The Nuclear Freeze: Past and Future
The summit between our country and Russia has been completed and the media fallout has come and gone.
We’ve been in a geopolitical struggle with Russia before from the 1940’s to the 1990’s, or one could argue the Cold War was over in 1989 when Soviet Russia left eastern Europe and one Communist regime after another collapsed. Although we prevailed in the struggle against a totalitarian ideology, during the Cold War our country also looked for ways to dampen tensions with the Soviet Union. The summit between President Joe Biden and Russia President Vladimir Putin is right down that alley.
The most promising point of the summit was an agreement amongst Putin and Biden on relaunching a bilateral strategic stability dialogue focused on ensuring predictability, reducing the risk of nuclear war, and setting the stage for future arms control and risk reduction measures. The announcement marked a step in what could be a long process to make further progress on nuclear arms control after a decade of no progress. The two presidents affirmed the point made by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
I ran across a short letter to the editor from Alvin Blake from Elwood City, Pa. to the Beaver County Times on the need for a nuclear freeze. Blake wanted a determination on if an arms race with Russia would lead to our annihilation; and if so, then we should agree to a nuclear freeze. He suggested such an agreement should include a guaranteed inspection of nuclear weapons sites. If Russia doesn’t agree to this, then we should slap tougher sanctions on them.
Let’s return to the Cold War between the United States and the SU. Both sides balanced each other in various ways, including in the realm of nuclear weapons. The U.S. elected President Ronald Reagan in 1980, a very hardline ideological right-winger, and he pledged a large defense buildup. It’s not remembered that the era of détente with the SU, that started under President Richard Nixon, came apart in the administration of Jimmy Carter over the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Nonetheless, tensions were tight at this time, and a nuclear freeze movement emerged.
The roots of the movement go back to the 1950’s when President Dwight Eisenhower discussed halting key aspects of the nuclear arms race with Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin. In 1970, the U.S. Senate passed a non-binding resolution calling for both superpowers to suspend further development of strategic nuclear weapons systems, both offensive and defensive, during negotiations for the Salt I Treaty. Reagan had opposed every arms control agreement with the SU and denounced Salt II as an “act of appeasement;” he also championed a nuclear weapons buildup, two facts that have been forgotten in time.
The Nuclear Freeze movement was initiated by Randall Forsberg , a young American who worked at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and, then, returned to the United States to become the executive director of the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies, a think tank that she had founded with the aim of reducing the risk of war and minimizing the burden of U.S. military spending. In 1979, she suggested to leading U.S. peace organizations that they combine their efforts in support of a US/Soviet agreement to halt the testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons. When the peace groups, enthusiastic about her idea, urged her to write up a proposal along those lines, she produced the “Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race” in 1980. That Nuclear Freeze proposal emphasized that the freeze would retain the existing nuclear parity between the United States and the Soviet Union, thereby opening the way for deep reductions in nuclear weapons or their elimination in the future.
Forsberg’s idea spread. After publication of the “Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race,” the Nuclear Freeze not only garnered the support of most American peace organizations but also was endorsed by numerous public leaders, intellectuals, and activists. Former public officials, such as George Ball, Clark Clifford, William Colby, Averell Harriman, and George Kennan, spoke out in favor of the idea. Support for the proposal also came from leading scientists, including Linus Pauling, Jerome Wiesner, Bernard Feld, and Carl Sagan. In March 1981, riding a wave of growing public concern about the nuclear arms race, the first national conference of the Freeze movement convened at the Center for Peace Studies at Georgetown University.
The campaign followed the slogan of think globally, act locally. The Union of Concerned Scientists held teach ins in schools. Freeze resolutions became popular in counties and cities around the country. Two famous Senators, Ted Kennedy (D-Ma.) and Mark O Hatfield (R-Ore.), published a book “Freeze: How You Can Prevent a Nuclear War.”
On June 12, 1982, the largest peace rally in U.S. history was held concurrently with the Second United Nations Special Session on Disarmament, with approximately a million participants. Many major U.S. religious bodies, such as the National Council of Churches, the Roman Catholic Church, the United Presbyterian Church, the United Methodist Church, the Episcopalians, the Lutherans, and the Synagogue Council of America, endorsed the campaign. Hundreds of national organizations, many of which had never before taken a stand on national defense issues, came out in favor of the Freeze – the American Association of School Administrators, the American Association of University Women , the American Nurses Association , the American Pediatric Society , the American Public Health Association, Friends of the Earth, the National Council of La Raza, the National Education Association, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and the Young Women’s Christian Association.
In 1982, when the Freeze campaign delivered its antinuclear petitions to the U.S. and Soviet missions to the United Nations, they contained the signatures of more than 2,300,000 Americans. Moreover, that fall, when Freeze referenda appeared on the ballot in 10 states, the District of Columbia, and 37 cities and counties around the nation, voters produced a victory to the Freeze campaign in nine of the states and in all but three localities. Covering about one-third of the U.S. electorate, this was the largest referendum on a single issue in U.S. history.
Patrick Caddell, one of the nation’s leading pollsters, reported in October 1983 that the Freeze campaign was “the most significant citizens’ movement of the last century. . . . In sheer numbers the freeze movement is awesome,” for there existed “no comparable national cause or combination of causes . . . that can match . . . the legions that have been activated.”
In time, Reagan’s rhetoric eased. He did attempt to draw down Cold War tensions as the years passed. First, he advocated the Star Wars missile defense system that would end the possibility of nuclear war. However, the whole idea was not scientifically viable. Then once Mikhail Gorbachev rose to the leadership of the SU, Reagan negotiated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
The Nuclear Freeze Movement was a citizen’s movement that rocked the political establishment, even under an ideological, right-wing administration. The Arms Control Association considered the Nuclear Freeze Movement to have been a long-lasting and groundbreaking movement that helped prevent nuclear war. The citizen journalist mentioned earlier in this story brought up a possible second Nuclear Freeze Movement? Many of the same organizations that gave it a voice still exist today, and the organizational pull of the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren campaigns should provide a foundation.
Jason Sibert is the Executive Director of the Peace Economy Project in St. Louis. This story was originally published on Daily Kos.
