Is This the Face of Anti-Nuke Activism?
The anti-nuke movement is pretty lonely these days, but the groundwork for serious disarmament is there.
By Jake Blumgart
August 28, 2009
Concepcion Picciotto has been protesting nuclear weapons across the street from the White House for 20 years. (Flickr/krawlito)
Residents of Washington, D.C. are well aware of the 64-year-old woman who has been permanently parked across the street from the White House for the last 20 years, protesting for the end nuclear armament in America. Unfortunately, this one woman is a pretty good representation of how lonely the anti-nuke movement is today.
In some ways, modern atomic apathy is justified. After all, the heady days of the Cold War drama are long over. U.S.-Russian relations may still get chilly from time to time, but few imagine a disagreement would end in all-out thermonuclear war. And there is only so much outrage to go around. With hot issues like climate change getting all the grassroots attention, few people can spare a moment for Hiroshima 2.0.
What most people might not know is that President Obama is unfolding the most ambitious anti-nuclear agenda in American presidential history, even if there are few grassroots voices on left to support or push beyond his goals. He is faced with a foreign policy establishment that considers the nuclear deterrent sacrosanct. Without active public support, Obama alone may prove inadequate to the task.
The movement wasn’t always so lonely. During the opening years of Ronald “we begin bombing in five minutes” Reagan’s presidency, aides talked openly about waging a nuclear war and huge amounts of money was relegated toward state-of-the-art delivery systems. In response, a million people rallied in Central Park to demand a radical revision of our nuclear policy.
Public opinion turned rapidly against such bellicose chest-thumping, climaxing in the 1982 Central Park rally, the single “largest political demonstration up to that point in U.S. history,” according to historian Lawrence Wittner. Sister movements in Europe forced Regan to pull U.S. nuclear missiles from the continent, while American legislators cut into weapons funding. The freeze movement of the 1980s opened up political space for forward thinking on nuclear weapons issues.
“The freeze campaign struck political fear into Reagan,” says William D. Hartung, director of the arms and security initiative at the New America Foundation (NAF). “It contributed to his willingness to talk with Gorbachev and set the stage for the first reduction treaty since the beginning of the Cold War. I’d view it as a victory, although I don’t think governments like to admit it. It’s going to encourage more popular action for reform if they acknowledge every time the public has helped change policy.”
Today, Obama is committed to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and to an extension of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (START) which would dramatically scale back American and Russian nuclear stockpiles. A renewed START treaty would eliminate 28 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons. But without grassroots support, Obama may have a tough time accomplishing his nuclear goals.
“If we don’t have [some] kind of activism again we will be unlikely to succeed,” says Joe Cirincione, president of the board of directors of the Ploughshares Fund, an influential foundation that supports a nuclear-weapon-free world, and former senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “Conservatives will oppose Obama’s agenda. They are attacking Obama on every issue, and they think he is particularly vulnerable on defense issues. They know that pulling back from Iraq is popular and they can’t make any ground there. So they are going to wage a pitched battle over this in the next year.”
Conservatives are already in the opening stages of the attack. In April, Obama gave a groundbreaking speech on nuclear weapons in Prague, declaring that as “the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act.” John Bolton, former ambassador to the United Nations under President Bush, immediately claimed that Obama is “ideologically committed … to a less robust U.S. defense posture.”
An active grassroots movement could have responded to such claims. There was some pushback from Frida Berrigan at NAF’s arms and security initiative, but she hardly represents a grassroots constituency. Active public interest will be essential when Obama’s plans make their eventual grueling slog through the Senate. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has already declared that he does not agree with the president’s desire for rapid implementation of the Test Ban Treaty.
There are some structures in place to facilitate an anti-nuke movement’s resurgence. One group that still works on nuclear freeze issues, Peace Action, has 100,000 members and an expansive network of allies. A 2007 Nation article (that named at least a dozen other organizations that want to see our stockpile reduced) quoted a University of Maryland poll showing that 73 percent of Americans support nuclear abolition. The groundwork and tacit support is there, but the movement still isn’t active enough to turn up the pressure.
“We need a new motivator,” Berrigan says. “During the Cold War people really lived with this sense of existential dread of nuclear weapons. That contributed to a sense of urgency and people turned out. Now there is a new drama we can create that isn’t a fear of the prospect of nuclear winter, but the drama of the prospect of a nuclear free world.”
Lisa Putkey, a veteran anti-nuclear organizer at University of California–Berkley, is confident that this exciting possibility will be a sufficient motivator, particularly when paired with environmental concerns. While attending Berkley, Putkey allied with other global issue groups on campus to bring the anti-nuclear message to her fellow students and to the board of Regents, who actively ally the school with nuclear interests. “Every nuke made by the United States was made by an employee of my university system,” she said in an email interview. Putkey and her allies even went on a hunger strike to gain more publicity, raising the profile of their cause among the student body considerably.
“Ordinary people are the people who have to be working for these changes,” Putkey says, now a Scoville fellow for Peace Action in Washington, D.C. “They aren’t responsible to their funders. They aren’t all about what is practical and winnable. They are about what they believe is right. I think in my lifetime we are going to have a huge resurge in the nuclear weapons movement.”
Jake Blumgart is a staff writer for Campus Progress.
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