June 12,
1982 was a very special day. It was the largest peace demonstration, I
believe, in U.S. history. Unless the environmental movement takes on the
Pentagon’s ecocide. Mother Earth is doomed.
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
The Nuclear Freeze Campaign
Prevented an Apocalypse, So Can the Climate Movement
Demonstrators march hand in hand toward Central Park under a
large banner reading, 'Freeze The Arms Race,' during a massive Nuclear
Disarmament Rally, where about 750,000 gathered to rally for a nuclear arms
freeze, New York City, New York, June 12, 1982. (Photo by Lee
Frey/Authenticated News/Getty Images)
2014 was the hottest year in recorded history. 2015 is on track
to be even hotter — and yet, before the most important
international climate talks of the decade, even the most ambitious
promises of action will fall short of what science demands.
At the same time, the movement to stop climate change is also
making history — last year the United States saw the biggest climate
march in history, as well as the growth of a fossil fuel divestment
movement (the fastest growing
divestment campaign ever), and a steady drumbeat of local victories
against the fossil fuel industry.
In short, the climate movement, and humanity, is up against an
existential wall: Find ways to organize for decisive action, or face the end of
life as we know it. This is scary stuff, but if you think no movement has ever
faced apocalyptic challenges before, and won, then it’s time you learned about
the Nuclear Freeze campaign.
Following Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, the global
anti-nuclear movement also stood up to a global existential crisis — one that
was also driven by a wealthy power elite, backed by faulty science and a
feckless liberal establishment that failed to mobilize against a massive
threat. The movement responded with new ideas and unprecedented numbers to help
lead the world towards de-escalation and an end to the Cold War.
Under the banner of the Nuclear Freeze, millions of people
helped pull the planet from the brink of nuclear war, setting off the most
decisive political changes of the past half century. The freeze provides key
lessons for the climate movement today; and as we face up to our own
existential challenges, it’s worth reflecting on both the successes and
failures of the freeze campaign, as one possible path towards the kind of
political action we need.
A short history of the Nuclear Freeze campaign
In 1979, at the third annual meeting of Mobilization for
Survival, a scientist and activist named Randall Forsberg introduced an idea
that would transform the anti-nuclear weapons movement. She called for a
bilateral freeze in new nuclear weapons construction, backed by both the United
States and the Soviet Union, as a first step towards complete disarmament.
Shortly afterwards, she drafted a four-page “Call to Halt the
Nuclear Arms Race” and worked with fellow activists to draft a
four-year plan of action that would move from broad-based education and
organizing into decisive action in Washington, D.C.
Starting in 1980, the idea took hold at the grassroots, with a
series of city and state referendum campaigns calling for a Nuclear Freeze,
escalating into a massive, nationwide wave of ballot initiatives in November
1982 — the largest ever push in U.S. history, with over a third of the country
participating.
The movement also advanced along other roads: In June 1982, they
held the largest rally in U.S. history up to that point, with somewhere between
750,000 and 1 million people gathering in New York City’s Central Park, along
with countless other endorsements from labor, faith and progressive groups of
all stripes. Direct action campaigns against test sites and nuclear labs also
brought the message into the heart of the military industrial complex.
The effort continued into electoral and other political waters
until around early 1985, pushing peace measures at the ballot box and in the
nation’s capital, but never quite returned to the peak of mobilization seen in
1982.
The impact of this organizing was palpable: President Reagan
went from calling arms treaties with the Soviets “fatally flawed” in 1980, and
declaring the USSR an “evil empire” in a speech dedicated to attacking the
freeze initiative in 1983, to saying that the Americans and Soviets have
“common interests… to avoid war and reduce the level of arms.” He even went so
far as to say that his dream was “to see the day when nuclear weapons will be
banished from the face of the earth.” The movement’s popular success led the
president to make new arms control pledges as part of his strategy for victory
in the 1984 election.
“If things get hotter and hotter and arms control remains an
issue,” Reagan explained
in 1983, “maybe I should go see [Soviet Premier Yuri] Andropov and
propose eliminating all nuclear weapons.”
Reagan’s rhetorical and policy softening in 1984 opened the door
for Mikhail Gorbachav -— a true believer in the severity of the nuclear threat,
and an advocate for de-escalation — to rise to power in the Soviet Union in
1985. Gorbachev’s steps to withdraw missiles and end nuclear testing, supported
by global peace and justice movements, created a benevolent cycle with the
United States that eventually brought down the Iron Curtain and ended the Cold
war.
Although the freeze policy was never formally adopted by the
United States or Soviet Union, and the movement didn’t move forward into full
abolition of nuclear weapons, the political changes partially initiated by the
campaign did functionally realize their short term demand. As a result, global nuclear
stockpiles have indeed been declining
since 1986, as the two superpowers began to step back from the nuclear brink.
The climate movement has room to grow
While the Nuclear Freeze shows that movements can move mountains
— or at least global super powers — it also shows that the climate movement
isn’t yet close to doing so. For starters, its size is not at the scale of
where it needs to be — not by historical measures, at least. The largest mobilization
of the Nuclear Freeze campaign was the largest march in U.S. history up to that
point, and included double the number of people who participated in the
People’s Climate March. The referendum campaigns that reached their peak later
in 1982 were historic on a different scale as well: They were on the ballot in
10 states, Washington, D.C., and 37 cities and counties, before going on to win
in nine states and all but three cities. The vote covered roughly a third of
the U.S. electorate.
This was a movement powered by thousands of local organizations
working in loose, but functional, coordination. Even in 1984, which is
generally considered after the peak of the Nuclear Freeze campaign, the Freeze Voter PAC
(created at the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign conference in St. Louis in
1983) included 20,000 volunteers in 32 states — an electoral push thus far
unmatched in the climate movement’s history.
Nuclear
Freeze referendum campaigns reached the ballot in 10 states. (Peace Development
Center)
At the same time, this moment also showed how quickly movements
can decline. While the Nuclear Freeze campaign thrived in the very early 1980s,
press and popular attention rapidly dissipated. There are many possible reasons
that could explain this: from a shift in strategy away from grassroots
campaigns towards legislative action (the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign
conference moved from St. Louis to Washington, D.C., around this time), to a
softening of President Reagan’s nuclear posture, taking the wind out of the
movement’s sails. The real answer is probably a combination of all of the
above. From a peak of organizing in 1982-83, participation in the movement
significantly declined by the mid-1980s, and mostly dropped off the political
radar well before 1990.
Fear is a real motivator and a real risk
What drove the initial outpouring of action? In no small part,
it was fear. As Morrisey, lead singer of The Smiths, sang in 1986, “It’s the
bomb that will bring us together.”
In the late 1970s, research about the survivability of a nuclear
conflict became dramatically clearer, showing that even limited nuclear
exchanges could threaten all life on Earth. Also in this period, Physicians for
Social Responsibility initiated a widespread education campaign that dramatized
the local impacts of nuclear conflict on cities around the country. These
developments, combined with the real impact of Reagan’s escalatory rhetoric,
created fertile ground for the freeze campaign, allowing movement voices to
appear more reasonable than the technocratic nuclear priesthood that had lost
touch with the public’s fears. Only when Reagan began to step back his
posturing and present alternative arms control proposals was he able to blunt
the power of the movement.
The debate about the use of fear in the climate movement is
ongoing, but compared to the debate about nuclear weapons, the mainstream
climate movement under-appeals to the fear of climate change. While it’s clear
that apocalyptic, decontextualized appeals to fear are demotivating, grounded
assessments of the problem that speak honestly about how scary the problem
really is, and are attached to feasible solutions are crucial to mobilizing
large numbers of people. One example of an effective appeal to fear was Bill
McKibben’s widely-read 2012 Rolling Stone article “Global Warming’s
Terrifying New Math,”
which succeeded for several reasons: First, it used specific, scientifically
grounded numbers to explain approaching thresholds for serious change.
Secondly, it also was connected to a new, national organizing effort to divest
from fossil fuels, including a 21-city tour that provided critical mass to
begin campaigning.
Nevertheless, fear is, by its nature, hard to control and — in
the case of the freeze campaign — it provided an opportunity for co-optation of
the movement’s rhetoric. Most significantly, President Reagan’s Star Wars
program was able to redirect the fear of nuclear exchange into a technocratic,
bloated military project — rather than solutions to the root cause of the problem.
The Reagan administration drew on the president’s personal charisma and
reflexive trust in the power of the military industrial complex to transform
some of the concern generated by the movement, and turn it towards his own
ends.
The climate movement faces a similar threat from technical
solutions that benefit elites, such as crackpot schemes to geoengineer climate
solutions by further altering the Earth’s weather in the hopes of reversing
planetary heating, as well as other unjust ways of managing the climate crisis.
Discussions about big problems need to be paired with approachable, but big
solutions.
One simple demand
The Nuclear Freeze proposal turned the complex and treacherous
issue of arms control into a simple concept: Stop building more weapons until
we figure a way out of the mess. It was a proposal designed to be approachable
in its simplicity, and careful in the way it addressed competing popular fears
of both nuclear annihilation and perceived Soviet aggression.
The idea of a bilateral freeze — the United States stops
building if the Soviet Union does too — handled both of these concerns in a way
that made the nuclear problem about growing arms stockpiles, not the specifics
of Cold War politics. Even though the movement against nuclear weapons had
existed as long as the weapons themselves, the idea of the bilateral freeze
turned arms control much more into the mainstream of American political
discussion at a moment of real escalation with the Soviets.
In a certain way, climate change is simple too: We need to stop
building fossil fuel infrastructure wherever there are viable renewable or
low-carbon alternatives, and do it quickly. Growing the movement in this moment
will require bold, bright lines that provide moral directness and opportunities
to take giant leaps forward in terms of actual progress to reduce carbon
emissions.
The simplicity of the freeze idea was intentional. At their
meeting in 1981, the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign made it clear that the
path to power was not through access in Washington, but through “recruiting
active organizational and public support” — a strategy that required demands
that were easy and quick to explain.
Developing such active public support was a wide-ranging
process, but the campaign distinguished itself from other contemporary peace
movements by its use of the electoral system — first via local and state
referendums in 1980-82, and then with initiatives like Freeze Voter in 1984.
The referendum strategy, in particular, was a tool that offered
intuitive, broad-based entry points for organizing with clear steps for
participants. And it worked: The freeze campaign won an overwhelming number of
the referendums it was a part of in 1982. Combined with demonstrations,
education campaigns and other grassroots actions, this strategy allowed the
movement to translate public sympathy into demonstrable public support.
It is possible that the current moment in the climate debate
could be ripe in a similar way. The public broadly favors
more climate action, but is faced with relatively few meaningful
opportunities to act on it. The task of growing the climate movement is in many
ways a task of activating these people with opportunities for deeper
involvement.
Other lessons learned
An important caveat must be made when discussing the breadth of
the freeze campaign’s support. Its demographics — mostly white and more middle
class than the public at large — reflected those of the establishment peace
movement from which it came. That lack of diversity not only represents a
failure of organizing, but also could have contributed to the movement’s lack
of staying power and lasting political potency.
While at least one key freeze organizer I spoke with said
explicitly that the climate movement is succeeding in this regard in ways they
never did, the experience of the Nuclear Freeze explains just a few of the
perils of failing to create a real diverse climate movement. This is a
challenge that will take work throughout the life of the climate movement, but
it’s at least underway in some key regards.
The freeze campaign thrived on an initial wave of activism that
was grounded in local organizing via the referendum strategy. But after
organizing shifted (perhaps prematurely) more towards legislative strategies,
the next steps for the hundreds of thousands of people involved in the campaign
never emerged. After the freeze became mainstream discourse — supported by
hundreds of members of Congress, presidential candidates and millions of voters
— the next step towards disarmament remained murky.
Ultimately, the referendum strategy was symbolic: Cities and
states did not have any formal power over U.S. or Soviet nuclear arsenals. But
symbols matter, and so does democracy. The overwhelming vote for the freeze in
1982 shifted the political ground out from underneath liberal hawks and the
president, allowing more progressive voices to ride the movement’s coattails —
to the point where the 1984 Democratic Party platform included a freeze plank.
In other words, it turned diffuse public opinion into a concrete count of
bodies at the polls.
The referendum vote also asserted the right of people to decide
such weighty issues, taking them out of the realm of the military industrial
complex and into the light of day. When asked, people wanted a chance to be
involved. The massive and democratic nature of the freeze campaign struck a
blow against the social license of the nuclear industrial complex by yanking
the implied consent of the majority of the American people from both the
military’s leadership and their tactics.
The path forward in an uncertain time
As the divestment movement grows, particularly on college
campuses — another effort aimed at the social license of an entrenched and
distant power elite — the lessons of the freeze campaign suggest that the
climate movement will need to answer many important questions in the coming
months and years.
We know how to march, but what comes next? Public opinion has
shifted, perhaps decisively, but how do we turn that diffuse energy into a
story about the need for action? If we mobilize in 2016 for the election, what
comes in 2017? And if we organize towards a single big demand, as the Freeze
campaign did in the 80s, how will we translate that into ongoing power?
The climate movement faces an epic, unique struggle, but the
challenges it faces as a movement are not as singular as some may think. As the
movement ventures onto new ground, it’s worth remembering that others have done
what felt like the impossible, in the face of an uncertain future — and
triumphed.
The author thanks Freeze campaign activists Leslie Cagan, Randy
Keehler, Joe Lamb and Ben Senturia for supporting the research of this article.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share
Alike 3.0 License.
Duncan Meisel is a Brooklyn-based climate activist, and writer.
He serves as the Digital Campaigns Manager for 350.org.
© 2015 Reader Supported News
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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