ABSTRACT
From the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, Cold War relations deteriorated sharply. The two superpowers became confrontational on many fronts, including a mutual boycott of the Olympics, and the nuclear arms race suddenly ramped up. The nuclear freeze campaign, which started in America as a broad, inter-class, mix-gendered, grassroots mobilization, deeply impacted Western society and culture. Then, an American arms control activist named Randall Forsberg elaborated on the nuclear freeze idea in an influential pamphlet that she co-authored under the title The Price of Defense, and later in a feature article published in Scientific American. In sum, despite the different political contexts in which European anti-nuclear activists worked, their public positions had numerous points in common, including a shared and open dissatisfaction with arms control initiatives proposed by the US and an "advocacy of some form of nuclear freeze.".
