Dreams for a Decade: International Nuclear Abolitionism and the End of the Cold War by Stephanie L. Freeman

Abstract

Histories of the end of the Cold War have credited a range of actors, from leaders and diplomats to grassroots activists in peace and human-rights movements, some of whom engaged in collaboration across state borders. Stephanie Freeman's Dreams for a Decade is unusual in its focus on both top political figures and transnational movements. She places them all in the category of “nuclear abolitionists” and argues that their commitment to a world free of nuclear weapons helped bring the Cold War and the U.S.-Soviet arms race to an end and contributed to the emergence (at least temporarily) of a reunified, peaceful, and democratic Europe. Freeman excavates an impressive range of English-language primary and secondary sources, from archives of popular movements to declassified records of U.S. National Security Council deliberations. She relies on copies of materials from the National Security Archive (a private repository in Washington, DC) and the Vitalii Kataev collection at the Hoover Institution Archives for insights into the Soviet side.The book opens by citing The Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race, the document drafted mainly by Randall Forsberg, founder of the Boston-based Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies (IDDS), which launched the campaign for a Nuclear Weapons Freeze. Freeman then introduces a parallel initiative, promoted in England by historian E. P. Thompson and political scientist Mary Kaldor, among others, that led to the formation of the European Nuclear Disarmament (END) movement for a nuclear-free Europe. Freeman has worked in the archives of the Freeze movement at Swarthmore College and of END at the London School of Economics. One of the book's most valuable contributions is her detailed recounting of the internal debates within the movements that produced distinct but complementary policies.Another key contribution is Freeman's focus on the level of national political leadership in the United States and the Soviet Union, where she identifies two leading abolitionist leaders: U.S. President Ronald Reagan and the reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Among their achievements was the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, signed in December 1987, the first agreement that led to the elimination of entire classes of nuclear weapons—intermediate and shorter-range nuclear missiles. Freeman's archival research on the U.S. side is particularly impressive, as she traces the impact of the Freeze and END movements on the internal deliberations of the Reagan administration. Popular pressure spurred the administration to propose arms talks with the USSR much sooner than it would otherwise have done and to introduce numerous initiatives, such as the “zero option” for INF, and, paradoxically, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) to create a system of defenses against ballistic missiles. SDI, dubbed “Star Wars” by its critics, nearly derailed the process of nuclear disarmament that both Reagan and Gorbachev endorsed. The issue was not so much that Gorbachev feared SDI per se—it was primarily a basic research program that never did produce a system that could render nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete,” as Reagan had originally promised. Rather, the Soviet leader worried that efforts to counter or imitate SDI, enthusiastically pursued by the Soviet military-industrial establishment, would undermine his plans to demilitarize the Soviet economy and focus on civilian needs, and that it could spark an arms race in space-based weapons.Freeman's parallel treatment of nuclear abolitionism at the level of government leadership and mass movements constitutes an effective organizing principle for her work. Yet there are some important differences between the two levels. Freeman typically describes Reagan's approach as the “peace through strength'' disarmament strategy” (e.g., pp. 77, 130). Reagan promoted a major military buildup, with a generation of new nuclear weapons, along with substantial increases in military spending, in the hope of pressuring the Soviet side to agree to nuclear disarmament. But that strategy depended entirely on the Soviet response. Gorbachev was probably unique among Soviet leaders in favoring nuclear abolition. His predecessors reacted to Reagan's “disarmament strategy” by breaking off arms talks and increasing deployments of their own weapons (pp. 115, 126). Reagan's own camp included few supporters of nuclear abolition. As Freeman carefully evaluates the evidence, she finds only Secretary of State George Shultz supportive of Reagan's goals (he later became one of the “gang of four” former U.S. officials to embrace “global zero”). Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger favored the military buildup for its own sake and resisted any efforts at negotiations. National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane wanted to use SDI as a “bargaining chip” to trade for Soviet reductions but remained committed to nuclear deterrence. George H. W. Bush, Reagan's vice president and successor, emerges as a key opponent of nuclear disarmament. As Gorbachev embraced the goals of the END movement and pushed for total denuclearization of Europe, Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, worried that plans to modernize the Lance short-range nuclear missiles deployed in West Germany would be undermined. If the Freeze, END, Gorbachev, and Reagan are the heroes of Freeman's story, Bush is undoubtedly the villain. She suggests that his hesitation in responding to Gorbachev's vision of a “common European home” in favor of a settlement on U.S. terms set the stage for the current dismal situation—the déjà vu all over again of a new division of Europe, except with the Iron Curtain pushed to the east, and new nuclear deployments by Russia and the United States.Freeman's treatment of the Malta summit of December 1989 effectively reveals Bush's lack of “the vision thing” (the phrase he himself used as a reminder of what he should project), especially compared to Gorbachev and the transnational coalition of European supporters of disarmament and human rights. A fascinating contribution of the book is its tracing of the contacts between the END activists and the dissidents associated with Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, the Polish movement Wolność i Pokój (Freedom and Peace), and East German feminists. The Soviet-bloc activists criticized the European disarmament proponents for insufficient attention to human rights and the repression inflicted by Communist authorities against any independent activity—even in support of peace initiatives the government ostensibly supported. The work of Daniel Thomas and Sarah Snyder has called attention to the “Helsinki Effect”—the way figures such as Václav Havel sought to use the Communist governments’ signature on the human-rights agreements of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe to demand their compliance. But Freeman's is the most detailed account of how the East-bloc activists convinced the END movement to embrace their goal, and, indeed, how the latter influenced Gorbachev's thinking on the “common European home” (although here one would hope to find more evidence than the author's reliance on the testimony of Tair Tairov, Aleksei Pankin, and Yurii Zhukov, none of whom had access to high-level Soviet decision-making).Freeman's treatment of the evolution of END's strategy compared to that of the Freeze is revealing. The Freeze movement caught the popular imagination, leading to local and state-level referenda in support of the initiative and a massive rally in New York City in June 1982. Sooner than Forsberg's multi-year strategy had envisioned, the Freeze entered the partisan political realm, with watered-down versions adopted by many Democrats, including Reagan's 1984 presidential rival, Walter Mondale. Much of the campaign's attention became focused on legislation, including efforts to cut funding for particular weapons (pp. 128–129). As END broadened its horizons, the Freeze narrowed its strategy.One element that could have strengthened this excellent study would have been discussion of the relationship between conventional forces and nuclear disarmament. European peace researchers had sought to strengthen their case for nuclear disarmament by promoting initiatives for so-called non-offensive or non-provocative defense—and their work ultimately found expression in Gorbachev's December 1988 speech at the United Nations announcing a unilateral reduction of half a million Soviet troops and a defensive restructuring of the armed forces. In the United States, Forsberg and other critics of the “deadly connection” between nuclear deterrence and military intervention were also searching for ways to make nuclear weapons superfluous by reducing the offensive potential of conventional forces. Freeman mentions that President Bush invited Forsberg to meet with him on the eve of the Malta summit to discuss arms control issues and European security. Freeman implies that the invitation was little more than a gesture of courtesy toward a prominent anti-nuclear activist (p. 237), but in fact, as the records of Forsberg's IDDS (recently made available at the Cornell University Library) reveal, the meeting was substantive. Forsberg used the occasion to try to convince Bush that restructuring and reduction of conventional forces would make Europe safe for nuclear disarmament, but ultimately he was unwilling to accept that argument. More than three decades after the end of the Cold War, with Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine, Europe again faces the prospect of nuclear war. The dreams of nuclear abolition, so effectively recounted in this superb study, remain unfulfilled.