Nuclear Freeze: A Walk in the Park

Lisa Perry:

For kids who grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, in the late 1950s, the Tooth Fairy had competition. Instead of participating in the American childhood rite of passage of tucking their baby teeth under their pillow for a little pocket change, youngsters in St. Louis were using their loose teeth to instigate real change by joining Operation Tooth. Obtaining membership was easy. Fill out your address, birthdate, and milk consumption habits in the provided form. Enclose a tooth and mail it off to Washington University. In return, you would receive the coveted Tooth Club membership card and official membership pin, which was a button depicting a gap-toothed child, smiling ear to ear, encircled by the words “I gave my tooth to science.” To these children, it may have seemed like a game, but their participation in Operation Tooth would ultimately help to save countless lives. These teeth would lay the foundation for the world's first ever nuclear arms control treaty.

 

Joe Mangano:

The Baby Tooth survey in St. Louis is in my estimation, one of the great and perhaps under-recognized citizen science collaborations of the 20th century.

Lisa Perry:

That's Joseph Mangano, epidemiologist and executive director of the Radiation Public Health Survey. He wrote the book Radioactive Baby Teeth about the St. Louis baby tooth survey after he conducted retrospective epidemiological research on the teeth left over from the original study. Mangano explains how in the late 1950s there was growing concern around the country over exposure to radioactive fallout after the isotope strontium-90 had been detected in milk.

Joseph Mangano:

Once the data from milk came in, the next question on people's minds was, well, how much of it is actually getting into our bodies, especially the bodies of the very young children who are most susceptible to radiation?

Lisa Perry: 

The researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, recognizing that strontium behaves similarly to calcium and accumulates in teeth and bones, determined that they could effectively measure the strontium-90 levels in the population by analyzing discarded baby teeth. This study was at its heart a civilian-led advocacy campaign, spearheaded by the Greater St. Louis Committee of Nuclear Information, an organization established by concerned citizens, in order to raise awareness about the dangers of nuclear testing.

Joseph Mangano: 

And in a phenomenal effort of grassroots advocacy, the committee was able to get 320,000 baby teeth donated to the study. And they did this really by just rolling up their sleeves and appealing to schools and to churches and to scout groups, and to other community organizations

 

Lisa Perry: 

The results of the survey were startling.

Joseph Mangano: 

The baby tooth study showed that fallout was rising very rapidly. Strontium-90 levels were about 60 times higher, not 60%, 60 times higher in the early sixties compared to the early 1950s.

Lisa Perry: 

These findings moved the nuclear threat from a distant theoretical one and into the mouths of American children and would provide fuel to the growing fire of protest against nuclear testing. For organizations that had been fighting against nuclear testing for years, they finally had a rallying cry for the American public.

Joseph Mangano: 

They made the goal very simple and very specific, and that was we want a ban on all above-ground nuclear weapons tests. Mostly women, mostly mothers would show up at these demonstrations with baby carriages or strollers with their kids, and some would have signs saying, get the strontium 90 out of my child's milk.  And, a lot of the credit goes to the citizens and the scientists who informed the general public about this, it really empowered them. It really got people to participate.

Lisa Perry: 

After almost a decade of activism against nuclear testing, this new strategy was finally getting traction, and it soon became clear that these protests were being heard at the highest levels of the US government.

Joseph Mangano: 

In July 1963, Kennedy gave a nationally televised address supporting the need for a test ban. And he used the phrase we must be concerned about. Our children, quote…

President John F. Kennedy:

….with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs, might seem statistically small to some in comparison with natural health hazards, but this is not a natural health hazard, and it is not a statistical issue. The loss of even one human life or the malformation of even one baby who may be born long after all of us have gone should be of concern to us all.

 

Lisa Perry: 

Politicians had debated halting testing for years, but all previous negotiation attempts had failed. But finally, with strong public support behind it, President Kennedy, who had campaigned on the need to close the so-called missile gap, was now seeking to end all atmospheric nuclear testing.

President John F. Kennedy: 

Yesterday, a shaft of light cut into the darkness. Negotiations were concluded in Moscow on a treaty to ban all nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water. For the first time, an agreement has been reached on bringing the forces of nuclear destruction under international control.

 

Lisa Perry:

The Partial Test Ban treaty was a major victory for arms control and paved the way for further cooperation among the nuclear powers. And it was made possible in part due to public pressure and protest.

 

Joseph Mangano:

The Test Ban treaty was a direct result of grassroots efforts, there can be no question about that. Without public awareness and without public action, there would be no test ban treaty. That treaty saved countless lives.

Lisa Perry:
But this treaty was just the beginning of the public's demand for change.

Lisa Perry:

I'm Lisa Perry and you are listening to At the Brink, a podcast about the dangers we face from nuclear weapons, and the stories of those who are fighting to protect us.

Sometimes it's the simplest ideas that can change the world, the ones that grab us and inspire us to action. In 1963, the idea was to get strontium-90 out of children's milk by banning nuclear testing. Twenty years later, a new idea would come to the forefront of public awareness.

News Clips:

You know what the nuclear freeze is all about….

The nuclear freeze movement….

We said pro-freeze groups have targeted a number of the….

Vote for the freeze referendum, and then we hope for pro-freeze candidates….

Lisa Perry:

This is an idea that would inspire a nation exhausted from living under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. This is an idea that would bring 1 million people to converge on New York City for the largest public protest in American history. This is an idea that would command the attention of world leaders and would go on to change the course of the Cold War. This is the story of the nuclear freeze movement.

To understand the origins of the nuclear freeze movement and why it would gain such popular support, you first need to understand the heightened climate of fear in the early 1980s. In the years that followed the negotiation of the Partial Test Ban treaty, the US and the Soviet Union entered a period known as detente, where Cold War tensions eased as diplomatic relations improved. But as the late 1970s rolled around, hostilities were once again on the rise. 

The Soviet Union had returned to expanding its nuclear arsenals with both intermediate and long-range weapons, raising alarms about the potential for a European nuclear conflict. At the same time, the US attitudes shifted towards a more confrontational stance, due in part to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This attitude shift was embodied by the new Republican presidential candidate, an avid anti-communist and longtime critic of detente, Ronald Reagan. Reagan argued that detente had allowed the Soviet Union to outpace the United States and campaigned instead for a policy of peace through strength.

Dr. Jeffrey Knopf is a professor and chair of non-proliferation and terrorism studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the nuclear protest movement of the 1980s.

Jeffrey Knopf: 

So Reagan won the election in 1980 and he brought with him a set of fairly hawkish advisors who all believed that the nuclear balance had gotten out of whack in a way that was disadvantageous to the United States, and that it was important for the United States to go through a period of nuclear modernization, investing a lot of money in building up new nuclear weapons. And very importantly, as part of this view, they thought it was a bad idea to continue nuclear arms control talks with the Soviet Union.

President Ronald Reagan:

I am announcing today a plan to revitalize our strategic forces and maintain America's ability to keep the peace well into the next century.

Lisa Perry:

Just as alarming as this slide back into the nuclear arms race was the messaging from the new administration about how they viewed these weapons.

Jeffrey Knopf: 

From really the moment it took office, you had the president and other officials say things in public that indicated that the Reagan administration was moving to embrace a view that the United States should make preparations if necessary to be able to fight and win a nuclear war. They said it's not enough to convince the Soviet Union that they won't win. In fact, we have to win. We, the United States, have to be able to convince the Soviet Union that if they start a nuclear war, we can engage in a way that when the war ends, in some sense, they've lost and we've won. Even if that just means, you know, there's a handful more Americans alive than than a handful more of Russians.

Lisa Perry:

Henry Maar is a professor of history at Cal State University, Northridge, and author of “Freeze, the Grassroots Movement to Halt the Arms Race and End the Cold War”. Maar details some of the more concerning examples of administration officials downplaying the risks of a nuclear exchange.

Henry Maar: 

So you have a number of figures within the Reagan administration that are talking about fighting, winning, surviving nuclear war, people like our Secretary of State who went and testified before Congress that if the Soviet Union were to invade Europe, we might have to fire off a nuclear test warning shot. You had Eugene Rostow who was supposed to represent the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and in his testimony before Congress, he's almost optimistic about this, that while some estimates predict there would be 10 million casualties on one side and 100 million on another, that is not the whole population. And the real cherry on top of all these was the Undersecretary of Defense for European Theater Forces. He tells this journalist from the Los Angeles Times, the US could fully recover from an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union in just two to four years. If there enough shovels to go around, everybody's going to make it.

Lisa Perry:

The focus on nuclear warfare wasn't limited to the political arena. It had also infiltrated public media and entertainment. Movies, books, magazines, and music of the era all reflected this growing unease about nuclear conflict. Iconic 1980s films like War Games, Terminator, and Mad Max vividly portrayed this anxiety on the silver screen. A 1983 made-for-TV movie about the aftermath of a nuclear attack, titled The Day After, was watched by over 100 million Americans the day it aired.

TV announcer: 

Good evening. Here's what's happening. Most of you who watched the ABC movie The Day After are probably still feeling just a little numb right now. Maybe you discussed what you saw with your family and friends. It still leaves you, though, wondering about life, about the world, and about what you'd do if you knew the nuclear missiles were in fact on the way here.

Lisa Perry:

Loose nuclear rhetoric did more than just increase public anxiety. It was also dangerously destabilizing. Tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union had risen to such heights that even an offhand joke made by President Reagan on a hot mic was enough to trigger an international incident.

 

TV clip: 

It was the joke heard round the world, the one by President Reagan about bombing the Soviet Union, and it resulted in a Soviet red alert… The president was joking his way through an audio check on August 11th: [Reagan] - I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever, we begin bombing in five minutes…. By August 14th, the story became world news, a major item on Moscow television where the joke was not treated as a laughing matter.

Lisa Perry:
The real-world consequence of this rhetoric was that it greatly increased the chances that a nuclear false alarm would be taken seriously, which could lead either side to stumble into an accidental nuclear war. Some of the most perilous nuclear false alarms on record would take place during this era. You might remember hearing about some of them in our first episode of season one. Dr. Ira Helfand, who helped to co-found the anti-nuclear advocacy group, Physicians for Social Responsibility in the 1980s, vividly recalls how omnipresent the sense of impending disaster was at the time

Ira Helfand: 

In the 1980s, if you ask people what are the most important problems facing the world, preventing nuclear war was either number one or number two on everybody's list. We were on the brink of nuclear war then, and we came close to nuclear war once in 79, once in 80 and twice in 83, I mean like literally within minutes of nuclear war. I mean, the fact that we're here today is either an incredible feat of luck or as Lee Butler used to say, it's enough to make you believe in God. We should not have survived that period. But what happened then was we were incredibly lucky and we survived, and we were able to use the fear that that situation generated to build a movement that totally transformed the political landscape.

Lisa Perry:

This new movement would be championed by a generation that came of age having lived their entire lives under the specter of the Cold War and the constant fear of nuclear annihilation. Activist Leslie Cagan remembers how this existential dread left a deep impression on her as a child.

Leslie Cagan: 

It wasn't like one day a bunch of organizers woke up and said, oh, let's have a march against nuclear weapons. There's always a context, there's always a history. When I was growing up in New York City in the fifties, I remember wearing a dog tag with my name and address and my birthday and being told by my teacher, you have to wear that because if a nuclear bomb drops and your body is burnt beyond recognition, we will be able to inform your parents about what happened. <laugh> I mean, that is a horrific image to implant in the minds of tens of thousands of young people. And it was a pretty frightening way to grow up.

Lisa Perry:

By the late 1970s, this Cold War generation had reached adulthood and yearned for an escape from the ever present threat of nuclear conflict. This desire for change finally found a focus in a new idea about how we could change the course of the arms race. The proposal, made by a young disarmament researcher, Dr. Randall Forsberg, would come to be known as the nuclear freeze. Jeffrey Knopf explains how it worked.

Jeffrey Knopf: 

So it's very, very simple. Let's just stop exactly where we are. We don't have to have any negotiations. We don't have to have elaborate decisions about who trades off what for what to get nuclear arms control. Let's just have an agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union that they'll both stop exactly what they are today and not build anything new and not deploy anything new. Right? And then once this freeze is in place, it will allow time for the more complicated and longer running negotiations that would be necessary to generate actual nuclear arms control treaties.

Lisa Perry:

Forsberg crafted her proposal with the goal of uniting the efforts of different peace organizations under a shared mission: halt the testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons. The straightforward and accessible nature of the nuclear freeze idea resonated not only with activists, but also with everyday individuals who were deeply concerned about the perils of the arms race, explains Leslie Cagan.

Leslie Cagan:

So the freeze movement was extremely important for people who were maybe a little concerned that calling for complete nuclear abolition was going too far too fast, and the freeze opened up a space for people to step into it and at least say, we've got to hold this. It can't get any worse. We gotta put a freeze on these weapons.

Lisa Perry:

Almost immediately, the nuclear freeze proposal had a galvanizing effect on the anti-nuclear movement. New organizations were formed and old ones ballooned in members as the idea of a freeze grew rapidly in popularity around the country. One group at the forefront of this new surge in interest was Physicians for Social Responsibility or PSR, the organization founded by medical professionals like Dr. Ira Helfand, who were concerned about the dangers of nuclear war. PSR found an impassioned new mouthpiece for the movement in its other co-founder.

Helen Caldicott: 

Dr. Helen Mary Caldicott Pediatrician, founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, founder of Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament, and various other organizations, which I can't remember.

Lisa Perry:

Coinciding with the emergence of the freeze idea, Dr. Caldicott began giving lectures across the country on the medical consequences of nuclear weapons use. Her blunt depiction of the potential horrors of nuclear war gained national attention and would land her on TV screens in living rooms across the country.

Helen Caldicott: 

Merv Griffin, Phil Donahue, on the networks, in Vogue, Life, Time. We were taking on the military-industrial complex full frontal by teaching people what happens if a bomb drops on their city or their town. So over time, the ordinary person in America watching television learned about the medical effects of nuclear war.

If You Love This Planet Clip from Helen Caldicott:
Out to a radius of 20 miles from the center, most persons would be dead, or lethally injured. And when I say lethally injured, I mean tens of thousands of cases of the most severe burns. There are only 2000 acute burn beds in the whole of the United States.

Lisa Perry:

Dr. Caldicott’s educational efforts played a vital role in shifting public opinion against nuclear weapons and strengthening demand for a nuclear freeze, helping to pave the way for a bold demonstration of this widespread support.

Helen Caldicott:

And so in that way, we were able to mobilize a million people in Central Park in 1982, the biggest mobilization of people ever in the history of this country. And we were winning.

Lisa Perry:

With the idea of a nuclear freeze in the American zeitgeist, supporters now planned a mass protest in order to increase the pressure on the administration to take action in the face of public demand. A rally was scheduled to take place in New York City on June 12th, 1982, to coincide with a UN conference on nuclear disarmament. And activist Leslie Cagan was there from the very beginning.

Leslie Cagan:

I served as the coordinator of the June 12th, 1982 nuclear disarmament demonstration. The middle of June in New York City is beautiful. It's just a gorgeous time of the year. The sun was shining. It was warm, but not hot. Not oppressively hot. There were a few clouds in the sky, but no chance of rain, it was just a perfect day. I had been up with a small team of people the whole night the night before getting the last backstage passes, figuring out who was gonna have stage access and backstage access, a bit of a nightmare. And so I hadn't slept at all. I and two or three others of us jumped in a cab and went up to the assembly area, which is 47th Street between First and Second Avenue diagonally across from the UN.

*Protest drum music*

Leslie Cagan:

I knew it was gonna be big 'cause I got there at 7:30 in the morning and there were already tens of thousands of people there. I mean, it was already massive. And I literally thought I was gonna throw up <laugh>. I was like, oh my God. Now what do we do? <laugh>? Who invited all these people? <laugh>.

*March Audio*

Leslie Cagan:

I had two major responsibilities. One was to say, start the march, and the other was then to get up to Central Park and to say, start the rally. So we started the march and it was phenomenal.

Rally speaker:

7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Leslie Cagan:

And it wasn't just about the numbers of people that made this one so special. It was about the variety of people, the creativity that people brought. The energy was palpable.

*March Audio*

Leslie Cagan:

And we literally shut down New York City. At one point, the police told me, we were already in Central Park and at the Great Lawn, which is a massive lawn in the middle in Central Park, was completely filled. Hundreds of thousands of people already in that park. He said to me, you know, there are still people on Second Avenue, Third Avenue, Park, Madison, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Avenues trying to get to the park. I think there were literally tens if not hundreds of thousands of people who never made it to the park that day. But they didn't care. They knew they were part of making history and that their voices were being heard.

Lisa Perry:

The freeze movement made a conscious effort to expand the reach of the anti-nuclear movement, and many attendees would later comment on the broad spectrum of people they would see in the crowd that day.

Leslie Cagan:

People came from literally all over the country and large delegations from around the world. There were many, many signs, social workers for peace, and teachers against nuclear weapons. People just holding up the name of their city. Podunk, you know, was in the house. You know, people saw that they were literally marching shoulder to shoulder with all kinds of people, and that gave it another kind of energy.

Lisa Perry:

Dr. Vincent Intondi is a professor of history at Montgomery College, and author of the books “Saving the World from Nuclear War, the June 12th, 1982 Disarmament Rally and Beyond” and “African Americans Against the Bomb”. Dr. Intondi argues that the June 12th rally demonstrated just how diverse the support for a freeze really was.

Vincent Intondi:

Too often the narrative in the story is this was a million white middle-class people getting together for a peace rally, and that's not the real story there. In May of 1982, which is a month before the June 12th rally, 83% of the American public were in favor of the nuclear freeze. And actually, 60% who identified as either Christian Evangelicals or very conservative also endorsed this. 50% of the leadership that day was African-Americans. You had thousands upon thousands of people that were African-American, but were also of different nationalities. The main leaders of this were part of the LGBTQ Community. So this was crossing political lines. This was reaching Middle America. This was transcending race and class, where people really were getting behind this.

 

Clip from the rally:

We are women, we are men, black and white, young and old, from church, synagogue and mosque. From every political persuasion, from every economic strata, and from every neighborhood in the cities, and the suburbs, states, and nation.

Lisa Perry:

For Helen Caldicott, the rally was the moment to bring her message home and urge American citizens to take action.

Helen Caldicott:

I was one of the main speakers and I had three minutes and I didn't know what I was gonna say to this ocean of faces, a million people. So I described a bomb dropping on New York and the medical effects, and my quote was the quote of the week in the New York Times. I quoted Nixon, don't listen to what we say, watch what we do.

 

Helen Caldicott (at rally):

And remember, there are communist babies or capitalist babies. A baby is a baby is a baby.

Lisa Perry:

Perhaps the most anticipated speaker that day was the originator of the nuclear freeze proposal.

 

Vincent Intondi:

Randy Forsberg made it very clear in her speech that this is not a one-off, that you must go home now and do something. And that really resonated with people.

Randall Forsberg (from rally):

This is the biggest peacetime peace movement in the history of the United States. The politicians don't believe it yet, but they will. We will not go home and be quiet, we'll go home and organize. We demand that the decency of this nation be restored!

Lisa Perry:

From a sheer numbers perspective, the June 12th rally was a spectacular success. It was the largest public protest ever held in American history, a distinction that held true for another 30 years when it was finally surpassed by the 2016 Women's March on Washington. But as Randy Forsberg said, it was now time to go home and organize, in order to convert those numbers into real-world results.

TV ad: 

You know what the nuclear freeze is all about, simple. Both sides have enough nuclear bombs, right? But how can we stop building more if we can't trust the Russians? Well, Proposition 12 says that our leaders should sit down with their leaders and figure out a way to stop.

Lisa Perry:

Their first approach was electoral. They prepared non-partisan referendums for a nuclear freeze to be voted on in local elections in cities and states around the country and launched major campaigns to rally support.

TV news announcer:

This summer, the nuclear freeze movement mounted the largest demonstration in the nation's history in New York. It failed by only two votes to win the support of the House of Representatives, and freeze propositions have been approved in more than 400 cities, towns, and counties. Next week, one of, out of every four voters will have a chance to register his support or opposition.

Lisa Perry:

Ultimately, freeze referenda would be passed in nine states and all but three localities, with an average of 72% of all voters supporting a nuclear freeze. This proposal would become the largest referendum on a single issue in US history. However, this resounding electoral success did not initially translate to administrative action. President Reagan and his administration largely rejected the idea of a nuclear freeze and actively disparaged the campaign as a Russian plot. But what was going on behind the scenes showed that they were paying attention to the movement, explains freeze historian Henry Maar.

Henry Maar:

The Reagan administration is very dismissive of the nuclear freeze movement, at least on the public side.

President Ronald Reagan:

The nuclear freeze movement, a movement that has swept across our country, I think is inspired by not the sincere, honest people who want peace, but by some who want the weakening of America.

Henry Maar:

What we're seeing publicly though, really kind of clashes with what we're seeing happening in private. There's a memo from inside the National Security Council where one of the members is very much warning about potential that could come from this large protest. And he very tellingly goes on to write that “the fact that the activists have our attention should be kept secret”. So the administration was really paying attention to this message.

Lisa Perry:

The memo went on to recommend implementing a comprehensive arms control effort in order to quell growing public concerns and even suggested arranging high-level meetings with freeze activists. Several years later, Dr. Jeffrey Knopf would interview key figures in the Reagan administration about the impact of the movement on their policy decisions.

Jeffrey Knopf:

Many of them told me that when they saw the freeze movement rise in popularity and gain support, they interpreted it more as a symbolic expression rather than a concrete policy proposal. And they viewed it more as just kind of a great big scream by the American public saying, do something. We, the American public, are afraid of the current direction in policy. We’re afraid that this is gonna lead to a nuclear war, and we want you as our government, we want you, the Reagan administration, to do something to change the direction in which things are going, to get back into nuclear arms control talks, to do something that will lower the danger of nuclear war.

Lisa Perry:

The effect of this internal debate became apparent with the approach of the 1984 presidential election.

Henry Maar: 

We start to see a shift in Reagan on the campaign trail. In order for them to get reelected, they're realizing that this is a key issue. They're worried about somebody from the Democratic party taking all of that momentum from the nuclear weapons freeze campaign. That might be the big issue that the Democrats ride on.

Lisa Perry:

Ronald Reagan's chief strategist would write that the fear of nuclear war was a huge vulnerability for their campaign. The Democratic nominee, Walter Mondale, had championed the freeze idea and the Democratic party had officially adopted the policy into its platform. In response, President Reagan began to express a markedly different attitude.

Jeffrey Knopf:

But Reagan started to give speeches in which he literally said,

 

President Ronald Reagan:

so to those who protest against nuclear war, I can only say I'm with you.

 

Jeffrey Knopf: 

And he tried to position himself as being sympathetic to and sharing the end goals of the freeze movement, but disagreeing with their specific policy proposals and tactics. The other thing they did is they clamped down on some of the, we can fight and win a nuclear war rhetoric. Like they realized just their language, the loose way they talk about nuclear war, is causing part of the problem.

Lisa Perry:

But it was more than just the administration's language that was changing.

Jeffrey Knopf: 

So you get this one change in rhetoric that we're with you. You get this quieting down of nuclear war fighting rhetoric, but that's not enough. The freeze movement is still gaining momentum. It's still gaining steam. So finally the people in the Reagan administration realize that the only way they can get out from the pressure that's being applied by the nuclear freeze movement is to get back into nuclear arms control talks with the Soviet Union.

President Ronald Reagan:

We must and will engage the Soviets in a dialogue as serious and constructive as possible. A dialogue that will serve to promote peace in the troubled regions of the world, reduce the level of arms, and build a constructive working relationship.

Lisa Perry:
Nuclear activists were skeptical of Reagan's pledge to re-engage in arms control, believing it to be a hollow gesture meant to boost his re-election chances. When Reagan went on to secure a resounding victory in 1984, it would be seen by many as a failure of the movement, and public focus on the Freeze idea began to dwindle.

But, for those who paid closer attention, the impact the movement had on history extended far beyond political campaigns and public rallies. Despite the justified cynicism of his intentions, Reagan honored his commitment to pursuing nuclear talks in his second term, and in a stroke of serendipity, the Soviets had recently installed a new leader who was eager to reopen diplomatic channels.

Mikhail Gorbachev came into office as a reformer, eager to shake up the old modes of thinking in the aging Soviet governance. As part of his fresh vision for the future. Gorbachev, much like his American counterpart, was being influenced by anti-nuclear sentiment, particularly the concurrent European anti-nuclear movement. Consequently, when Reagan and Gorbachev convened for their initial summit in Geneva in 1985, both leaders found themselves unexpectedly on common ground.

Jeffrey Knopf: 

So one of the first things that Reagan and Gorbachev do is they agree to a public statement. And it's a very simple public statement, but it's a very powerful one that says “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

 

President Ronald Reagan:

A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.

Jeffrey Knopf: 

So whatever else people have been saying about their nuclear strategies, here's the two leaders at the top of these two countries saying, we think that there's no such thing as winning a nuclear war and that the primary objective of our policy should be not to get into one. And that's a giant rhetorical shift for President Reagan and the Reagan administration.

Lisa Perry:

Just as important as the joint statement was their agreement to meet again at another summit to be held in the Icelandic capital city of Reykjavik in October 1986. There is no formal agenda in place. Instead, Reagan and Gorbachev, having found a positive rapport during their first meeting in Geneva, decided to take a more spontaneous approach. Little did anyone know that what would unfold in those conversations would surpass all expectations.

Jeffrey Knopf:

When Reagan and Gorbachev sat down to talk to each other, one-on-one, they suddenly went off into this discussion about maybe we could just get rid of nuclear weapons. Reagan and Gorbachev seemed to have been on the brink of what would've been a mind-blowing, completely historic agreement to dismantle really big chunks of US and Soviet nuclear weapons.

Lisa Perry:

In the end, their endeavors in Reykjavik fell short of securing an agreement to dismantle nuclear weapons. The major stumbling block was Gorbachev's insistence that the US abandon research on Reagan's pet project, the Strategic Defense Initiative, which aimed to create a shield against nuclear missile attacks. Despite the prevailing consensus among experts that such a system was technically unattainable, Gorbachev remained anxious about the potentially destabilizing consequences of even an imperfect missile defense system. Although the two leaders would walk away from Reykjavik empty-handed, the summit set a new high water mark. The tone of the narrative around nuclear disarmament changed almost overnight.

Jeffrey Knopf:

I think a lot of anti-nuclear people were shocked in a pleasant way by Reykjavik and disappointed that it failed. But they felt that it still was a change. It legitimated anti-nuclear rhetoric, right? Hey, if even Ronald Reagan can come this close to reaching an agreement to ban nuclear weapons, this is a valid thing to talk about. We're not just a bunch of, you know, naive utopian peaceniks if we talk about nuclear disarmament, you know; serious people can talk about nuclear disarmament too.

President Ronald Reagan: 

We are not just discussing limits on a further increase of nuclear weapons. We seek instead to reduce their number. We seek the total elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the earth.

Lisa Perry:

Reykjavik also set the stage for real substantive negotiations to finally move forward with both parties having established a newfound trust and a shared commitment towards creating a safer world for all. The conversation that began in Reykjavik would ultimately lead to some of the most significant advances in arms control ever achieved.

Jeffrey Knopf:

So Reykjavik, it looks like a failure because the summit collapses with no agreement, but it's really a turning point, and it enables Gorbachev to afford a proposal that Reagan is willing to agree to, that allows them to have their first successful nuclear arms control agreement reached. So the first treaty that ends up getting successfully negotiated in this time period is the INF Treaty, which is signed in late 1987.

Lisa Perry:

The Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty focused on a longstanding goal of anti-nuclear activists, complete bilateral elimination of an entire class of missiles. Although there was opposition to the treaty among his fellow Republicans, President Reagan supported it because he understood that it was popular with the public. The INF treaty was not just successful for what it achieved for arms control; it was also successful in what it achieved for the relationship between the US and the Soviet Union. Henry Mara explains how this marked a pivotal moment in history

 

Henry Maar:

So eventually what's going to happen with Reagan and Gorbachev, they’re going to come to an agreement, one of the more important treaties of the Cold War, a treaty which I think, when we're looking at the Cold War when we try to figure out where does the Cold War end? Does it end in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union? Does it end somewhere else? And I think that the INF treaty, it really kind of signals to me, like, the end of the actual Cold War.

Lisa Perry: 

While the collapse of the Soviet government signaled the end of communism in the eastern bloc, it was the INF treaty that turned the tide for US-Soviet hostilities and triggered a cascade of progress.

Jeffrey Knopf: 

And once INF is successful, it opens the door for treaties that deal with strategic weapons. The first one is called Start I, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. But those two treaties then put the United States and the Soviet Union on a path to a whole series of treaties that end up reducing nuclear weapons quite a bit. And this was really the most productive, successful period of arms control in the history of the US-Russian relationship.

Lisa Perry:

Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States threatened each other with nuclear annihilation. After a long and winding path, through negotiation, this decades-long existential confrontation was finally coming to a peaceful end, an end that was achieved in part through protest. Beginning with the INF Treaty through the end of the George HW Bush presidency, the total US stockpile for nuclear warheads decreased by over 50% and included the unilateral elimination or significant reduction of several classes of tactical nuclear weapons.

Henry Maar:

I think you don't have an INF treaty without the nuclear freeze campaign. I don't think you have an INF treaty without anti-nuclear activism. Without that public pressure being put on the superpowers.

Lisa Perry:

Four decades later, the prevailing narrative is that ultimately the nuclear freeze movement never achieved its goal. But there is another way to look at that era.

Jeffrey Knopf:

One thing that historians who studied this period have to wrestle with is how we describe the impact of the freeze. Was that a success or was it a failure? If you say the freeze had a very specific policy demand, immediate freeze to the nuclear arms race, they never got that demand implemented. From that point of view. You might say, oh, that's too bad. The freeze movement was a failure. I interpret that time period differently. I think that everything that happened in the second half of the 1980s, was very much influenced by the freeze movement in the United States. They created conditions that really changed the internal debate and the policymaking dynamic inside the Reagan administration. They forced the Reagan administration to come up with forward-looking nuclear arms control proposals. They forced them to move back to the negotiating table and enter into negotiations with the Soviet Union. And all of those things set the table. They made the situation more conducive that when Mikhail Gorbachev comes along and Reagan thinks he has a partner for negotiations, they're willing to sit down and actually have fruitful nuclear arms control talks.

Lisa Perry:

Despite the fact that a nuclear freeze never happened, for seasoned peace activist and rally organizer Leslie Cagan, the contributions of the movement left an undeniable mark on history.

Leslie Cagan:

I thought about this a lot over many years now. I honestly believe that what we did on June 12th, 1982 was successful. I would've been thrilled beyond belief. I probably would've had a heart attack and died if the next day all the governments of the world said we're abolishing nuclear weapons. It wasn't a success in that way, <laugh>, but we do believe that we helped change not just public awareness, but the dynamics of public pressure on the government. It also was a success in that we brought many new people into this work, into even thinking to take on nuclear weapons as an important issue. It's impossible to measure then how that ripples out. But we think we did change the climate around nuclear weapons, at least for a while in this country. And so, and on all those measures, I have to think of it as a success

Lisa Perry:

For historian Vincent Inandi, the success achieved by these activists was nothing short of revolutionary.

Vincent Intondi:

When you look at the 1980s, the freeze movement, you could argue, was one of the greatest citizen-led mobilization efforts in our entire history. It's extraordinary what they did

Lisa Perry:

Today, one of the most commonly expressed sentiments around the threat of nuclear weapons is, why should I care when there's nothing I can do about it? But the freeze movement, and the campaign to abolish nuclear testing before that, demonstrate that not only are everyday citizens capable of impacting nuclear policy, they've actually been instrumental in shaping nuclear history. When we look at modern nuclear dangers, the freeze movement provides a template for how we might turn the tide. A clear and compelling goal, an educated public, and concentrated political pressure. The ultimate lesson of the freeze movement is that there is real hope for change in the face of this existential threat if we're willing to step up and demand it.

Ira Helfand:

When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, he was the most hawkish president we've ever had about nuclear weapons. He wanted to build an arsenal that would enable us to fight and win a war in Europe. And four years later, he's saying nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought. And he actually meant it. We'd brought about this 180-degree change in his thinking and we ended the Cold War arms race. We turned things around and we saved the world. And I think we have to understand today is as daunting as the task may seem, really only asking ourselves to do again what we've already done once before. It's something we know we can do 'cause we've already done it.

 

Lisa Perry:

At the Brink is made possible by the generous support of the Carnegie Corporation and the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

Thanks to our guests this episode, Leslie Cagan, Helen Caldicott, Jeffrey Knopf, Ira Helfand, Vincent Intondi, Joseph Mangano, and Henry Marr. We're grateful for the expert assistance of Dr. Lawrence Wittner for this episode.

Our appreciation to the WNYC archives for their audio of the June 12th rally, from their piece, Voices of Disarmament. Credit for incidental audio of the rally goes to Media Burn from their footage March of Disarmament. The excerpts from the McNeil-Lehrer report produced by NewsHour Productions on October 17th, 1982, were obtained from the National Records and Archives Administration, Washington, DC, thanks to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. If you'd like to support the efforts of At the Brink, the biggest help you can provide is by rating and subscribing to the show and by sharing it with your friends.

This episode was written by myself, David Perry, and Webb Wright. Production support was provided by Jeff Large and Maggie Fisher from Come Alive Creative. Isadore Nieves is our audio producer, and Ryan Hobler is our composer and audio engineer. Our production assistants this season were Maggie O'Brien and Katharine Leede. As always, thank you to our listeners. You're helping us to try and save the world, one podcast at a time. I'm Lisa Perry. Thanks for listening.