Nuclear Freeze campaign
[1] The idea of simply halting key aspects of the nuclear arms race arose in the early stages of the Cold War.
Probably the first suggestion of this kind, discussed in letters between US President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin in the mid-1950s, called for a freeze on fissionable material.
In 1970, the US 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.
In the late 1970s, Soviet-American détente unraveled and the Cold War began to revive, with new conflicts emerging in Africa, Central America, and Afghanistan.
The Soviet government began to replace its older nuclear weapons with more accurate, intermediate-range SS-20 missiles, directly threatening Western Europe.
[4] 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.
[5] In 1979, she suggested to leading US 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.
In April of that year, having secured the support of the American Friends Service Committee, Clergy and Laity Concerned, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, her Institute and these groups jointly published the “Call” and invited other peace organizations to endorse it.
Additionally, Forsberg maintained that a nuclear weapons Freeze would result in substantial fiscal savings and detailed the social and economic benefits of various alternative domestic spending options.
Support for the proposal also came from leading scientists, including Linus Pauling, Jerome Wiesner, Bernard Feld, and Carl Sagan.
[7] 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.
Jonathan Schell, a prominent journalist, wrote a series of powerful antinuclear essays for The New Yorker that, in 1982, were turned into a best-selling book, The Fate of the Earth.
[1] In March 1982, 88 percent of the 180 Vermont town meetings voted to support a bilateral nuclear weapons freeze between the United States and the Soviet Union.
[12] 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.
[1] 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...
Naturally, the UN votes contributed to the mounting political pressure on the United States and Soviet Union to halt the nuclear arms race.
McGeorge Bundy (a critic of the Reagan administration) said "the issues were far too complicated to be resolved by a bilateral freeze, which was a dubious notion in any case".
[15] The neo-conservative Commentary published an article claiming that there was “not the slightest doubt that this motley crowd is manipulated by a handful of scoundrels instructed directly from Moscow.” Human Events, which billed itself as “the national conservative weekly,” published numerous attacks upon antinuclear activists, including: “How Far Left Is Manipulating U.S. Nuclear `Freeze’ Movement.” In May 1982, the Heritage Foundation distributed a “Backgrounder” on “Moscow and the Peace Offensive” that called for a massive campaign to block the growth of the antinuclear movement in the United States and abroad.
Of course, this did not pose a problem for the faithful, for “if you are saved, you will never go through one hour, not one moment of the Tribulation.” As fundamentalism grew more political in the 1980s, its proponents saw in Reagan's nuclear buildup the working out of God's alleged plan.
James Robison, the pre-millennialist television preacher who delivered an invocation at the 1984 GOP national convention, warned: “Any teaching of peace prior to [Christ's] return is heresy.
In a lengthy fundraising letter of June 17, 1982, Falwell promised “a major campaign’ against “the `freeze-niks.’” They were “hysterically singing Russia's favorite song,” he maintained, “and the Russians are loving it!” Beginning in the spring of 1983, he placed full-page newspaper ads in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and more than 70 other newspapers, assailing “the `freeze-niks,’ `ultra-libs,’ and `unilateral disarmers’” and exhorting “patriotic, God-fearing Americans to speak up” for military defense.
He also aired a one-hour, prime-time TV special attacking the Freeze and used his weekly Sunday morning sermons, broadcast over 400 television stations around the country, to condemn the antinuclear campaign.
It soon involved the dispatch of officials from numerous government agencies to wage a public relations campaign against the Freeze propositions on the ballot that fall.
Challenged to produce evidence for those accusations, Reagan pointed to two Reader’s Digest articles and a report by the House Intelligence Committee.
and of various antiwar organizations.”[1] In the United States, the Reagan administration managed to stave off the challenge posed by the Freeze campaign and other critics of its nuclear policies.
With the Freeze campaign's momentum blunted by these events, as well as by a rapid falloff in mass media attention after 1983, the movement declined and began to revise its approach and activities.
