Tell me how you got into this whole, you know, peace game. Prior to 1981, what were you doing, Randy?

I started in 1968. I was married to a Swede and by accident I wandered into an International Peace Research Institute in Stockholm -- I got into this field in 1968 really quite by accident. I was married to a Swede, living in Stockholm and I heard that an International Peace Research Institute had just been created by the Swedish Government. I thought, well, that would be interesting for an American abroad at a time of war. I could learn something about peace and maybe make a little contribution. I took a temporary job as a typist and I got hooked. I couldn't believe what I was typing. I discovered that all the literature in this field, everything you need to know is in the public domain. We have a huge standing army in peacetime. We have huge standing nuclear forces and there weren't any really serious efforts in the arms control negotiations to reverse this. As Alva Myrdal said we were engaged in the game of disarmament. Not serious arms reduction negotiations. So, I decided if I could make a living doing this kind of work, I would make it my life's work and I would not go into the government. I would learn everything I could learn about the military and kind of became a teacher, a public teacher and teach activists and teachers and journalists and sort of be a mediator between -- I would know as much as people in the government, but I would turn my expertise outward instead of inward.

Let me go back to when, or forward actually in terms of your chronology, to when Reagan has just gotten elected. It's -- say that spring. Where was the freeze movement at that time?

That's too late.

Okay, go ahead.

In the fall of -- in the summer of 1979, the SALT II treaty was presented to the Senate or was in the process of being presented to the Senate by President Carter. And there was a lot of resistance to ratifying this treaty. And in August, Senator Frank Church suddenly discovered a few Russian soldiers on Cuba, which had been there for 20 years, but no one had noticed before. And there was a big flap about this. And it was not at all clear that the Senate was going to ratify the SALT II treaty. Then in December, the Soviet Union went into Afghanistan and in January of 1980, Carter withdrew the treaty and it never did come up before the Senate. Well, it was in that environment that the freeze movement was born. The way I saw it, and other people who were concerned with arms control and disarmament -- the SALT II Treaty was not that strong. It was a relatively weak treaty which essentially codified the next generation of nuclear weapons an both sides. It didn't cut out anything. It didn't eliminate any new weapons. What it did was set ceilings an how far they could build up. And we thought that it was amazing that a treaty that was that weak could run into that much trouble from the right and that this was absurd and ridiculous and it was time to get a public movement going that would demand arms control. So, it was actually in the spring of 1980, well before Reagan was elected that the freeze movement started. And it started as a movement to create popular pressure to support those people in Washington and the Senate and the Congress who wanted to see good arms control agreements with the Soviet Union, support them over the opposition of the vested interests.

Am I correct in remembering that the last time there was a movement of any significance at all in regard to our nuclear policy toward the Soviet Union was really in the late 50's, early 60's with the Women's Strike for Peace and what happened? Why does it...I mean, other than the specific narrow reason, why does it emerge again in the late 70's?

I think that there were some long-term historical swings. In the late 1950's and early 1960's, there was the ban the bomb movement at the time that we were testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. This was creating radioactive fallout that was getting into grass, that was getting into cow's milk, that was getting into baby's milk and mothers didn't like that. And there were a lot of mothers out pushing baby carriages in the early 1960's. This, in effect...that public pressure led to the partial test ban treaty that ended nuclear testing in the atmosphere. But moved it underground. It didn't stop the testing and development of new types of nuclear weapons. Just when they produced a new bomb design they tested it underground where the fallout didn't get into our milk. That was followed -- that was in '63. Between '65 and the early 1970's there was the Vietnam War and the whole peace movement, which was not so much an anti-nuclear movement. It was a peace movement. It was an anti-war, anti-militarism, anti-Vietnam movement. During the Vietnam period, there was a brief upsurge concerned about the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1969, 1970; that was mainly in the cities where they were going to put ABMs in their backyards and people didn't want missiles raining dawn on those anti-missiles. So, there had been a little movement, but that was mainly sort of a scientist-based, small, urban movement. And I think that what happened after the Vietnam War was that we had a big back swing against self-flagellation, against self-criticism, pro-America. We're a good country. We stand for good values. We provide good leadership in the world. We're going to stop dumping on ourselves in any way, including in the military dimension. So, in my view, between 1974 and 1979 -'80, we had the pendulum swing back completely in the other direction from what it had been during the Vietnam era. And I think that it was during that period when we had the SALT II Treaty -- we had arms control negotiations, but we had this kind of against-criticism-of-the-military public sentiment. So, there wasn't much support for the arms control process. During that period, we had a whole new generation of we're fighting counter-force nuclear weapons coming along. And, so, there was a convergence at the end of the 1970's of the people kind of...the pendulum coming back to the middle. There had been a period where no criticism of the military was acceptable in the national mood. And that period was ending and sort of, okay, well, now could be mare realistic. We had come to a kind of balanced view where you accept things and support things that are good, but you criticize things that are bad. So, there was this change in mood and that was converging with the failure of a very weak treaty, even to come before the Senate and the emergence of a whole new generation of nuclear war fighting systems. So, these three things, I think, came together, and in my view it was not President Reagan that initiated the nuclear freeze movement. It was well under way for these reasons. And we wouldn't have had a freeze movement even if President Carter had been re-elected.

Does President Reagan's election and the bringing into his Administration a bunch of real hard liners, even harder than the Carter people, for sure, the Committee on the Present Danger, does that affect the freeze in any way at that time?

Well, Reagan was elected in 1980. I think it's worth mentioning that there were, you know, there were parts of the country where people voted for Reagan at the same time that they voted in favor of a freeze referendum already in 1980. So support for Reagan expressed a kind of national self-affirmation, while support for the freeze was, but we don't want a nuclear arms race. That doesn't have to be part of our national self-affirmation. So, I think it took quite a while before Reagan's rhetoric really had an impact an the public. It didn't have it in 1980. It didn't really happen in the beginning of 1981, which was the early days of the Reagan Administration. It's really going in late '8l, early '82, that you have people in the Reagan administration saying things like, you know, with enough shovels we can caver our doors with dirt and protect ourselves from a nuclear war and survive. We want to prevail in a nuclear war. We are prepared for a nuclear shot across the bow. These kinds of statements coming out of the Reagan administration, I think did gradually, not instantly, but gradually over a period of a year or two, and Reagan's

Evil Empire

speech, create a concern or deepen the concern in the public that as we were getting a new generation of nuclear weapons systems, which had war-fighting capabilities, they were not just for deterrence, but for actually trying to fight and win a war. This was being coupled with an administration that was talking about being prepared to do it. And was adamantly against arms control and refusing to talk to the Soviets at all. So, I think that Reagan did certainly contribute to strengthening the freeze movement and concern about the nuclear arms race that was expressed in that movement.

Now, what is your role during this period?

Well, in 1979, in December of 1979, I was asked to give a talk at a national peace movement conference an the theme, Stopping the arms race. And this particular group that sponsored the conference had several themes that were part of it's ongoing work and stop the arms race was just one of them. And I had been thinking about the idea of a nuclear freeze for about six months before that. In fact, I had been giving some smaller talks, saying what we need to do is to stop the nuclear arms race and to end intervention as a initial steps toward arms reduction and improving East-West relations. I had been talking about that throughout '78 and '79. But in late '79 I was asked to attend a big convention with 600 people from around the country and to talk on this theme stop the arms race. And I gave a ten minute speech in which I said,

If the peace movement...if all the different little fragmented groups in the peace movement --

which at that time was very small and very weak, really at a nadir, and had a range of demands ranging from not getting a particular new weapon to total disarmament and everything in between. And I said in this little speech if all the groups in this small peace movement got together and focused, got them...focused on one demand and united behind one demand, and if they picked a demand that was moderate, that was sort of in the middle of the spectrum, larger than just one new weapons system, but smaller than complete disarmament, and if they made a bilateral, so it would have to apply to the Soviets as well as the United States, we could create a movement in this country. Because that's what people needed to hear. They were confused by the mixed message coming out of the peace movement, by the big demands and the little demands. They were turned off by unilateralism, they're not motivated by the small demands and they're also not motivated by the Utopian demands, but something in between could motivate people to actually turn out and become activists. And, finally, I commented that if we only look at the danger of nuclear war and the effects of nuclear weapons and the huge size of nuclear stockpiles, people become very depressed and demoralized and hopeless and despairing. But if we couple public education about the danger of nuclear war and the arms race with a concrete proposal to take an initial first step that leads in a good direction, this would have the opposite effect of empowering people, giving them hope, giving them something to work for. And it was that coupling of bath the sense of the negative, the terrible danger and fear, and also the sense of the positive step of something to work for that I thought would really turn the trick in creating a national movement. So, essentially, in December of 1979, I said, if we create a campaign like the freeze campaign, this will create a national movement and that's what happened.

When you say the people or people, you're really referring to a terribly small minority of people aren't you?

I'm sorry, I didn't understand that question. People what?

How many people are you talking about who...either who were motivated or could potentially be motivated by the freeze movement at the --

Well, during the course of the really active stage of the freeze movement, the most-active, popular stage, between early 1981 and, let's say, late 1984, there were a number of national opinion polls taken that showed that somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of the people supported the nuclear-freeze proposal. And people supported it in all parts of the country, at all levels of income, men and women, republicans and democrats. Actually, at the Republican 1984 National Convention, a resolution supporting the freeze was passed, incredibly enough. So, that the notion of people supporting the freeze...there is a sense in which you ask people, do you like the idea that both the United States and the Soviet Union should stop making nuclear weapons and we should have a verifiable agreement to close down any new production of nuclear weapons. This was not at all a minority position. It was...a vast majority of the American people supported this position and that was shown repeatedly over those years. There was another measure of how popular this was...was how many people were active. There were referenda in ten states. At the statewide level, which was practically unprecedented, there were thousands of people, literally thousands, maybe 20 or 30 thousand people working as activists at the grassroots level to collect petition signatures. Two million petition signatures were collected saying...calling an the president to negotiate a freeze with the Soviet Union. The peace movement grew from a few hundred local groups around the country to 5000 local groups, each of which had ten or twenty members.

This begins as a fairly localized referendum movement, doesn't it? And I think of Western Massachusetts, maybe California. This is not a...in '80 and '81 this is not yet a big movement, am I right?

The nuclear freeze movement started, it really got going... The nuclear freeze movement got going in April of 1980, when there was a document printed called The Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race. This was printed jointly by my institute: the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies, the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group, Clergy and Laity Concerned, a religious-based peace group which had been formed during the Vietnam days, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which is an older religious-based peace group. So, these four organizations started printing The Call To Halt The Nuclear Arms Race which is a little four-page statement that called on the United States and the Soviet Union to stop making nuclear weapons. It gave some details of how this might be implemented. And then it concluded with an appeal to local activists to put this message before their town councils, garden groups, Kiwanis Clubs, school boards, whatever they had access to at the local level and get an endorsement so that we could build a huge grassroots movement that would send a message to Washington. It was very explicit about this process of percolating up. We want to go out at the grassroots level and create a vast movement that will percolate up. And we asked...we started by asking 40 or 50 peace groups operating at the national level, with mailings lists all around the country, to reproduce the The Call To Halt The Nuclear Arms Race in their newsletter or send it out in their mailings to all their local chapters, the few hundred local chapters around the country. And then to get their local activists to create petitions and go out in their towns and so an and so forth. This process did, in fact, go on between April of 1980 and December of 1980 and in that time we distributed several hundred thousand copies of The Call To Halt The Nuclear Arms Race. So, just a few hundred groups really -- it just grew like wildfire within what was then a very tiny peace movement. It continued growing in 1981 and that was when the referenda process really began. It started in November of 1980, when some districts...state senatorial districts in the Western part of Massachusetts had a local referenda on the freeze that was very popular. This led to several other states, local activists in several other states heard about the Western Massachusetts referenda and thought, oh, that would be a good idea, we can do that here. And in early 1981, there were a few town meetings in New Hampshire and Vermont. By early 1982, it was on the agenda in every town meeting. So, during the course of that year, between the beginning of '81 and the beginning of '82, the local peace activists in New Hampshire and Vermont had gotten it onto the agenda, had sent around petitions and so on and so forth. So, there were these really very complete statewide grassroots level discussions. In the meantime, it had -- there was a process under way of collecting petition signatures in California where there were many thousands of petition signatures required even to get it an the ballot. So, first, there was the drive to get the signatures, to get the question an the ballot and then there was the drive for a yes vote an the ballot question on the freeze which came up in 1982 when we had the national elections in the fall of 1982. So, there was a sort of spreading out process that started with just a handful of people and then went to a few peace groups and then went to their few hundred local chapters. And then at that point it sort of made a transformation and it wasn't...it became not just a peace movement, it became a popular movement at the grassroots level that was drawing in and being implemented by people who had never been activists before.