Description
Book SynopsisIn Freeze!, Henry Richard Maar III chronicles the rise of the transformative and transnational Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. Amid an escalating Cold War that pitted the nuclear arsenal of the United States against that of the Soviet Union, the grassroots peace movement emerged sweeping the nation and uniting people around the world.
The solution for the arms race that the Campaign proposed: a bilateral freeze on the building, testing, and deployment of nuclear weapons on the part of two superpowers of the US and the USSR. That simple but powerful proposition stirred popular sentiment and provoked protest in the streets and on screen from New York City to London to Berlin. Movie stars and scholars, bishops and reverends, governors and congress members, and, ultimately, US President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev took a stand for or against the Freeze proposal.
With the Reagan administration so openly discussing the prospect of winna
Trade Review
Maar's Freeze! skillfully shows the interplay between activists, public opinion, and political leaders, and should put to rest the outdated notion that social movements cannot and do not influence foreign policy. The book is also well-written and eminently useful for college courses on nuclear weapons, foreign policy, and the 1980s.
* Peace & Change *
Maar's important examination of the freeze campaign highlights the challenges of that effort but also the ingredients that brought success to the movement: a clear mobilizing narrative, the development of creative grassroots strategies, and an appeal to moral values in partnership with the religious community.
* Arms Control Association *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Grassroots Diplomacy
1. The Lost Years: The Peace Movement, from Vietnam to Nuclear Freeze
2. Igniting a Movement: The Reagan Administration's War on Peace
3. From the Streets to the Pulpit: The Catholic Challenge to the Arms Race
4. With Friends Like These: Congress and the Nuclear Freeze Debate
5. Envisioning the Day After: Fear of the Bomb in 1980s Political and Popular Culture
6. The Perils of Failed Diplomacy: 1983 and the Year of Living Dangerously
7. Seizing the Peace: The Nuclear Freeze Movement and the 1984 Election
Epilogue: Bedtime for the Bomb
