ABSTRACT
The 1980s will be remembered as the decade in which disarmament and nuclear policy constituted the central issues of the age. From the renaissance enjoyed by peace protest groups to the historic signing of a treaty to abolish medium range missiles, nuclear policy came to dominate political thought and practice. In Britain, the Greenham Common protest came to epitomise peace politics, both for sympathetic supporters and for more hostile observers. Focusing upon an anti-nuclear protest as the ‘object of representation’ for the press also acknowledges the attrition of the century. The encroachment of the millennium entangles with the post-Oppenheimer inability to feel certain of the future, of any future for the world. Heidensohn, dealing with ‘images of women’s deviance’, points out that sociologists have become over-fascinated with the ‘deviant’. Her complaint, however, that the aspect ignored is the production of conformity, provides merely the reverse side to this binary pair, as ‘deviance’ is overturned to highlight ‘conformity’.
