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chapter 4 massachusetts and the national nuclear weapons freeze movement 1980–1984 a trans-atlantic peace movement The 1979 national election of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party in Great Britain foreshadowed the rightward turn in American politics symbolized by the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Like Reagan, Thatcher called for cuts in social spending, decreased regulation of business, reduced taxation, arms buildup, and a harder line toward the Soviet Union. Even Social Democrats such as Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of West Germany, a staunch advocate of détente, called for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to build up its nuclear weaponry. Meeting in Brussels in December 1979, the leaders of NATO nations adopted a decision to deploy U.S. medium-range missiles in Britain, Holland, Belgium, Italy, and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) by the fall of 1983. The intent of the NATO nations was to counter the 700 medium-range SS-20s that the Soviet Union had aimed at Western Europe. To augment the existing independent nuclear capability of Britain and France, the United States would install 464 Cruise and 108 Pershing II intermediate-range missiles in NATO nations, with every Pershing and 96 Cruise missile earmarked for the FRG alone. First, the goal was to create a closer link between the United States and its Western European allies, who feared that the parity in strategic long-rangemissilessoughtbySALTIIwouldleavethemvulnerabletothesuperior conventional forces of the Soviet Union. Second, leaders of European NATO nations hoped to pursue what they called a “double track” policy of building up the intermediate nuclear weaponry of NATO while pursuing parallel negotiations aimed at reducing the number of comparable Soviet SS-20s.1 The decision to install U.S. “Euromissiles” in NATO nations (made while JimmyCarterwas in office) was followed onlyweeks laterbythe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. By 1980, the stirrings of a new European peace movement were evident across Western Europe, and especially in the FRG, as concern grew over the Massachusetts and the National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Movement 137 emergence of what some called Cold War II. As in the United States, the nascent European peace movement grew exponentially with the election of Reagan, who had campaigned against détente and arms control.2 If Reagan’s loose talk of “winnable nuclear war” disturbed many Americans, it positively rattled many Europeans, who viewed the U.S. president’s rhetoric of nuclear war as confirmation of their image of the former actor as a Hollywood cowboy who now had his finger on the nuclear trigger. Unlike earlier presidents—who, regardless of policy, had at least sought to assuage the fear of nuclear war—Reagan seemed to go out of his way to exacerbate such concerns. In a speech at West Point, for example, he proclaimed, “Man has used every weapon he has ever devised....It takes no crystal ball to perceive that a nuclear war is likely, sooner or later.”3 The freeze movement in the United States, which began before Reagan’s election, was, in fact, galvanized into action by the breakdown of détente and the adoption of more hard-line anti-Soviet policies in the late Carter years. For its part, the European peace movement had already begun mobilizing by late 1979. For the political scientist Steve Breyman—who has written about the West German peace movement in the early 1980s and its impact on West German and U.S. cold war policy—it was the NATO decision of December 1979 that constituted the “spark that ignited the dry kindling of [European] peace movement potential.”4 Thus, as Reagan assumed office, the growing trans-Atlantic anti– nuclear weapons movement had already begun to stir. Against the backdrop of the belligerent rhetoric of the Reagan administration, NATO plans to base U.S. Pershing II and Cruise missiles in Western Europe seemed less a part of the “double-track” policy aimed at negotiations than flat-out preparation for waging limited nuclear war. Many Europeans now believed that instead of binding the United States to the fate of Europe, the Euromissiles served to decouple the United States from Western Europe by allowing the option of fighting a nuclear war limited to the European theater.5 From 1981 through the final showdown in the fall of 1983, when the U.S. Cruise and Pershing II missiles were installed, Western Europe witnessed the largest peace movement in its postwar history. Anti–nuclear weapons protests attended by tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands swept across the...

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