Much as they had at Three Mile Island, these appeals to women stood in complex relation to feminism. On the one hand, they illustrated women’s empowerment vis-à-vis issues like the arms race that had once been construed as the exclusive domain of male leaders and policymakers. But on the other hand, they undermined the feminist plea that women not be reduced to their identities as mothers. Meanwhile, Caldicott’s call for a contingent of visibly pregnant women again evoked the unborn in ways that suggested an affinity between the nuclear issue and the abortion war. Women’s centrality within the freeze also converged with their growing visibility within the professional middle classes. A membership poll of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) conducted in 1983 found that its members, almost half registered Republicans, ranked nuclear war higher than the Equal Rights Amendment and educational opportunity as a pressing women’s issue.68 But above all, the appeal to motherhood worked to solidify the movement’s nonpartisan, mid-American character. Mother’s Day rallies and vigils for the freeze were held in traditionally conservative parts of the country, like Little Rock, Arkansas, Helena, Montana, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, and leaders were encouraged that the participation of mothers at these events “generated considerable interest” in the local press. “Someone once criticized the freeze as a mom-and-apple pie issue,” observed Vermont-based organizer David McAuley. And “that’s exactly what it is,” he proclaimed proudly.69
FIGURE 4.3. What Do You Feel About the Unthinkable? Courtesy of the State Historical Society of Missouri.
Along with women, religious leaders helped to translate the atomic imaginary into the ecological one via the figure of the unborn. As we have seen, many local clergy had facilitated the transformation of Christian residents into activists at Three Mile Island, and a similar dynamic pervaded freeze activism. Freeze leaders cast disarmament as a spiritual as much as a geopolitical imperative. Randy Kehler’s turn to freeze activism had been accompanied by what he called a “profound spiritual awakening.”70 Not surprisingly, the original Call to Halt the Arms Race was endorsed by pacifist religious organizations like the American Friends Service Committee, Clergy and Laity Concerned, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation. But by the end of 1981, several mainline church organizations had endorsed it as well. These included the Presbyterian Church USA, the United Methodist Church, the American Baptist Church, the National Council of Churches of Christ, the Episcopal House of Bishops, and the Lutheran Church. Local parishes throughout the country became pipelines through which organizers met with congregants and distributed profreeze literature.71
But it was the Roman Catholic Church that provided the movement with its most influential backing. The international Catholic peace group Pax Christi distributed copies of the call to its members for Lent, several Catholic orders and nuns’ associations endorsed it, and one bishop even advised members of his diocese not to seek employment in the nuclear industry. The decisive movement came in May 1983, when the country’s Roman Catholic bishops ratified by an overwhelming margin a pastoral letter on war and the nuclear arms race, The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response.72 While the bishops insisted that they were not formally endorsing any specific course of action, the letter described the arms race as “one of the greatest curses” on humanity. It took direct aim at the concept of a limited nuclear war, and it expressed support for a bilateral verifiable agreement to halt (not curb, a term that had appeared in earlier drafts) the testing, production, and deployment of new nuclear weapons systems. The ratification of the letter constituted a watershed for the Catholic Church. “Many of the 50 million Catholics in the United States,” wrote the New York Times, “consider the bishops’ action to be the boldest and most decisive step on social issues in the history of the American hierarchy.”73 Over a million copies were distributed and studied at churches throughout the United States and the world. At forty-five thousand words, the letter was wide-ranging. It elaborated the Church’s position on war, the policy of deterrence, the arms race and disarmament, nonviolence, and how to best promote peace.
Crucially, the statement also tethered the nuclear arms race to the practice of abortion by describing both as mutually reinforcing malevolent forces that threatened innocent lives and diminished their worth. The secular culture’s tolerance of abortion had dulled its collective sense of horror toward the prospect of nuclear war, the letter maintained. “In a society where the innocent unborn are killed wantonly,” the bishops asked, “how can we expect people to feel righteous revulsion at the act or threat of killing noncombatants in war?” The unintended loss of innocent human lives during conventional war, while tragic, could “conceivably be proportionate to the values defended.” But nuclear warfare was different because its weaponry was designed precisely to “kill millions of defenseless human beings.” There was no justification for a “direct attack on human life, in or out of warfare,” and abortion was just such an attack.
Abortion thus emerged in the letter not simply as an analog to nuclear war, but as a gateway to it. According to one passage, “We must ask how long a nation willing to extend a constitutional guarantee to the ‘right’ to kill defenseless human beings by abortion is likely to refrain from adopting strategic warfare policies designed to kill millions of defenseless human beings, if adopting them should come to seem ‘expedient.’ ” The pastoral letter thus provided the bishops with an opportunity not only to weigh in on the escalating arms race, but also to formulate what they called a “consistent ethic of life” that traversed genetics, abortion, capital punishment, modern warfare, and euthanasia. “Some see clearly the application of the principle to abortion, but contend the bishops overstepped their bounds when they applied it to choices of national security,” explained Cardinal Joseph L. Bernardin (who had chaired the committee that wrote the letter) at a speech at Fordham University. “Others understand the power of the principle in the strategic debate, but find its application to abortion a violation of the realm of private choice. I contend the viability of the principle depends upon the consistency of its application.”74 In its attempt to articulate a consistent principle, the pastoral letter again placed the figure of the unborn at the center of the nuclear threat. The practice of abortion, it contended, had inured the nation to the mass killing of innocent people.
The seemingly disparate issues of disarmament and abortion thus converged around the unborn, and the unborn was the cord that tethered the earlier atomic age to the emergent ecological one. In the 1950s, test ban advocates had appealed to the unborn in order to condemn contamination without representation. At Three Mile Island, residents evoked the same figure to sound the alarm over future harm. The unborn surfaced again within disarmament activism, this time as a symbol of a systemic degradation of human life that tied the practice of abortion to nuclear proliferation. Thus within disarmament activism, one could see how ecological symbols and images—the threatened fetus, the irradiated body—were circulating throughout the political field of the 1980s, creating deeply ambiguous social movements that could be pulled in any number of directions but that would gravitate rightward over the course of the decade.
This ambiguity shaped disarmament activism. As we have seen, from the beginning, this activism had woven together discrete and even contradictory elements. It appealed to centrism but was driven by a sense of urgency rather than moderation. It enlisted professionals to steel itself against charges of radicalism. It drew women into its orbit but often in their exclusive capacities as mothers. It identified itself as a spiritual, global movement and singled out the church as one of its vital epicenters. By the mid-1980s, freeze activists had adopted another tactic: the reclamation of a patriotic ideal that would establish that they were motivated by a deep love of country. After voting in their town halls and parishes to endorse the call, citizens would stand up and sing “God Bless America.” One strategist urged freeze groups to use the American flag and anthem at public events, insisting that doing so was at once
a moral and political imperative.75 Activists worked hard to “protect this beautiful country from devastation and to save the lives of tens of millions of our fellow Americans,” he maintained, “By all moral right, we should consider ourselves to be at least as sincere patriots as our opponents,” going on to suggest campaign slogans like “Love America—Let Us Live,” “Nuclear Freeze: Save American Lives,” and “Keep America Beautiful: Prevent Nuclear Holocaust.”76 These appeals to patriotism signaled the rise of a biotic, body-centered nationalism that placed a premium on American lives over others. At the same time, they reflected the movement’s desire to win the political center and disaffiliate from the “hippies and the flag-burning that were so prominent in the peace movement of that day.”77
This attempt at disaffiliation effaced the complex role that patriotism had played in the earlier antiwar movement. Indeed, some opponents of the war had claimed the mantle of patriotism, insisting that they were truer patriots than the war’s defenders and that opposition to war constituted the highest form of patriotism. But now, within disarmament activism, patriotism became bound up not with the issue of war, but rather with reproduction. “Center the issue” of children, advised Educators for Social Responsibility in a brochure. “The health and survival of children is a mainstream issue. It is a patriotic issue. Let’s carry the flag and stand on the parade ground as we teach others about the ways that nuclear weapons subvert our political ideals and undermine the rights of human beings everywhere.”78 After all, what could be more patriotic than wanting to save the lives of the nation’s children?
In its embrace of patriotism, freeze activism tracked a political realignment as the country gravitated rightward, a center-right hegemony consolidated, and the left became marginalized. The freeze’s move toward the center was at least in part a tactical response to critics. For no matter how hard disarmament activists worked to establish their patriotic bona fides, there were always groups, such as Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), the Moral Majority, and the American Security Council, that attacked them from the right. Some conservatives, for example, accused freeze activists of being tools of the Kremlin. The call for nuclear disarmament was a deceptive cover, claimed the Alliance to Halt the Advance of Marxism in the Americas. “Don’t march for this phony ‘peace’ plan,” warned one of its flyers. “This plan was designed in Moscow to help the enemy bury us.”79 In a letter to Moral Majority members, Jerry Falwell observed that “Here in America the ‘freeze-niks’ are hysterically singing Russia’s favorite song: a unilateral nuclear freeze—and the Russians are loving it!”80 Critics like Falwell contended that because American strength had declined precipitously over the previous decade, a freeze would permanently lock a Soviet military advantage in place. The movement’s attempts to distance itself from the taint of the 1960s left these critics wholly unconvinced. As the American Security Council portrayed it, the movement was led by a “small contingent of radical leftists and Marxist leaning 60s leftovers … whose whole lives have been devoted to bringing about the eventual end of the capitalistic system in America.”81
This charge overlooked the cleavages between disarmament activism and leftist opposition to US militarism. For their part, leftist critics recognized the nationalist tendencies within disarmament activism, critiqued those tendencies on universalist and cosmopolitan grounds, and urged the movement to expand its vision. The very quality that made the freeze so compelling as a recruiting tool—namely, its focus on a narrow, specific goal—could also be construed as a liability, for it precluded the development of a more thoroughgoing critique of US militarism. For some longtime pacifists and social justice advocates, the voicing of collective concern about nuclear war ran an inch deep and a mile wide. As one peace activist dismissively wrote in a letter to the national office, the freeze movement was made up of “philosophically, politically, and socially disparate people whose only bond is their anxiety about being incinerated.”82 Mark Niedergang, who worked full-time for the campaign in the early 1980s, urged the movement to go beyond what he called “apoco-porn” and engage more directly with policy questions. If it failed to do so, he warned, it could set the stage for a scenario in which nuclear weapons were traded for “an unnecessary and expensive increase in conventional military forces.”83
For critics on the left, the movement’s preoccupation with a nuclear attack in the future was effacing forms of violence being unleashed by US conventional weapons in the present. In December 1981, Beverly Woodward, a Fellowship of Reconciliation member and a trainer in nonviolent action, wrote to Freeze director Randy Kehler in order to make this point. “The military itself may decide to ‘save’ the war system by deemphasizing nuclear weapons and moving to other horribles,” she speculated. “And as you know, even if we get rid of all nuclear weapons (an achievement that would go considerably beyond the freeze), the Third World would not perceive itself to be a great deal better off.”84 Along with her letter, she included a copy of a correspondence with Noam Chomsky, who elaborated on her argument. The war system could cause “horrendous suffering and damage even without nuclear weapons,” Chomsky observed, and he questioned whether the freeze campaign was deepening people’s understanding of “how we got where we are.” “An emphasis on the disastrous consequences of nuclear war is reasonable, but not the main point in my view,” Chomsky wrote. “The point that should be constantly pressed, I believe, is that the cold war system has been highly functional for the superpowers as a device for legitimizing and mobilizing popular support for their respective programs of aggression, terror, and operation—in pretended defense against the superpower enemy. For the peasants of Guatemala, or the people of Afghanistan or Timor, the effects of nuclear bombardment are a secondary matter, or plainly irrelevant, since they are already suffering something similar. So called ‘conventional’ weapons are, in my view, possibly even more dangerous than strategic weapons, for which the motivation is largely either propaganda or military Keynesianism, or supporting the internal power of military-bureaucratic-industrial elites; the ‘conventional’ weapons, in contrast, are used.”85
For critics like Chomsky, the freeze movement’s exclusive focus on nuclear weapons over conventional ones constituted at once a temporal and a spatial misstep. Its temporal misstep was that it accorded priority to a theoretical future scenario (a nuclear war) in ways that occluded suffering in the present (much of it perpetrated by the US military). Its spatial misstep was that it relocated violence away from actual theaters of military conflict (Afghanistan, Guatemala) and grafted it onto the domestic space of the United States, if only in people’s worst nightmares. Both moves implicitly valued American lives over others; Afghans and Guatemalans, to borrow from Judith Butler, were thus “un-mourned.”86 The freeze’s temporal emphasis on futurity posed yet another problem. It made it difficult for the campaign to move beyond its overwhelmingly white, middle-class base of support within the United States. Patricia Williams, an African American hired by the campaign to work on minority outreach, observed that “few black leaders are inclined to put aside what they call ‘immediate survival issues’ in order to accommodate themselves to the overwhelmingly white antinuclear movement.”87 The freeze’s strategy of using such a tight, single-issue focus to attract conservative and Republican constituencies, she speculated, had come at the “expense of bringing in the masses of poor, black, and other minorities who are already on our side.”88
Thus even as freeze activists condemned the Second Cold War, they unwittingly aligned themselves with the new nationalism of the 1980s by invoking patriotism and distancing themselves from the antiwar left. They did this to deflect redbaiting, but in the process, they disowned their own debt to what had come before. That debt was not hard to see. Randall Forsberg’s original call to halt the nuclear arms race built on the prior work of organizations like Mobilization for Survival (founded by antiwar activists who in the late 1970s turned to the nuclear threat), as well as groups like the American Friends Service
Committee and the Fellowship of Reconciliation that had actively opposed the Vietnam War. Randy Kehler, who headed the freeze campaign in the early 1980s, had himself cut his political teeth on antiwar activism. He spent twenty-two months in prison for defying the draft in 1969. The freeze strategy of using a simple demand that cut through the mystique of military jargon took its inspiration from an earlier antiwar movement that had indicted a cult of foreign policy experts whose authority had gone unquestioned for far too long, with devastating results.89 Yet freeze strategists sometimes suppressed this shared history. A set of outreach guidelines titled Depolarizing Disarmament Work cautioned against labeling people as “hawks” or “doves” and called for close attention to language when talking with potential recruits. “The words right-wing, hawk, dove, conservative, radical, or left-wing all tend to peg people in a certain position from which it becomes difficult to move. Once people feel that the alternatives are staying ‘hawkish’ or turning into a ‘dove’ they may decide it is safer to stay where they are.” The guidelines went on to urge activists to think twice before bringing up any connection between the fight for disarmament and the earlier movement against the war:
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