Fighting for Time: Rhodesia’s Military and Zimbabwe’s Independence by Charles D. Melson

Abstract

also captures well the irony, even the hypocrisy, of congressional support for the freeze while simultaneously voting in favor of new weapons systems such as the B-1 bomber and the Strategic Defense Initiative. Maar acknowledges the tactical compromises the freeze movement found itself having to make with its political supporters, but he underestimates the contribution of the latter to elite support for the freeze. He gives little attention, for example, to how widely Senators Kennedy and Hatfield were able to garner academic, labor, professional, religious, think tank, and business support, which played a large role in transforming U.S. arms control policies in the 1980s. Maar also overstates his argument that the freeze movement played a major role in ending the Cold War. Although the movement did affect U.S. policies, far more decisive were such factors as the Soviet war in Afghanistan, anti-Communism in Eastern Europe, and the bankruptcy of the Communist system in the Soviet Union itself, not to mention the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev. In one of the book’s best chapters, Maar examines the impact of nuclear weapons fears on political and popular culture in the 1980s. From Jonathan Schell’s book The Fate of the Earth (1982) to the seminal made-for-TV film The Day After (1983), with references to comics, cartoon strips, Hollywood films, rock performances, and television shows, Maar vividly re-creates the spirit of the age and the freeze’s place in it. The book is most effective, and moving, in its description of the rise and fall of the nuclear freeze movement itself. Maar achieves his goal of “decentering the narrative away from a top-down focus on the personalities of statesmen.” In the great tradition of U.S. popular movements, the freeze was perhaps most impressive as an expression of the grassroots, and Maar tells that story exceedingly well.