Peace (40 page)

Exposing the limits of this professionalized peace, extolling peace as a way of life and its absence as the way to death, were activists who extended and refined organized peace movement strategies and Gandhian Satyagraha tactics, combining them with Pugwash urgency. Towards the end of his presidency, Eisenhower stated that

the people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our government. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government better get out of the way and let them have it.
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Anti-nuclear movements since the end of the Second World War make his point clear by pointing to the plain but powerful principle that only by efforts of individuals and groups can peace and the world with it be passed on to future generations because in the atomic age without peace there can be no world and without a world there can be no peace. Ironically, then, the logic that led to the use of atomic weapons to secure victory and peace in the Second World War was the same used to safeguard the world and peace from atomic weapons. With the proliferation of nuclear capabilities, for the first time since the origin of our species, survival of the peaceful applied equally to individuals and groups as to humanity as a whole. Actualizations of this bio-genetic and cultural imperative could not have been accomplished without deterrence and détente, but they would not have taken the forms that they did without two concurrent types of anti-nuclear movements.

One was non-violent direct action, which like the other is explicable by way of examples. In the 1950s Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers in New York refused to participate in civil defense drills aimed at preparing citizens for nuclear war, which by the logistical impossibility of the task may have simply served to inflame fear. They were popularly demonized for their civil disobedience, but in so being ignited anti-nuclear activists already incited by the scientists-as-peacemakers' informational campaigns. The next year, a pioneering anti-nuclear group as much about individual consciences as collective consciousness was formed by longtime peace activist A. J. Muste, a former Navy Commander turned Quaker named Albert Bigelow and others. Their Committee for Non-Violent Action (CNVA) established the basic patterns of peace activism still in place today, holding non-stop protest vigils and being purposefully arrested for trespassing or obstructing traffic by sit-ins at nuclear-related government facilities across the US. In the 1960s, the CNVA organized two cross-continental Walks for Peace, bringing the issue of nuclear arms reduction door-to-door. A CNVA activist and University of Chicago student founded the Student Peace Union, which became one of the largest groups of its kind. Bigelow's publicity-stunt sea voyage into a nuclear test site in the Pacific inspired another group in to carry out similar stunts,
which became Greenpeace, today the largest environmental activist group in the world, and its campaigns later successfully pressured the superpowers to withdraw atomic weapons from their surface ships. Always the nonconformist, Russell started a non-violent direct action group called the Committee of 100, which with their thousands of supporters held disruptive demonstrations at the War Office in London for which many were arrested, ironically, for breaching the peace. The value of non-violent direct action when the forces against which it is immediately addressed are exponentially greater lies more in making a point than making a difference. However, when non-violent direct actions reach critical mass, the point becomes the difference.

Other anti-nuclear activists focused their efforts on nuclear power, as did farmers in West Germany who prostrated before bulldozers to prevent the construction of a nuclear power plant, only to be water-cannoned away by police, but returning with larger numbers secured a judicial ruling against its construction. Similar peaceful obstructions occurred at the construction sites of nuclear power plants in the US. More than a thousand members of the Clamshell Alliance were imprisoned for so protesting in the 1970s, using their captivity to network and train members in new non-violent direct action techniques, such as working in small, autonomous, consensus-based
affinity groups
to respond to confrontations with authorities, reducing risks of mass violence breaking out. Two plants were proscribed by state legislatures when Clams attracted national media attention. The anti-nuclear power Abalone Alliance put forth a Nonviolence Code adopted by many non-violent direct action groups, prescribing openness and friendliness, abstention from physical and verbal violence, respect for property, abstinence from intoxicants while on duty, and a commitment not to flee nor carry weapons of any kind.
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Christianity also resurged as a focal point for anti-nuclear activity as one US bishop convinced workers at a weapons assembly plant to quit on moral grounds, and another refused to pay half of his income taxes on the grounds that they were being used for war purposes, prompting many others to do the same. Direct action of questionable non-violence broke new grounds in the 1980s, when eight people broke into a Pennsylvania warhead facility, damaged specimens and poured blood over documents. A movie they inspired in turn led to similar
plowshare
action around the world, so-named after a sharp steel wedge used to cut loose top layers of soil. Their destruction of property and dubious intents were condemned by many peace activists, but none of the hundreds of ploughshare actions that have since been taken have been against individuals as they thereby lose their meaning.

The second type of anti-nuclear movement was mass action, the value of which lies in its awareness-raising mobilization and the political
influence such mobilization makes for. In 1957, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) was formed by distinguished civil rights, peace and health activists. SANE's provocative anti-nuclear newspaper ads also increased its membership to 25,000 in a year. When a famous talk-show host formed a Hollywood chapter in 1960, celebrities as big as Marilyn Monroe flocked to SANE, the same year it began holding huge anti-nuclear rallies. In a matter of months, Eisenhower offered to stop nuclear testing if the USSR agreed to do the same, and did. An international SANE petition signed by philosophers and artists urged Kennedy to extend the moratorium, which he did. SANE lobbied in its Voter's Peace Pledge Campaign (1966) by sponsoring candidates who committed to peace and with its support the US War Powers Resolution and Act (1973) was passed, limiting presidential war powers without Congress' explicit support. In 1961, a SANE member formed a parallel group also aimed at empowering women, which decided that a single-day strike by women would be a practical way to start, set for November 1. Their slogan, “End the Arms Race, Not the Human Race,” soon gained national media attention, along with what has been referred to as their maternity-based appeal, calling on women to assure not only their children's immediate safety, but also that they have a future to be safe in. An estimated 50,000 women participated in the worldwide Women's Strike for Peace. Thereafter, the Un-American Activities Committee, a federal anti-communist body, called Strike leaders in for questioning, sardonically represented by a cartoonist asking whether they were un-American for being women or peace activists. The Clearing House on the Economics of Disarmament was established by them in 1963, which published seminal research. That year, the UN thanked the Strike for the pivotal role it played in the run-up to the Partial Test Ban Treaty. What SANE and the Strike show is that mass action moves the public, policies and before them its participants in the direction of peace.

By this time, the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) had been staging mass action anti-nuclear demonstrations across England for years. The globally recognizable symbol of peace (see the following page) was designed for the CND to use in a protest march against nuclear weapons research. The symbol superimposes the semaphores of “N” and “D,” for Nuclear Disarmament: “N” is formed by holding two flags in an upside-down “V” and “D” by holding one flag pointed straight up and the other straight down. After the CND became a general anti-war advocacy group, as it is today, the European Nuclear Disarmament (END) led by E. P. Thompson held yearly international conventions on the topic. “We must protest if we are to survive,” he wrote, “Protest is the only realistic form of civil defense.”
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END ended with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (1987) between
the US and USSR that removed missiles from the region. Back in the US, the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign was initiated in 1980 by Randall Forsberg, who received her PhD in defense policy from MIT then worked at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the same year she started the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Freeze sought to achieve nuclear arms reductions by ballot initiatives through a network of affiliated grassroots groups, prompting local and states legislatures to pass Freeze resolutions. In 1986, SANE merged with the Freeze, which became Peace Action in 1993, with a much broader mandate and now over 100,000 members worldwide.

A successful synergy of non-violent direct and mass action came in West Germany. Anti-nuclear and environmental activists, united by the belief that a healthy peace is dependent on a healthy world, joined forces to form the world's first Green Party, which gained nearly ten percent of the national vote in 1983 even while carrying non-cooperation campaigns against the government. One of its founders, Petra Kelly, put the Party's mixed methods in this way:

When we talk of nonviolent opposition, we do not mean opposition to parliamentary democracy. We mean opposition from within parliamentary democracy. Nonviolent opposition in no way diminishes or undermines representative democracy, in fact it strengthens and stabilizes it. It is expressed in all kinds of local groups operating outside parliament, in work councils, and other self-governing bodies. Nonviolent opposition is one way, among others, of forming political opinion within that infrastructure.
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As Kelly indicates, the German Green Party's mass action sought to simultaneously change public policy and opinion from both inside and outside government, whereas SANE, the Strike, the CND, END and the Freeze sought to do the same solely from outside. Nonetheless, faced with the Freeze's mass action, Reagan proposed a Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), a two-phased deal between the US and USSR to reciprocally reduce warhead counts. START's final implementation resulted in the removal of 80 percent of nuclear weapons in existence as of 2001. That
these anti-nuclear movements took place in only one of the two superpowers' sphere is neither purposeful nor without coincidence, but serves as a sign of the leeway they had compared to people in the other. While it is beyond the scope of this book to compare the actualities of peace within the superpowers and their spheres with their own peace ideals, it is within its range to suggest that in neither did the actualities match the ideals to different degrees.

Just as these anti-nuclear movements attest to how bottom-up approaches to bridging the gap between actualities and ideals could be effective, Mikhail Gorbachev's career (b. 1931) attests to how top-down approaches can be likewise, and maybe even more so. After studying law at Moscow State University, he steadily rose in the Communist Party administration, holding posts ranging from Secretary of Agriculture to Youth Affairs. By the 1970s, he was an integral part of the powerful Communist Party Politburo and was selected by superiors as head delegate on diplomatic missions in the early 80s. Upon the death of his predecessor, for whom Gorbachev acted as Politburo liaison, he became the Premier of the USSR in 1985. He immediately began implementing reforms under the
glasnost
(“opening”) program, making government operations more transparent and lessening restrictions on civil liberties such freedoms of speech and press. He also announced an end to the arms race that had debilitated the Soviet economy and the abolition of nuclear weapons altogether. To this end, he met with Reagan in Geneva in 1985, pointedly asking why new nuclear weapons were being built when old ones never deployed. They met again in Iceland a year later and, for the first time in the Cold War, superpower leaders openly discussed disarmament together. Perhaps the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster a few months earlier reminded them of what was at stake.

In 1987, Gorbachev published
Perestroika
(“restructuring”), referring to Soviet domestic and foreign affairs. In theoretical terms, he explained: “We want peaceful competition between different social systems to develop unimpeded, to encourage mutually advantageous cooperation rather than confrontation and an arms race.”
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He proposed creating societies that are more peaceful, productive and integrated, not dogmatically based on one ideology, but by combining principles with proven results regardless of origin. Practicing Perestroika, he decreased military spending to revitalize the now-more decentralized economy, freed political prisoners, removed press restrictions, and met again with Reagan to discuss disarmament. Perestroika was admired abroad, but domestic opponents feared the reforms as too rapid or slow. In 1988, he announced that Soviet troops in Afghanistan, fighting there for a decade in a failed attempt to occupy, would be withdrawn. Speaking at the UN at that year's end, he announced further overall reductions in the
USSR's standing army, particularly those stationed in Eastern Europe. Peaceful protests against repression in Hungary went undisrupted and led to multi-party elections. The ban on Poland's Solidarity Party was lifted and its leader, Lech Walesa (Nobel Peace Prize, 1984, for keeping worker strikes against Soviet interference non-violent), became President. Gorbachev said that he would not block further reforms; other Eastern European and Central Asian countries followed suit. Revolutionary violence occurred, but as an exception not the rule. The dramatic destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which for many worldwide symbolized the Cold War, signaled the beginning of its end. But the superpower dichotomy that changed what peace meant by changing how it could be made and maintained had always competed with another paradigm it also framed that, after the end of the Cold War and its hot peace, remains.