ABSTRACT

The global movement for human rights, which surged during the 1970s, also was a factor in drawing activists away from the antinuclear movement and policymakers away from arms control. As the cause of human rights became more popular in the 1970s, negotiating arms-control agreements with the Soviet Union increasingly became a political liability. While the Port Huron Statement attacked nuclear weapons indirectly, college students occasionally took action against the arms race directly in the late 1960s and early 1970s by protesting the many weapons labs scattered across the nation's universities. George Vesey, reporting on the rally for The New York Times, noted the connections to 1960s movements when he wrote that the gathering of religious activists "revived memories of the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. In the 1980s, feminism would profoundly shape the antinuclear movement by breaking free from the reliance on traditional ideas about gender expressed in the early 1960s.