December 12, 2012

Standing on the threshold: banning nuclear weapons

"On the 25th anniversary of the first real disarmament agreement of the Cold War, Rebecca Johnson looks back at how the 'people to people' and 'women to women' peace campaigns helped to reframe Europe as our shared home rather than the divided and militarised Cold War blocs."

"Twenty-five years ago, on 8 December 1987, the Presidents of the United States and Soviet Union met in Washington to sign a breakthrough treaty to eliminate ground-launched US Cruise and Pershing missiles and Soviet SS20s from Europe. This was not just the usual kind of Cold War arms reduction meant to clear out some obsolete nukes and pave the way for new refinements. The 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was the first real disarmament agreement of the Cold War, resulting in the withdrawal and destruction of 2,000 landbased US and Soviet missiles with ranges between 300 and 3,000 miles. By 1992, all 96 state-of-the-art cruise missiles were removed from the US Airforce base at Greenham Common, Berkshire, as well as 16 that had just been sited at the Molesworth base near Cambridge.

The INF Treaty was finalised in conventional bilateral negotiations, but it reflected deeper political changes and ushered in a very different future than had seemed possible a few years earlier. Among the pressures that brought about this breakthrough disarmament agreement were two kinds of civil society action. Studies by US and Russian scientists that concluded that nuclear war would cause a global “nuclear winter” shocked President Gorbachev into taking the first step; while the US military was being undermined and demoralised by the innovative, persistent, and unquenchable protests of a new generation of women peace activists that grew out of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. Helping to reframe Europe as our shared home rather than the divided and militarised Cold War blocs,  European Nuclear Disarmament (END), ‘people to people’ campaigns and the ‘women to women’ initiatives from Greenham and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) crisscrossed the Iron Curtain, journeying by foot, train and bus from Britain, West Germany, Sweden and elsewhere in Western Europe through the Baltic states or East Germany to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and on to Leningrad and Moscow.

The new thinking and people-based strategies in the resurgent European peace movement were epitomised by actions begun by a handful of women living in the open rain and mud in front of the main gate of the US Airforce Base at Greenham Common. On December 12, 1982, on the third anniversary of the NATO decision to bring the new US missiles into Europe in a “dual track” strategy that confronted the Soviet Union missiles with a “zero option”, 35,000 women answered our call a to come to Greenham and “Embrace the Base”." ...

Read full article here

and visit the excellent archival website: http://www.yourgreenham.co.uk/

Source: Open Democracy, 50:50: http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050
December 8, 2012