In the late 1970s in the United States, veterans of movements for civil rights and against the US war in Vietnam joined with older activists who had been involved in “Ban the Bomb” efforts since the 1950s and more recent critics of nuclear power to oppose the acceleration of the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Events during the last stretch of President Jimmy Carter’s administration marked a turning point, including the decision by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in December 1979 to deploy new Pershing II and cruise missiles to Europe; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan later that month; Carter’s resumption of registration for the military draft (for men); the announcement that the United States would deploy armed force to prevent any threats to the oil fields of the Persian Gulf (the “Carter Doctrine”); and leaked news of a presidential directive, PD-59, with plans for “limited,” regional, and protracted nuclear warfare.¹

A new peace movement arose even before Ronald Reagan’s electoral victory in 1980. The heightened nuclear anxiety that followed — with Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger’s plans to fight and win a nuclear war and the official in charge of civil defense against a nuclear attack telling the journalist Robert Scheer that “if there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it” — brought in new recruits.² By 1981, Europeans had joined the European Nuclear Disarmament (END) movement and were protesting in the hundreds of thousands against the new “Euromissiles,” and US activists promoted the Nuclear Freeze, a campaign to secure an agreement to halt the production and testing of nuclear weapons. These movements echoed the critique of Swedish diplomat Alva Myrdal that years of the superpower Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) had amounted to a “game of disarmament” by essentially codifying an ongoing arms race.³The first step to stop it would be to cease production, testing, and deployment of new weapons and then begin reductions. This was the message of the Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race, drafted by scholar-activist Randall Forsberg in 1979.⁴ The Freeze caught fire in the early 1980s and spread well beyond the traditional community of peace activists. Its appeal was reflected in ballot referenda starting in western Massachusetts in November 1980, where it won in 59 of 62 towns. In the next four years, Freeze resolutions were endorsed in hundreds of counties and municipalities and more than a score of state legislatures.

The early 1980s also witnessed the growth of a movement against US military intervention, particularly in Central America, where the Reagan administration propped up dictatorships in Guatemala and El Salvador and sought to destroy Nicaragua’s Sandinista Revolution by supporting an armed insurgency by the so-called Contras. In the 1970s, as a founder of the Boston Study Group along with nuclear physicist Philip Morrison, Randy Forsberg had argued that stopping the nuclear arms race and preventing superpower military interventions were two sides of the same coin — what activists came to call the “deadly connection.”⁵ Nuclear disarmament was not possible, she argued, unless the prospects for conventional military conflict were diminished. Forsberg argued for confining the military to territorial defense and for eliminating capabilities for foreign intervention and “power projection” as a path to ending the nuclear arms race. She promoted, with European colleagues, notions of nonoffensive or nonprovocative conventional military defense as an alternative to nuclear deterrence in Europe.⁶ The ideas caught on in the Soviet Union once the reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 and contributed much to the demilitarization of Europe and the end of the Cold War.