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From a local ballot initiative in Massachusetts, the nuclear weapons freeze movement has grown during the last three years into an important national issue. By 1983, Congress had been asked to consider more than two dozen freeze resolutions, and more than 25% of the voters in the U.S. had the opportunity to vote on state-wide and regional freeze initiatives. This book explores the issues behind the current debate over nuclear weapons and the freeze movement from a wide range of perspectives. The contributors assess the goals and implications of the freeze movement, examine its origins in religious and secular pacifism, explain the amendments to the original freeze proposal introduced in Congress, and discuss the reaction and policies of the Reagan administration. The nuclear freeze movement is placed in an international context with discussions of recent arms negotiations, European views of U.S. policies, and the possible effects of a freeze on NATO allies and on U.S. national security. The book includes a comprehensive annotated bibliography.
In Freeze!, Henry Richard Maar III chronicles the rise of the transformative and transnational Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. Amid an escalating Cold War that pitted the nuclear arsenal of the United States against that of the Soviet Union, the grassroots peace movement emerged sweeping the nation and uniting people around the world. The solution for the arms race that the Campaign proposed: a bilateral freeze on the building, testing, and deployment of nuclear weapons on the part of two superpowers of the US and the USSR. That simple but powerful proposition stirred popular sentiment and provoked protest in the streets and on screen from New York City to London to Berlin. Movie stars and scholars, bishops and reverends, governors and congress members, and, ultimately, US President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev took a stand for or against the Freeze proposal. With the Reagan administration so openly discussing the prospect of winnable and survivable nuclear warfare like never before, the Freeze movement forcefully translated decades of private fears into public action. Drawing upon extensive archival research in recently declassified materials, Maar illuminates how the Freeze campaign demonstrated the power and importance of grassroots peace activism in all levels of society. The Freeze movement played an instrumental role in shaping public opinion and American politics, helping establish the conditions that would bring the Cold War to an end.
The early 1980s were a tense time. The nuclear arms race was escalating, Reagan administration officials bragged about winning a nuclear war, and superpower diplomatic relations were at a new low. Nuclear war was a real possibility and antinuclear activism surged. By 1982 the Nuclear Freeze campaign had become the largest peace movement in American history. In support, celebrities, authors, publishers, and filmmakers saturated popular culture with critiques of Reagan's arms buildup, which threatened to turn public opinion against the president. Alarmed, the Reagan administration worked to co-opt the rhetoric of the nuclear freeze and contain antinuclear activism. Recently declassified White House memoranda reveal a concerted campaign to defeat activists' efforts. In this book, William M. Knoblauch examines these new sources, as well as the influence of notable personalities like Carl Sagan and popular culture such as the film The Day After, to demonstrate how cultural activism ultimately influenced the administration's shift in rhetoric and, in time, its stance on the arms race.
These two books, which helped focus national attention on the movement for a nuclear freeze, are published in one volume.
Early in 1982 a group of lawmakers introduced into both houses of the U.S. Congress a resolution calling on the United States and the Soviet Union to negotiate a mutual and verifiable halt to the nuclear arms race. It was a bold measure and one that sparked intense debate between members of Congress and the White House over the conduct of U.S. arms control policy. This book is an inside account of that legislative battle, told by a congressional aide who was in the thick of it.
Nuclear disarmament is firmly back on the international agenda. But almost all current thinking on the subject is focused on the process of reducing the number of weapons from thousands to hundreds. This rigorous analysis examines the challenges that exist to abolishing nuclear weapons completely, and suggests what can be done now to start overcoming them. The paper argues that the difficulties of 'getting to zero' must not preclude many steps being taken in that direction. It thus begins by examining steps that nuclear-armed states could take in cooperation with others to move towards a world in which the task of prohibiting nuclear weapons could be realistically envisaged. The remainder of the paper focuses on the more distant prospect of prohibiting nuclear weapons, beginning with the challenge of verifying the transition from low numbers to zero. It moves on to examine how the civilian nuclear industry could be managed in a nuclear-weapons-free world so as to prevent rearmament. The paper then considers what political-security conditions would be required to make a nuclear-weapons ban enforceable and explores how enforcement might work in practice. Finally, it addresses the latent capability to produce nuclear weapons that would inevitably exist after abolition, and asks whether this is a barrier to disarmament, or whether it can be managed to meet the security needs of a world newly free of the bomb.
Military analyst, peace activist, teacher, and social theorist Randall Caroline Watson Forsberg (1943–2007) founded the Nuclear Freeze campaign and the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies. In Toward a Theory of Peace, completed in 1997 and published for the first time here, she delves into a vast literature in psychology, anthropology, archeology, sociology, and history to examine the ways in which changing moral beliefs came to stigmatize forms of "socially sanctioned violence" such as human sacrifice, cannibalism, and slavery, eventually rendering them unacceptable. Could the same process work for war? Edited and with an introduction by political scientists Matthew Evangelista (Cornell University) and Neta C. Crawford (Boston University), both of whom worked with Forsberg.
This book describes the positions advocated by ethicists and churches in the public debate on nuclear weapons. After tracing the development of just-war theory, the dominant moral position on war in Western thought, Dr. Davidson synthesizes the views of contemporary ethicists on the moral principles associated with the just-war tradition. He then documents the postures of Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Ramsey, Michael Walzer, and James Turner Johnson with regard to the first use and retaliatory use of nuclear weapons, deterrence policy, the nuclear freeze proposal, the arms race, and disarmament. The positions endorsed by the Roman Catholic Church and the major Protestant and Jewish denominations in the United States on the issues of nuclear warfare are described in detail, with extensive treatment given to the development of the Catholic Bishops' 1983 pastoral letter on war and peace and the statements of churches affiliated with the National Council of Churches. The views of over 30 denominations, representing more than 110 million members, are considered. The final chapter of the book contrasts the stance of the churches with that of the Reagan Administration. Proposing guidelines for a moral defense policy in the nuclear age, Dr. Davidson's thesis is that national security requires a recognition of the need to protect and preserve values worth defending while simultaneously taking steps to prevent nuclear war.
The debate about appropriate purposes and policies for U.S. nuclear weapons has been under way since the beginning of the nuclear age. With the end of the Cold War, the debate has entered a new phase, propelled by the post-Cold War transformations of the international political landscape. This volume--based on an exhaustive reexamination of issues addressed in The Future of the U.S.-Soviet Nuclear Relationship (NRC, 1991)--describes the state to which U.S. and Russian nuclear forces and policies have evolved since the Cold War ended. The book evaluates a regime of progressive constraints for future U.S. nuclear weapons policy that includes further reductions in nuclear forces, changes in nuclear operations to preserve deterrence but enhance operational safety, and measures to help prevent proliferation of nuclear weapons. In addition, it examines the conditions and means by which comprehensive nuclear disarmament could become feasible and desirable.