American Anti-Nuclear Activism, 1975-1990

The Challenge of Peace

K. Harvey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137432841
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia sociale

Looking at national peace organizations alongside lesser-known protest collectives, this book argues that anti-nuclear activists encountered familiar challenges common to other social movements of the late twentieth century.

1

Anti-Nuclear Coalitions: Pacifism, Radical Action, and a Rising Atomic Threat

The anti-nuclear movement in the United States in the mid-1970s arose from concerns held by many Americans about the dual dangers of nuclear power and nuclear weapons. With the end of the Vietnam War, a growing interest in modern environmentalism, and the collapse of détente between the superpowers, citizens began to organize themselves in various ways to challenge these dangers. Later in the 1970s, with increased defense spending, accidents at nuclear power plants, and troubling international developments, public concern about these dangers increased dramatically. As activists seized the opportunity to build a nationwide anti-nuclear movement that encompassed the diverse concerns of environmentalism, anti-militarism, and social justice, they also struggled to negotiate just what this movement would look like. New coalitions dedicated to connecting nuclear power with nuclear weapons also attempted to unite different anti-nuclear and environmental campaigns scattered across the nation. The first national umbrella coalition, Mobilization for Survival (MFS, or simply “the Mobe”), also became a key player in the organization of mass demonstrations at three United Nations Special Sessions on Disarmament, held in New York City in 1978, 1982, and 1988. This chapter focuses primarily on the 1982 Special Session.

In the early 1980s, as public anti-nuclear sentiment grew and the anti-nuclear movement broadened, traditional radical and pacifist voices clashed with more moderate actors attempting to increase the public appeal and political potential of these mass anti-nuclear demonstrations. Conflict and compromise in these coalitions highlight the challenge inherent in developing a national agenda that was comprehensive in scope with the potential to mobilize what one activist described as the great mass of “typical, uninvolved, unconcerned Americans” into a potent social and political force.¹

This chapter looks at the nascent anti-nuclear movement as it expanded from its modest roots in the mid-1970s to its peak in 1982. A significant theme in the organizational base of this movement was the tension between radical and liberal activists within movement coalitions and between different organizations. In many ways, the interaction between activists and organizers from diverse backgrounds highlights the broader challenge of negotiating the agenda of anti-nuclear activism itself. Since the anti-nuclear movement developed as a largely middle-class affair, similar to the ban-the-bomb movement of the 1950s and early 1960s, a coalitional effort to galvanize the maximum amount of public support for the movement inevitably encountered division over the goals, strategies, and ideologies behind such efforts.

Organizational tensions in peace activism, as Robert Kleidman observes, are “an interplay between forces pulling campaign organizations in different directions.”² These different directions had as much to do with strategy as they did with deeper ideas about the nature of dissent and the role of radical thought and action in the peace movement. These issues, as they were debated among progressives in the wake of the anti-war movement and in the beginnings of the anti-nuclear movement, demonstrate an ambivalence about the direction and goals of anti-nuclear activism, as well as an uncertainty about how to best approach the development of an effective mass movement opposed to the prescient dangers of nuclear power and nuclear weapons.

Such tensions are common occurrences in social movements and individual social movement organizations, and various scholars have examined how they were manifested in parts of the broad and diverse anti-nuclear movement.³ This chapter takes a wider perspective, focusing on several peace organizations central to the story of anti-nuclear coalition building in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time when public anti-nuclear sentiment signaled to organizers that a mass movement was a real possibility. Despite auspicious beginnings in the early 1970s, public concern over nuclear issues grew dramatically over the following decade. A growing environmental awareness, concerns over safety in the nuclear industry, and what Charles Chatfield calls “an ominous sense of threat” in international relations, each contributed to public disquiet and demonstrated the potential for a large-scale movement opposed to nuclear power and nuclear weapons.⁴ Seeking to translate this widespread concern into an effective movement, some anti-nuclear activists sought to maximize the breadth and scope of their constituencies. Others felt such an approach negated the role of radical thought and its place in the goals and strategies of the movement.

As activists of various persuasions came together in broad coalitions designed to mobilize public opposition to the nuclear arms race, these tensions reflected familiar differences among progressives over the relationship between radical thought and pragmatic action.⁵ In major coalitions designed to bolster a sense of national cooperation and communication, and to foster increased public involvement in anti-nuclear protest, the influence of pacifism and radical ideas among movement organizers was significant. Many of these organizers came from long-standing pacifist institutions, including the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), War Resisters League (WRL), Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), and others. As these organizers sought to extend their often radical ideas about activism and movement-building into the forging of a broad peace movement dedicated to comprehensive social change, they clashed with other organizers aiming to develop a movement that would be more mainstream, media-friendly, and moderate.

At the heart of this chapter are the several peace and social justice organizations whose involvement in the push for greater public involvement in the anti-nuclear movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s most clearly demonstrates the centrality of these larger challenges to the process of peace movement mobilization. Tensions within coalitions and between organizations highlight the common push and pull of different interests in social movement activism as the surge of certain ideas and the receding of others, as influenced by time and circumstance, produced a wider movement developed by compromise. From the early challenges to link the threats posed by nuclear power and nuclear weapons to the negotiation over the operation of the mass demonstration on June 12, 1982, this chapter explores the fraught nature of coalition building and maintenance. A key theme is the contested nature of activism, as illuminated by the interplay between different actors and their ideas about how best to develop a broad and effective anti-nuclear movement. The story of their debates is one involving the fundamental processes of coalition building, ideological compromise, and public mobilization familiar to social movements and grassroots organizers across the political spectrum in the twentieth century.

Local Hazards, National Consequences

The development of the anti-nuclear movement as a major cultural and political force in the early 1980s began with a series of isolated local campaigns in the mid-1970s. Localized opposition to issues such as pollution, overdevelopment, taxation, and other affairs dominated citizen politics and reform in the United States in this era, prompting contemporary critics to proclaim a “backyard revolution” in public participation in civil affairs.⁶ Increasingly, nuclear power became a divisive issue, as energy crises, soaring costs of reactor construction, environmental concerns, and unease about nuclear safety dominated public debate in many states. Concerned citizens, some of them seasoned activists but many inexperienced in protest of any kind, initiated local campaigns against planned nuclear power plants as well as other nuclear-related facilities that were seen as threats to local health and safety. What emerged, gradually, were campaigns that challenged the safety of nuclear power and weapons industries, as well as their legal legitimacy. Increasingly toward the end of the decade, fears of nuclear war began to play into this web of anxiety and community-based activism.

In the mid-1970s, nuclear weapons played little role in the peace and environmental movements. As activist and writer Ann Morriset Davidon wrote in 1979, “Nuclear weapons are not only largely invisible, but their effects are practically inconceivable, and people prefer not to think about them.”⁷ Nuclear power plants, on the other hand, were visible targets, even if their radioactive dangers were less so. Many opponents of nuclear power also linked the dangers of nuclear power to deeper issues of social decline, government irresponsibility, or corporate wrongdoing. This was not a new phenomenon; as Lawrence Wittner comments, in the late 1960s, “the ruthless military interventionism of the great powers, coupled with their intractable commitment to nuclear weapons, led many anti-nuclear activists to conclude that they faced a deeply rooted, systemic problem.”⁸ Opposition to rampant capitalism, to US military intervention abroad, and to political systems that encouraged corporate misadventure along with ignoring systemic problems of racism and poverty began to filter into the peace movement as it began to focus more enthusiastically on nuclear power and weapons after the Vietnam War. In local contexts, similar connections were made, and these influenced the growth of grassroots opposition to nuclear power plants and weapons facilities.⁹

This movement of opposition was diverse in its composition, its strategies, and its tactics. High profile campaigns against nuclear power plant construction in Seabrook, New Hampshire, and San Luis Obispo, California, produced diverse alliances of activists whose ideas about civil disobedience, expressive protest, and personal politics were frequently sources of division and confrontation.¹⁰ Other diverse campaigns emerged in the mid-1970s, opposing nuclear waste dumps, nuclear weapons manufacturing plants, nuclear submarine bases, and plutonium reprocessing plants. Direct action campaigns targeted arms bazaars and uranium mining sites, and by the middle of 1978, Davidon estimated that “there were more local direct-action groups than could be counted.”¹¹ The partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in March 1979 succeeded in popularizing anti-nuclear power protest, assisted by an unease about potential links between nuclear power and nuclear weapons and an increasingly unstable international climate that would intensify in late 1979 with the hostage crisis in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. By this stage, the diversity of anti-nuclear action was immense, and activism encompassed lobbying, legal action, public education, public demonstrations and rallies, occupations, and, of course, direct action and civil disobedience.

The timeframe of this surge in anti-nuclear activism is significant. In 1975, the Directory of Anti-Nuclear Activists recorded 149 anti-nuclear organizations active in the United States.¹² Nine years later, the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies’ American Peace Directory 1984 counted over 1,350 anti-nuclear and peace groups.¹³ A big part of this dramatic expansion was a dramatic proliferation in citizens and professional groups dedicated to education, political action, and liberal reform. Utilizing ideas about citizen involvement in legislative politics, many anti-nuclear and environmental activists began campaigns designed to challenge the legitimacy of nuclear facilities through the electoral processes of ballot initiatives and referenda.¹⁴ Coalitions of activists involved in opposing nuclear facilities were often very diverse, counting environmentalists, scientists, local residents, and community groups in their ranks. Spirited opposition to nuclear weapons facilities like the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant near Denver had demonstrated the grassroots nature of anti-nuclear campaigning since 1974. Similar local campaigns in Barnwell, South Carolina, Amarillo, Texas, and other locations utilized a combination of mass demonstrations and civil disobedience as their causes began to be taken up by national peace organizations as prototypes of a rising anti-nuclear sentiment.¹⁵ The coalitional response to this web of weapons facilities and power plants would challenge the legitimacy of government authority and corporate accountability in matters of local health and safety throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and in the process, began to define the approach to anti-nuclear activism as one whose composition reflected interesting combination of radical activists and political pragmatists.

Along with FOR member Mike Jendrzejczyk, Colorado activist Pam Solo of the AFSC, and Steve Ladd of the Berkeley chapter of the WRL, an intergroup project—the Nuclear Weapons Facilities Task Force—aimed to provide a national source of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Dynamics of Anti-Nuclear Activism in the Second Cold War
• 1 Anti-Nuclear Coalitions: Pacifism, Radical Action, and a Rising Atomic Threat
• 2 Building a Mainstream Movement: Advertising, Publicity, and Image
• 3 Personal Politics: Radical Feminism, Difference, and Anti-Nuclear Activism
• 4 Prayer or Protest? Fasting, Nonviolence, and Anti-Nuclear Activism in the 1980s
• 5 Activism in the Heartland: Local Identities, Community, and The Day After in Lawrence, Kansas
• 6 Lifestyle Politics and Participatory Democracy: Communicating Peace across the United States on the Great Peace March
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index