The founding statement of END was the European Nuclear Disarmament Appeal issued in April 1980 and circulated by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation (http://www.russfound.org).
In Europe, the main geographical stage for the East-West confrontation, new generations of ever more deadly nuclear weapons are appearing.The document was notable for two things in particular.
.The main authors of the appeal were British – E. P. Thompson, Mary Kaldor, Dan Smith and Ken Coates – and it was launched at a press conference in the House of Commons.
But their intention was to create a Europe-wide movement, and by summer 1980 it had been endorsed by an impressive list of supporters, mainly in western Europe but with a smattering from the Soviet bloc, among them former Hungarian prime minister András Hegedüs and Russian dissident Roy Medvedev.
With movements for nuclear disarmament emerging throughout western Europe and gaining support from social democratic and Euro-communist parties, the Russell Foundation, centred on Ken Coates, consulted about organising a massive conference to bring together everyone involved.
During these conventions, especially in Perugia and Amsterdam, there was an intensive cooperation with the Dutch Interchurch Peace Council (IKV) and their secretary-general Mient Jan Faber and Wim Bartels.
Bartels was also the president of the International Peace Coordination Centre (IPCC), a cooperation of 'like-minded' movements, which linked their commitment of the struggle against nuclear weapons and the support of independent, dissident peace-initiatives in Eastern-Europe.
Thompson, Kaldor and others in the END group in the UK disagreed with Coates's interest in winning the support of political parties and trade union leaders, and in 1983 there was a parting of the ways: Coates and his Nottingham-based Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation concentrated on the Convention process, leaving Thompson and Kaldor as dominant figures in the UK END group.
END supporters, most notably Thompson and Kaldor, were the most prominent intellectuals of the movement, constantly in demand for public meetings and for opinion pieces in newspapers and magazines (The Guardian, the New Statesman and Tribune were always particularly keen).
Subsequently, British END published a series of pamphlets through Merlin Press and a bi-monthly magazine, European Nuclear Disarmament Journal, which was edited by Mary Kaldor.
Nevertheless, thanks largely to the persistence of END and like-minded activists from other countries, who kept up a constant stream of correspondence with dissidents in the Soviet bloc and visited them whenever they could, by the mid-1980s a fruitful dialogue had been established.