Antinuclear Movement

Organized effort to ban the manufacture, testing, and deployment of nuclear weapons, to shut down nuclear power plants, and to protest the disposal of nuclear waste. The first protest against a nuclear weapon occurred in July 1945 in New Mexico after the detonation test of the first atomic bomb during World War II. A small group of scientists from the Manhattan Project, the project responsible for developing the bomb, appealed to President Harry S. Truman to discontinue the mission to build atomic bombs. Although this effort was unsuccessful, several antinuclear groups emerged after the war.

The Antinuclear Weapons Movement

In the aftermath of World War II, the Atomic Scientists of Chicago (mostly scientists from the Manhattan Project), the Federation of Atomic Scientists, and the United World Federalists (a group supporting the United Nations) joined forces to pressure the U.S. government to cease the production of atomic bombs and to educate the public about the dangers of nuclear war. As would happen many times during the Cold War, however, this coalition of antinuclear groups collapsed when increased Soviet aggression caused the United States and its citizens to become preoccupied with the threat of communism and fearful of the Soviet Union.

Antinuclear activity in the United States resurged in 1954 following the U.S. test of a hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll in the central Pacific Ocean. When 23 Japanese fishermen who were exposed to radioactive fallout from the blast suffered from radiation sickness, Americans became alarmed. Concerns about the health effects of radioactive fallout from nuclear tests dominated the news at that time and galvanized citizens in questioning the safety of nuclear testing.

In 1957, upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, the noted missionary doctor and humanitarian Albert [Page 26]Schweitzer urged people around the world to work toward nuclear disarmament. At this time, many popular and influential Americans, including former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, joined the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), which became a leading antinuclear organization.

As SANE grew during the late 1950s and early 1960s, it pressured the U.S. government to enact a comprehensive test ban treaty, which was pursued by Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy with the Soviet Union and Great Britain. When the Limited Test Ban Treaty was ratified in 1963, it was the rallies, demonstrations, picketing, and letter-writing campaigns of thousands of antinuclear activists from SANE, Women Strike for Peace, and other grassroots groups that were instrumental in creating the public outcry necessary to enact change. However, once the treaty reduced fears about fallout from nuclear testing, the public's interest in the antinuclear movement waned.

The next surge in antinuclear activism occurred during the early to mid-1980s. With the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan in 1981, the U.S. public was exposed to his administration's determination to increase the nation's nuclear arsenal. As U.S. relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated during this period, thousands of activists organized the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign (NWFC), a project that culminated in 1982 with the largest peace crusade in the history of the American peace movement. Nuclear freeze proponents advocated a multilateral halt to all nuclear weapons manufacture and testing.

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