked for “collective action to formalize consultation among the trilateral areas.”11 Two years later, in light of economic recession, the commission, which gathered an impress- ive group of supporters within Western governments, held its first plenary session, and the tone of its analysis had become somewhat hysterical.
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The authors of a commission study entitled “Crisis of Democracy”– Samuel Huntington, Michel Crozier, and Joji Watanuki – were question- ing the ability of Western democracy to serve as a form of modern government: “What are in doubt today are not just the economic and military policies but also the political institutions inherited from the past. Is political democracy, as it exists today, a viable form of government for the industrialized countries of Europe, North America, and Asia?”12 The authors not only questioned the effectiveness of democracy at the time but also stressed the urgent need of “inspiring” Western political leaders. When in 1974,withinashortperiodoffive months, the most important Western democracies experienced sudden changes in gov- ernment, the circumstances for Western leadership had improved. It was the outcome of an unusual convergence of international events and political crises: the end of the Edward Heath government in the United Kingdom, the death of French President Georges Pompidou, the retreat of the German Chancellor Willy Brandt, and the resigna- tion of US President Richard Nixon. The emerging group of heads of government and state turned out to get along personally better than their respective predecessors. In addition, they were more open- minded regarding the trilateral ideas. One of them, Helmut Schmidt, was a strong advocate for change in the international system. More than anyone else, he put an emphasis on international economic policy, which he regarded as an integrated part of Western security.13 Already in Spring 1974 he had warned his own party of the possible implications of a severe international economic deterioration: stagnation, he feared, might endanger the democratic insti- tutions, which is why the political leaders of the West had to realize their “economic leadership responsibilities” and to pursue them in an “audible and visible” way.14 Part of Schmidt’s pessimism stemmed from the state of international organization when he wrote the following for the journal Foreign Affairs: “The crisis toward which the world economy was moving was not so much one of production as a crisis of its institu- tions in structural respects.”15 He criticized the sluggishness with which these institutions were adapting to changing conditions, new tasks, and objectives. When Schmidt himself came into office he was in a position to push for the handling of economic issues on the international level. He met with the newly elected President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing of France and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger – international partners who
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shared much of his thinking. They believed in exclusive meetings among heads of government or “la gouvernance éclairée d’une aristocratie de dirigeants” (the enlightened governance of an aristocracy of directors).16 Interdependence, for them, did not mean solely the global connection of markets but the Western interrelationship of economic and societal development with political fate. Therefore, they urged not to let these questions be handled exclusively either by diplomats, who lacked the economic knowledge, or by economic experts, who lacked the political insights.17 They stressed the need to deal with these issues on an exclusive governmental top level. As Kissinger, with reference to American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, said, “In the words of a famous Pennsylvanian, we must hang together or we shall surely hang separately.”18 Yet, there was another important factor, which drove the Western leaders to a new model of international cooperation. The burden of responsibility, according to Schmidt, made the heads of government and state “relativ einsame Personen” (relatively lonely persons).19 He later wrote that the targeting of this phenomenon was a central element of summit diplomacy: “the loneliness is alleviated by summit meetings – notably when two men can meet privately without language barriers and time restrictions.”20 Moreover, the personal encounter would create “mutual trust and calculability” and, therefore, even “serve to promote peace” as it strengthened international aspects against domestic concerns.21 Self-representation as international leaders and self-assertion of the heads became “significant features of the conference.”22
The Spirit of Rambouillet The “new spirit of cooperation”23 was first tested in Rambouillet in the Autumn of 1975. On the occasion of the signing of the final act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), the American and French presidents together with the British prime minister and the German chancellor had decided to hold a summit meeting to coordinate and discuss common political problems. Giscard and Schmidt convinced Gerald Ford and Harold Wilson of the necessity “to get together and act.”24 The decision was preceded by months of intense efforts on the part of French and German leaders to promote the summit idea to their American and British counterparts. Their goal was a “summit Camp David ... for an expression of ‘views’ rather than a ‘decision-making meeting.’”25
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From the beginning, a main target of the summit proposal was to influence public opinion. In his “Private Memorandum on International Concertation of Economic Action,” Schmidt underlined for his counter- parts the need to prevent a backlash in public opinion.26 The Chancellor feared the loss of votes in the upcoming parliamentary election,27 and the American administration shared his belief that a summit might help him stay in office.28 In support of the whole project, Giscard, during the discussions in Helsinki, added that the Western economic and monetary crisis stood in sharp contrast with the apparent stable and prosperous development in the Eastern hemisphere. Hence, the Western leaders needed to acknowledge their common responsibilities in times of crisis and take concerted action.29 It was, nevertheless, a tricky task, as stressed in a memo from Kissinger’s staff of advisors:
The essential dilemma of the summit is that it will try to project publicly that Western leaders are able to manage current problems at a time when they do not fully understand the nature of the new types of problems they confront. The trick will be for the leaders to avoid both deluding themselves by boldly confident statements (which could tend to divert them from serious inquiry into their common problems) and lapsing into a categorization of their frustrations (which if made public would further erode confidence in democratic leadership) ... The message we want to convey to the public is a sense of confidence and forward motion – stressing both technical cooperation and a common political will to avoid divisive actions or indecisive policies and instead ensure action based on “common purpose and conviction.”30 Notwithstanding a certain reluctance on the part of the British, which was based on the expected protest of those OECD countries not invited, the first summit was held in November 1975 in Rambouillet, near Paris.31 The six participants were the heads of state or government of France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States (one year later joined by Canada, mak- ing it the G7) accompanied by their foreign and finance ministers and averylimitedsetofadvisers.Itwasnotatallcleariftheexperiment would be repeated, given the complaints that the summiteers received from their international partners who were not invited. But already in June 1976 another summit was held and after that the yearly routine of the summit cycle was established. The G7 became another institution of international affairs, but one without the elements of classical institutions, like an organizational body or founding documents outlining the summit’s functions, membership, and tasks. The informality of this setting was a major appeal of the idea, at
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least at the beginning. The informal structure of the gathering, together with its exclusive membership, ran somewhat contrary to the principles that had led to the creation of the United Nations thirty years before. In contrast to the “Parliament of Man,”32 the new model of cooperation did not claim a representative membership, nor was it looking to be grounded in international law. Instead, it was used as a high-level steering committee for the most urgent questions of international politics. If the G7 decided to take action, it did so on national levels or within the existing framework of the international system, primarily within NATO and the OECD. In this regard, the G7 was not thought to replace any existing organization but to coordinate the Western interests and thereby strengthen its members’ influence on a global scale.
Nuclear Policy at the Summits The handling of macroeconomic and monetary issues was the primary focus at the outset of the meetings. But the agenda of the summits was wide enough to include economy-related issues, such as trade or energy problems, or even traditional political questions of North-South and East-West relations. To draw a line between established policy fields, such as foreign and domestic or economic and security policy, became more difficult than ever before. As for nuclear policy, the issues became immanently clear. Initially handled as matters of energy supply, the use and development of nuclear power were closely connected to questions of proliferation. Furthermore, the flashpoint for the oil crisis of 1973 had been a political conflict between the Western, pro-Israeli industrial democracies and the Arab OPEC countries. When, at the end of the decade, the tensions between East and West began to grow again and the “second Cold War” was underway, nuclear policy at the summits gained weight. Now, it was about the stationing of missiles in Europe. In the case of both nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, the Western public became increasingly skeptical toward the policy of their govern- ments, which pursued buildups in these two domains. Fear of the dangers posed by waging nuclear warfare and creating nuclear energy established a link between the two practices and found expression in the growing protest movements in Western Europe and North America. The G7 in this respect was a place of communication: among the heads of government and state, as well as toward the public. Their message was that there was no accidental Armageddon to fear as long as the Western leaders dealt
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with the problem. The nuclear crisis was an international crisis and so were the responses from high politics.
Communicating the Unpopular The problem of communicating unpopular decisions is one of the basic challenges for leaders. In a keynote address, Robert Hormats, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic and Business Affairs of the U.S. State Department, laid out the dilemma of the G7 governments in this regard:
Western societies require both a unifying sense of purpose and a greater under- standing of the need to make hard choices among competing demands ... Yet frequently governments fail to take decisive policy action because the long-term impact of failure to act is not adequately understood or perceived in the public mind ... Thus the fundamental test of leadership will be to communicate to our societies the critical nature of the problems we face before the wolf is at the door ... Governments must make a major effort to articulate clearly and simply the major problems in such a way that they are understood, that the implications of failure to act effectively are widely perceived, and that a consensus can be developed on the necessity of decisive measures to produce the desired results.33 On the international level, the G7 constituted this communication plat- form. It had a certain importance, which was simply based on the fact of its prominent membership. The media, therefore, developed a “fascina- tion” for the summits, which was reflected in the steadily growing number of observers. The press corps covering the G7 rose from around five hundred in 1975 to two thousand reporters in 1977.34 By 1981 the Canadian officials expected up to six thousand journalists.35 The heads of state used the public attention to demonstrate – through their collective appearance in front of the cameras (the “family picture”) and their joint declarations at the end of the meetings – the commonality of their positions.36 The international scene was used to address domestic problems. A proactive public relations policy therefore was an important element of every summit preparation. Despite different approaches, which varied with each summit host, a standard to this effect evolved. It involved the provision of a technically well-equipped press pool and a well-organized support staff. The organizers, working under the auspices of national Sherpas, who were appointed for the G7 as directly responsible to the heads of state and government, did a balancing act between scheduling the private and informal talks that their state leaders needed and supplying the media with the kind of information that would convey a positive
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image of the meeting. For example, in preparation for the Bonn summit in 1978, German Sherpa Dieter Hiss tried to convince the chancellor, who disliked the public attention at the meetings, of the importance of comprehensive media arrangements: “A positive mood among the jour- nalists will be important for the political resonance and the ‘educational effect’ of the summit on the public. If we keep them at a distance, it will endanger the goals of the summit.”37 Nuclear questions concerning energy and weapons were the most contested issues at the summits, and thus presented the greatest challenges in producing a homogenous picture of the Seven as a unified group.
Energy The problem of energy supply had entered the world stage with force in the aftermath of the OPEC oil embargo of 1973. Besides the economic restrictions, the political impact was substantial. Not surprisingly, the G7 delegations dealt regularly with the energy question at their yearly meetings. The need to develop alternative energy sources, of which nuclear energy was certainly a key option, emerged as a solid consensus among the participants over the years. First mentioned in the 1977 summit declaration, nuclear energy was a constant topic of the meetings. In terms of extent, 10 percent of all words in the communiqué were devoted to nuclear energy production in 1977, rising to 13 percent in 1979 and 1980,38 a level of focus not again achieved until the catastrophe of Chernobyl in 1986. During the Tokyo summit in 1979 the energy question dramatically rose to attention when, in the middle of the meeting, OPEC announced a new round of supply restraint. Against the background of the “Islamic Revolution” in Iran, the producer cartel had chosen the G7 summit as the right moment to signal its support for the revolutionaries’ cause. The surprised summiteers reacted with an immediate abandoning of the preset agenda. To arrive at a common position on the matter, the heads of state and government themselves sat together until late night to negotiate an answer to the provocation from the Arab oil exporters.39 Energy, its conservation and production, never before had such an important place in high politics. The G7 governments tried to convince the public of the need for nuclear power, which had become an increasingly unpopular energy source. The Tokyo communiqué emphasized the connection of energy supply and the economic well-being of Western industrialized countries: “Without the expansion of nuclear power generating capacity
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in the coming decades, economic growth and higher employment will be hard to achieve. This must be done under conditions guaranteeing our people’s safety.”40 The references to safety and security aspects within the communiqué point to the Seven’s skepticism, a reaction that the issue of nuclear energy had first provoked in 1979. They were repeated in the following year at the summit in Venice: “We underline the vital contribution of nuclear power to a more secure energy supply ... We shall therefore have to expand our nuclear generating capacity. We will continue to give the highest priority to ensuring the health and safety of the public and to perfecting methods for dealing with spent fuels and disposal of nuclear waste.”41 When in 1981 the energy situation had not improved, the tone of the summiteers became more urgent, reflecting the impatience with which the state leaders reacted to the growing protest movement: “In most of our countries progress in constructing new nuclear facilities is slow. We intend in each of our countries to encourage greater public acceptance of nuclear energy, and respond to public concerns about safety, health, nuclear waste management and non-proliferation.”42 Protesters forced the governments to react, and government heads decided that their response should be delivered, at least in part, on the international level of G7 summitry.
Weapons That nuclear politics was more than just energy politics was obvious from the beginning, when the G7 documents were constantly referring to the risks of proliferation in connection with the buildup of nuclear power plants – an acknowledgment to show that the leaders were sensitive to public concerns related to nuclear energy.43 In 1977, when European Commission President Roy Jenkins was pushing for attendance at the summit discussions, his pledge was initially rejected by the British Prime Minister James Callaghan, because “these ques- tions [concerning nuclear power] would involve matters that exceed the energy question.”44 Jenkins eventually succeeded but had to keep away from all “political” discussions at the summit. The relevance of the G7 format for nuclear policy in the traditional security realm became even clearer at the meeting in Guadeloupe in December 1978: Leaders from the “big” four of the G7 – the US and French presidents, the British prime minister, and the German chancellor – gathered to discuss the concerns of Western defense in light of the Soviet arms
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buildup in Europe and the American-Soviet arms limitation talks (SALT II). Helmut Schmidt, in particular, was urging for a substantial response by NATO to the stationing of the Soviet SS-20 missiles in Central Europe and appealed to the American government not to unilaterally deal with the Soviets. The idea of a Western arms buildup with a simultaneous round of arms limitation talks offer with the Soviets (the later Double-Track Decision) was born here.45 It was not the first meeting of this kind. Since the installation of the G7, the four frequently came together during the summit meetings to discuss within the smaller group issues of defense and foreign policy. Under the smokescreen of “Berlin talks”–this was thought to be a justified reason for the selection of the group and the exclusion of other NATO states like Italy – the heads discussed “privately and frankly issues which are too sensitive or otherwise unsuitable for discussion among the Seven.”46 The participants were satisfied with the outcome, although nothing concrete had been announced after those kind of meet- ings. The purpose was representation and self-assertion on the part of the leaders, like at the gathering in Guadeloupe, where Jimmy Carter pointed publicly to the “common commitment of the four democracies present to an increasingly secure and free world,”47 and where James Callaghan stated that the meeting served to “establish a basis of common perception of central political and security issues.”48 Callaghan was thus “very pleased about the way the summit had gone” and Carter described it as “one of the best meetings that he had ever attended.”49 In times of a common nuclear threat, the Western group of seven provided a welcome framework for mutual reassurance and demonstration of unity. It was therefore decided to continue the discussion on the occasion of the next G7 summit with a “Berlin breakfast” in Tokyo.50 Eighteen months later the summit was again a place of discussion for the armament issue. Meanwhile NATO had adopted the “Double-Track Decision” on December 12, 1979. But public protest, notably in the Federal Republic, was growing, and Helmut Schmidt, who had initially pressed the Americans hard for the deal, was now under pressure from his own party to retract his support for the Western arms buildup.51 At Venice, the G7’s host city in 1980, the chancellor clashed with the US president. What Carter later described as “the most unpleasant personal exchange I have ever had with a foreign leader” was based on a history of mutual distrust and animosity between the two men.52 What set the stage for this encounter was a remark made by Schmidt before an SPD party conference in April, which was interpreted as an initiative
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for a moratorium on the stationing of the Pershing II missiles. The White House interpreted this as a unilateral abandoning of the NATO strategy by the Germans. In an unusually open way, the US president criticized Schmidt in a letter, which was made public. The chancellor was enraged and reacted very emotionally at the encounter in Venice.53 A deviation from the official G7 format, the clash raised broad public attention and projected the opposite image of what the summit was originally supposed to be: a forum for showcasing the unity of the Western governments. Venice was an example of the dangers that could arise out of the summit format: the concentration on the ideas and actions of individual leaders bore the risk of inharmonious meetings.
Protest Although public awareness was meant to be exploited as a beneficial tool, it became a problem for the G7 in the late 1970s. There were growing numbers of protesters converging upon the meetings and the summit became even a target for terrorist action. What had been no problem in the beginning, when the summit took place at such isolated spots as Rambouillet (1975) and Puerto Rico (1976), had now become a major concern. The summit of Tokyo (1979) set new standards of security arrangements. With the meeting taking place in the heart of the Japanese metropolis, the summit organizers were afraid of attacks by left- wing terrorist groups who had announced the “dismantling of the summit meeting.”54 The thirty thousand police officers who were deployed as “living walls” around the summit venue could not prevent anarchist and Communist groups from disrupting the event. Even a bomb was detected inside the New Otami hotel, the accommodation for the delegations.55 It was an embarrassment for the Japanese government, which regarded this summit as a matter of highest importance and a symbol of the Japanese return to world politics, and Prime Minister Masayoshi Ohira apologized repeatedly to his guests.56 Consequently, the following summit took place at the isolated isle of San Giorgio within the Venetian Lagoon, which was easier to protect partly because it was unreachable by civil protesters. Similarly, when the Canadian government in 1981 was looking for a summit venue, it chose the remote Château Montebello, a small and isolated hotel complex fifty miles outside of Ottawa.57 All visitors and observers had to stay at the capital and were not allowed to approach the summit venue. Instead, they were given the option of following the meeting via televised transmissions
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and press conferences, given by the Canadian host and the national spokespersons and members of delegation. In 1981, Helmut Schmidt was the only one left from the original founders of the group. It had become harder to reach understandings in economic matters with the neoliberal and monetarist British and American governments on the one side and Socialist François Mitterrand on the other. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan rejected the idea of interna- tional macroeconomic coordination and the G7, thus, turned more than ever toward questions of traditional foreign policy. The “second Cold War” brought the nuclear questions to new heights and in response to growing tensions between East and West, the summit produced a firm statement on the Double-Track decision: “We all view with concern the continuing threats to international security and stability ... In East-West relations, we are seriously concerned about the continuing build-up of Soviet military power. ... We ourselves, therefore, need a strong defense capability. We will be firm in insisting on a balance of military capabilities and on political restraint.”58 Notwithstanding the security arrangements, about sixty peace- and environmental-activist groups used the occasion of the summit to demon- strate their concerns with nuclear politics and their discontent with the Western governments.59 They were not so much interested in the eco- nomic points of the summit declaration but in the “political” statements. Nuclear policy was not the only issue but certainly a central one for these groups. Even though the G7 decided not to change its nuclear politics, the group had to communicate its stance much more carefully than in the previous years of summitry. Two years later, at Williamsburg, Virginia (1983), economic issues clearly were downgraded to second rank. To avoid an image of disunity, which had been produced at Versailles (1982), the summit gave the heads more freedom to talk informally and with less economic emphasis.60 The conflict about the Double-Track Decision had reached a peak. The deployment of the Pershing II missiles was slated for the end of the year, and the protest movement in several NATO countries had gained con- siderable momentum. The G7 “felt a need for collective international support.”61 The outcome was a strong message to the Soviet Union in light of the NATO strategy. The Declaration on Security was a product of the 1983 summit discus- sions and was not predrafted by the Sherpas, as had become the custom for summit documents. The tone was more ideological than ever, referring to the “duty” of the seven leaders “to defend the freedom and justice on
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which our democracies are based.”62 It affirmed the commitment to the Double-Track Decision, but the most important point of the declaration was the phrase, “The security of our countries is indivisible and must be approached on a global basis,” as it included for the first time France, which was not part of the integrated military structure of NATO, and Japan, which was not even a member of the Atlantic Alliance.63 The summit thus was aimed at demonstrating to the Soviet leaders as well as to the Western public the leaders’ determination to proceed with the NATO strategy. Regarding the latter, the declaration exposed the fundamental skepticism of the G7 toward the protest movement and the fear of foreign influence: “Attempts to avoid serious negotiation by seeking to influence public opinion in our countries will fail.”64
Conclusion The G7 summits were an instrument of communication. Founded on the basis of the Western crisis of the mid-1970s, this forum of cooperation was institutionalized in a way that allowed the handling of a broad range of issues. The central concerns of the environmental and the peace move- ment of the late 1970s and early 1980s – nuclear energy and nuclear weapons – were important points of discussion for the heads of state and government, who assembled every year in different locations and settings. The main purpose of the meetings was to create an image of confidence, determination, and unity. The participants were aware of the growing uneasiness, which was felt among the Western public and sought a stage where they could appear as responsible leaders of the Western world. They perceived the nuclear crisis as a problem of political leader- ship, which meant not so much making concessions in their decisions in the areas of energy or armament but rather raising awareness of the need for adequately communicating decisions to the public. From their posi- tions at the top echelon of international politics, the summiteers argued to have the clearest view of the world’s most pressing problems. The G7 was created in a moment when national governments were experiencing the challenge of interdependence through the process of an “intensified globalization.”65 Traditional political fields were increasingly hard to separate and “security policy” became a collective term for what was handled at the summits. Like President Carter said at the G7 press conference in Venice (1980), “There is no longer much real distinction that can be drawn between domestic affairs and foreign affairs, between military strength and energy or economic strength, between economic
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health and political vitality ...All these elements must be fused together to provide the basis of genuine security – security for the future as well as for the present.”66 In this light, the Double-Track Decision, as well as the nuclear energy buildup, was communicated as elements of a single comprehensive security strategy for the West, for which the heads of state and government alone claimed responsibility. The summits increasingly gained public attention. The G7’sgoal was to generate media attention and publicity rather than protests and demonstrations. In its early years the G7 had to worry only rarely about protests (in Tokyo and Montebello, as it has been shown), compared to the 1990sand2000s, when antiglobalization demonstra- tions at the G7/8 summits increased. But even though public discon- tent over nuclear policy appears to have had no direct impact on the group’s decisions, the very existence of the institutionalized meetings is an indicator of the change that had come to international politics: communication and justification in face of a skeptical public had become a major concern for Western governments in the 1970s, espe- cially in such contested areas like nuclear policy. The people’s interest forced the political leaders to explain their policies. It was, however, not the end of private and secretive talks among heads of state and government. These leaders were themselves uncertain about their ways and in need of coordination, which resulted in the fireside chat arena of the G7. In both directions of communication, nuclear policy was a core issue and a driving force of the institution’s development.
Notes
1. Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, WHC Files, TR 55 Paris (Rambouillet), Box 71: Henry Kissinger, Address before Pittsburgh World Affairs Council, Nov. 11, 1975. 2. The ideas of this paper are based on the doctoral thesis of the author, Enrico Böhm, published under the title Die Sicherheit des Westens: Entstehung und Funktion der G7, 1975–1981 (Munich, 2013). 3. Richard Rosecrance, ed., America as an Ordinary Country. U.S. Foreign Policy in the Future (Ithaca, NY, 1976); Robert Putnam and Nicholas Bayne, Hanging Together: Cooperation and Conflict in the Seven-Power Summits (London, 1987), 17. 4. Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, “Langfristige Ursprünge und dauerhafte Auswirkungen: Zur historischen Einordnung der siebziger Jahre,” in Konrad H. Jarausch, ed., Das Ende der Zuversicht? Die siebziger Jahre als Geschichte (Göttingen, 2008), 313–29, 313.
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5. Tim Schanetzky, “Ölpreisschock 1973: Wendepunkt des wirtschaftspoli- tischen Denkens,” in Andreas Rödder and Wolfgang Elz, eds., Deutschland in der Welt: Weichenstellungen in der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik (Göttingen, 2010), 67–81, 67–68. 6. Gabriele Metzler, “Krisenbewußtsein, Krisendiskurse und Krisenbewältigung: Die Frage der ‘Unregierbarkeit’ in Ost und West nach 1972/73,” Zeitgeschichte 34 (2007): 151–61. 7. Rüdiger Graf, “Gefährdungen der Energiesicherheit und die Angst vor der Angst. Westliche Industrieländer und das arabische Ölembargo 1973/74,” in Patrick Bormann, Thomas Freiberger, and Judith Michel, Angst in den internationalen Beziehungen (Göttingen/Bonn, 2010): 73–92; Borman/ Freiberger/Michel, Öl und Souveränität. Petroknowledge und Energiepolitik in den USA und Westeuropa in den 1970er Jahren (Munich, 2014). 8. Rudolf Vierhaus, “Zum Problem historischer Krisen,” in Karl-Georg Faber, ed., Historische Prozesse (Munich, 1978), 313–30, 323–24. 9. Charles S. Maier, “‘Malaise’: The Crisis of Capitalism in the 1970s,” in Niall Ferguson et al., eds., The Shock of the Global: The 1970’s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 25–48. 10. Henry Kissinger, “The Year of Europe,” New York, Apr. 4, 1973, Department of State Bulletin 68 (May 1973): 593–98. 11. François Duchêne, Kinhide Mushakoji, and Henry D. Owen, Crisis of International Cooperation: A Report of the Trilateral Political Task Force to the Executive Committee of the Trilateral Commission, Tokyo, 22–23 October 1973 (New York, 1974), 8–9. 12. Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy. Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York, 1975), 2; Maier, “Malaise,” 40–41. 13. Helga Haftendorn, Sicherheit und Stabilität: Außenbeziehungen der Bundesrepublik zwischen Ölkrise und NATO-Doppelbeschluss (Munich, 1986), 11–31. 14. Archiv der sozialen Demokratie (Bonn), 1/HSAA010071: Helmut Schmidt, Ökonomisches Papier zu unserer aktuellen ökonomischen Problematik unter dem Gesichtspunkt der außenpolitischen Bedingtheiten, 1974; Helmut Schmidt, “Der Politiker als Ökonom,” speech delivered spring 1974, Schmidt, Kontinuität und Konzentration (Bonn, 1975), 36–52. 15. Helmut Schmidt, “The Struggle for the World Product: Politics between Power and Morale,” Foreign Affairs 3 (1974): 437–51, 438. 16. Gabriel Robin, “Valéry Giscard d’Estaing et l’Europe,” in Serge Berstein and Jean-François Sirinelli, eds., Les années Giscard: Valéry Giscard d’Estaing et l’Europe 1974–1981 (Paris, 2006), 81–87, 82. 17. Bundesarchiv (Koblenz), B 136/8482, Bd. 1: Internationale Konferenz von Ölproduzenten und -konsumenten (“Bergedorfer Gesprächskreis” der Körber Stiftung), Vortrag Schmidt, Mar. 24, 1975.
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18. Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, WHC Files, TR 55 Paris (Rambouillet), Box 71, Address by Kissinger before Pittsburgh World Affairs Council, Nov. 11, 1975. 19. Helmut Schmidt, “Glanz und Elende der Gipfeldiplomatie und ihre Notwendigkeit,” in Helmut Schmit and Walter Hesselbach, eds., Kämpfer ohne Pathos: Festschrift für Hans Matthöfer zum 60. Geburtstag am 25. September 1985 (Bonn, 1985), 235–39. 20. “Die ‘Einsamkeit’ wird im Gipfeltreffen zu einem erheblichen Maß gelindert – am allermeisten, wenn zwei Männer sich ohne Sprachbarrieren und ohne zeitliche Bedrängnis unter vier Augen austauschen können” (ibid.). 21. Ibid. 22. Kurt Becker, “Between Image and Substance: The Role of the Media,” in Cesare Merlini, Economic Summits and Western Decision Making (Beckenham, 1984), 153–66, 155. 23. Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, WHC Files, TR 55 Paris (Rambouillet), Box 71: Henry Kissinger, Address before Pittsburgh World Affairs Council, Nov. 11, 1975. 24. Archives Nationales (Paris), 5 AG 3/885, [conseiller diplomatique]: Compte rendu du M. Sauvagnargues concernant le déjeuner quadripartite, Jul. 31/ Aug. 1, 1975. 25. The National Archives (College Park), RG 59, Central Policy Files, 1975BONN11654: Hillenbrand (US embassy Bonn) to State Department, Chancellery Economic Adviser [Hiss] on French monetary conference, raw materials, and the dialogue, Jul. 17, 1975. Johannes von Karczewski, “Weltwirtschaft ist unser Schicksal.” Helmut Schmidt und die Schaffung der Weltwirtschaftsgipfel (Bonn, 2008), 111–54. 26. The National Archives (Kew), PREM 16/356: Helmut Schmidt, Private Memorandum on International Concertation of Economic Action, Jul. 31, 1975. 27. Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, National Security Adviser, Memoranda of Conversations, Box 14: Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, Martin Hillenbrand, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, Robert Hartman and Helmut Schmidt, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Hans Friderichs, Walter Gehlhoff, Karl Otto Pöhl, Günther van Well, Berndt von Staden, Manfred Schüler, Carl- Werner Sanne, Bonn, Jul. 27, 1975. 28. The National Archives (College Park), RG 59, Central Policy Files, 1975STATE179175: Ingersoll (State Department) to Henry Kissinger, Giscard’s proposal for an economic summit, Jul. 30, 1975. 29. Archives Nationales (Paris), 5 AG 3/885: Compte rendu du M. Sauvagnargues concernant le déjeuner quadripartite, Jul. 31–Aug. 1, 1975. 30. Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, National Security Adviser, International Economic Affairs Staff, 1975–76, Box 4: Robert Hormats to Henry Kissinger, Memo, Oct. 24, 1975.
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31. Putnam and Bayne, Hanging Together, 25–47. 32. Paul Kennedy, The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations (New York, 2006). 33. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, WH Central File, Subject File, Foreign Affairs, FO 6–8, Box FO45: Robert Hormats, Address before Third US-EC Economic Journalists’ Conference in Airlie, Virginia (Sep. 9, 1978), and “Managing Economic Problems in the Industrialized Democracies,” The Department of State Bulletin 39 (Oct. 1978). 34. Ivan Head and Pierre E. Trudeau, The Canadian Way: Shaping Canada’s Foreign Policy 1968–1984 (Toronto, 1995), 214. Numbers for 1975 in Archives Nationales (Paris), 5 AG 3/3101, Dossier Rambouillet: Premiers listes de journalistes, Nov. 15, 1975. Numbers for 1977: ibid., Dossier Londres: AP news report, London, May 1977. 35. Library and Archives Canada (Ottawa), MG26 O 22 vol. 3: Note to the Prime Minister from Prime Minister Office, Jun. 22, 1980; John Kirton, “Introduction: The Significance of the Seven-Power Summit,” in Peter Hajnal, ed., The Seven Power Summit: Documents from the Summits of Industrialized Countries 1975–1989 (New York, 1989), xxi–xli, xxvii. 36. Archives Nationales (Paris), 5 AG 3/3101, Dossier Rambouillet: Xavier Beauchamps to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Nov. 14, 1975; Bundesarchiv (Koblenz), B 136/8482: Kurt, Stand der Verhandlungen in Bezug auf Teilnehmer, Themen, Prozedur, Oct. 7, 1975. 37. Bundesarchiv (Koblenz), B 136/8489: Dieter Hiss, Ergebnisse der Vorbesprechungen der Persönlichen Beauftragten am 30./31.3.1978 in Bonn, Apr. 3, 1978. 38. “The G8 Summit Communiqués on Nuclear Energy, 1975–2007,” compiled by Sarah Cale (G8 Research Group) June 9, 2008, http://www.g8.utoronto.ca /conclusions/index.html (accessed May 9, 2016). 39. Hugo Dobson, The Group of 7/8 (London, 2007), 61; Putnam and Bayne, Hanging Together, 110. Archiv der sozialen Demokratie, 1/HSAA006740: Schulmann/Lautenschlager/Steeg, Stand der Vorgespräche der Persönlichen Beauftragten, May 21, 1979. 40. Toyko Summit Declaration, Jun. 29, 1979, in Hajnal, Seven Power Summit, 64–70. 41. Venice Summit Declaration, Jun. 23, 1980, in ibid., 80–90. 42. Ottawa Summit Declaration, Jul. 21, 1981, in ibid., 104–11. 43. The G8 Summit Communiqués on Nuclear Non-Proliferation, 1975–2005, compiled by John Kirton and Laura Sunderland, November 2005, http:// www.g8.utoronto.ca/conclusions/index.html (accessed May 9, 2016). 44. The National Archives (Kew), PREM 16/1222: Memo of Meeting between the Prime Minister and Roy Jenkins, Apr. 4, 1977. 45. The National Archives (Kew), PREM 16/2050: Note, Four Power Discussion in Guadeloupe, First Session, Jan. 5, 1979; ibid.: Prime Ministers [Callaghan]
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Notes at Barbados, Sep. 1, 1979; ibid.: M.J. Vile (FCO), Note for the record, Guadeloupe summit, Jan. 15, 1979. Haftendorn, “Sicherheit und Stabilität,” 92–132. 46. The National Archives (Kew), PREM 16/1223: Foreign Office, Planning Staff, Steering Brief, Apr. 28, 1977. 47. Carter Library, WH Central File, Subject File, Foreign Affairs, FO 6–8, Box FO45: James E. Carter to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Jan. 1, 1979. 48. The National Archives (Kew), PREM 16/2050: Cartledge (Cab) to the Prime Minister, Your statement to the House on Guadeloupe, Jan. 1, 1979. 49. The National Archives (Kew), PREM 16/2050: M.J. Vile (FCO), Note for the record, Guadeloupe summit, Jan. 1, 1979. 50. The National Archives (Kew), PREM 16/2050: Note, Four Power Discussion in Guadeloupe, Third Session, Jan. 6, 1979. 51. Haftendorn, “Sicherheit und Stabilität,” 124–34. 52. Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (New York, 1982), 538. 53. Klaus Wiegrefe, Das Zerwürfnis: Helmut Schmidt, Jimmy Carter und die Krise der deutsch-amerikanischen Beziehungen (Berlin, 2005), 356. 54. “Lebende Mauern,” Der Spiegel, Jun. 25, 1979. 55. Wiegrefe, Zerwürfnis, 299. 56. Hugo Dobson, Japan and the G7/8: 1975–2002 (London, 2004), 35–36. 57. Guido Garavoglia, “From Rambouillet to Williamsburg: A Historical Assessment,” in Cesare Merlini, ed., Economic Summits and Western Decision-Making (Beckenham, 1984), 1–42, 26. 58. Chairman’s Summary of Political Issues, Jul. 21, 1981, in Hajnal, Seven Power Summit, 112–14. 59. “5,000 Protest in Ottawa,” New York Times, Jul. 20, 1981. 60. Putnam and Bayne, Hanging Together, 170–74. 61. Ibid., 179. 62. Statement at Williamsburg [Declaration on Security], May 29, 1983, in Hajnal, Seven Power Summit, 242–43. 63. William Wallace, “Political Issues at the Summits: A New Concert of Powers?” in Merlini, Economic Summits, 137–52, 137. 64. Statement at Williamsburg [Declaration on Security], May 29, 1983, in Hajnal, Seven Power Summit, 242–43. 65. Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels Petersson, Geschichte der Globalisierung: Dimensionen, Prozesse, Epochen (Munich, 2003), 24. 66. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, Office of Staff Secretary, Handwriting File, Box 193: Presidential Closing Statement, Jun. 23, 1980.
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Abalone Alliance campaign, 186–87 historical development of, 7 creation of, 193–94 through opposition to nuclear power Abel Archer exercise, NATO and, 35 plants, 7–8, 178–81 abortion, 69–71 Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 and, Abraham, Peter, 154 271–72 accidental Armageddons, 10, 88–89, pro-life movement and, 69–72 317–18 as resistance movement, 91–92 Ackerman, Thomas, 27–28, 29–30, 33, response to nuclear winter threat, 34–35 45–46 in West Germany, 167–68, 181, 185 Action for Reconciliation Peace Services anti-nuclear pop. See popular music, nuclear (ASF), 254, 256–57 crisis themes in active neutrality, 228 anti-toxics movement, 187–88. See also Adamson, Stuart, 106 Love Canal Adelman, Kenneth, 280–81 LCHA and, 196–200 Agar, Jon, 44 legislation as part of, 204 AIF. See Atomic Industrial Forum Apel, Hans, 293, 301 Albertz, Heinrich, 86–87, 92 Apfelberg, Liz, 193 Albrecht, Ulrich, 229 Appeal for European Nuclear Alphaville, 120 Disarmament, 229–31 Alvarez, Walter, 29 Aron, Raymond, 319 American Cancer Society, 69 Artists for Peace festival, 123, 136–37 Anders, Günther, 82 Artists for Peace initiative. See Künstler fur Andre, Fabrizio de, 123 den Frieden initiative Antarctic Treaty, 208 ASF. See Action for Reconciliation Peace Antarctica, as nuclear-free zone, 224 Services anti-Americanism, 87–88 atomic Holocaust, 86 anti-nuclear movement. See also No Nukes Atomic Industrial Forum (AIF), 188–89, movement; popular music, nuclear 202 crisis themes in; Wyhl reactor site, atomic pop, 102–3 occupation of atomic threat. See nuclear crisis anti-Americanism and, in West Germany, Australia 87–88 nuclear disarmament movement in, 274 civil disobedience in, 7–8 nuclear-free zones in, 210, 222 in contemporary context, 93 in France, 316–18 Bahr, Egon, 290–91, 302 CODENE-CFDT alliance and, 326–30 Bahro, Rudolf, 303 as nonaligned, failure of, 326–30 Barrett, Marcia, 135 high-risk activism in, 5 Bastian, Gert, 123, 298, 303
355
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Baudissin, Wolf Graf, 298 Bush, Kate, 4 BCC. See British Council of Churches Beckmann, Lukas, 126, 131 Caldicott, Helen, 66, 71–72 Bedford, Henry, 191 Callaghan, James “Sunny Jim,” 278, 344, Belafonte, Harry, 123–24 345 Beresford, Meg, 233 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Berger, Senta, 126 (CND), 228 Berrigan, Daniel, 72 in Christian Peace movement, 254–55 Berrigan, Philip, 72 END compared to, 228, 231–34, 246 Berstecher, Dieter, 171, 172 Canada Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, nuclear disarmament movement in, 272 228–29, 232, 237 nuclear-free zones in, 210 Beuys, Joseph, 87, 126, 133, 134, 137 Carey, Hugh, 197–98 Bielefeld, Rolf, 130 Carson, Rachel, 40, 43–44 Bielefeld Appeal, 302 Carter, Jimmy, 67, 107, 202, 253, 345 Biermann, Wolfgang, 126, 142, 144–45, missile deployment strategy under, 272, 152, 303 293 biological citizens, 62–63 neutron bomb policy, 291 Birks, John, 29 nuclear disarmament policy, 277–78 BKA. See Federation of Communist SALT II Treaty and, 278 Workers Catholic Church, abortion and, 70 Bleuel, Hans Peter, 156 CDU. See Christian Democratic Union ”Blue Marble,” earth as, 39 Celan, Paul, 88 Blueprint for Survival, 41–42 CFDT (French trade union), 326–30 Boardman, Elizabeth, 189 change of government. See Wende Bobichon, Jean-Pierre, 329 Charter 77, 238, 240–41, 275 Bohley, Bärbel, 238 Chernenko, Konstantin, 108, 147–48 Böll, Heinrich, 123–24, 132, 144, 150, 259 Chichester, Guy, 189 Bonbrest, Bette Gay, 77 A Child Is Born (Nilsson), 77 Bonbrest v. Kotz, 68, 77 The China Syndrome, 3–4, 60 Boney M., 120, 135 Christgau, Robert, 105–6 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 92 Christian Democratic Union (CDU), 79–80 Bourdet, Claude, 229, 326–27, 331 Christian peace movement. See also Bowie, David, 3, 110–11 Interchurch Peace Council Boyens, Armin, 89 CND as part of, 254–55 Brandt, Willy, 41, 129, 301–2, 338 defined, 252 Brezhnev, Leonid, 272, 278, 279, 320 END and, 255 Briggs, Raymond, 3, 105, 110–11 in Great Britain, 257–58, 260–62 Bright, Charles, 216–17 BCC and, 260–61 British Council of Churches (BCC), 260–61 influence of churches in, 260–62 Brower, David, 192–93 organizational coordination within, Brown, Harold, 294 258–60, 263 Brown, Jerry, 192–93 Pax Christi and, 254–55, 262–63 Browne, Jackson, 192 in West Germany, 256–57, 260–62 Bruyn, Günter de, 150, 153 Christian Right, opposition to nuclear Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 277, 291 disarmament, 276 Buckley, William, 3 churches. See Christian peace movement; Bukovsky, Vladimir, 275–76 Interchurch Peace Council Bundesregierung, 294–301 civil defense policies Harmel formula and, 299–300 in Great Britain, 103–5 Bush, George H. W., 271 in US, 103–5
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Clamshell Alliance campaign, 186–87, Dai, Caroline, 124–25 189–92 Davis, Belinda, 180 mass arrests during, 191–92 The Day After, 2–3, 35 political criticism of, 190–91 de Gaulle, Charles, 318–19 Wyhl reactor site occupation as influence Declaration of Security, 347–48 on, 190 Degenhardt, Franz Josef, 123 The Clash, 4 Deile, Volker, 86 The Closing Circle (Commoner), 41 Deile, Volkmar, 256 Cloward, Richard, 200–1 Denton, Harold, 60 CND. See Campaign for Nuclear Derrida, Jacques, 31 Disarmament d’Estaing, Valéry Giscard, 293, 338–39 Coates, Ken, 228–29, 234, 237. See also Deutschmann, Matthias, 131–32 Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, CODENE. See Committee for the 192–95 Denuclearization of Europe Abalone Alliance campaign and, 186–87 Cold War. See also Cuban Missile Crisis creation of, 193–94 atomic pop and, 102–3 mass arrests at, 195 MAD and, 2 Mothers for Peace and, 193 nuclear-free zones and, 208 public support for, 193 West Germany during, 1 Dienstbier, Jií, 238 Committee for the Denuclearization of Ditfurth, Jutta, 84 Europe (CODENE), 326–30 domaines réservés, 318 goals of, 327 Doomsday Book (Taylor), 41 organizations in, 326–27 Doomsday Machine, 31–32 Committee to Protect Fessenheim and the Dörries, Matthias, 44 Rhine Valley (CSFR), 170–71 Double Exposure (Racek), 231 Commoner, Barry, 41, 43–44, 193 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Communist League of West Germany Worrying and Love the Bomb, 12, (KBW), 177–78 31–32 concentration camps Dual-Track Decision, of NATO, 17–18, missile bases and, 88–89 117, 227 pacifism movement and, in West Bielefeld Appeal and, 302 Germany, 88–89 END and, 228–29 Conze, Eckart, 306 French support for, in press, 323–24 Cook, James, 195 G7 summits and, 347–48 Cornwall, Hugh, 110–11 Hollanditis and, 251 Cosgrove, Denis, 38–39 IKV response to, 255–56 credibility gap, in US political culture, 56 nuclear disarmament and, 277–78 Cronkite, Walter, 55 Soviet Union and, 1–2 Crozier, Michel, 337–38 SV response to, 142–43 Cruise Missiles, deployment of, 1–2, 227, West Germany and 272 Bielefeld Appeal and, 302 Crutzen, Paul, 29 Bundesregierung response to, 294–301 CSFR. See Committee to Protect Fessenheim peace movement influenced by, 83, and the Rhine Valley 292–301 Cuban Missile Crisis, 10 SPD response to, 301–5 culture of death, 8 Dubos, René, 38 Czaputowicz, Jacek, 242 Dubrow, Sara, 69, 77 Czechoslovakia, 241, 249 Duff, Peggy, 229 Charter 77 in, 238, 240–41, 275 Dukakis, Michael, 195
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Earth in the Balance (Gore), 39 Dual-Track Decision as factor in, East German Writers Union (SV) 323–24 expulsion of writers from, 142 FRG response to, 321–22 during peace movement, 143–46, 159 Pershing II missiles and, 325 in Bebelplatz, 148–50 political consensus on, 321–22 cooperation with West German in press, 322–24 authors, 150–56 public opinion on, 324–26, 330–31, socialist participation in, 146–48 333 union-sponsored international events, Europe, peace movements in. See also 148–50 European Nuclear Disarmament; response to NATO Dual-Track Decision, West Germany; Western Europe 142–43, 157–58 CND and, 228, 231 SED and, 142, 144–46 organizational network among, 235 East Germany, West German Green Party political agendas of, 227–28 in, 155–56 Third Way tradition in, 228 Ebert, Theodor, 177 transnational diffusion of, 228, 245 ecocide, 53 European Economic Community (EEC), EEC. See European Economic Community 173 Eggleston, Barbara, 257 European Nuclear Disarmament (END), Ehrlich, Paul, 30–31, 40–41 228–44, 272 Einstein, Albert, 282 Appeal for, 229–31 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 103 Charter 77 and, 238, 240–41 “Eiszeit,” 120 Christian Peace movement and, 255 Ellsberg, Daniel, 193 CND compared to, 228, 231–34, 246 END. See European Nuclear Disarmament Conventions for, 235–37 Engelmann, Bernt, 150, 156, 157, 163 Dual-Track Decision as influence on, Enhanced Radiation Weapon (ERW), 228–29 290–91 East-West dialogue, 237–44 environmental movement. See also anti- goals of, 229–31 nuclear movement; No Nukes Great Britain and, 228, 231–34 movement Helsinki network and, 243–44 anti-toxics movement and, 187–88 independent peace groups as part of, “Blue Marble” photograph as symbol of, 238–40 39 divergent goals of, 239–41 in contemporary context, 93 political coalitions in, 229, during 1970s, 37–38, 39 234–35 NRDC and, 43 roots of, 228–29 pollution and, 201 in Western Europe, 234–37 reproductive health as symbol of, 64 European Trade Union Confederation against Vietnam War, 53 (ETUC), 328 in West Germany, 41 Euroshima, 92 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 144 extinction of human race, 31, 32–33 Eppler, Erhard, 89–90, 303 Epstein, Barbara, 192 Faber, Mient Jan, 253–54, 258 ERW. See Enhanced Radiation Weapon Fail Safe, 11 ETUC. See European Trade Union Falwell, Jerry, 276 Confederation Farian, Frank, 135 Euromissile crisis, 318 Farrell, Bobby, 135 development of, 316 The Fate of the Earth (Schell), 4–5, 31, in France, 319–21 44–45 CODENE-CFDT alliance and, 326–30 FDP. See Free Democratic Party
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Federal Republic of Germany. See West Franklin, Benjamin, 339 Germany Free Democratic Party (FDP), 290 Federation of Communist Workers (BKA), Freiligrath, Ferdinand, 83 172–73 French Communist Party (PCF), 317 Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, 69 Fried, Erich, 126 fetal health, fetus and front porch politics. See also Love Canal; abortion and, 69–71 Love Canal Homeowners Bonbrest v. Kotz and, 68, 77 Association as cultural symbol, 68–71 as activist movement, development of, radiation scares and, 56–57 200–1 technology and, 69 defined, 200–1 TMI coolant accident and, 63–64, 66–71 Fühmann, Franz, 144, 153 Filbinger, Hans, 168 “Fulda Gap: The First Battle of the Next films, TV and War,” 1 The China Syndrome, 3–4, 60 The Day After, 2–3, 35 G7 summits. See Group of Seven summits environmental movement in, 41 Gaia (Lovelock), 39 nuclear crisis in, 3–4, 11, 12 Gallois, Pierre-Marie, 318–19 Fischer, Gotthilf, 139 Geißler, Heiner, 79–80, 83, 84–85 Fischer, Joschka, 79, 91, 93, 131–32 Genesis, 109 Flessati, Valerie, 262–63 Genscher, Hans-Dietrich, 290–91 Foley, Michael, 170 Gergan, David, 278–79 Ford, Gerald, 339 Germany. See East German Writers Union; “Forever Young,” 120 West Germany Forsberg, Randall, 272–73 Geyer, Michael, 143–44, 216–17 France Gibbs, Lois, 196, 197, 199. See also Love accidental Armaggedons and, in public Canal Homeowners Association discourse, 317–18 Ginsburg, Faye, 71 anti-nuclear movement in, 316–18 Giscard, Valéry, 319 CODENE-CFDT alliance and, 326–30 Glotz, Peter, 130, 303 as nonaligned, failure of, 326–30 Goebbels, Joseph, 89–90 Dual-Track Decision and, press support Goldwater, Barry, 12, 32 for, 323–24 Gollwitzer, Helmut, 86 Euromissile crisis in, 319–21 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 35–36, 148, 282–83, CODENE-CFDT alliance and, 326–30 284–85. See also Second Cold War Dual-Track Decision as factor in, Gore, Al, 39 323–24 Graham, Thomas, 278–79 FRG response to, 321–22 Grass, Günter, 87–88, 129, 144, 150, 152, Pershing II missiles and, 325 155–56 political consensus on, 321–22 Graswurzelrevolution, 175–76, 179, 183 in press, 322–24 Gray, Colin S., 2 public opinion on, 324–26, 330–31, Great Britain 333 anti-nuclear protest music in Euromissile debate in, 319–21 compared to US, 101–2 pacifism in, public opinion on, 323–24, decline in popularity of, 111 330–31 during 1980s, 105–11 peace movement in Protect and Survive films critiqued by, lack of, 317–18 106–7 PCF and, 317 roots of, 103–5 SS-20s as strategic threat to, 318–21 Christian peace movement in, 257–58, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, 108 260–62
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Great Britain (cont.) Haraszti, Miklós, 238 BCC and, 260–61 Hardcastle, Paul, 110–11 civil defense policies in, 103–5 Harloff, Margot, 171 CND and, 228, 231, 246 Harwell, Mark, 43 END and, 228, 231–34 Hays, Samuel, 194 IKV influence in, 257–58 Hazareesingh, Sudhir, 317 nuclear disarmament movement in, 272 Heath, Edward, 338 nuclear-free zones in, 209–10, 224 The Heavy Dancers (Racek), 231 peace movement in, 231–34. See also Hegedüs, András, 234 European Nuclear Disarmament Helsinki network, 243–44 Protect and Survive films in, 105 Henniger, Gerhard, 144–45, 147, 151 Third Way tradition in, 228 Herbein, Jack, 59–60 Green Party, in West Germany, 124–32. See Herf, Jeffrey, 1 also Beuys, Joseph; Project Green Hermann, Ludolf, 89–90 Caterpillar Hermlin, Stephan, 144, 147, 148, 154, 156 as alternative to institutionalized parties, Heubach, Joachim, 89 129–30, 132–33, 141 Hirsch, Ludwig, 126 in East Germany, 155–56 Hiss, Dieter, 343 historical development for, 132–34 Hoffmann, Freia, 169 SPD and, 129 Hoffmann, Hans-Joachim, 148 “Green Tent,” 137 Holden, Stephen, 101–2 Greenpeace, 208 Holland, Stuart, 229 Greet, Kenneth, 260–61 Hollanditis, 251. See also the Netherlands Grinspoon, Lester, 42–43 the Holocaust Group of Seven (G7) summits in modern context, 93 communication of unpopular decisions, nuclear armament and, 80–81, 85–89 342–43 political context for, 81–83 Declaration of Security and, 347–48 universalization of, 85 development of, political and economic in language, 86–87 context for, 336–37 Honecker, Erich, 151, 155–56 Dual-Track Decision and, 347–48 Höpcke, Klaus, 154 energy supply issues at, 343–44 Hormats, Robert, 342 goals of, 335–36, 348–49 Hunthausen, Raymond G., 95 nuclear policy during, 341–42 Huntington, Samuel, 337–38 nuclear weapons policy at, 344–46 Huntzinger, Jacques, 321–22 original participants of, 340 political leadership and, 337–39 ICBM system. See Intercontinental Ballistic public protests of, 346–48 Missile system at Rambouillet, 339–41 ICSU. See International Council of Scientific Schmidt and, 345, 347 Unions Grundgesetz (German constitution), 81 IKV. See Interchurch Peace Council Grüne Raupe. See Project Green Caterpillar An Inconvenient Truth, 39 Grzimek, Bernhard, 41 INF treaty. See Intermediate-Range Nuclear Guha, Anton-Andreas, 86 Forces treaty Guthrie, Arlo, 192 information politics, 243 Gyorgy, Anna, 192 Interchurch Peace Council (IKV), 252–53 ASF and, 254, 256–57 Hager, Kurt, 148, 155–56 churches in, 264 Haig, Alexander, 280 Dual-Track Decision and, 255–56 Hambacher Fest, 83 establishment of, 253–55 Hamon, Léo, 319 in Great Britain, 257–58
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international influence of, 253–54, Kent, Bruce, 232, 254 255–58 Kershaw, Nik, 4 IPCC and, 259–60 Kidder, Tracy, 190 protests against neutron bomb, 253 King, Coretta Scott, 123–24 in West Germany, 256–57 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 123–24 Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) Kirsch, Sarah, 144 system, 283 Kis, János, 238 Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles Kissinger, Henry, 3, 335, 336–37, 338–39 (IRBMs), 107 Klineberg, Eric, 72 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Knabe, Wilhelm, 131 treaty, 111, 156 Kohl, Helmut, 6, 84–85, 125, 135, 278, International Council of Scientific Unions 308–9, 322, 323 (ICSU), 43 Konrád, György, 238, 243 International Peace Communication and Köpke, Günter, 328 Coordination Centre (IPCC), 233, Koppel, Ted, 40 235, 259–60 Krefeld Appeal, 151 IPCC. See International Peace Krefeld Initiative, 122–23 Communication and Coordination Krevitz, Pascal, 120–21 Centre Kubrick, Stanley, 31–32 IRBMs. See Intermediate Range Ballistic Künstler fur den Frieden (Artists for Peace) Missiles initiative, 117 Kunze, Heinz Rudolf, 127 Japan Kupper, Patrick, 37 nuclear disarmament movement in, 274 Kuro, Jacek, 238 nuclear-free zones in, 210, 222 JEF. See Young European Federalists LaFalce, John, 197 Jenkins, Roy, 344 Lafontaine, Oskar, 303, 304 Jens, Walter, 92 Lage, Klaus, 123 Joffe, Josef, 297 Laqueur, Walter, 251, 262, 263 journals and magazines, nuclear winter LaRocque, Gene, 320 threat in, 41, 42 Lattmann, Dieter, 87 Judt, Tony, 36 Layzer, Judith, 196 Julius oder Der Schwarze Sommer (Rabsch), Lazar, Marc, 317 4–5 LCHA. See Love Canal Homeowners Association Kahn, Herman, 31–32 Leber, Georg, 292 Kaldor, Mary, 229, 242, 243, 249, 273, 280 Leinen, Jo, 176, 178–79 Kamnitzer, Heinz, 148 Lellouche, Pierre, 319 Kant, Hermann, 144–46, 157 Life, 69, 77 “Karl der Käfer,” 120 Lifton, Robert Jay, 31 Kastler, Alfred, 324 Limited Test Ban Treaty, 68 KBW. See Communist League of West Limits to Growth, 41–42 Germany Lindenberg, Udo, 120–21, 122, 123, Keck, Margaret, 243 126–27, 139 Kelly, Petra, 92, 123, 125, 127, 128, Lindsay, Hal, 276 131–32, 176, 259, 303 Lis, Ladislav, 242 Kemeny Commission, 67, 70, 73 literature. See also journals and magazines Kennan, George, 243 nuclear crisis in, 4–5, 31, 44–45 Kennedy, Donald, 32 “A Little Peace,” 116–17, 121 Kennedy, John F., 84 Live Aid concert, 111 Kenney, Padraic, 249 Loeb, William, 190
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Loest, Erich, 156 Moral Majority, 276. See also Christian Love Canal, 196–200 Right evacuation of, 197–98 Moreton, Bethany, 71–72 No Nukes movement and, 196 Morgner, Irmtraud, 144 relocation of residents, 199, 205 Motchane, Didier, 321 toxic waste discovery at, 196–97 Mothers for Peace, 193 Love Canal Homeowners Association “Mother’s Talk,” 109–11 (LCHA), 196–200 MSD. See Minimum Sufficient Deterrence Lovejoy, Sam, 189 MTV. See Music Television Lovelock, James, 39 Müller-Westernhagen, Marius, 123 Lown, Bernard, 282 MUSE. See Musicians United for Safe Energy Maahn, Wolf, 120 music. See popular music MacLeish, Archibald, 38 Music Television (MTV), 9 MAD. See Mutual Assured Destruction anti-nuclear pop music in, 103 Maffay, Peter, 120, 139 British musicians on, 105–6 magazines. See journals and magazines Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE), Maier, Charles, 336–37 194–95 Makeba, Miriam, 123 Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), 2 Markov, Georgi, 146 nuclear winter and, 31–32 Markovits, Andrei, 179 MX missile program, 283 Mastnak, Tomaž, 238 Mayes, Jane, 247 Nader, Ralph, 188–89, 201–2, 203 McCormick, John, 38 Nannini, Gianna, 127 McCoulf, Grace, 198 National Committee for a Sane Nuclear McEwan, Ian, 243 Policy (SANE), 274 McFarlane, Robert, 278–79 National Socialism (NS) McGrory, Mary, 34–35 historical anniversaries, 89–91 McNamara, Robert, 3 historical context for, 81–83 McNeill, J. R., 37 in modern context, 93 Mead, Margaret, 38 1960s student movements and, long-term Mechtersheimer, Alfred, 298 influences on, 82–83 media. See also films, TV and; journals and nuclear armament and, 80–81 magazines public memory of, 90–91 nuclear crisis in, 4–5 NATO. See North Atlantic Treaty nuclear winter in, 31, 40 Organization Medvedev, Roy, 234 Natural Resources Defense Council Medvedev, Zhores, 229 (NRDC), 43 Medvedkova, Olga, 243 Naumann, Konrad, 148 Meinecke, Ulla, 123 Nazi Germany. See also National Socialism Mende, Silk, 179 commemoration of book burnings in, Mercier, Albert, 330 148–49 Mertes, Alois, 84 Nehring, Holger, 88, 185 Met Ed. See Three Mile Island nuclear Nena, 4, 103, 121–22 power plant the Netherlands Mills, C. Wright, 228 anti-NATO movement in, 251–52 Minimum Sufficient Deterrence IKV in, 252–53 (MSD), 33 Neue Deutsche Welle (New German Wave), Mitchell, Liz, 135 118, 135 Mitterand, François, 316, 322, 331. neutron bomb See also France during Carter presidency, 291
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ERW and, 290–91 NS. See National Socialism IKV and, 253 nuclear anxiety, skepticism on modernity protests against, in West Germany, and, 305–6 290–92 nuclear crisis. See also popular music, as political bargaining chip, 292 nuclear crisis themes in Neutsch, Erik, 147 arms control policy influenced by, 35–36 New German Wave. See Neue Deutsche culture of death and, 8 Welle The Day After and, 2–3 New Left, 82–83 in films, 3–4, 11, 12 New Zealand historical development of, 1, 17–18 nuclear disarmament movement in, 274 in literature, 4–5 nuclear-free zones in, 209 NATO and, 1, 17–18 NGOs. See nongovernmental organizations political protests in response to, 5 Niedecken, Wolfgang, 127, 131–32 in popular culture, 2–5, 9–10, 105 Niemczyck, Piotr, 242 public opinion on, 35 Niemöller, Martin, 123 Reagan’s policy towards, 35–36 Nilsson, Lennart, 69, 77 as totalitarian, 82 “99 Luftballons” (99 Red Balloons), 4, 103, in traditional media, 4–5, 31 121–22, 136 nuclear disarmament movement. See also inspiration for, 136 anti-nuclear movement; Campaign Nitze, Paul, 280–81 for Nuclear Disarmament; European Nixon, Richard, 338 Nuclear Disarmament No Nukes movement. See also Abalone in Canada, 272 Alliance campaign; Clamshell Dual-Track Decision and, 277–78 Alliance campaign; Diablo Canyon global strategies in, 271–77 nuclear power plant; front porch international alliances in, 275 politics; Seabrook nuclear power in Great Britain, 272 plant in Pacific region, 274 appraisals of, 201 social protests as part of, 273–74 cultural context of, 186–87 throughout Soviet Union nations, 274–75 decline of nuclear power industry in US, 274 influenced by, 195–96, 203–4 during Carter presidency, 277–78 focus of, 186–87 Christian Right opposition to, 276 future implications for, 200 public policy influenced by, 277–85 historical development of, 187–88 during Reagan presidency, 273–77, Love Canal and, 196 278–85 Mothers for Peace and, 193 resistance to, 275–77 NRC licensing influenced by, 203–4 in Western Europe, 272, 273–74 TMI accident and, 194 nuclear fear, 10–12 Noll, Dieter, 154 Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), movement, 274 38, 43 Nuclear Free (and Independent) Pacific North Atlantic Treaty Organization Movement, 208 (NATO), 103. See also Dual-Track nuclear Holocaust, 85, 86 Decision nuclear power, as industry. See also Diablo Abel Archer exercise, 35 Canyon nuclear power plant; Dutch opposition to, 251–52 Seabrook nuclear power plant; Three nuclear crisis and, 1, 17–18 Mile Island nuclear power plant; NRC. See Nuclear Regulatory Commission Wyhl reactor site NRDC. See Natural Resources Defense corruption in, 203 Council in culture of death, 8
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nuclear power, as industry (cont.) Antarctic Treaty and, 208 decline of, 195–96, 203–4 Antarctica as, 224 emergency planning strategies, 195 in Australia, 210, 222 NRC and, 57–58, 60–61 campaigning for, 210–12, 220 opposition to, 7–8, 178–81, 188–89 in localized settings, 212–13 public campaigns for, 188–89, 202 in Canada, 210 public trust in, 57–59 Cold War as influence on, 208 Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), cumulative effect of, on global scale, 215 57–58, 60–61, 203–4 global perspective arguments for, 216–19 nuclear sites, high-risk activism at, 5 global-local dynamics of, 214–16 nuclear war historical development of, 206–7, 208–10 extinction of human race from, 31 as grassroots movement, 208–10 global biological consequences of, 30–31 institutionalization of, 210 MAD and, 2 in Japan, 210, 222 nuclear-free zones as response to, 225 as legally-binding, through treaties, 224 US countervailing strategy for, 2 legitimation of, 212–13 nuclear weapons in New Zealand, 209 Cruise Missiles, 1–2, 227, 272 nuclear war threat and, 225 at G7 summits, 344–46 Outer Space Treaty and, 208 Holocaust symbolism and, 80–81, 85–89 in Pacific region, 208, 210 Pershing Missiles, 1–2, 227, 272 patriotism and, 225 French public opinion on, 325 skepticism of, 207 during Reagan presidency, 273, 278 South America as, 224 Thatcher government support of, 273, transnational perspectives on, 213–14 278 as transnational political space, 219 in West Germany, 79–80 Treaty of Tlatelolco and, 208 nuclear winter, as global threat, 28–36 in UK, 209–10, 224 anti-nuclear movement response to, in US, 210, 222 34–35 in Western Europe, 209–10 arms control policy influenced by, 35–36 Nukewatch, 206 crisis narratives for, in 1970s, 36–42 Nye, Joseph, 34 environmental movement and, 37–38, 39 Ohira, Masayoshi, 346 NGOs and, 38 Only One Earth (Ward and Dubos), 38 crisis narratives for, in 1980s, 42–45 Onyskiewicz, Janusz, 238 critique of concept, 47–48 Orzabal, Roland, 109–11 global biological consequences of, 30–31, Ospolitik approach, in West Germany, 1–2 40–42 Outer Space Treaty, 208 in journals and magazines, 41, 42 long-term implications of, 45–46 Pacific region. See Australia; Japan; New 31–32 MAD and, Zealand in media, 31, 40 pacifism. See peace movement Sagan on, 27–28 Pankin, Alexei, 243 fi 28–31 scienti c basis for, Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, 271–72 34 SDI as defense against, Partridge, Andy, 106–7 as theory, development of, 27–28 patriotism, nuclear-free zones and, 225 27–28 29–30 33 TTAPs theory on, , , , Pax Christi, 254–55, 262–63 45–46 PCBs. See polychlorinated biphenyls US response to threat of, 33–34 PCF. See French Communist Party nuclear-free zones peace movements. See also Christian peace 211 as alternative movement, movement; Europe, peace
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movements in; nuclear disarmament Poole, Robert, 40 movement popular culture. See also films; media in France nuclear crisis in, 2–5, 9–10, 105 lack of, 317–18 peace movement as influence on, 122–24 PCF and, 317 political culture as influence on, 117–24, in Great Britain, 231–34 135 Project Green Caterpillar and, 131 popular music, nuclear crisis themes in, 4 socialists in, 146–48 atomic pop, 102–3 Sofia International Writers Meetings, genealogy of, 102 147–48 in Great Britain SV during, 143–46, 159 compared to US, 101–2 in Bebelplatz, 148–50 decline in popularity of, 111 cooperation with West German during 1980s, 105–11 authors, 150–56 Protect and Survive films and, 106–7 socialist participation in, 146–48 roots of, 103–5 union-sponsored international events, on MTV, 103 148–50 punk and, 102 in West Germany, 80, 83–85, 122–24, in West Germany, 116–17, 118–24. See 185, 290 also Project Green Caterpillar Bundesregierung and, 294–301 Artists for Peace festival, 123, 136–37 among Christians, 92 Krefeld Initiative, 122–23 concentration camp references in, Neue Deutsche Welle, 118, 135 88–89 political culture as influence on, Dual-Track Decision as factor in, 117–24, 135 292–301 The Population Bomb (Ehrlich), 40–41 neutron bomb protests, 290–92 Powell, Colin, 285 pop culture influenced by, 122–24 Project Green Caterpillar, 124–32 Project Green Caterpillar and, 131 historical development of, 125–27 SPD and, 290, 293–94, 306–8 institutionalization of, 128 writers’ role in, 143–46 opponents of, 127 in Western Europe, 264 peace movement and, 131 Peace Squadron, 208 positive support for, 126–27 peace studies, 23 public response to, 127–28 Perrow, Charles, 60 reactivation of, 131–32 Pershing Missiles, deployment of, 1–2, 227, Project Ploughshares, 272 272, 325 Prokofiev, Sergei, 109 Petryna, Adriana, 62–63, 73 pro-life movement, 69–72 Pettitt, Ann, 243, 250 Protect and Survive films, 105 Piven, Frances Fox, 200–1 anti-nuclear pop as critique of, 106–7 planetary citizenship, as collective global Protest and Survive (Thompson, E.), 105, identity, 44 231, 232, 253 Poland, 241 Protestant Kirchentag, 89 Polish Writers Union, 163 protests, political. See also anti-nuclear political protests. See protests, political movement Pollack, James, 27–28, 29–30, 33, 45–46 at G7 summits, 346–48 pollution. See also Love Canal on historical anniversaries, 89–91 anti-toxics movement and, 187–88 NS as influence on, 82–83 legislation as part of, 204 against nuclear crisis, 5 public opinions on, 201 in nuclear disarmament movement, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), 204 273–74 Pompidou, Georges, 338 Protestant Kirchentag, 89
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protests, political (cont.) Rühl, Lothar, 319 in West Germany, 82–83, 87–88 “Russians,” 4, 109 establishment’s response to, 306–8 for peace movement, 123–24 Sacherer, Günter, 171, 172 Public Service of New Hampshire (PSNH), Sagan, Carl, 27–28, 30, 31–32, 33, 35, 189–91 42–43 punk music, 102 SALT II Treaty, 278 Sandford, John, 246 Rabsch, Udo, 4–5 SANE. See National Committee for a Sane Racek, Václav, 231 Nuclear Policy radiation, public scares of, 55–56. See also Sanguinetti, Antoine, 320 Three Mile Island nuclear power SAPL. See Seacoast Anti-Pollution League plant Scared by Our Friends (Lafontaine), 304 fetal health and, 56–57 Schafley, Phyllis, 275–76 after Limited Test Ban Treaty, 68 Schell, Jonathan, 4–5, 31, 44–45 Radkau, Joachim, 38–39 Schily, Otto, 79, 91, 131–32, 133–34 RAF. See Red Army Faction Schmidt, Helmut, 83, 129, 277–78, 291–92, Rau, Fritz, 125–26, 128 293, 301, 308–9, 338. See also Reagan, Ronald, 6, 101–2, 195, 347 Bundesregierung civil defense measures under, 104 G7 summits and, 345, 347 countervailing strategy for nuclear war Schneider, Peter, 144, 152 under, 2 Schneider, Rolf, 144, 152–53 European opinion on, 107 Schneider, Stephen, 32 MX missile program, 283 Schram, Wilke, 256 nuclear disarmament movement under, Schröder, Gerhard, 306 273–77, 278–85 Schwab, James, 199 nuclear power policy, 8 Schweitzer, Albert, 68 nuclear weapons strategy, 273, 278 Scientific Committee on Problems of the response to nuclear crisis, 35–36 Environment (SCOPE), 43 SDI and, 2, 3, 34, 281 Scranton, William, 59–60 nuclear winter and, as defense against, SDI. See Strategic Defense Initiative 34 SDP. See Social Democratic Party Red Army Faction (RAF), 168–69 Seabrook nuclear power plant, 186–87, Reichel, Achim, 123 189–92, 203 Reid, Robert, 58 Clamshell Alliance campaign against, Reiser, Rio, 131–32 186–87, 189–92 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, mass arrests during, 191–92 204 political criticism of, 190–91 Rettig, Inge, 170–71 Wyhl reactor site occupation as Rettig, Jean-Jacques, 170–71 influence on, 190 Rév, István, 249 PSNH and, 189–91 Ridder, Helmut, 123 public opposition to, 189 Ridley, Matt, 36–37 Seacoast Anti-Pollution League (SAPL), 189 Riewoldt, Otto, 130 Second Cold War, 284–85, 347 “The Rights of the Unborn and the Peril SED. See Socialist Unity Party Today” (Schweitzer), 68 Seeger, Pete, 192 Robin, Gabriel, 320 Shultz, George, 3, 280–81 Robison, James, 276 Sikkink, Kathryn, 243 Robock, Alan, 45 Silent Spring (Carson), 40 Rockefeller, David, 337 Sills, John, 193 Roth, Claudia, 140 Silver, Sandy, 193
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Simon, Paul, 4 Ter Veer, Ben, 253, 256–57 Smith, Dan, 229, 233 Thatcher, Margaret, 6, 101–2, 280, 347 Smith, Howard K., 188 civil defense measures under, 104–5 Snyder, Sarah, 243 nuclear weapons buildup and, 273, 278 Social Democratic Party (SPD), 86–87. See theater nuclear forces (TNF), 292 also Brandt, Willy Third Reich. See the Holocaust; National Green Party and, 129 Socialism peace movement and, 290, 293–94, Third Way tradition, 228 306–8 Thomas, Lewis, 40 response to Dual-Track decision, 301–5 Thompson, Dorothy, 228–29 social movement studies, 200–1 Thompson, Edward, 228–29, 230, 231–34, Socialist Unity Party (SED), 142, 144–46 243, 272. See also European Nuclear socialists, in peace movement, 146–48 Disarmament Sofia International Writers Meetings, Protest and Survive, 105, 231, 232, 253 147–48 Thompson, E.P., 105 “Soft Water Breaks Stone,” 119 Thompson, Starley, 32 Sölle, Dorothee, 87, 88, 97 Thomson, Meldrim, 190 “Sonne statt Reagan” (“Sun Instead of Thornburgh, Richard, 61 Reagan”), 133 Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear power South America, as nuclear-free zone, 224 plant, 3–4 South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, 208 biological citizens and, 62–63 Soviet Union coolant accident at, 55, 59–64 END and, 243–44, 250 cover-up of, 60–61 INF treaty, 111, 156 crisis of visuality for, 61–62 IRBMs and, 107 fetal health issues and, 63–64, 66–71 MAD and, 2 long-term impact of, 194–95 NATO Dual-Track Decision and, 1–2 No Nukes movement and, 194 nuclear disarmament movement as political and cultural crisis, 73–74 throughout, 274–75 decline in public trust in US, 56 nuclear missile strategy, 272 Kemeny Commission, 67, 70, 73 response to US nuclear missile strategy, public campaign for, 58–59 281–83 public trust in, 57–59 Second Cold War and, end of, 284–85, breakdown of, 59–64 347 radiation scares and, 55–56 SPD. See Social Democratic Party health risks from, 65–74 Der Spiegel, 251–52 TNF. See theater nuclear forces Springsteen, Bruce, 4 Toon, Owen Brian, 27–28, 29–30, 33, SS-20 missiles, as threat to Western Europe, 45–46 318–21 Topham, Tony, 228–29 Sting, 109 Toulat, Jean, 324 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), 2, 3, 281 Toxic Substances Control Act, 204 nuclear winter and, as defense against, 34 Trampert, Rainer, 87, 130 Strauß, Franz Josef, 89–90, 296 Treaty of Rarotonga. Sununu, John, 195 See South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone super Holocaust, 86 Treaty SV. See East German Writers Union Treaty of Tlatelolco, 208 Trident missile system, 227 Tatu, Michael, 319 Trilateral Commission, 337–38 Taylor, Gordon Rattray, 41 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott, 277 Tears for Fears, 109–11 “Tschernobyl,” 120 Ten Berge, Gied, 256
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TTAPs. See Ackerman, Thomas; nuclear radiation scares in, 55–56 winter; Pollack, James; Toon, Owen Resource Conservation and Recovery Act Brian; Turco, Richard in, 204 Tunnicliffe, Stephen, 249, 257 response to threat of nuclear winter, Turco, Richard, 27–28, 29–30, 33, 45–46 33–34 Second Cold War and, end of, 284–85, UKCD. See United Kingdom Civil Defense 347 UKWMO. See United Kingdom Warning Toxic Substances Control Act in, 204 and Monitoring Organization Trident missile system and, 227 Ultravox, 107–8 Upper Rhine Valley, Germany. See Wyhl UNESCO. See United Nations Educational, reactor site Scientific and Cultural Organization US. See United States Union of German Writers (VS), 143, 150–51 resignations from, 163 Vahle, Fredrik, 124 United Kingdom. See Great Britain “Vamos a la playa,” 120, 135 United Kingdom Civil Defense (UKCD), van Creveld, Martin, 46 101–2 Van De Ven, Willem, 256 United Kingdom Warning and Monitoring Vance, Cyrus, 277–78 Organization (UKWMO), 104–5 Verhoeven, Michael, 126 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Vietnam War, 53 Cultural Organization (UNESCO), “Visit Europe as Long as It’s Still Around,” 37–38 119–20 United States (US). See also Carter, Jimmy; Vogel, Hans-Jochen, 130 front porch politics; No Nukes Voice of Women, 272 movement; nuclear power; Reagan, Vollmer, Antje, 131–32 Ronald; Strategic Defense Initiative von Trotta, Margarete, 126 anti-nuclear protest music in, compared von Uexküll, Gösta, 123 to British music, 101–2 von Weizsäcker, Carl-Friedrich, 298 anti-toxics movement in, 187–88 VS. See Union of German Writers legislation as part of, 204 civil defense policies in, 103–5 Wader, Hannes, 120–21, 123 countervailing strategy for, 2 Wald, George, 66 credibility gap in, 56 Walker, J. Samuel, 203–4 Cruise Missiles and, deployment of, 1–2, War Games, 3, 12 227, 272 war simulation games, 1 INF treaty, 111, 156 Ward, Barbara, 38 MAD and, 2 Watanuki, Joji, 337–38 NRC in, 57–58, 60–61 Waters, Roger, 3, 110–11 nuclear disarmament movement in, 274 WCC. See World Council of Churches during Carter presidency, 277–78 We Almost Lost Detroit, 61 Christian Right opposition to, 276 “We Kill the World (Don’t Kill the World),” public policy influenced by, 277–85 120 during Reagan presidency, 273–77, Wecker, Konstantin, 123, 126 278–85 Wegener, Bettina, 126, 127 resistance to, 275–77 Wehner, Herbert, 293 nuclear missile strategy Weinberger, Caspar, 280 European response to, 280–81 Wende (change of government), 91 Soviet response to, 281–83 West Germany. See also the Holocaust; nuclear-free zones in, 210, 222 National Socialism; Wyhl reactor Pershing Missiles and, site, occupation of deployment of, 1–2, 227, 272 anti-Americanism in, 87–88
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anti-nuclear movement in. See also Wyhl Project Green Caterpillar in, 124–32 reactor site historical development of, 125–27 in West Germany, 167–68, 181, 185 institutionalization of, 128 anti-nuclear pop in, 116–17 opponents of, 127 ASF and, 254, 256–57 peace movement and, 131 Bundestag in, 79–80 positive support for, 126–27 CDU in, 79–80 public response to, 127–28 Christian peace movement in, 256–57, reactivation of, 131–32 260–62 protest culture in, 306–8 during Cold War, 1 resistance movements in, 91–92 Cruise Missile deployment in, 1–2 SPD in, 86–87 The Day After and, 3 Green Party and, 129 Dual-Track Decision in peace movement and, 290, 293–94, Bielefeld Appeal and, 302 306–8 Bundesregierung response to, 294–301 response to Dual-Track Decision, peace movement influenced by, 83, 301–5 292–301 Wende and, 91 SPD response to, 301–5 Wilhelminism in, 83–84 END in, 234–37 Western Europe. See also specific countries environmental movement in, 41 Cruise Missile deployment throughout, Green Party in, 124–32 1–2, 227, 272 Grundgesetz, 81 Euromissile crisis in, 316, 318 Hambacher Fest, 83 INF treaty, 111 IKV in, 256–57 nuclear anxiety in, 305–6 Künstler fur den Frieden initiative in, 117 nuclear disarmament movement in, 272, militarization of, during 1950s, 81–82 273–74 New Left in, 82–83 nuclear-free zones in, 209–10 nuclear anxiety in, 305–6 peace movements in, 264 nuclear weapon deployment and, 79–80 Pershing Missile deployment throughout, nuclear winter threat in, 41, 42 1–2, 227, 272 Ospolitik approach in, 1–2 French public opinion on, 325 peace movement in, 80, 83–85, 122–24, Soviet missile deployment towards, 272 185, 290 SS-20 missile threat to, 318–21 Bundesregierung and, 294–301 When the Wind Blows (Briggs), 3, 105, concentration camp references in, 110–11 88–89 Wick, Charles, 279 Dual-Track Decision as factor in, 83, Wiesel, Elie, 3 292–301 Wilhelminism, 83–84 FDP and, 290 Williams, Maizie, 135 neutron bomb protests, 290–92 Wilson, Harold, 339 political protests in, 123–24 winnable wars, 10, 13 pop culture influenced by, 122–24 Winock, Michel, 331 Project Green Caterpillar and, 131 Witte-Rang, Greetje, 259 Reagan’s public image and, 296–97 Wittner, Lawrence, 22, 244 SV cooperation with West German Wolf, Christa, 144, 150, 153, 154 authors, 150–56 World Council of Churches (WCC), 261 writers’ role in, 143–46, 150–51 World Federation for the Protection of Life Pershing Missile deployment in, 1–2 (WSL), 168 political protests in, 5, 82–83, 87–88 Wyhl reactor site, occupation of, 167–68, establishment’s response to, 306–8 181 Protestant Kirchentag, 89 BKA and, 172–73
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Wyhl reactor site, occupation of (cont.) local responses to, 177–78 Clamshell Alliance campaign influenced organization of, 169–72 by, 190 as regional movement, 172–75 communist groups’ response to, 177–79 co-optation of, 175–78 XTC, 108 CSFR and, 170–71 175–76 179 Graswurzelrevolution and, , , Young European Federalists (JEF), 176 183 inspiration for, 175–78 231 JEF and, 176 Zero Option (Racek), 148 KBW and, 177–78 Zinner, Helda,
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