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 [PAUSE AND RESTART] 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 50s, EARLY 60s 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 70s?

I think that there were some long-term historical swings. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, 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 1960s. 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 1970s 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 1970s 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 '81, 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 and 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 20,000 or 30,000 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 5,000 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.

IS IT FAIR TO SAY THAT IF YOU WERE SIMPLY A READER OF NEWSPAPERS AND NOT A PARTICIPANT THAT UP UNTIL SOME TIME IN '82, YOU MIGHT HAVE READ A GREAT DEAL OR SEEN ON YOUR TELEVISION SETS A GREAT DEAL ABOUT A VERY VIBRANT PEACE MOVEMENT IN WESTERN EUROPE, BUT ALMOST NOTHING ABOUT A PEACE MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES. SOMETHING...AT SOME POINT IN THERE, THAT CHANGES.

A really extraordinary thing happened with the freeze movement. There was a grassroots process going on throughout 1980 and 1981, spreading the message, collecting petition signatures, invigorating people, drawing in new activists, getting new blood, involving people, motivating people and yet there was nothing reported in the national media. It was a dead, dead silence. And suddenly there burst on the scene the fact that there was a big movement out there, a counterpart to the movement that had been growing in Europe in 1980 and 1981. There was an American counterpart. It wasn't a vacuum. And when that happened was basically in February of 1982. Senator Kennedy and Representative Markey from Massachusetts, which was the home of the freeze movement, but by that time not its only source of strength, had heard a goad deal from their local constituents about why they ought to be supporting a freeze and getting up and doing something about it in Congress. And they made a decision in January of 1982 to introduce a freeze resolution in Congress and to hold a press conference announcing that they were going to introduce a freeze resolution and to round up Congressional and Senatorial co-sponsors of the freeze resolution. Up to that time, the freeze campaign had deliberately had a grass roots strategy of not going directly to Washington and appealing in a lobbying way to individual members of the House and Senate for their endorsement. What we did was we suggested that in each state and in each Congressional District those people who supported the freeze, should go to their own members of Congress when they got strong enough and they were ready to do that and tried to get them to support the freeze. So, we were sort of taking it from the ground up. And in January of 1982, we had something like 20 House sponsors and three Senate sponsors. And Kennedy and Markey got their staffs to get behind a joint House-Senate. Democratic/Republican resolution and they got Senator Hatfield, who's against the arms race to support it on the Republican side and a Congressman from Iowa to support it in the House, who was on the Republican side. And they rounded up, in the space of two weeks, something like 150 members of the House and 20 members of the Senate, who were the initial charter endorser of the freeze resolution, which was then announced at a press conference at American University on, I think, February 10th or February 20th, in 1982. At which I was present and Randy Kehler, and a number of the other national freeze leaders. And there was a big press coverage. And all of a sudden people started asking, we had brought with us a map of the United States and we had a pin -- a dot for every freeze -- every major freeze center around the country. We had a little code showing the different kinds of activities that people were doing. So suddenly, the national media was exposed to this grassroots movement, which had been there and had been building all along, but had been ignored. And on national network news and national newspapers and wire services, local freeze activities had been going on before, unreported, suddenly began to be reported in a big way.

WAS THERE ANY FEAR INSIDE THE PEACE MOVEMENT THAT THIS COULD LEAD TO THE KIND OF GRASSROOTS ORGANIZING BEING CO-OPTED?

There was some fear that when the House and Senate started talking about a freeze, especially a freeze resolution that they would say that they would give lip service to the idea of a freeze and say, We support a freeze, this would undercut the grassroots movement. People would stop working for the freeze and we wouldn't get any real change out of it. There was that kind of fear in the peace movement. I don't have anything to say about that.

IT WAS AROUND THIS TIME, OR MAYBE MY TIME MIGHT BE WRONG, WHEN THE ADMINISTRATION IS STARTING TO SAY QUITE OPENLY AND PUBLICLY THAT THE FREEZE IS CERTAINLY BEING HELPED BY, IF NOT EVEN ORGANIZED BY, REPRESENTATIVES OF THE SOVIET BLOC COUNTRIES. YOU GET FOR THE FIRST TIME -- FOR YEARS IN THE UNITED STATES, AS I RECALL -- A LITTLE BIT OF RED BAITING. DO YOU RECALL THAT AT ALL?

Yes. I think that's such a small part of the story, I'm really not thrilled about doing it again.

I GUESS WHAT INTERESTS ME ABOUT IT AND MAYBE THIS IS THE WAY TO ASK IT, THAT IT WAS SO UNCHARACTERISTIC OF THE TIME AND UNCHARACTERISTIC OF THIS ERA OF REAGAN, THAT I WONDER IF IT SPEAKS TO THE DEPTH OF THE CONCERN ON THE PART OF THE ADMINISTRATION AT THIS POINT FOR THE FREEZE MOVEMENT. MAYBE ANOTHER WAY OF ASKING THAT IS, YOU KNOW, WHAT ARE YOU...WHAT KIND OF IMPACT DO YOU THINK THIS WAS HAVING ON THE ADMINISTRATION?

When the freeze movement began to get in the media, the administration immediately reacted in a very negative way. A freeze was a bad idea. The freeze movement must be communist inspired. Where did this movement come from? There was no way that we could do this technically. It wouldn't be a good idea for the country any way and Reagan tried to upstage the freeze movement by saying at one and the same time this concept of stopping the production of nuclear weapons was too ambitious. And also it wasn't ambitious enough. We should try to get rid of nuclear weapons. We should have deep cuts in nuclear weapons. He also misrepresented the freeze by saying we wanted to freeze where we are and that's a kind of number concept, like we should stop with the current numbers and keep them. And he wanted to cut numbers. But, in fact, that put the whole thing backwards. What we wanted to do was to freeze or stop or halt production of new types of nuclear weapons and then go on to reductions. Of course, we didn't want to keep what we had. Whereas, Reagan wanted to make token reductions, but allow all the new types to continue being developed and produced, which was within the traditional arms control framework that you sort of fit around...numbers around, like a glove around the production of new types of weapons. So, they misrepresented the movement. They said it was too ambitious. They said it wasn't ambitious enough. They said it must come from the Soviet Union. They couldn't imagine where it came from in the United States. And they really pulled out all the stops in terms of top administration spokesmen coming out and slamming this movement and its goals and its motivations and its technology, its sort...take on technology. That was went on all during 1982. And the freeze movement kept growing and that I think is what led to Reagan pulling out SDI, suddenly out of his back pocket, with no preparation, no technical support, no sounding out the administration or the scientific community in 1983. It was because these various reactions in 1982 just hadn't anything to dampen the movement and it was still growing.

I'M GOING TO TALK TO MEMBERS OF CONGRESS AND ALSO TO SOME STAFFERS ABOUT HOW THAT...HOW THE FREEZE MOVEMENT, YOU KNOW, WORKED ITS WAY THROUGH CONGRESS AND WHAT HAPPENED THERE. BUT DO YOU HAVE ANY REFLECTIONS UPON THAT IN ADDITION TO WHAT YOU SAID?

Yes. But I have to just think through the timing a little bit. In August of 1982, the freeze resolution did come to a vote in the House. It had been introduced in February or March in both houses, it didn't come to a vote in the Senate, because the Senate was controlled by the Republicans. But in the House controlled by Democrats, it was brought to a vote and a really extraordinary thing happened. It got a tie vote. And then two Republicans went and changed their vote so that it would lose. That's what happened to the freeze. In the space of six months, in 1982, we went from a nation which had never talked about ending the production of nuclear weapons, to a nation where we almost had the House on record supporting it. A new freeze resolution was introduced in Congress in both Houses, a sort of slightly revised version, was introduced in both Houses in the spring of 1983 and in between we had had the 1982 elections, where many Congressional races were affected by the freeze, freeze activists at the local level. And we had had the freeze referenda, which had been overwhelmingly successful. And this impact on the 1982 elections and the referenda clearly showed up in the House reaction to the freeze in 1983, where it was brought to a vote again in May and won by an overwhelming majority. The really devastating thing was that three weeks later, there was there was a vote for the MX missile, which won by an equally large majority. And this just tore up the freeze movement. People felt, what does this Congressional resolution supporting the freeze mean, if the same people who voted in favor of a resolution calling on the President to negotiate a freeze with the Soviets could also vote for a counterforce, first-strike-vulnerable ICBM, which had no role in second-strike deterrence, but was purely a war-fighting system. That must mean that Congressional support of the freeze was just lip service. It was hollow. It was sort of a salve to the movement and it really didn't have any conviction behind it. And the great problem that the freeze movement then faced in the rest of 1983, the second half of 1983 and '84 was how to deal with this hallow quality of the response in Washington.

THIS WAS REAGAN'S GAME, THOUGH, WASN'T IT, ALWAYS TO SAY IF YOU VOTE FOR WHATEVER PEACE INITIATIVE, WHATEVER HE WANTED FOR HIS DEFENSE BUDGET, THAT WILL GIVE ME THE TOOLS I NEED TO NEGOTIATE FROM A POSITION OF WHATEVER WITH THE SOVIETS FOR SOME KIND OF RESOLUTION OF THIS WHOLE ISSUE.

There's no doubt that we experienced between 1980 and 1984 one of the tragedies of the modern era that foreign policy which is, especially in the area of weapons and especially nuclear weapons, is a matter of great concern to all and should be reflected...it should have positions reflected in Congress and, yet, because it involves negotiations with other countries, it lies so narrowly in the hands of the administration and the President that it's virtually beyond the capability of the Congress to make a major change in direction in the nuclear area over the head of the President. The Congress really, because of the nature of international negotiations -- the Congress really does have to defer to the President and it puts us all in a terrible bind if we don't have a good president on this issue.

REAGAN'S RHETORIC SHIFTS IN JANUARY OF '84, PROBABLY IN PREPARATION FOR THE '84 ELECTIONS. DOES THE FREEZE HAVE...TAKE CREDIT FOR THAT?

Reagan reacted in two big ways to the freeze movement. The first was to pull out the SDI proposal out of nowhere and the second was to start negotiating with the Soviets, which was one of the main things that the freeze movement wanted. After three or four years of saying the Soviet Union is an evil empire, we can't trust them, we can't negotiate with them, we won't negotiate with them, we don't need to negotiate with them, it's not a problem, all of a sudden the rhetoric started changing. The SDI proposal came out in 1983 and early 1984 Reagan started talking about the importance of arms-control negotiations. And I think that one of the lasting impacts of the freeze movement which will never go away is that we will never have another presidency in the United States like the early years of the Reagan administration. There will never be another president who will say we don't need arms-control negotiations. We can do without it. We don't have to talk to the Soviets. I think that Reagan tried that and lost. And he found that that is not an acceptable position to the American public. So, he started talking about arms control and eventually he started doing something about arms control and moving his own administration away from the more right-wing individuals who remained adamantly against any kind of limits on our weapons systems and any kind of agreements with the Soviets and favoring the more moderate members like Shultz who thought that arms control was a reasonable and desirable proposition and that we ought to work for reasonable agreements.

DOES THE FREEZE HAVE A ROLE IN THE '84 ELECTION?

The freeze movement succeeded in getting lip service to the freeze from the politicians in the '84 election. The freeze movement had an important impact to the 1984 election in one sense, we got lip service to the freeze concept from all of the leading Democratic candidates, from the Democratic Party. Even the Republican Convention passed a resolution supporting the freeze. The freeze movement also had some...an important impact on certain congressional elections in 1984, but where the movement failed, I think, was in not really bringing the issue of stopping the arms race to the forefront of the agenda in the Presidential race. And, in fact, I don't see this as a failure of the nuclear freeze movement. I think it was a failure of the Democratic Party, which had the opportunity to make stopping and reversing the nuclear arms race a major issue in 1984 with President Reagan, because of the fact that Reagan had been so adamantly against the freeze and had failed himself to rise to the needs in the arms-control area in the first part of his administration. And leadership of the Democratic Party continued to be...to take the advice of traditional arms-control experts who oppose the freeze, said that it was unworkable and undesirable and that we should continue modernizing. We should continue the bipartisan policy of modernizing nuclear weapons, meaning beef up their war-fighting capabilities. So, that meant that there was no deep issue dividing any of the leading Democratic candidates from the Reagan administration, and it was a none issue, so we had this huge movement with no expression in the political arena, no reflection of the alternatives desired and demanded by this movement in the political arena. And that was the failure of the freeze to achieve its goal and it was the failure of the political system to respond to the opportunity and demands represented by the freeze movement.

YOU SAID EARLIER THE FREEZE CONTINUES AS A MOVEMENT TO SOME EXTENT.

Yes.

BUT AS A MASS...AS SOMETHING WHICH RESONATES WITH GREAT POPULARITY AMONG THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, IT SEEMS TO ME THAT SDI HAS AS MUCH SUPPORT. I MEAN, THE IDEA IS THAT PRESIDENT REAGAN'S STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE IS ALSO IMMENSELY POPULAR WITH PEOPLE. DID HE KIND OF COOPT THE GROUND, DID HE KIND OF SEIZE THE HIGH MORAL GROUND BY TALKING ABOUT DEFENSE HERE?

Well, in the question of what happened to the freeze movement after 1984, I think that there are three important parts of the answer. It's true that the freeze movement was somewhat pacified by the claims of the president that he wanted to work to abolish nuclear weapons or to free us from fear of nuclear war by providing a defense. And this seemed to respond...the SDI program seemed to respond to the freeze movement's fears and concerns and demands to a great extent. I think it's notable, however, in looking at that, part of what happened that there has been no popular SDI movement. You won't find any grassroots groups out there supporting the SDI and calling on Congress to spend more money and to resist the claims of the left that this won't work and this is a boondoggle. I mean, yes, sure, people would like to be defended. They'd like to get out from under the threat of nuclear war. But I think that in a deep and not very clearly articulated way, the bulk of the American public remains skeptical that SDI will work, that we can have a defense. The lessons I think that we learned in the late 1960s that there...ultimately there is no defense against nuclear war. I think that those lessons have been very internalized by the American people. Not that people are aware. People are not aware that we have no defense. They...first of all, they think we already must have some defenses. And when you tell them that we don't have, but we want to get some, they agree. Yes, if we don't have some, we should certainly get them. But then if you have other experts come in and say but when you think about it, it's really not going to work for a variety of reasons, we can't get all the missiles. There are not only missiles, there are aircraft. If you take them off aircraft, you can put them on barges and put them into cities. Actually, you literally can ship in nuclear weapons in cartons and have them explode in air terminals. I mean, you can't stop the penetration of nuclear weapons ultimately. And I think that that's something that, as soon as they hear that kind of argument, people understand that. So, it's not as though people have embraced SDI and made it a part of their conviction of what we need, should have and can have for the future.

LET'S COME TO THE PRESENT. ESSENTIALLY, SO FAR AS I CAN TELL, THE PEACE MOVEMENT IS DEAD.

People think that after the 1984 election, the freeze movement disappeared, the peace movement is dead, it all sort of went back into the woodwork and there wasn't any peace movement any more. They don't realize that another lasting impact of the freeze movement was to change the nature of the peace in the United States forever. Before the freeze in the late 1970s there were a few hundred, mostly pacifist, peace groups around the country. After the freeze, today, in 1986...this is an older edition, we're putting out a 1988 edition... there are 5,000 local peace groups, around the country. This is...goes state by state and lists all the peace groups in the country. This is in 1986. Actually, this was a 1986 edition. In the 1988 edition, there are going to be 7,000 local peace groups listed. So, the freeze movement has, in fact, institutionalized the peace movement in a way. There are now grassroots groups in cities and towns throughout the United States. They're not out marching in the streets. They're not, by and large, getting in front of television cameras, although we do see them here and there, sort of sitting down in front of trains or going to Central America or bashing a nuclear warhead or something. We see few in the media. But what they're doing is changing their children's education, talking with their members of Congress, discussing foreign policy and arms control in churches. There's a sort of self-education process and a local deepening of activist commitment and understanding and outreach in the local communities that is going on right now around the United States in exactly the same way that happened in the early days of the freeze movement in 1980 and 1981, when because there was no news in the national media, people thought there was no movement; when, in fact, there was this vast movement percolating out there. So, today, there is a vast movement percolating out there. It's not a half a million people in Central Park. It's not half a million people surrounding the Pentagon. But it is half a million people who are preparing, who are talking and thinking about, and preparing for what will become the next major wave of the peace movement in the United States. In the past, when we had waves of the peace movement, that was only at a time of crisis, when there was radioactive fallout in the atmosphere or when we were in a war with body bags coming home. Now, we're in a new situation where there is going to be, there is the ground work for, and we are going to see the products of a peace movement that exists in peacetime, which is concerned with changing the direction of the permanent peacetime policy of the United States in a new and more constructive way. And, which right now is concerning itself with talking about what those changes could be, sort of beyond the freeze. It's not less than the freeze, it's what is the freeze part of a larger vision of...what kind of world might there be out there. If we began restructuring at a deeper level, if we look at military spending, if we look at the conventional situation in Europe, if we look at relations with the Soviets, as well as the nuclear arms race, if we take sort of the whole ball of wax, and not just nuclear-war-fighting systems. And we try to define a different world, what might that world look like. And I think that when the next wave of what was the freeze movement comes along it's going to be a much more informed, much more thoughtful movement, which won't be deflected by lip service. Because that's the ground work that's being laid right now. [PAUSE AND RESTART] Most people think that the freeze movement ceased to exist in 1984, after the election when Reagan was re-elected. In fact, just the opposite is true. One of the major and lasting impacts of the nuclear freeze movement has been to institutionalize the peace movement in the United States. In the late 1970s there were a few hundred local peace groups around the country, mostly pacifist groups. In 1986, we put out a directory of peace groups, which contains the addresses and telephone numbers of 5,000 groups listed state by state in every state, every part of the country with their local contacts; their congressional districts and so on and so forth. In 1988, we're going to be putting out an updated edition, which we're sending to the printer next week. It contains over 7,000 local peace groups in it. So, there is a new environment for the peace movement in the United States and what these groups are doing is not getting out in the streets, marching in a demonstration, carrying banners, sitting in at the Pentagon, demonstrating in Central Park. What they're doing is educational programs in their communities, in the high schools for their children, even at the grade school level; self-education groups in churches and community centers; coffee circles, reaching out to their friends. And people are engaged in looking at why didn't the freeze work, why didn't we get further in terms of...it worked as a movement, but why didn't it work in terms of ending the arms race. What is the larger context of US-Soviet relations? What can we do about the way in which our country and the Soviet Union and the Europeans have relied on nuclear weapons to avoid conventional war? What can we do about the level of military spending which has gone up 50 percent under President Reagan, which is historically unprecedented for a country in peacetime? So, there is a whole complicated set of questions that are being discussed at the grassroots level in preparation for a new wave of the peace movement. And what that means is that when we have the next wave of focused activity in a particular issue in Washington for legislation, it's going to grow out of a much more informed, dedicated, cohesive movement. Not a movement like the original freeze which suddenly came out of nothing with no background and no experience. The next time around, we're going to be experienced people who know what they're talking about, who can't be deflected by lip service, let's say like lip service to the freeze, who will stick to their guns and insist on legislation and administrative action that corresponds to their demands and not just words and rhetoric.

WHEN YOU'RE DEALING WITH AN IMPLACABLE ENEMY BENT ON WORLD DOMINATION, I MEAN, WHAT CAN YOU REALLY DO FOR PEACE IN A SITUATION LIKE THAT OR WOULD YOU NOT ACCEPT THAT CHARACTERIZATION OF THE SOVIET UNION?

The fact that Gorbachev has made so many new openings for arms control, has undertaken so many initiatives with the test-ban moratorium. He's made an offer for a flight-testing moratorium. He's made offers for deep cuts in forces, in conventional forces in Europe. He's offered 50 percent reductions in strategic nuclear forces, so he's made both unilateral moratoria and unilateral initiatives and also offers for bilateral negotiations and bilateral agreements. All...what all this adds up to is the United States has more opportunities to move forward in this area, as long as Gorbachev is in charge, than we've ever had in the entire post-war period before, from the Soviet point of view.

LET ME ASK YOU TWO QUESTIONS, KIND OF ASSESSING REAGAN'S LEGACY, LOOKING BACK ON IT AS IF IT WERE OVER, WHICH IT VIRTUALLY IS. AND ONE IS WITH SDI, STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE. IT SEEMS LIKE A MORALLY REASONABLE POSITION TO SAY THAT WE HAVE THE RIGHT AND OBLIGATION TO DEFEND OURSELVES. WE'RE NOT TRYING TO HURT ANYBODY, WE JUST WANT TO PROTECT OURSELVES AND OUR CITIZENS. WHAT'S WRONG WITH THAT SIMPLE IDEA?

The problem with SDI and the concept of defense against nuclear war arises out of the fact that nuclear weapons are so powerful, so you only need a very few, and even relatively small ones to kill millions and tens of millions of people. And this is the opposite of traditional warfare. In traditional warfare, if you get 90 percent or 95 percent of what's coming in or even a smaller proportion, that will be sufficient to survive and to win and to carry on. In the case of nuclear weapons, even if you get 99 percent, one percent is enough. In fact, in today's world, one-tenth of one percent of all the US and Soviet nuclear weapons could wipe out every major city in the Northern Hemisphere, one-tenth of one percent. So, you have to have a virtually perfect defense and we all know from technological problems in daily life with cars and can openers, let alone, you know, missiles and air traffic control systems, that you don't get that kind of perfection. That's the first problem with SDI. The second problem is that SDI is only designed to defend against one type of nuclear weapon system, ballistic missiles, which are like rockets that go up into outer space and then come back down. Well, there are a zillion other types of nuclear weapon systems. There are nuclear weapons put on airplanes. There are nuclear weapons on cruise missiles, which are little, like little unmanned airplanes that fly very low, close to the ground and can come in below the range at which radar can detect them, sneak in. There are nuclear weapons on ships, on submarines. You could put nuclear weapons on barges. You could put them in the postal service. You could send a heavy package with a nuclear bomb in it...and into a postal-receiving area in a big city and that would be the end of, you know, half of that city. So, even if we should get a relatively effective way of intercepting ballistic missiles, first of all, it wouldn't be effective enough and second of all, there are all these other ways of getting nuclear weapons in and only a very few nuclear weapons are all that we need to destroy our large cities and kill tens of millions of people. So, the whole concept of defense against nuclear weapons is one, which in its very basic and simple elements doesn't work. It's not a complicated matter for physicists to talk about how many ballistic missiles can you intercept on their way up and out in space and can you fool the defenses and this and that. I mean, they can argue about that all they want to and we can go ahead and spend tens of billions and even up to hundreds of billions of dollars developing and building a system that will intercept some proportion of ballistic missiles. But in the final analysis, however much they argue and however much money we do or don't throw away on this, we will not be able to defend our country against nuclear weapons. They're too small and they're too devastating and they can be introduced in too many ways. And the only way to avoid a nuclear war is to negotiate, to keep up good relations and to reduce nuclear weapons. We cannot, unfortunately, we cannot defend against them.

ALTHOUGH IT WOULD BE A TRAGEDY OF MAJOR PROPORTIONS, I MEAN, COULDN'T, IN FACT, WE SURVIVE AND RECUPERATE FROM EVEN THE LOSS OF TENS OF BILLIONS OF PEOPLE? THE SOVIET UNION LOST 20 MILLION DURING WORLD WAR II AND EMERGED MORE POWERFUL THAN THE BEGINNING OF THE WAR.

This is very hard for me to deal with. A nuclear war would be unlike any war in history. In World War II there were several very large cities destroyed by fire bombing and two cities destroyed by nuclear weapons. There were millions of people killed in gas chambers and there were millions of people killed on the battlefield. But what we would see if only a small number, some tens or a hundred or two out of the 50,000 nuclear weapons were exploded in cities, we would see the death of 100, 150 million people. There isn't any historical precedent for this. We don't know at what level of nuclear war how many hundreds or how many thousands or tens of thousands of nuclear weapons would result not merely in eliminating our culture, our government, our civilization, our economy, but our species. We don't know where that level is. Whether it's some thousands or some tens of thousands, what would happen in terms of nuclear winter, in terms of darkening the sky, in terms of radioactive fallout, in terms of the food chain. What we do know is that even in a very small nuclear war, everything that has been built up over several thousand year's of civilization would be gone and we would be living in the stone age. So, our range of choices, our range of outcomes in a nuclear war at the lower end of the range, it's going back to the stone age, to sort of agriculture, hunting and gathering economies. And at the higher end of the range, it's eliminating the species. And we cannot develop any defenses that can change those basic outcomes of a nuclear war because of the fact that a small number of nuclear weapons have such enormous devastating capability and can be introduced into countries in so many different means of transportation that we simply can't get them all.

OKAY WE'VE DEALT WITH SDI. IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE, IN TERMS OF ASSESSING THE REAGAN YEARS...I MEAN, WHEN PEOPLE LOOK BACK, RANDY, IN 20 YEARS AND LOOK AT THIS ERA, WHAT LESSONS ARE THEY GOING TO TAKE FROM IT, OTHER THAN WHAT WE'VE ALREADY TALKED ABOUT?

A truly remarkable thing happened in the 1980s. We began the decade with an administration that was uninterested in arms control, that was adamant about not talking to the Soviets. We're ending the decade with an administration which is not only talking to the Soviets, but has concluded the first treaty that is going to eliminate a whole class of nuclear weapons, recently deployed, new types of nuclear weapons. A remarkable thing happened in the 1980s. We began the decade with an administration that was that was adamantly against talking to the Soviet Union about arms control. The first and only administration since the early 1950s of which that could be said. We ended the decade in just the opposite way with the first US-Soviet arms control treaty that eliminates a whole class of recently deployed, modern technology nuclear weapons. What happened between 1981 and 1988, what intervened to bring about this transformation was the nuclear freeze movement. And the other really remarkable thing about the decade is that the nuclear freeze movement was at its height when we were at the worst of the Reagan rhetoric against the Soviet Union. And as the nuclear freeze movement became demoralized and stopped being publicly very active and putting a lot of lobbying pressure and demonstration pressure on Washington. That was just the period when the Reagan Administration started reacting...showing the impact of the anti-nuclear movement in the United States and the anti-nuclear movement in Europe, going back to the bargaining table with the Soviets, concluding that it was not possible to come out of this second administration successfully, as a president, as a legacy or as a Republican Party going into a new presidential election without an arms control agreement. So, we have two really remarkable things and the Reagan Administration turning around 180 degree about face, and yet the correlation with the peace movement was like the timing was exactly the opposite, although it's understandable in retrospect that it was an impact of the nuclear freeze movement, that this administration did respond, that it found that it was not able -- it was not acceptable to the American public not to talk to the Soviets, not to pursue bilateral arms control. But it didn't sort of come around to fulfilling that premise, to being backed in a corner and then having to act on it until the time when the nuclear freeze movement had thought it had lost and appeared to have gone home, which is a really ironic conclusion for the decade.