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MARCO WERMAN: There’s something striking about all the anti-nuclear talk this week.  It’s coming from world leaders, not anti-nuclear protestors.  The call for a nuclear-free world used to come from the grassroots, not the halls of power.  So, whatever happened to the nuclear disarmament movement?  The World’s Jeb Sharp takes a look.

JEB SHARP: The dangers of nuclear weapons can seem so overwhelming, they could just as well produce passivity as activism.  Jonathan Schell is author of The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger.

JONATHAN SCHELL: I think people love not to think about nuclear weapons.  They’re just horrible things that do horrible things.  They oppress the mind, they oppress the spirit.  And especially if you don’t have a belief that they might be gotten rid of it’s very hard to dwell on that. It’s very disagreeable.

SHARP: And yet, Schell says, during the Cold War, the fear of nuclear confrontation was powerful enough to mobilize people.

SCHELL: There was just something about that ever present immediate threat of something like the end of the world, the end of civilization, that concentrated the mind on occasion and brought out a public movement.  When the Cold War ended, that movement ended with it.  And it was just never reconstituted in force.  The public seemed to act for a couple of decades as if the nuclear dilemma had just gone away with the Cold War.  Of course, that was a terrible illusion as we know now.

SHARP: The first people to protest the atomic bomb were actually the scientists who developed it.  Historian Lawrence Wittner is author of Confronting the Bomb, a history of the disarmament movement.

LAWRENCE WITTNER: They had built the bomb as a deterrent to Nazi Germany’s use of the bomb and they were therefore were concerned when they realized that Nazi Germany had been defeated and the US government was moving forward with the bomb program, and apparently planning to bomb Japan.

SHARP: The scientists couldn’t stop the United States from using the atomic bomb against Japan.  But after the war, they were instrumental in forging a growing movement against nuclear weapons. Wittner says those early protests paid off during the administration of President Harry Truman.

WITTNER: During the early Cold War there was an upsurge of protest against nuclear weapons and this led Truman to back off from further use of nuclear weapons.  The movement declined thereafter, but it began to revive with the testing of the hydrogen bomb—the H bomb—and protests against nuclear testing grew to become very powerful and to influence public opinion against testing.

SHARP: Wittner’s book traces how the movement ebbed and flowed over time as it responded to world events and the politics of the day.  He credits the disarmament movement with creating the pressure necessary to bring about the arms control treaties of the 1960s, 1970′s and 1980s.   Wittner says the movement peaked when Ronald Reagan was president.

WITTNER: Reagan was a strong supporter of the development of new nuclear weapons by the United States.  He certainly didn’t plan on supporting arms control and disarmament measures when he came to power and yet as he saw unprecedented protests against nuclear weapons as he saw the largest demonstration in American history in June of 1982.  When he saw that the nuclear weapons freeze campaign had support of 70 to 80 percent of the public, Reagan began to shift.

SHARP: Reagan became a believer in the end, but the breakthroughs he and his Soviet counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev made in the late 1980s still left huge arsenals on both sides when the Cold War ended.

SCHELL: The great tragedy of it all…

SHARP: That’s Jonathan Schell again…

SCHELL: …was that the end of the Cold War was at the same time the most golden opportunity to actually get hold of these weapons and drown them in the bathtub, get rid of them, but unfortunately interest in them dropped at exactly that moment of the greatest opportunity, and so we lost the chance for the time being.

SHARP: Schell points out though, that in the years since, the ideas of the movement have survived, and even seeped into mainstream national security policy.  The threat of nuclear terrorism and a growing number of nuclear states means that you now find presidents calling for a nuclear weapons-free world, not just the anti-nuclear demonstrators of old.  For The World, I’m Jeb Sharp.

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