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.
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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.
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“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 Gorbachev - 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.
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.
Photo from Shutterstock.
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 geo-engineer 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.
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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
Kheeler, Joe Lamb, and Ben Senturia for supporting the research of this
article.
Duncan Meisel wrote this article for Wagingnonviolence.org. Duncan is a Brooklyn-based climate activist, writer and movement history nerd. He'll debate you over Twitter at @duncanwrites.
