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Mobilizing for Peace
The Antinuclear Movements in Western Europe
By Thomas R. Rochon PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1988 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05671-5
CHAPTER 1
Mobilization of the Peace Movement
On 12 December 1979, the foreign and defense ministers of the NATO alliance finalized their plans to place 108 Pershing II and 464 cruise missiles in West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, beginning in 1983. Emerging from this meeting, American Secretary of State Cyrus Vance said, "I believe that our governments can be proud of this memorable achievement and that the free people of the alliance will show overwhelming support for the decisions made here today." His expectations were to be disappointed. The two-track decision allowed a lag of four years in order to give the United States and the Soviet Union time to reach a negotiated agreement on medium-range nuclear weapons. As it turned out, these negotiations were not fruitful until after most of the INF missiles were actually deployed. But the time lag between the announcement and the deployment of the new missiles did have the unintended effect of giving the peace movement a chance to organize. The result was a wave of political protest unprecedented in the postwar history of Western Europe. As two peace movement activists remarked, "In a very bizarre way, we can thank the NATO ministers for giving us a challenge and a deadline."
The mass mobilization that took place in opposition to the INF decision was so heterogeneous that it is difficult to characterize it in any one set of terms. What is true of large national peace movement organizations is not true of local organizations or of unaffiliated activists. What may be true of religious groups is not likely to hold for Marxists. The speeches of movement leaders do not tell us much about those on the periphery of the movement or about passive sympathizers. Differences especially of ideology and of preferred tactics loom large both within and between peace movement organizations. With 2,300 local, national and international groups organized within the rubric of the peace movement by 1982, it could hardly be otherwise.
One may go so far as to say that the peace movement itself is only a media label; an organizing concept used to draw a connection between a huge array of independent actions taken by people who have little in common other than their belief that nuclear weapons are a dangerous form of defense. Even the chief actors within the movement tend to be reluctant to speak for the movement as a whole. As a press release from the West German Coordinating Committee (KA), a federation of leading peace movement organizations, put it, "We deny anyone the right to define who or what the peace movement is in this land. Even the Coordinating Committee for the autumn actions can only speak for the organizations represented therein, and not for the peace movement as a whole."
Despite this diversity, it is possible to speak of a single phenomenon that, in the early 1980s at least, characterized the peace movement as a whole. That is the focus on cruise and Pershing II deployment in Western Europe. In some quarters, response to the INF decision was almost immediate. Forty thousand people gathered in Brussels to protest the decision even as it was announced in December 1979. In January 1980, a divisional tank commander in the West German army, General Gert Bastian, publicly criticized the proposed missile deployment and was relieved of his duties. Also in early 1980, two veteran peace campaigners in Great Britain launched the World Disarmament Council to circulate petitions on a global basis for submission to the 1982 United Nations Special Session on Disarmament. In April, E. P. Thompson took the lead in founding European Nuclear Disarmament (END), an organization intended to provide a center for communication and coordination between various national peace groups. A petition campaign was launched that spring in Krefeld to call on the West German government to reverse its support for the new missiles; it had gathered 1.5 million signatures by late 1981.6 In the fall of 1980, the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), all but defunct since the mid-1960s, organized a rally that drew between fifty and eighty thousand people. In the Netherlands a campaign against nuclear weapons begun by the Interchurch Peace Council (IKV) in 1977 gathered momentum in the wake of a heated debate in the Dutch parliament on the cruise missiles.
But these pockets of activism did not coalesce into a continentwide peace movement until Easter 1981, when a rally in Brussels drew over one hundred thousand people. Peace groups from several countries participated in planning the Brussels rally, and they returned home to organize the wave of demonstrations held that autumn throughout the capitals of Western Europe. Many of these demonstrations were the largest seen in their countries in the postwar era: between one hundred and two hundred thousand people marched in the streets of London and Brussels, and over a quarter-million gathered in Bonn. There were a half-million marchers in Rome and Paris in late October, and nearly that many in Amsterdam in November. In each city it took hours for the rows of marchers to pass by a single point, some of them dressed in skeleton costumes or wearing gas masks, others holding aloft banners or chanting "Ban the bomb" (London), "Neither Pershing nor SS-20" (Paris), "Peace without armaments" (Bonn), or "From Sicily to Scandinavia, no to NATO and the Warsaw Pact" (Rome).
October 1981 was only the beginning. When President Reagan visited a number of European cities in June 1982 for the economic summit in Bonn, he was greeted with demonstrations even larger than those of the previous fall. There were over a quarter-million marchers in London and in Rome on 5 and 6 June, and between them Bonn and West Berlin put nearly a half-million people in the streets on 10 June. Although none of these rallies was as large as the gathering of one million people in New York's Central Park on 12 June, each of them was of unprecedented size for countries with populations less than a quarter that of the United States.
The scale of the fall 1981 rallies was not repeated in the autumn of 1982, and by the end of the year political leaders in both the United States and Europe asserted that the movement was finished and that politics would now return to normal. It was wishful thinking. Sixteen months after the June 1982 rallies, as the time approached for the host countries to give final approval to the missiles, the peace movement once again brought even greater numbers of people into the streets. During the month of October 1983, demonstrations around Western Europe attracted more than three million participants. Over one million people demonstrated in major cities across West Germany on a single day: 400,000 each in Bonn and Hamburg, 250,000 in Stuttgart, 150,000 in Neu-Ulm (site of one of the Pershing II missile bases), and 100,000 in West Berlin. A rally that same month in The Hague brought out 550,000 people, nearly 4 percent of the Dutch population, or a proportion equivalent to almost ten million in the United States. Nearly as many people, perhaps a half-million, marched in Brussels, and there were 300,000 gathered in London's Hyde Park. The most dramatic actions were the human chains, including one seventy-two miles long stretching between the NATO European Command Headquarters in Stuttgart and the proposed Pershing II deployment site in Neu-Ulm.
The great national rallies were only the tip of the peace movement iceberg. Thousands of local organizations sprang up across Europe to spread information on nuclear weapons and to agitate for nuclear disarmament. Neighbors got together to discuss books and films or to trade ideas on what could be done to halt the nuclear arms race in Europe. Soon these groups were raising money, printing pamphlets for distribution at community events, and collecting signatures on petitions. Some local groups were composed of women, while others were organized by students or by residents of a particular street. Though less visible to the media than the national rallies, the local groups got more people involved in movement activities than large demonstrations in a capital city ever could.
Widespread involvement in major demonstrations and in local organizations was matched by intensity of involvement on the part of a much smaller number of people. In September 1981, forty-four members of an organization called Women for Life on Earth arrived at Britain's proposed cruise missile base at Greenham Common on a march from a nuclear weapons plant in Cardiff, Wales. Their original plan was to challenge Secretary for Defence John Nott to a debate on defense policy, and then to disperse. When Mr. Nott declined to meet with them, they chained themselves to the perimeter fence of the base and stayed to establish a permanent peace camp. Since then, the Greenham Common peace camp has been visited by several hundred thousand people for stays of a day, a weekend, or longer. There were fifty thousand women there on one day in December 1983, when the base was encircled and parts of the fence pulled down. The real story of the Greenham Common peace camp, however, is not its size but rather the dedication of the small number of women who choose to live there for months at a time, never quite warm, never quite dry, and never quite sure when the next eviction attempt will be mounted by the local constabulary. The spirit of the peace campers was evoked by the reaction of one of them as they returned from an eviction during which virtually all of their supplies were confiscated.
I'm so pleased to be back here on this patch, the fire in the same place, no caravans, no tents. It's like it was when the camp first started. Nothing except a fire, blankets, plastic, a bit of food and spirit, determination, joy — yes joy — we feel great. We know they're not going to get rid of us.
Asked about the 1981 peace rallies throughout Europe, American and European officials emphasized that, while they were impressive and disturbing, the demonstrations would not be allowed to influence the planned INF deployment. In France and Great Britain, politically secure governments responded to the demonstrations with scorn. The French government pointed out, correctly, the extensive communist role in the French peace movement, and denounced it, incorrectly, as a one-sided condemnation of the NATO missiles. In a much-quoted phrase that captured concisely the belief that the peace movement should take its show to Moscow, President Mitterrand remarked that "the missiles are in the east, while the pacifists are in the west." Spokesmen for the British government reiterated the need for armed strength to hold the Soviet Union in check, and asserted, without foundation, that the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was under communist influence.
The governments of Germany and the Netherlands had a more difficult time of it. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt began to lose control of his own party as the issue of nuclear weapons proved increasingly divisive between left- and right-wing Social Democrats. The Dutch government, reliant on a Christian Democratic party deeply divided on cruise deployment, faced parliamentary deadlock on the issue. The elections held in the Netherlands in 1982 featured the missiles as a key issue of the campaign, despite the fact that the Dutch were simultaneously confronted with 17 percent unemployment and a crisis in government finance. The elections brought a coalition of Christian Democrats and Liberals to power, but the Christian Democrats remained divided on whether the deployment should take place. Even Christian Democratic Minister of Defense Job de Ruiter expressed doubt that the cruise missiles were a good idea.
The American government, too, found itself in the awkward position of being blamed for a weapons deployment whose need had first been broached on the European side of the alliance. Against the inclinations of the Reagan administration, pressure from the peace movement brought about a belated beginning of negotiations on theater nuclear weapons in November 1981, and then forced the development of a continuing series of proposals, including the zero option, that had initially met with American resistance. These negotiations did not lead to an agreement on the elimination of intermediate-range nuclear weapons until late 1987. Yet the fact that the negotiations continued for so long, and the fact that they focused specifically on intermediate-range nuclear weapons must both be attributed in part to the ability of the peace movement to keep these missiles controversial.
Antecedents of the INF Decision
Negotiations on intermediate-range nuclear weapons were complicated by the fact that there had been no single logic behind the adoption of the new missiles. Some saw the deployment as a modernization of existing weapons. The Pershing IIs were to replace the Pershing IAs, and the cruise missiles, while they had no direct antecedent, were a "substitution of sorts" for the old British Vulcan bomber. The element of modernization in the INF program was reinforced by the fact that, while 572 new missiles were to be deployed, one thousand older short-range nuclear weapons were slated for removal.
Most public explanations of the planned deployments, however, did not refer to modernization. They stressed instead that the decision to deploy the missiles was a response to the build-up of Soviet SS–20s. This version of the story emphasized that NATO had no direct counterpart to the SS–20 and was forced to meet the threat posed by those missiles. Rather than being a modernization of existing weapons, then, the cruise and Pershing II missiles were said to have added a new military capability made necessary by a Soviet escalation of the nuclear arms race in the European theater.
Within military circles, the dominant explanation of the INF deployment was that it filled a gap in NATO's defense capabilities. Some military analysts claimed that a force of intermediate-range nuclear missiles based in Europe was necessary in order to plug a hole in the ladder of escalating responses between the initial reply to a Soviet attack with conventional and battlefield nuclear weapons and the ultimate response involving America's strategic arsenal. The strategy of escalation dominance required something like the cruise and Pershing missiles for use after conventional defenses failed, but before the full power of the intercontinental strategic force was to be unleashed. According to this justification for INF, the new missiles would be necessary even if the Soviet Union had never deployed a single SS–20. Brushing aside the frequent claim by politicians that the Soviet Union forced the INF decision with its SS–20 deployments, NATO commander General Bernard Rogers told the U.S. Senate that "most people believe it was because of the SS–20 that we modernized. We would have modernized irrespective of the SS–20 because we had this gap in our spectrum of defense developing and we needed to close the gap."
The specific gap that needed to be closed is suggested by the improved capabilities of the new missiles over their predecessors. The Pershing II, unlike the Pershing IA, would be able to hit targets within the Soviet Union, and to do it with far greater accuracy than was previously possible. The cruise missiles are an accurate and relatively inexpensive weapon capable of penetrating Soviet defenses because they are numerous and because they fly too close to the ground to be easily detectable by radar. General Rogers argued that both missiles were vital to the credibility of nuclear deterrence under NATO'S prevailing strategic doctrine of flexible response.
It is of some interest to know which of these three justifications for the INF deployment was of the greatest importance to public officials. The argument that the new missiles were a simple modernization of the old ones is not very strong, given the greatly increased range and accuracy of the Pershing IIs over the Peshing IAs and the unprecedented problems for Soviet defenses posed by the cruise missiles. The other two arguments, that INF is necessary to counter the Soviet SS–20s and that it is needed for the middle level of NATO's response to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, are both reasonable propositions. They are not compatible with each other, however. If the cruise and Pershing II missiles are needed additions to NATO's arsenal in order to make credible the strategy of flexible response, then there could never be serious interest in bargaining them away for the reduction or elimination of the SS–20s. The Geneva negotiations would be given a chance to succeed only if INF really was a response to the Soviet SS–20 deployment.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mobilizing for Peace by Thomas R. Rochon. Copyright © 1988 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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