Nuclear Freeze in a Cold War

For good or ill, the 1980s are back. On the hit show The Americans (2013–), two Soviet spies steal U.S. state secrets, President Donald J. Trump conjures nuclear images when he warns of fire and fury over the Asian peninsula, and allegations of Russian collusion in the 2016 election have sparked a third Cold War. In this breezy, accessible book, William M. Knoblauch takes us back to the early 1980s, when fears of nuclear war that had lain dormant for two decades returned with a vengeance. With the collapse of détente and the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, the arms race intensified, and members of the administration began to speak of the possibility of a limited, winnable nuclear war. In response, a national movement made a simple and powerful demand: both the United States and the Soviet Union could stop the madness by “freezing” the arms race in place. To win support for the proposal, activists circulated visions of just how catastrophic a nuclear confrontation between the two superpowers would be. In best-selling works such as Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth (1982), in Carl Sagan's writings on nuclear winter that bridged the divide between expert and lay audiences, and in the ABC made-for-TV movie The Day After (1983), what Knoblauch calls “cultural activists” who explored the biosocial, environmental, and epidemiological consequences of a war that, in their view, must never come to pass

Administration (probate law · Arms race · Cold war · Economic history · Nuclear weapon · Political science · Politics · American Environmental and Regional History · American Political and Social Dynamics · History · Law · Research, Science, and Academia