Nuclear Freeze in a Cold War

The Reagan Administration, Cultural Activism, and the End of the Arms Race

William M. Knoblauch

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781613765074
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The early 1980s were a tense time. The nuclear arms race was escalating, Reagan administration officials bragged about winning a nuclear war, and superpower diplomatic relations were at a new low. Nuclear war was a real possibility and antinuclear activism surged. By 1982 the Nuclear Freeze campaign had become the largest peace movement in American history. In support, celebrities, authors, publishers, and filmmakers saturated popular culture with critiques of Reagan's arms buildup, which threatened to turn public opinion against the president.Alarmed, the Reagan administration worked to co-opt the rhetoric of the nuclear freeze and contain antinuclear activism. Recently declassified White House memoranda reveal a concerted campaign to defeat activists' efforts. In this book, William M. Knoblauch examines these new sources, as well as the influence of notable personalities like Carl Sagan and popular culture such as the film The Day After, to demonstrate how cultural activism ultimately influenced the administration's shift in rhetoric and, in time, its stance on the arms race.

1

Fear Books

The March 26, 1982, issue of Publishers Weekly featured “A Checklist of Nuclear Books” which included a timely question from the editor Joann Davis: “Fear books. Books that deliver disquieting messages about radiation leaks and environmental poisons and bombs so powerful they could ultimately destroy the human race. Most of us have a hard time escaping these horrors on the nightly news and in the morning papers. Do we really want to read about them in our leisure time?”1 If the New York Times best-seller list was any indication, the answer to Davis’s question was yes. In response to the Reagan administration’s rhetoric and arms buildup, antinuclear nonfiction—defined here as any bound nonfiction work in print that was critical of nuclear weapons—sold relatively well in early 1982.2

This new crop of antinuclear nonfiction was a result of rising fears largely fueled by the Reagan administration’s tough talk supporting its arms buildup. In time, the growing popularity of these books led the White House to consider that perhaps it had gone too far with its brazen rhetoric. As the journalist Robert Scheer assessed, “By the spring of 1982, the Administration realized that it had got itself into deep trouble on this issue [nuclear war] and began to alter its public posture.”3 That analysis is certainly correct; however, Scheer’s account overlooks the important role that writers and publishers of antinuclear paperbacks played in this turnabout. In the early 1980s, an increasing number of antinuclear nonfiction books rallied Americans to the disarmament cause and helped to galvanize huge protests.

To put this phenomenon in context, consider the April 12, 1982, Newsweek article “The Nuclear Book Boom,” which noted that between 1979 and 1983 more than 130 antinuclear books entered the literary marketplace. After months of Reagan administration rhetoric about “winning” or “prevailing” in a nuclear war, publishers anticipated “a brisk business” for books critical of the arms race. It was a rare prediction for a Cold War literary subgenre that historically sold modestly; Joann Davis remarked that “even taking into account publishers’ habitual consignment of slow-selling titles—and books about nuclear matters often fall into this category—this statistic still indicates considerable growth.”4 This flood of antinuclear paperbacks wasn’t fueled by profit but by publishers’ political convictions. Daniel Moses of Sierra Club Books commented that “editors and publishers don’t expect to sell a lot of books on [nuclear war]. It’s not a commercial enterprise. I think they genuinely feel an obligation to inform the public on this issue.”5 In other words, early 1980s publishers who put antinuclear paperbacks into the marketplace despite traditionally low sales figures were engaging in a form of antinuclear activism.

Of these 130 paperbacks, four in particular led to the Reagan administration’s media response. The first, The Unforgettable Fire, predated Reagan’s presidency but it proved to publishers that readers were again interested in antinuclear literature. The second, Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth, warned about the dangers of the arms race in vivid detail. When Schell’s book topped best-seller lists, it inspired Nuclear War: What’s in It for You?, a book by the antinuclear group Ground Zero that became an important promotional and organizational tool for a nationwide “Ground Zero Week.” Finally, recognizing the political impact of these books, Senators Edward Kennedy and Mark Hatfield published Freeze!: How You Can Help Prevent Nuclear War, which aimed to build support for upcoming freeze resolutions to appear in midterm elections in ten states. The seriousness with which the Reagan administration responded to this nuclear book boom confirms antinuclear nonfiction’s potential to bolster the freeze movement.

The Unforgettable Fire

Lawrence Wittner, a scholar of the antinuclear movement, notes that “during the early 1970s, nuclear weapons went largely unnoticed” in American activist circles, and that “in contrast to earlier upsurges of public concern and antinuclear activism . . . there was relatively little popular protest against nuclear weapons in the 1970s.” The historian Paul Boyer concurs, calling this period the “Big Sleep,” or the “period of diminished attention to nuclear issues that extended from 1963 to the later 1970s.”6 Even as nuclear proliferation became a global issue, in the 1970s American antinuclear activism was, by comparison to the 1950s or early 1980s, moderate. That began to change on March 29, 1979, when a meltdown nearly occurred at Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. The accident resulted from a combination of engineer negligence, faulty control panel gauges, and reactor relief valve disruption. Although engineers prevented a total reactor failure, the radioactive steam released contaminated the surrounding community and nearby Susquehanna River. TMI made headlines just as the major motion picture The China Syndrome—featuring a story of events remarkably like the Pennsylvania nuclear accident—hit the theaters. Together, TMI and The China Syndrome reenergized nuclear power debates.7

Three Mile Island also influenced the publication of The Unforgettable Fire, a project initiated by the editor and writer Tom Engelhardt. Immediately after TMI, Engelhardt met with Ann Marie Cunningham, a member of President Carter’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, who related a story. After the accident, Japanese reporters traveled to Pennsylvania to interview locals, including displaced expecting mothers; as a safety precaution, these women had been relocated from their homes to an abandoned skating rink in Harrisburg. Questioning the women about fears of radioactivity and their knowledge of Hiroshima, one reporter was alarmed to discover that only a few of the dozens of women interviewed knew anything about the US atomic bombings of Japan.8

The story shocked Engelhardt. As a child, the film Hiroshima Mon Amour made a lasting impression on him, especially its images of Hiroshima survivors, while living through the 1962 Cuban missile crisis solidified his fear of nuclear weapons. Like many young Americans in the 1960s, Engelhardt protested the Vietnam War, and he remained politically active afterward. Cunningham’s story redirected his activism to the antinuclear movement. He decided to publish a book about Hiroshima, and asked a friend, the historian John Dower, for advice. Dower first suggested publishing a collection of photographs taken in Hiroshima after the bombings, but these images proved “too grim” for public consumption; then, he sent Engelhardt a collection of pastels and drawings by Hiroshima survivors titled The Unforgettable Fire. Engelhardt was moved, and convinced Pantheon Books to publish the collection in the United States.9

The original Japanese publication of The Unforgettable Fire predates its US release by six years. The project began in 1974 when a Hiroshima survivor, Iwakichi Kobayashi, entered the Hiroshima NHK television studios. Inspired by a recent program on the bomb’s survivors, Kobayashi shared his own sketch, drawn from memory, with the company’s producers. Awestruck by the “extraordinary power of Mr. Kobayashi’s picture and the vividness of his memory even after almost thirty years,” NHK put out a call for Hiroshima survivors to submit atomic bomb drawings and received numerous submissions from amateur artists forever scarred by the bomb.10 These images were featured in an NHK program commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the bombings and later comprised the moving display at the Peace Culture Center in Hiroshima City.

Engelhardt recalls the impact these unsettling images had on American readers: “In America . . . in the mainstream . . . there had never been a book that went under the mushroom cloud. You could look at the ruins, but you couldn’t see . . . the human beings. If you were on the fringes and you knew comics, if you knew Barefoot Gen . . . maybe . . . but there wasn’t much.” Engelhardt believes that The Unforgettable Fire became a sensation because it provided the “first full-scale publication of the memories of survivors of Hiroshima since John Hersey.” Hersey, author of the 1946 work Hiroshima, agreed. He found the book to be “tremendously moving—more moving than any book of photographs of the horror could be, because what is registered is what has been burned into the minds of the survivors.” Many in the American news media echoed these sentiments. A New York Times reviewer, for example, argued that The Unforgettable Fire “deserves a place next to John Hersey’s Hiroshima.”11

As Reagan administration rhetoric about winning a nuclear war intensified, The Unforgettable Fire became a political tool, a book that came to represent not the past, but the potential future horrors of what awaited survivors of a nuclear war. “The book became an integral part [of] the antinuclear weapons movement,” recalls Engelhardt, and these images were used in an exhibit at the Chicago Peace Museum.12 Mark Rogovin, curator and museum cofounder, recalled that The Unforgettable Fire contained “the most powerful visual documents [he] had ever seen” regarding atomic weapons, and the exhibit ran for close to a year. On November 30, 1982, Rogovin took these images on the road, touring America with a mobile exhibit and prompting newspapers to report on the “powerful effect” The Unforgettable Fire had on citizens who realized for the first time “just how dreadful it was for the people [attacked].”13 The exhibit even influenced the Irish rock group U2 to write a song and title their politically charged 1984 album The Unforgettable Fire.14 Engelhardt’s collection, then, hinted to writers and publishers that serious antinuclear books could have an impact. One writer even appropriated excerpts from The Unforgettable Fire for his forthcoming series of essays set to appear in the New Yorker. That writer was Jonathan Schell, and his series, The Fate of the Earth, would become one of the most popular antinuclear publications in US history.

The Fate of the Earth

The Fate of the Earth began as a three-part serialized essay that could convey the horrific details of nuclear war in accessible language. Schell had devoted five years to the project, researching the consequences of nuclear war by interviewing biologists, ecologists, and weapons experts, all of which lent Schell’s arguments more than an air of expertise. Still, his plain but illustrative prose helped to assure a wide readership. Plausible, unflinching, and frightening, Schell’s The Fate of the Earth quickly became required reading for Americans in, or interested in joining, the rapidly growing antinuclear movement.15

In early 1982, when The Fate of the Earth first appeared in the New Yorker, antinuclear grassroots activism was already on the rise, a trend evidenced by the growth of the Randall Forsberg–led nuclear freeze campaign. Forsberg recognized the role of literature in building a broad coalition from the American middle class, a lesson learned from her time protesting the Vietnam War. She grasped The Fate of the Earth’s importance, and by promoting the book she hoped to ensure that it became a must-read for freeze activists.16 Additionally, Schell’s ability to sidestep the authority of nuclear strategists, those mathematicians and economists who had long held prominence in nuclear debates—the men Fred Kaplan called the “Wizards of Armageddon”—meant that The Fate of the Earth held the potential to reach nonactivists and convert them to the antinuclear cause.17

In explaining the realities of the atomic age, Schell was blunt. Nuclear war wouldn’t really be war at all, but human extinction. Governments were lying; in fact, they had been in denial about atomic dangers for some thirty-seven years. Survivalism was futile, and the nuclear threat was far greater than anticipated. During and after a nuclear war, death would come in many forms: gamma rays, blast waves, fallout, and, after stripping the ozone, sunburn. It would mean certain death not only for humans, but for animals and plant life, which would lead to widespread human starvation. Nuclear war, then, would not just kill one generation, but doom all future generations. Faced with potential extinction, the only way for humanity to proceed was to grapple with the nuclear threat head-on; for Schell, that meant international control of the bomb—a solution that required a rethinking of nation-state atomic autonomy in the pursuit of global disarmament.18

The Fate of the Earth’s most graphic section may be “A Republic of Insects and Grass,” which examines the ecological, biological, and societal consequences of a nuclear war. Schell argues that lessons from history, and in particular the US atomic bombing of Japan, could only show Americans a fraction of the devastation that awaited them in a modern, full-scale nuclear war. Here, he appropriates quotes and imagery from The Unforgettable Fire to narrate the horrors that awaited Hiroshima’s survivors:

In the weeks after the bombing, many survivors began to notice the appearance of petechiae—small spots caused by hemorrhages—on their skin. These usually signaled the onset of the critical stage of radiation sickness. In the first stage, the victims characteristically vomited repeatedly, ran a fever, and developed an abnormal thirst. (The cry “Water! Water!” was one of the few sounds often heard in Hiroshima on the day of the bombing.) Then, after a few hours or days, there was a deceptively hopeful period of remission of symptoms, called the latency period, which lasted from about a week to about four weeks . . . in the third, and final, stage . . . the victim’s hair may fall out and he may suffer from diarrhea and may bleed from the intestines, the mouth, or other parts of the body, and in the end he will either recover or die.19

It’s a haunting passage, one of many. Schell provided readers with much disturbing imagery, such as, “The naked man, standing on the blasted plain that was his city, holding his eyeball in his hand.” The Japanese experience after Hiroshima, then, shows the inability of a government to deal with a nuclear attack, and atomic bombs of 1945 were comparably weak; modern thermonuclear weapons, Schell assures us, would lead to even worse consequences: “In the months after a holocaust, there would be no activity of any sort, as, in a reversal of the normal state of things, the dead would lie on the surface and the living, if there were any, would be buried underground.”20 For readers in 1982, the message was clear: despite recent rhetoric of ad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Fear Books
• 2. The Nuclear Winter
• 3. Containing The Day After
• 4. Weapons in Space
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index