Lessons from the Anti-nuclear Movement of the 1980s

In an era of polycrisis and realignment, what can we learn from the successes of the European peace movement in the 1980s? Martin Shaw argues for a new security politics of the left that mobilises citizens, civil society and parties to link peace, politics and democracy for a Europe whole, free and equal.

Forty years ago, in the spring of 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union, and the nuclear tension of the Second Cold War – which had terrified Europe and the world during the first half of the decade – began to dissipate, as he took the initiatives which culminated in his agreement with Ronald Reagan in 1987. Two years after that, the Berlin Wall was breached and the end of the Cold War was proclaimed.

US ideologues claimed that Reagan’s escalation of the nuclear arms race had brought the USSR to heel. However, the truth is that it was a victory for European citizens and activists who had fought for five years against NATO’s 1979 decision to introduce cruise and Pershing II missiles into five countries – the UK, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium – and democratic protestors in Eastern Europe.

Now that the ‘post-Cold War’ era has itself been pronounced dead, one could be forgiven for thinking that revisiting the peace movement is an exercise in nostalgia. Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship has eclipsed Gorbachev’s memory and Donald Trump makes Reagan’s version of right-wing reaction seem almost quaint. Trump ditched the Gorbachev-Reagan Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty during his first term; his rapprochement with Putin promises a new global authoritarianism, not a democratic peace.

Yet in writing my new history of The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (Agenda Publishing), I found much that is relevant to our daunting new challenges. Although my focus is primarily British, it covers far more than the eponymous CND, including the direct actionists and the Committee of 100 in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, the Greenham women’s peace camp in the 1980s, and more recent nonviolent direct action (NVDA) campaigns like Trident Ploughshares. And I conclude that the British movement was more successful in the ‘80s than in the earlier period, largely because it was part of a well-networked movement across the continent, partly coordinated by European Nuclear Disarmament (END), which originated in this country.

There was more to it than that, of course: END had achievable short-term objectives, to stop the Euromissiles being installed, rather than the maximal idea of unilaterally ending British nuclear weapons which drove the first wave of CND. And its larger vision of ending the Cold War, however idealistic it seemed in 1979, came to chime with new geopolitical realities once Gorbachev decided to seek a big rapprochement with the West. Although those realities appear very different today, we should learn from the ‘80s that they can change very rapidly and it is important to know what we are striving for, even if the short term looks very unpromising.

Europeanising security culture

One similarity is that we start once again from a position where Europe is squeezed between Russia and the United States. END’s big idea was that we should start to think and act as members of a united Europe, independently of the two superpowers, even though the continent remained divided by the Cold War. Today, Europe is institutionally more united, and security thinking is converging on the idea that Europe must be more independent of the United States. That is actually an advance on 1979, when many European governments were desperate to hang on to the Americans’ apron strings – the idea of installing cruise missiles actually came from leaders like Germany’s Helmut Schmidt.

Today, there are of course still many leaders, Keir Starmer foremost among them, who set great store by maintaining cooperation with the United States despite Trump’s manifest unreliability. And there are those in the governments of Germany, Poland and elsewhere who are entertaining nuclear fantasies, both of new ‘independent deterrents’ and of Europeanising French and British nuclear weapons. At the same time, many leaders share Trumpian ideas like defying the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu – not to mention that some, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Slovakia’s Robert Fico, are sidling up to Putin too.

This feebleness of the new official European security consensus is underlined by the fragility of the political order across the continent, with many countries facing the threat of far-right governments coming to power within the next few years. But far from negating the possibility of a new security politics from below, these dangers underline the need once more for independent citizens’ movements demanding a consistent non-nuclear and pan-European security response to the threats from both Russia and the United States.

A new campaign will not, of course, be a carbon copy of the old. In many ways the challenges are steeper: Putin’s aggression in Ukraine is far worse than anything the USSR did, and the prospects of independent citizen activism in Russia, and hence of reviving the ‘80s ‘across the blocs’ approach, are minimal in the short term. The Trump broligarchs’ subversion of online media is also a new type of threat, as is Russian cyberwarfare. The new security politics must address these issues, and it may not centre as much on nuclear weapons as it did before.

The UK and a new European security politics

Nevertheless, there are lessons from the antinuclear movements. A consistent source of difficulty that I tracked across the decades was the question of NATO. CND didn’t originally oppose the alliance, but it adopted a policy of withdrawal very early, in 1960, to which it has clung doggedly ever since. This caused problems in the ‘80s, when it threatened to cut across the priority for European-wide action against cruise missiles. The Alternative Defence Commission proposed instead a ‘conditional NATO option’, in which the UK would stay in NATO while taking steps towards non-nuclear defence. Both Labour, in that period, and the Scottish National Party, when it was pursuing independence before 2014, ended up in taking similar positions.

The politics of NATO today are different. On the one hand, after Ukraine, the necessity of collective European defence is almost universally accepted, and the idea of the UK going it alone, or relying on a loose global non-aligned bloc as some in the early CND envisaged, seems a political non-starter. On the other, the idea that NATO as it exists, at the mercy of Trump’s whims, is fit for purpose, is obviously flawed. There is momentum behind the idea of a new European approach to security, and it is urgent that citizen action helps steer it in a better direction than it will it take if left to Starmer, Macron and Merz.

Here the big idea of END’s 1980 appeal, drafted by EP Thompson, the need to link peace politics and democracy, can provide inspiration. Peace and security can only be guaranteed when societies are free and equal. Perhaps we need a new appeal by concerned citizens, parties and collectives across the continent, for a policy of ‘defensive defence’ which is linked to a vision of a progressive Europe. This should link defence to social welfare, climate action, international law, political liberty, migrant and gender rights, and express solidarity with Gaza as well as Ukraine. This could be initially a British initiative, since here the government is particularly compromised by the US alliance, and there is the additional dynamic of reorientation to the EU with which we can work.

Unless a new security politics of the left gains momentum, there is a real danger that the new European security agenda will amount to no more than increased militarisation, diverting state spending from social to military purposes, with investment in the transnational military industries which are mostly centred in the United States. Palestine will be sacrificed, Ukraine will continue to be dependent on a fickle and treacherous Donald Trump, and the far right will be encouraged.

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Martin Shaw is emeritus professor of international relations and politics at the University of Sussex and research professor at IBEI, Barcelona. After writing The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, he began writing The New Age of Genocide: Political and Intellectual Challenges after Gaza, which will be published by Agenda on 07 October 2025.

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The views and opinions expressed in posts on the Rethinking Security blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the network and its broader membership.

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Image Credit: Flickr. CND Protest against visit of President Reagan to the UK, Trafalgar Square, London, June 1984.