American Anti-Nuclear Activism, 1975–1990: The Challenge of Peace by Kyle Harvey (review)

Kyle Harvey’s analysis of the American anti-nuclear movements is an elegantly written and well-documented study that provides important insights into the history of American peace activism and social movements. This book also sheds new light on many of the innovative elements that the American anti-nuclear campaigners introduced in the years of Reagan’s ascendancy, such as ground-breaking protest repertoires, inventive communication strategies, and original local actions.

Harvey takes a convincingly internal perspective so as to explain how American opposition to nuclear weapons revamped from the mid-Seventies onward. In doing so, he agrees with Larry Wittner’s idea that, by the mid-Seventies, the transnational struggle against nuclear weapons, after a dormant period that started with the signature of the limited test ban treaty in 1963 and lasted until détente dominated the international political scene, “had created much of the structure that enabled it, in the early 1980s, to pose a substantial challenge to the nuclear policies of the great powers.”¹

Hence, Harvey’s contribution does not fill a still existing gap in the scholarship of the anti-nuclear movements, the one represented by the mid-1960s and early 1970s. Nevertheless, the volume is extremely useful in clarifying how the American anti-nuclear protests hit the mainstream and regained their apparently lost popularity throughout the 1980s. In this regard, the book’s most important contention is that such a success stemmed from a delicate equilibrium between idealism and pragmatism, which the American anti-nuclear protesters managed to achieve not without difficulties and tensions.

To strengthen this point, the book presents six case studies that, although not being entirely representative of the multifaceted American anti-nuclear protests of the period, may offer a good example of how this movement, as a whole, gradually grew, broadened its horizon, and became socially attractive.

The first chapter describes the internal dynamics of the anti-nuclear movement in the U.S. and argues that its newest and most fruitful characteristic was the launching of a genuine dialogue between its moderate and its most radical wings. This dialogue contributed to closing the traditional rift between idealists and pragmatists, a quarrel that had undermined the socio-political effectiveness of the movement for long time. The chapter underestimates such important causal factors as, for instance, the rise of Ralph Nader’s public interest groups, the watershed represented by NATO’s controversial double track decision, which, along with the Three Mile Island accident, sparked off popular demands for nuclear disarmament and environmental safeguard. Nevertheless, it gives the right prominence to the ability of building new multi-issue coalitions, a feature that the antinuclear movement undoubtedly sharpened up from the late 1970s onward.

The second chapter is slightly more controversial than the first one. According to the author, the American anti-nuclear movements hit the mainstream as soon as they adopted new communication strategies and methods of protest, like massive advertisement campaigns or widespread mail bombing. Such a conspicuous activism, however, was not entirely new. The anti-nuclear opposition of the 1950s and early 1960s had indeed deployed very similar tools and set up similar strategies too. The first American anti-nuclear leaders recruited the most prominent figures and public intellectuals of their time and asked for their help to convince people to mobilize against unbounded nuclear testing. In communication terms, doctor Benjamin Spock’s famous picture on the New York Times or Gregory Peck’s many public utterances in favor of nuclear disarmament were comparable to 1979 Bruce Springsteen’s first live performance at Madison Square Garden—an event that Harvey curiously overlooks—where the Boss played with a dozen of other popular musicians under the common flag of a band called Musician United for Safe Energy (MUSE): in spite of the media-related differences, all of these attempts were intended to foster the anti-nuclear campaigns’ visibility and trigger the reaction of the American middle class through...