In the late 1950s and early 1960s, and then again in the early 1980s, when the US and the Soviet Union were pointing their missiles at each other in Europe, there were mass protests in the streets against governments plotting global annihilation. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was born in the United Kingdom and organized large-scale marches in the heart of the British nuclear weapons establishment in Aldermaston. More than four decades ago, a million Americans gathered in New York’s Central Park to end the arms race and freeze nuclear weapons. In late 1982, more than 30,000 women formed a human chain around Greenham Joint Air Base as an act of resistance to the deployment of US cruise missiles there. In October 1983, the CND organized the largest march on London the city had ever seen. With Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and his repeated threats to use nuclear weapons if his regime felt threatened, the danger is just as real as it was during the Cuban missile crisis or the missile standoff in Europe. This time, there were no mass protests, but there was a popular response that found other channels to express itself. Thousands of women protested at RAF Greenham Common in 1982. Protests continued until 1991, when the last US Cruise missiles were removed. Photo: PA At the forefront of the new movement is the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (Ican), which successfully advocated for a Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) at the UN general assembly, leading to its adoption in 2017. Since then, more than 90 countries have signed the treaty and 68 have ratified it. It hasn’t stopped the US and Russia from upgrading their arsenals and China from pursuing plans to become a third leading nuclear weapons power, but Beatrice Fihn, Ican’s executive director, said the ultimate goal was something more lasting. : the delegitimization of nuclear weapons around the world. “It makes it harder to see what’s going on because maybe you don’t see as many people on the streets,” said Fihn, who received the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize on Ican’s behalf. But he added: “The movement is very much here, and we’re definitely growing and building.” While continuing the work of CND and the nuclear freeze movement, Ican and its 652 partner organizations around the world look to other forms of civil society action for inspiration, including campaigns to ban landmines and cluster munitions , who tried to establish new rules. and redraw the red lines of what is acceptable on the international stage. “We’re trying to undo the brainwashing of accepting nuclear weapons as normal,” Fihn said. The movement’s greatest source of leverage, he argued, was nuclear weapons’ need for legitimacy. “We’re seeing that with Russia right now. They are fighting hard to restore legitimacy around nuclear weapons and their seat on the Security Council and around the narrative of this war. And to me, it’s a sign that they’re vulnerable.” Kate Hudson, the CND’s general secretary, says new members have surged since Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine was launched. “Activism is very much there, but it’s taking new forms and is more fluid than before: the way people understand and act on the connections between issues, politically and in campaign terms,” Hudson said. The nuclear disarmament movement is no longer in a silo of its own, he argued, as it shares common concerns with those fighting to stop the climate crisis or to advocate for social justice in a world where governments are spending huge sums on nuclear stockpiles while poorer people in their society get cold and hungry. Protesters in London demonstrate against the US handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. Photo: Keystone/Getty Images The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement is now framing nuclear disarmament as a social justice issue for many newly recruited activists, making it a much more diverse field. Mari Faines, advocacy fellow at the disarmament advocacy group Global Zero, said BLM has pushed her to see more clearly the “correlation between systems of policing and militarism” and the overlap between the nuclear weapons complex, social justice struggles and other existential threats. “I’m hopeful and hopeful that this new wave of new and different voices coming into this space are thinking about it,” Faines said. “They think about diplomatic responses in a different way. They are reiterating what security could and should look like.” Molly Hurley, who was born in China but adopted by a white American family, said the nuclear disarmament movement was not as open as she thought it was. “The nuclear space is not the most welcoming for young people, for women of color, for anyone of color,” she said. After a few years working for disarmament activist groups, Hurley, who turns 27 in November, started an arts degree in Baltimore. He even made the trip to a nuclear conference in Washington hosted last month by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She explained: “The issues themselves are things I just can’t stop caring about.” As Russia steps up its aggression in Ukraine, a sense of dread and anxiety has spread among Hurley’s friends. To them, he said, it’s just another existential threat over which they have no control. Anti-nuclear activists at a protest in front of the US embassy in Berlin in 2017. Photo: Britta Pedersen/dpa/AFP/Getty Images “One of my friends said to me specifically: I am quite shocked at the prospect of the whole world ending because of the decisions of a few white men whom I will never meet and who will never hear anything I have to say.” he said. Hurley is experimenting with new ways to talk about geopolitical threats. While working on her art degree, she writes a column for the website Inkstick, and her last one was about what the US and China could learn from the enemies-versus-lovers trope in romantic fiction. “You can’t fear your way into a mass movement,” she said, arguing that what has been perceived as apathy in her generation was really a “coping mechanism for hopelessness.” The solution, he argued, was to offer some reasons for hope. “There are things we can do, and we need to clear up all these doable, very specific steps that can be taken.”
