War and Peace in the Nuclear Age; Interview with Randall Forsberg, 1987

I want to begin just for the record you get Tell me how you got into this whole you know piece. I mean like prior like part of 1980 when I started in 1968 I was married to a Swede. And by accident I wandered into an International Peace Research Institute in Stockholm. I got a temporary job. I have to do it. Good. OK. Do you want to come back here before I start. Quick have the tape. OK. OK. I got into this field in 1968 really quite by accident. I was married to a Swede living in Stockholm and I heard that an International Peace Research Institute had just been created by the Swedish government. I thought well that would be interesting for an American abroad at a time of war I could learn something about peace and maybe make a little contribution. I took a temporary job as a

typist and I got hooked. I couldn't believe what I was typing. I discovered that all the literature in this field. Everything you need to know is in the public domain. We have a huge standing army in peacetime we have huge standing nuclear forces and there weren't any really serious efforts in the arms control negotiations to reverse this as Murdoch said we were engaged in the game of disarmament not serious arms reduction negotiations. So I decided if I could make a living doing this kind of work I would make it my life's work and I would not go into the government. I would learn everything I could learn about the military and kind of become a teacher a public teacher and teach activists and teachers and journalists and sort of be a mediator between I would know as much as people in the government that I would turn my expertise outward instead of inward. Let me let me go back to forward in terms of your religion. When Reagan is just going to just go to work let's say the spring. Where where was that.

That's too late. OK. In the fall of in the summer of 1979 at the Soul 2 treaty was presented to the Senate or it was in the process of being presented to the Senate by President Carter. And there was a lot of resistance to ratifying this treaty and in August Senator Frank Church suddenly discovered a few Russian soldiers on Cuba which had been there for 20 years. But no one had noticed before and there was a big flap about this and it was not at all clear that the Senate was going to ratify this treaty. Then in December the Soviet Union went into Afghanistan and in January of 1980 Carter withdrew the treaty and it never did come up before the Senate. Well it was in that environment that the freeze movement was born. The way I saw it and other people who are concerned with arms control and disarmament the sold to treaty was not that strong it was a relatively weak treaty which essentially codified the next generation of nuclear weapons on both sides. It didn't cut out anything it didn't eliminate any new weapons. What it did was

set ceilings on how far they could build up. And we thought that it was amazing that a treaty that was that weak could run into that much trouble from the right and that this was absurd and ridiculous and it was time to get a public movement going that would demand arms control. So it was actually in the spring of 1980 when before Reagan was elected that the freeze movement started and it started as a movement to create popular pressure to support those people in Washington in the Senate and the Congress who wanted to see good arms control agreements with the Soviet Union to support them over the opposition of the vested interests. Correct and remember the last time there was a movement of any significance at all in regard to nuclear policy with the Soviet Union was really in the late 50s early 60s with the women's vote for peace. What what what does it mean other than the specific no reason why does it emerge again in the late 70s. I think that there were some long term historical swings in the late 1950s and

early 1960s. There was a band the movement at the time that we were testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. This was creating radioactive fallout that was getting into grass that was getting into cow's milk that was getting into babies milk and mothers didn't like that. And there were a lot of mothers out pushing baby carriages in the early 1960s. In effect that public pressure led to the partial test ban treaty that ended nuclear testing in the atmosphere but moved it underground it didn't stop the testing and development of new types of nuclear weapons just when they produced a new bomb design they tested it underground where the fallout didn't get into our milk. That was followed. That was 63 between 65 and the early 1970s there was the Vietnam War and the whole peace movement which was not so much an anti-nuclear movement it was a peace movement as an anti-war anti militarism anti-Vietnam movement during the Vietnam period. There was a brief upsurge concerned about the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1969 1970 that was mainly in the cities where they were going to put A-bombs

in their backyards and people didn't want missiles raining down on those anti missiles. So there had been a little movement but that was mainly a sort of scientist based small urban movement and I think that what happened after the Vietnam War was that we had a big backswing against self-flagellation against self-criticism pro we're a good country we stand for good values we provide good leadership in the world we're going to stop dumping on ourselves in any way including in the military dimension. So in my view between 1974 and 1979 80 we had the pendulum swing back completely any other direction from what it had been during the Vietnam era. And I think that it was during that period when we had the soul to a treaty we had arms control negotiations but we had this kind of. Against criticism of the military public sentiment. So there wasn't much support for the arms control process during that period. We had

a whole new generation of we're fighting counter-force nuclear weapons coming along. And so there was a convergence at the end of the 1970s of people kind of the pendulum coming back to the middle. There had been a period where no criticism of the military was acceptable in the national mood. And that period was ending and sort of OK well now we could be more realistic and come to a kind of balanced view where you accept things and support things that are good. But you criticize things that are bad. So there was this change in mood and that was converging with the failure of a very weak treaty even to come before the Senate and the emergence of a whole new generation of nuclear warfare system. So these three things I think came together and in my view it was not President Reagan that initiated the nuclear freeze movement it was well underway for these reasons and we would have had a freeze movement even if President Carter had been re-elected. Does President Reagan's election come into his administration a bunch of real hard liners even harder than the court or the Committee on the present. Does that

affect the any way. Well Reagan was elected in 1980 I think it's worth mentioning that there were you know there were parts of the country where people voted for Reagan at the same time that they voted in favor of a free referendum already in 1980. So support for Reagan expressed a kind of national self affirmation while support for the freeze was but we don't want a nuclear arms race that doesn't have to be part of our our national self-affirmation. So I think it took quite a while before Reagan's rhetoric really had an impact on the public. It didn't happen in 1980. It didn't really happen in in the beginning of 1981 which was the early days of the Reagan administration it's really going into the late 81 early 82 that you have people in the Reagan administration saying things like you know with enough shovels we can cover our doors with dirt and protect ourselves from a nuclear war and survive. We want to prevail in a nuclear war. We are prepared for a nuclear shot across the bow.

These kinds of statements coming out of the administration I think did gradually not instantly but gradually over a period of a year or two. And and Reagan's evil empire speech create a concern or deepen the concern. In the public. That. As we were getting a new generation of nuclear weapons systems which had were fighting capabilities they were not just for deterrence but for actually trying to fight and win a war. This was being coupled with an administration that was talking about being prepared to do it and was adamantly against arms control and refusing to talk to the Soviets at all. So I think that Reagan did certainly contribute to strengthening the free movement and the concern about the nuclear arms race that was expressed in that movement. What is your role during this period. Well in 1979 in December of 1979 I was asked to give a talk at a national peace movement conference on the theme stopping the arms race and this particular group

that sponsored the conference had several themes that were part of its ongoing work and stop the arms race was just one of them. And I had been thinking about the idea of a nuclear freeze for about six months before that. In fact I had been giving some smaller talks saying what we need to do is to stop the nuclear arms race and to end intervention as initial steps toward arms reduction and improving espress relations. I've been talking about that throughout 78 and 79 but in late 79 I was asked to attend a big convention with 600 people from around the country and took on this theme of the arms race and I gave a 10 minute speech in which I said if the peace movement if all the different little fragmented groups and the peace Mowatt which at that time was very small and very weak really at a nadir and had a range of demands ranging from not getting a particular new weapon to total disarmament and everything in between. And I said in this little speech if if all the groups in this

small peace movement got together and focus get them focused on one demand and united behind one demand and if they paid to demand that was moderate. That was sort of in the middle of the spectrum larger than just one new weapon system but smaller than complete disarmament. And if they made it bilateral so it would have to apply to the Soviets as well as the United States. We could create a movement in this country because that's what people needed to hear. They're confused by the mixed message coming out of the peace movement by the big demands and the little demands they're turned off by unilateralism. They're not motivated by the small demands and they're also not motivated by the utopian demands. But something in between could motivate people to actually turn out and become activists. And finally I commented that if we only look at the danger of nuclear war and the effects of nuclear weapons and the huge size of nuclear stockpiles people become very depressed and demoralized and hopeless and despairing. But if we couple public education about

the danger of nuclear war and the arms race with a concrete proposal to take an initial first step that leads in a good direction. This would have the opposite effect of empowering people giving them hope giving them something to work for. And it was that coupling of both the sense of the negative the terrible danger and fear and also the sense of the positive step of something to work for that I thought would really turn the trick in creating a national movement. So essentially in December of 1979 I said if we create a campaign like the freeze campaign this will create a national movement and that's what happened. You say that people are people you're really referring to a terribly small minority. I'm sorry I didn't understand that question. People what. How many people are you talking about who either who are motivated or could potentially be motivated. Well during the course of the really active stage of the freeze movement the most active popular stage between early

1981 and let's say late 1984 there were a number of national opinion polls taken that showed that somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of the people supported the nuclear freeze proposal and people supported it in all parts of the country at all levels of income men and women Republicans and Democrats actually at the Republican 1984 National Convention a resolution supporting the freeze was passed. Incredibly enough so that the notion of people supporting the freeze there is a sense in which you ask people Do you like the idea that both the United States and Israel should stop making nuclear weapons and we should have a verifiable agreement to close down any new production of nuclear weapons. This was not at all a minority position it was a vast majority of the American people supported this position and that was shown repeatedly over those years. There was another measure of how popular this was was how many people were active. There were referenda in ten states at the state wide

level which was practically unprecedented. There were thousands of people literally thousands maybe 20 or 30000 thousand people working as activists at the grassroots level to collect petition signatures two million potage petition million petition signatures were collected saying calling on the president to negotiate a freeze with the Soviet Union the peace movement grew from a few hundred local groups around the country to 5000 local groups each of which had 10 or 20 members. Let me give you a little bit. OK let's go back to you. Yeah. OK we'll take you through that a little more slowly for you too many of you jump into this with this just so you break it up into pieces and I'll take the pieces separately. This begins I mean it doesn't begin but it begins a referendum really localized referendum of western Massachusetts maybe California.

This is not a 1881 this is not a big move around. Yeah. OK. The nuclear freeze movement started. It really got going. The nuclear freeze movement got going in April of 1980 when there was a document printed called the call to halt the nuclear arms race. This was printed jointly by my institute the Institute for Defense and disarmament studies the American Friends Service Committee a Quaker group clergy and laity concerned a religious based peace group which had been formed during the Vietnam days and the fellowship of reconciliation which is an older religious based group. So these four organizations started printing the call to hold the nuclear arms race which is a little four page statement that called on the United States and the Soviet Union to stop making nuclear weapons. It gave some details of how this might be implemented and then it concluded with an appeal to local activists to put this message before their town councils garden groups Kiwanis

Club school boards whatever they had access to at the local level and get an endorsement so that we could build the huge grassroots movement that would send a message to Washington that was very explicit about this process of percolating up. We want to go out at the grassroots level and create a vast movement that will percolate up. And we asked as we started by asking 40 or 50 piece groups operating at the national level with mailing lists all around the country to reproduce the call to halt the nuclear arms race in their newsletter or send it out in their mailings to all their local chapters a few hundred local chapters around the country and then to get their local activists to create petitions and go out in their towns and so on and so forth. This process did in fact go on between April of 1980 and. December of 1980 and in that time we distributed several hundred thousand copies of the call to hold the nuclear arms race. So just a few hundred groups really it just grew like wildfire within what was then a very tiny peace movement. It continued growing in

1981 and that was when the referenda process really began. It started in November of 1980 when some. Districts state senatorial districts in the western part of Massachusetts had a local referenda on the phrase that was very popular. This led to several other states local activists and several other states. Heard about the western Massachusetts reference and thought Oh that would be a good idea. We can do that here. And in early 1981 there were a few town meetings in New Hampshire and Vermont by early 1982. It was on the agenda in every town meeting. So during the course of that year between the beginning of 81 in the beginning of 82 the local peace activists in New Hampshire and Vermont had gotten it onto the agenda had sent around petitions and so on and so forth so there were these really very complete statewide grassroots level discussions. In the meantime it had there was a process under way of collecting petitions signatures in California where there were many thousands of petitions signatures required even to get it on

the ballot. So first there was a drive to get the signatures to get the question on the ballot and then there was a drive for a yes vote on the ballot question on the freeze which came up in 1982 when we had the national elections in the fall of 1982. So there was a sort of spreading out process that started with just a handful of people and then went to a few peace groups and then went to there few hundred local chapters and then at that point it sort of made a transformation. And it was it became not just a peace movement movement it became a popular movement at the grassroots level that was drawing in and being implemented by people who had never been activists before. Is it fair to say that if you were some of your readers newspapers not a partisan until some time and to you what it wrote a great deal or seen on your television sets a great deal about the very vibrant peace movement in Western Europe but almost nothing about the peace movement. You know something at some point in there that changes.

Really extraordinary thing happened with the freeze movement. There was a grassroots process going on throughout 1980 and 1981 spreading the message collecting petitions signatures invigorating people drawing in new activists getting new blood involving people motivating people. And yet there was nothing reported in the national media. It was a dead dead silence and suddenly there burst on the scene the fact that there was a big movement out there. A counterpart to the movement that had been growing in Europe in 1980 in 1981 there was an American counterpart. It wasn't a vacuum. And when that happened was basically in February of 1982. Senator Kennedy and Representative Markey from Massachusetts which was the home of the Free's movement but by that time it not not its only source of strength had heard a good deal from their local constituents about why they ought to be supporting freeze

and getting up and doing something about it in Congress and they made a decision in January of 1982 to introduce a resolution in Congress and to hold a press conference announcing that they were going to introduce a resolution and to round up congressional and senatorial co-sponsors of the resolution up to that time the freeze campaign had deliberately had a grassroots strategy of not going directly to Washington and appealing in a lobbying way to individual members of the House and Senate for their endorsements. What we did was we suggested that in each state and in each congressional district those people who supported the freeze should go to their own members of Congress when they got strong enough and they were ready to do that and try to get them to support the freeze so we were sort of taking it from the ground up. And in January of 1982 we had something like 20 House sponsors and three Senate sponsors and Kennedy and Markey got their staffs to get behind a joint House Senate Democratic Republican resolution

and they got Senator Hatfield who is against the arms race to support it on the Republican side and Congressman from Iowa to support it in the in the house who was on the Republican side and they rounded up in the space of two weeks something like 150 members of the house and 20 members of the Senate who were the initial charter endorsers of the freeze resolution which was then announced at a press conference at American University on I think February 10th or February 25th in 1982 at which I was president and Randy Kessler and a number of the other national Free's leaders on there was big press coverage and all of a sudden people started asking we have brought with us a map of the United States and we had a plan ADOT for every frees every major free center around the country we had a little code showing the different kinds of activities that people were doing. So suddenly the national media was exposed to this grassroots movement which had been there and had been building all along but had been ignored and on national network news and national newspapers and wire services local freeze activities that had

been going on before and reported suddenly began to be reported in a big way. Was there any fear inside that piece that this would lead to a kind of grassroots organizing being co-opted. There was some there was some fear that when the House and Senate started talking about a freeze especially a freeze resolution that they would say they would give lip service to the idea of a freeze and say we support the freeze. This would undercut the grassroots movement people would stop working for the freeze and we wouldn't get any real change out of it. There was that kind of fear in the peace movement. I don't know to I don't have anything to say about that. I mean that goes way to or you have to ask a more leading question or it was around this time when the illustration begins to say quite openly and publicly that the phrase is certainly being helped by not even organized by represent the Soviet bloc and for the

first three years as I recall if you recall. Yes I think that such a small part of the story. I'm really not thrilled about doing it again. I guess what interests me about it and maybe this is it was it was so uncharacteristic of the characteristic of this era of Reagan that I wonder if it speaks to the depth of the concern of the part of the administration at this point. Well the way this is you know what are you what kind of impact do you think this was having on the administration. When the freeze movement began when the freeze movement began to get in the media. The administration immediately reacted in a very negative way. It was a bad idea the freeze movement must be communist inspired. Where did this movement come from. There was no way that we could do this technically it wouldn't be a good idea for the country anyway. And Reagan tried to upstage the freeze Mumbai by saying one in the same time.

This concept of stopping the production of nuclear weapons was too ambitious and also it wasn't ambitious enough. We should try to get rid of nuclear weapons. We should have deep cuts in nuclear weapons. He also misrepresented the phrase by saying we want it to freeze where we are and that's a kind of a numbers concept like we should stop with the current numbers and keep them. And he wanted to cut numbers but in fact that put the whole thing backwards where we wanted to do was to freeze or stop or halt production of new types of nuclear weapons and then go on to reductions of course we didn't want to keep what we had. Whereas Reagan wanted to make token reductions but allow all the new types to continue being developed and produce which was within the traditional arms control framework that you sort of fit around numbers around like a glove around the production of new types of weapons. So they misrepresented the movement. They said it was too ambitious. They said it wasn't ambitious enough. They said it must come from the Soviet Union they couldn't imagine where it came from in the United States. And they really pulled out all the stops

in terms of the top administration spokesman coming out and slamming this movement and its goals and its motivations and its technology its sort of take on technology. That was what went on all during 1982 and the freeze movement kept growing and that I think is what led to Reagan pulling out SDI suddenly out of his back pocket with no preparation no technical support no sounding out the administration or the scientific community in 1983. It was because these various reactions in 1982 just hadn't done anything to dampen the movement and it was still growing. I would talk to members of Congress how that's how the freeze movement know its way through Congress and what happened there. But do you have any reflections on that in addition to what you said. Yes but I have to just think through the timing a little bit. In 1982 let me just think that in 82 the introduction. Yes.

OK I'm ready. In August of 1982 the phrase resolution did come to a vote in the house. It had been introduced in February or March in both houses. And it didn't come to a vote in the Senate because the Senate was controlled by the Republicans. But in the House controlled by Democrats it was brought to vote and a really extraordinary thing happened. It got a tie vote and then two Republicans went and changed their vote so that it would lose. That's what happened to the freeze in the space of six months. In 1982 we went from a nation which had never talked about ending the production of nuclear weapons to a nation where we almost had the House on record supporting in a new freeze resolution was introduced in Congress in both houses a sort of slightly revised version was introduced in both houses in the spring of 1983 and in between we had had the 1982 elections where many congressional races were affected by the freeze freeze activists at the local level. And we had had the freeze referenda which had been overwhelmingly successful and

this impact on the 1982 elections and the referenda clearly showed up in the House reaction to the freeze in 1983 where it was brought to a vote again in May and won by an overwhelming majority. The really devastating thing was that three weeks later there was a vote for the missile which won by an equally large majority. And this just tore up the freeze movement. People felt what does what does this congressional resolution supporting the freeze mean. If the same people who voted in favor of a resolution calling on the president to negotiate a freeze with the Soviets could also vote for a counterforce first strike vulnerable ICBM which had no role and second strike deterrents but was purely a war fighting system. That must mean that congressional support of the freeze was just lip service. It was hollow. It was sort of a sop to the moment and it really didn't have any conviction behind it. And the great problem that the freeze movement then faced in the rest of 1983 the second half of

1983 in 84 was how to deal with this hollow quality of the response in Washington. This was Reagan's game the there was always is. You vote for whatever peace initiative whatever you want the for defense budget that will give me the tools I need to negotiate a position of whatever Soviets were some kind of resolution of this issue. There's no doubt that we experience between 1980 and 1984. One of the tragedies of the modern era that foreign policy which is especially in the area of weapons and especially nuclear weapons is a matter of great concern to all and should be reflected. It should have positions reflected in Congress. And yet because it involves negotiations with other countries it lies so narrowly in the hands of the administration and the president that it's virtually beyond the capability of the Congress to make a major change in direction in the nuclear area over the head of the president. The Congress really because of the nature of international negotiations the Congress really does have to defer

to the president and it puts us all in a terrible bind if we don't have a good president on this issue. You know this is a get. Yes. They don't have any counter Kleenexes. So let me let me read what. Are we going to go back further or come up to now. No listen. Reagan's rhetoric shifts the German word for probably in preparation for the elections as a result of. This not as a question. No Reagan reacted in two big ways to the freeze movement. The first was to pull out the CIA proposal out of nowhere. And the second was to start negotiating with the Soviets which was one of the main things that the freeze movement wanted after three or four years of saying the Soviet Union is an evil empire we can't

trust them we can't negotiate with them we won't negotiate with them we don't need to negotiate with him it's not a problem. All of a sudden the rhetoric started changing the SDI proposal came out in 1983 in early 1984. Reagan started talking about the importance of arms control negotiations and I think that one of the lasting impacts of the freeze movement which will never go away is that we will never have another presidency and the United States like the early years of the Reagan administration there will never be another president who will say we don't need arms control negotiations we can do without it. We don't have to talk to the Soviets. I think right. Reagan tried that and lost. And he found that that is not an acceptable position to the American public. So he started talking about arms control and eventually he started doing something about arms control and moving his own administration away from the more right wing. Individuals who remained adamantly against any kind of limits on our weapons systems and any kind of agreements with the Soviets and favoring the more moderate members like Shultz

who thought that arms control was a reasonable and desirable proposition and that we ought to work for reasonable agreements those that have a role for the freeze movement succeeded in getting lip service to the phrase from the politicians in the 84 election. I get to say that again because that was too much of an answer to your question. The free movement had an important impact in the 1984 election. In one sense we got lip service to the phrase concept from all of the leading Democratic candidates from the Democratic Party even the Republican convention passed a resolution supporting the phrase the most movement also had some an important impact on certain congressional elections in 1984. But where the movement failed I think was in not really bringing the issue of stopping the arms race to the forefront of the

agenda in the presidential race. And in fact I don't see this as a failure of the nuclear freeze movement I think it was a failure of the Democratic Party which had the opportunity to make stopping and reversing the nuclear arms race a major issue in 1984 with President Reagan because of the fact that Reagan had been so adamantly against the freeze and had failed himself to rise to the needs of in the arms control area and the first part of his administration and the leadership of the Democratic Party. Continued to be to take the advice of traditional arms control experts who opposed the freeze said that it was unworkable and undesirable and that we should continue modernizing it. We should continue the bipartisan bipartisan policy of modernizing nuclear weapons meaning beef up there we're fighting capable capabilities. So that meant that there was no deep issue dividing any of the leading Democratic candidates from the Reagan administration and it was a

non-issue. So we had this huge movement with no expression in the political arena no reflection of the alternatives desired and demanded by this moment in the political arena. And that was that was a failure of the Friis to achieve its goal. And it was a failure of the political system to respond to the opportunity and demands represented by the freeze movement or the freeze continues as a movement. Yes there was a message resonates with great popularity among American people it seems to me that I had more support. I mean the idea President Reagan's Defense Initiative is also immensely popular with people that he did he cut off the ground he kind of sees the high moral ground why don't you answer. Well in in the question of what happened to the freeze moment after 1984. I think that there are three important parts of the answer. It's true that the freeze movement was somewhat pacified by the claims of the president that he wanted to work

to abolish nuclear weapons or to free us from fear of nuclear war by providing a defense. And they seemed to respond this. The SDI program seemed to respond to the freeze movements fears and concerns and demands to a great extent. I think it's notable however in looking at that part of what happened that there has been no popular SDI movement. You won't find any grassroots groups out there supporting the SDI and calling on Congress to spend more money and to resist the claims of the Left that this won't work and this is a boondoggle. I mean yes sure people would like to be defended. They like to get out from under the threat of nuclear war. But I think that in a in a deep and not very clearly articulated way the bulk of the American public remains skeptical that SDI will work. That we can have a defense. The lessons I think that we learned in the late 1960s that there ultimately there is no defense against nuclear war. I think that those lessons have been very internalized by the American people not the people are

aware. People are not aware that we have no defense. They first of all they think we already must have some defenses. And when you tell them that we don't have what we want to get some they agree yes if we don't have some we should certainly get them. But then if you have other experts come in and say but when you think about it it's really not going to work for a variety of reasons we can't get all the missiles. There are not only missiles there are aircraft if you take them of aircraft you could put them on barges and put them into cities. Actually you literally can ship nuclear weapons in cartons and have them explode in their air terminals. I mean you can't stop the penetration of nuclear weapons ultimately. And I think that that's something that as soon as they hear that kind of argument people understand that. So it's not as though people have embraced SDI and made it a part of their conviction of what we need should have and can have for the history of this senseless over these. People think that after the 1984 election the free movement disappeared the piece is dead

it all sort of were back into the woodwork and there wasn't any peace movement anymore. They don't realize that another lasting impact of the peace movement was to change the nature of the peace and the United States forever before the freeze in late in the late 1970s. There were a few hundred mostly pacifist peace groups around the country after the freeze today in 1986. This is an older edition we're putting it in 1988 edition. There are 5000 local peace groups around the country this goes state by state and list all the peace groups in each state around the country. This is in 1986. Actually this was the 1986 edition in the 1988 edition they're going to be 7000 local peace groups listed. So the Freisleben has in fact institutionalized the peace movement in a way. There are no grassroots groups and cities and towns throughout the United States. They're not out marching in the streets. They're not by and large getting in front of television cameras although we do see them here and they're sort of sitting down in

front of trains or going to Central America or bashing a nuclear warhead or something we see a few in the media. But what they're doing is changing their children's education talking with their members of Congress discussing foreign policy and arms control in churches. There is there's a sort of self education process and a local deepening of activist commitment and understanding and outreach in the local communities. That is going on right now around the United States in exactly the same way that happened in the early days of the freeze movement in 1980 in 1981 when because there was no news in the national media people thought there was no movement when in fact there was this vast movement percolating out there. So today there is a vast movement percolating out there. It's not half a million people in Central Park. It's not half a million people surrounding the Pentagon but it is half a million people who are preparing who are talking and thinking about and preparing

for what will become the next major wave of the peace movement in the United States. In the past when we had waves of the peace movement that was only at a time of crisis when there was radioactive fallout in the atmosphere or when we were in a war with body bags coming home. Now we're in a new situation where there is going to be there is the groundwork for and we are going to see the products of a peace movement that exists in peace time which is concerned with changing the direction of the permanent peace time policy of the United States in a new more constructive way. And which right now is concerning itself with talking about what those changes could be sort of beyond the freeze. It's not less than the freeze it's that what is the freeze part of a larger vision of what kind of world might there be out there if we began restructuring at a deeper level if we look at military spending if we look at the conventional situation in Europe if we look at relations with the Soviets as well as the

nuclear arms race if we take sort of the whole ball of wax and not just nuclear we're fighting systems and and we try to define a different world what might that world look like. And I think that when the next wave of what was the freeze moment comes along it's going to be a much more informed much more thoughtful movement which won't be deflected by lip service because that's the groundwork that's being laid right right now. Yes. Well just I don't have to do that. It won't happen. There are 5000 badly. That's because I was over I was like two. Let's just do the book part of that again. OK. We will hit the water this time. Look at me while I'm talking while you're talking. Just go. How can I look at the book and look at you. Yes. OK.

OK. OK. Six six brothers huh. People think that the freeze movement is out there. Ready go man. Most people think that the freeze moment ceased to exist in 1984 after the election when Reagan was re-elected. In fact just the opposite is true. One of the major and lasting impacts of the nuclear freeze movement is has been to institutionalize the peace movement in the United States in the late 1970s. There were a few hundred local peace groups around the country mostly pacifist groups. In 1986 we put out a directory of peace groups which contains the addresses and telephone numbers of five thousand groups listed state by state in every state. Every part of the country with their local contacts their congressional districts and so on and so forth. In 1988 we're going to be putting out an updated edition which we're sending to the printer next week. It contains over 7000 local peace groups in it. So there is a

new environment for the peace movement in the United States and what these groups are doing is not getting out in the streets marching in a demonstration carrying banners sitting in at the Pentagon demonstrating in Central Park what they're doing is educational programs in their communities in the high schools for their children even in grade at the grade school level self education groups in churches and community centers coffee circles reaching out to their friends and people who are engaged in looking at why didn't the Friis work why didn't we get further in terms of it worked as a movement but why didn't it work in terms of ending the arms race. What is the larger context of U.S.-Soviet relations. What can we do about the way in which our country and the Soviet Union and the Europeans have relied on nuclear weapons to avoid conventional war. What can we do about the level of military spending which has gone up 50 percent under President Reagan which is historically unprecedented for a country in peacetime. So there is a

whole complicated set of questions that are being discussed at the grassroots level in preparation for a new wave of the peace movement and what that means is that when we have the next wave of focused activity on a particular issue in Washington for legislation it's going to grow out of a much more informed dedicated cohesive movement not a movement like the original phrase which suddenly came out of nothing with no background and no experience. The next time around we're going to be experienced people who know what they're talking about who can't be deflected by lip service. Let's say like lip service to the phrase who will stick to their guns and. And insist on legislation and administrative action that corresponds to their demands and not just words and rhetoric. When you're dealing with an implacable world domination What can you really do business or do you not accept

the fact that Gorbachev has made so many new openings for arms control has undertaken so many initiatives with the the test ban moratorium. He's made an offer for a flight testing moratorium. He's made offers for deep cuts in forces and conventional forces in Europe. He's offered 50 percent reductions in strategic nuclear forces so he's made both unilateral moratoria and unilateral initiatives and also offers for bilateral negotiations and bilateral agreements. What all this adds up to is the United States has more opportunities to move forward in this area as long as Gorbachov is in charge than we've ever had in the entire post-war period before from the Soviet point of view. Let me ask you two questions of kind of assessing Reagan's legacy. Looking back which is what is with this deal.

It's such a compelling it seems like morally reasonable position to say we have a right an obligation to defend So we're not trying to hurt anybody. We just want to protect ourselves and our citizens. What's wrong with that symbol. The problem with SDI and the concept of defense against nuclear war arises out of the fact that nuclear weapons are so powerful. So you only need a very few and even relatively small ones to kill millions and tens of millions of people. And this is the opposite of traditional warfare in traditional warfare. If you get 90 percent or 95 percent of what's coming in or even a smaller proportion that will be sufficient to survive and to win and to carry on. In the case of nuclear weapons even if you get ninety nine percent one percent is enough. In fact in today's world one tenth of one percent of all the U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons could wipe out every major city in the northern

hemisphere one tenth of 1 percent. So you have to have a virtually perfect defense and we all know from technological problems in daily life with cars and can openers let alone missiles and air traffic control systems that you don't get that kind of perfection that's the first problem with SDI. The second problem is that SDI is only designed to defend against one type of nuclear weapon system ballistic missiles which are like rockets that go up into outer space and then come back down. Well there are zillion other types of nuclear weapon systems. There are nuclear weapons put on air airplanes. There are nuclear weapons on cruise missiles which are little like little unmanned airplanes that fly very low close to the ground and come it can come in below the range which radar can detect them and sneak in. There are nuclear weapons on ships on submarines you could put nuclear weapons on barges you could put them in the postal service you could send a heavy package with a nuclear bomb in it and into into a postal

receiving area in a big city and that would be the end of you know half of that city. So even if we should get a relatively effective way of intercepting ballistic missiles first of all it wouldn't be effective enough. And second of all there are all these other ways of getting nuclear weapons in and only a very few nuclear weapons or all that we need to destroy our are large cities and kill tens of millions of people so the whole concept of defense against nuclear weapons is one which in its very basic and simple elements doesn't work it's not a complicated matter for physicists to talk about how many ballistic missiles can you intercept on their way up and out in space. And can you fool the defenses in this and that. I mean they can argue about that or they want to we can go ahead and spend tens of billions and even up to hundreds of billions of dollars developing and building a system that will intercept some proportion of ballistic missiles. But in the final analysis

however much they argue and however much money we do or don't throw away on this we will not be able to defend our country against nuclear weapons. They're too small and they're too devastating and they can be introduced in too many ways. And the only way to avoid a nuclear war is to negotiate to keep good keep up good relations and to reduce nuclear weapons. We cannot unfortunately we cannot defend against them. Be a tragedy of major proportions. I mean in fact survive and recuperate from the loss of tens of millions. So you work to emerge more powerful in the beginning it was very hard for me to deal with. A nuclear war would be unlike any war in history. In World War Two there were several very large cities destroyed by fire bombing and two cities destroyed by nuclear weapons. There were millions of people

killed in gas chambers and there were millions of people killed on the battlefield. But what we would see if only a small number some tens or a hundred or two out of the 50000 nuclear weapons were exploded in cities. We would see the death of 100 150 million people. There isn't any historical precedent for this. We don't know at what level of nuclear war how many hundreds or how many thousands or tens of thousands of nuclear weapons would result not merely in eliminating our culture our government our civilization our economy but our species. We don't know where that level is whether it's some thousands or some tens of thousands. What would happen in terms of nuclear winter in terms of darkening the sky in terms of radioactive fallout in terms of the food chain. What we do know is that even in a very small nuclear war everything that has been built up over several thousand years of civilization

would be gone and we would be living in the stone age. So our arch our range of choices are a range of outcomes in a nuclear war at the lower end of the range. It's going back to the Stone Age to sort of Agriculture. Hunting and gathering economies. And at the higher end of the range it's eliminating the species and we cannot develop any defenses that can change those basic outcomes of a nuclear war because of the fact that a small number of nuclear weapons have such enormous devastating capability and can be introduced into countries in so many different means of transportation that we simply can't get them all. With us. Is there anything else in terms of assessing the Reagan years. I mean what people is this. What lessons are they going to take from it.

Well let me let me. Yes. I have no I have a good answer. Let me give you mine and then you can ask a truly remarkable thing happened in the 1980s. We began the decade with an administration that was an interested in arms control that was adamant about not talking to the Soviets we're ending the decade with an administration which is not only talking to the Soviets but has concluded the first treaty that is going to eliminate a whole class of nuclear weapons. Recently deployed new types of nuclear weapons Don. That's exactly. That's felt. OK. So I thought so. OK. From the beginning a remarkable thing happened in the 1980s. We began the decade with an administration that was adamantly against talking to the Soviet Union about arms control. The first and only administration and since the early 1950s of which that could be said we ended the decade in just the opposite way with the first U.S.

Soviet arms control treaty that eliminates a whole class of recently deployed modern technology nuclear weapons. What happened between 1981 and 1988 what intervened to bring about this transformation was the nuclear freeze movement and the other really remarkable thing about the decade is that the nuclear freeze movement was at its height when we were at the worst of the Reagan rhetoric against the Soviet Union. And as the nuclear freeze movement became demoralized and stopped being publicly very active and putting a lot of lobbying pressure and demonstration pressure on Washington that was just the period when the Reagan administration started reacting showing the impact of the anti-nuclear movement in the United States and the anti-nuclear movement in Europe going back to the bargaining table with the Soviets concluding that it was not possible to come out of this second administration successfully as a president as a legacy or as a Republican Party going

into a new presidential election without an arms control agreement. So we have two really remarkable things in the Reagan administration turning around a 180 degree about face. And yet the correlation with the peace movement it's like the timing was exactly the opposite although it's understandable in retrospect that it was an impact of the nuclear freeze movement that this administration did respond that it found that it was not able. It was not acceptable to the American public not to talk to the Soviets not to pursue bilateral arms control. But it didn't sort of come around to fulfilling that premise to being backed in a corner and then having to act on it until the time when the nuclear freeze movement had thought it had lost and appeared to have gone home which is a really ironic conclusion for the decade.