1 The Euromissile Crisis and the end of the Cold War

As you have seen, the early 1980s marked a highpoint of anti-nuclear activism in Western Europe, spurred on by the planned deployment of ‘Euromissiles’ in five European countries. While millions of citizens participated in anti-nuclear activism by attending demonstrations, wearing badges, or lobbying their elected representatives, their impact on policymakers and their achievements remain debated among academics, activists and policymakers.

Activity 1

Watch this video, featuring peace activists, policymakers and historians reflecting on the impact of the UK peace movement of the 1980s. Then answer the questions below.

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LUC-ANDRE BRUNET

Well, if we think that the CND throughout this period-- it opposed trident. It opposed cruise. It opposed the UK’s participation in the Star Wars, the strategic defense initiative of Ronald Reagan. And yet, in all of these areas, the UK government pursued precisely the policy that the CND was advocating against. So in that sense, the CND wasn’t successful in changing the mind of the Conservative government in the 1980s. But I think, nevertheless, the peace movement and the CND, in particular, were important in that they really articulated the kinds of anxieties and fears that were being felt by millions of people across the UK. And by giving a voice to these anxieties, I think it forced the government to address these to some extent. Even if it didn’t change the government’s mind, it nonetheless forced the government to justify what they were doing, to engage in this conversation, to try to convince the British people that their course of action was better than the alternative being advocated by the peace movement.

BRUCE KENT

I think that the CND can claim some success. First of all, that we actually still exist, and we’re an interesting force in the country, and we still are. That’s important. I think that a lot of the language about cruise missiles, with the help of the Greenham Common Women, was inspired by CND. And actually, the cruise missiles were removed. And I think that had something-- because we were saying you can’t fight wars with nuclear weapons, and cruise missiles were there to be used in war. If deterrence ever fails, nuclear weapons will come into their own, said the document. So I think we did. We helped to keep the issue on the agenda. And I think we helped to move some of the big charities like Christian Aid and Oxfam. They wouldn’t campaign on our things, but at least they were aware. You can’t talk about poverty in the world without talking about militarisation and so on. It’s still going. It’s quite a healthy organisation. It hasn’t won yet, but I think we’re moving much closer to being winning as a result of some of the things that have happened recently.

EIRINI KARAMOUZI

Well, if you think about impact on policy agenda, it probably wasn’t much of a success. If you take the UK, there was never a policy change on nuclear proliferation. The 1983 elections, for example, was a huge failure for the Labour Party, that had, at that point, embraced unilateral disarmament. But one of the things that I think successful for this peace movement and for the UK was that, especially in the 1980s, it kept the topic on the top of the political agenda. In 1983, issues of nuclear policy were second in importance for the population. And that was partly because of the intense campaigning that was taking place through CND and other grassroots organisations that were keep on pressuring policy makers to really kind of interact. And also, we have to understand how difficult that task is because CND and every peace movement has to campaign on an issue that is quite exclusively discussed at the executive. There were even sparse parliamentary debates on the issue. So being able to penetrate that kind of exclusivity and bring a spotlight on it, I thought, was a huge success in the 1980s despite its quite weak policy outcomes.

MATTHEW JONES

The peace movement in the early 1980s, really, I think, it influenced the policy of the UK government in several different ways, several different important ways. It made it essential for the Conservative government to explain its policies, defence policies, far, far more clearly and transparently in some ways, to the British people. I think it had to be more candid about what its approaches were. It became more offensive as well, in a sense of the information strategies. It became much more keen to try to tarnish and accuse the peace movement and CND of being really in the pockets of Moscow, really, and playing Moscow’s game in the issues about deployment of cruise and Pershing missiles to Western Europe. So you can see it does have an influence on the way the UK government reacts in a public relations sphere. The UK government-- also, they’ve become more defensive about its policies, I would say, in a private fashion. If one looks at the papers that are now available for the period, you can see the UK government is concerned about the rising feeling of opposition to nuclear weapons. It’s concerned that this might become a much more widespread feeling amongst the general population and might act to undermine its defence policies if it doesn’t handle the issue effectively and well. So for example, if he doesn’t handle the protests that are taking place around Greenham Common effectively, by the peace camps around Greenham Common.

KATE HUDSON

In many respects, it was very successful. Obviously, it’s very hard to exactly quantify things, and to know. So for example, the INF Treaty, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which was signed later in the 1980s, and then all the cruise missiles were eventually withdrawn from Europe, and the base was closed down at Greenham Common. So what kind of impact? What kind of role did we play in achieving that when it was-- took place in the context of the ending of the Cold War? It’s hard exactly to quantify the role that we played, but I think, I’m absolutely certain that we did play a role in that because we contributed to really not only raising public awareness about the issue, but articulating a mass desire for peace. And I think it’s that desire for peace, which became enacted, as it were, through many of the changes that led to the end of the Cold War.

MARY KALDOR

I think we were incredibly successful. And I think the story of how the peace movement ended the Cold War has never been properly told. Everyone thinks we failed. And in one sense, we did fail, that there are still nuclear weapons in Europe. But I think where we succeeded was, first of all, the INF agreement in 1987, which banned all intermediate weapons from Europe. Now, the story of how that happened is never usually told. It’s usually argued that Reagan put pressure on Gorbachev. Actually, what happened was that, first of all, Reagan, and I was told this actually by Richard Burt, Reagan’s nuclear advisor, decided to propose the ‘Zero Option’, which was to get rid of all intermediate missiles in Europe. And that was more or less. And, in fact, I was told that they got that idea from our banners, which said ‘No SS, No Pues, No Cruise, No Pershing, No SS-20’. And they thought they’d been really clever because the Russians had many more intermediate nuclear weapons than the West did. So the Russians would never accept it. So the ‘Zero Option’ was proposed by them. When Gorbachev came to power, we had been arguing-- our big argument was, look, there’s-- we have enough nuclear weapons to kill people several times over. You don’t need all these nuclear weapons. You can still have a deterrent at a much lower level. In fact, you can have a deterrent with conventional weapons. And that was an argument that Gorbachev took up. He called it ‘reasonable sufficiency’. And actually, I know that the people around Gorbachev read the END Journal.

RICHARD MOTTRAM

It’s an interesting question how far the peace movement influenced UK policies in the 1980s, and beyond actually. On one level, quite clearly, they failed in their strategic goals. Their strategic goals were to stop the cruise missile deployment and to stop the modernisation of the British independent deterrent. Both of those went ahead. But of course, actually, in the medium term, cruise didn’t go ahead because we struck an arms control deal with the Soviet Union. And you could argue that they contributed to the sense of the validity and importance of pursuing the arms control dimension. And secondly, I think that the focus that they brought and others brought to say the scale of the UK nuclear deterrent may have influenced some of the governments in a largely subliminal way, the way in which the machine thought about what was necessary and the conscious efforts that kept on a repeated basis being made to reduce the scale of the UK nuclear deterrent as international circumstances allowed. So to that extent, you could say they lost the two big strategic arguments in the short term, but they did have some influence in the medium and long term.

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1. How far was the UK peace movement successful in preventing Cruise missiles from being deployed in the UK?
2. Beyond its impact on specific policies, what impact did the anti-nuclear movement have on policymakers in the UK?

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Discussion

1. In the short term, the anti-nuclear movement was unsuccessful in preventing Cruise missiles from being deployed in the UK. In the medium term, however, the movement’s goal was achieved, as the 1987 INF Treaty resulted directly in the removal of the Cruise missiles that were deployed in England in 1983.
2. Beyond specific policies, such as the deployment of Cruise missiles, the anti-nuclear movement gave voice to widely shared anxieties around nuclear weapons and the possibility of war in the 1980s. This forced the UK Government to explain its defence policies and to justify its decisions in order to engage with the arguments of anti-nuclear activists and to try to convince the public of the merits of the Government’s policies.

Figure 1 The cover of a 1980 pamphlet written by Ken Coates, one the leaders of European Nuclear Disarmament (END), calling for the elimination of INF on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

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A pamphlet cover with the following text: No cruise missiles: European nuclear disarmament. No SS20s.

Figure 1 The cover of a 1980 pamphlet written by Ken Coates, one the leaders of European Nuclear Disarmament (END), calling for the ...

The 1987 INF Treaty was a landmark agreement that paved the way to the end of the Cold War. Signed by US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, the treaty abolished an entire class of nuclear weapons, known as intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF), which included the ‘Euromissiles’ recently deployed in Western Europe. As a result, these nuclear weapons were removed from Europe, and the treaty led to further nuclear arms agreements between the superpowers.

The role of anti-nuclear activism in bringing about the INF Treaty and the end of the Cold War continues to be debated among historians, activists and policymakers. The origins of the INF Treaty can be traced to a proposal made by President Reagan in 1981, when he suggested ‘the zero option’ to the Soviet Union. In short, if the Soviets were to remove their recently-deployed INF, the Americans would cancel their planned deployment of the ‘Euromissiles’.

Western European governments had come under increasing pressure from the surging anti-nuclear movements in their countries and public opinion more broadly for NATO to advance a negotiating position that might prevent the need to deploy the ‘Euromissiles’. Now these European leaders in turn put pressure on the Reagan administration to advance a credible arms control position.

One source for this American proposal was indeed the international anti-nuclear movement, which had called precisely for the removal of Soviet SS-20s and the cancellation of the planned deployment of Cruise and Pershing by NATO (as you can see in Figure 1). The ‘zero option’ was initially rejected by the Soviets in 1981, but the changing political situation after the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin meant that the idea was revived and provided the foundation for the historic 1987 treaty. Thus, even though anti-nuclear activists had been unable to prevent the deployment of the ‘Euromissiles’ in the early 1980s, their actions and ideas ultimately contributed to the significant reduction of nuclear weapons in Europe later that decade.

Figure 2 Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and US President Ronald Reagan signing the INF Treaty in 1987. The superpowers agreed to eliminate INF from Europe, resulting in the removal of the ‘Euromissiles’ that had sparked so much opposition.

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A photograph of Gorbachev and Reagan signing the INF Treaty.

Figure 2 Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and US President Ronald Reagan signing the INF Treaty in 1987. The superpowers agreed to ...