Abstract
In the early 1980s, a wave of varied discontent emerged in the Western world. Western Europe and the United States witnessed massive demonstrations that took the shape of peaceful marches as well as alarming riots. The protesters alternately aimed to challenge capitalism, support different models of economic development, promote anti-militarism and non-violence or redefine urban and social spaces. Large portions of them, however, heralded safeguarding the environment as their primary goal and identified nuclear energy as their main object of concern. The quest for a cleaner and safer environment, which was the essential feature of a broad array of criticisms of nuclear power, mobilized large sections of society and provided people with new tools of civic expression.
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Notes
See W. Burr and D.A. Rosenberg (2010) ‘Nuclear Competition in an Era of Stalemate, 1963–1975’, in M.P. Leffler and O.A. Westad (eds) The Cambridge History of the Cold War. Vol. 2. Crises and Détente (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 88–111;
F.J. Gavin (2010) ‘Nuclear proliferation and non-proliferation during the Cold War’, in Leffler and Westad, The Cambridge History of the Cold War. Vol. 2, pp. 395–416.
See also R.D. Schulzinger (2010) ‘Détente in the Nixon-Ford years, 1969–1976’, in The Cambridge History of the Cold War. Vol. 2. Crises and Détente (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 374, where the author argues that détente ‘succeeded at first, because it reduced popular anxieties about the dangers of war between the United States and the Soviet Union’. Francis Gavin has recently explained to what extent disarmament and non-proliferation have been a shared interest of both the superpowers;
see F.J. Gavin (2012) Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America’s Atomic Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
A good explanation of the crisis of American hegemony and its broader consequences is given in T. Engelhard (2007) The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press). As regards interpretations focusing on the individual actors,
see L.S. Wittner (2003) The Struggle Against the Bomb. Vol. 3. Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971–Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press).
See R. Keohane and J. Nye (1991) ‘Interdependence in World Politics’, in G.T. Crane and A. Amawi (eds) The Theoretical Evolution of International Political Economy: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 122–40.
J.B. Price (1989) The Antinuclear Movement (London: Cengage Gale), p. 138. According to Helena Flam, ‘The contestation of the antinuclear movements was directed against a sensitive central policy area which depended on the dominant materialist, technocratic and growth-oriented world-view …. The antinuclear movements questioned this world-view. They exposed it as political myth and challenged the interests that had a stake in it’.
See H. Flam (1994) States and Anti-Nuclear Movements (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), p. 3.
See T.R. Rochon and D.S. Meyer (1997) ‘Introduction: The Nuclear Freeze in Theory and Action’, in T.R. Rochon and D.S. Meyer (eds) Coalitions and Political Movements: The Lessons of the Nuclear Freeze (London: Lynne Rienner), p. 4.
See also B.A. Miller (2000) Geography and Social Movements: Comparing Antinuclear Activism in the Boston Area (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Finally, see TAM 127, Box 2, 2–11 December 1977 conference evaluation.
Flam, States and Anti-Nuclear Movements, p. 144; J-C. Simoën (1977) Chroniqu d’une lute: Le combat antinucléaire à Flamanville et dans La Hague (Didier Anger: Paris).
J.R. McNeill (2010) ‘The Biosphere and the Cold War’, in M.P. Leffler and O.A. Westad (eds) The Cambridge History of the Cold War. Vol. 3. Endings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 438.
See also E.J. Walsh (1988) Democracy in the Shadows: Citizen Mobilization in the Wake of the Accident at Three Mile Island (New York: Greenwood). A contemporary ABC News survey showed that 71 per cent of Americans wanted further reassurances from the US administration. See Price The Antinuclear Movement, p. 132.
T. Judt (2005) Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York, The Penguin Press), p. 590.
T.R. Rochon (1988) Mobilizing for Peace (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 3.
See M.J. Hogan (1994) The Nuclear Freeze Campaign: Rhetoric and Foreign Policy in the Telepolitical Age (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press), pp. 1–2.
See also K.D. Rose (2001) One Nation Underground. The Fallout Shelter in American Culture (New York: New York University Press), p. 222.
R.E. Powaski, (2000) Return to Armageddon, The United States and the Nuclear Arms Race, 1981–1999 (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 18–19.
See also D. Cortright and R. Pagnucco, ‘Transnational Activism in Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign’, in Rochon and Meyer, Coalitions and Political Movements, p. 83. Finally, see N. Tannenwald (2007) The Nuclear Taboo. The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press), p. 285.
M. Lumsden (1983) ‘Nuclear Weapons and the New Peace Movement’, in World Armaments and Disarmament: SIPRI Yearbook 1983 (London: Taylor & Francis), pp. 101–26.
See B. Thompson, (1982) Comiso, END Special Report (London: European Nuclear Disarmament and the Merlin Press), online at http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/113723, date accessed 15 April 2015.
D.S. Meyer ‘Institutionalizing Dissent: The United States Structure of Political Opportunity and the End of the Nuclear Freeze Movement’, p. 159; J.P. Knopf, ‘The Nuclear Freeze Movement’s Effects on Policy’, in Rochon and Meyer, Coalitions and Political Movements, p. 127. For a critical review of the Reagan administration’s nuclear strategy, see R. Jervis (1984) The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
See also R. Scheer (1982) With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War (New York: Random House).
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Fazzi, D. (2016). The Nuclear Freeze Generation: The Early 1980s Anti-nuclear Movement between ‘Carter’s Vietnam’ and ‘Euroshima’. In: Andresen, K., van der Steen, B. (eds) A European Youth Revolt. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-56570-9_10
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