The Effect of the Nuclear Freeze Movement and the Need for a Nuclear Abolition Movement Now 

by John M Repp

The chart on the next page shows us the number of nuclear weapons that could be delivered in a first strike. The total amount of weapons was reduced after the Nuclear Freeze campaign of the 1980’s, a mass movement initially organized by Randall Forsberg. On June 12, 1982, the largest peace rally in U.S. history was held in New York as the Second United Nations Special Session on Disarmament was happening. There were approximately a million participants in that rally. The chart looks like a mountain peak with the high point in the early 1980’s. After that there were negotiations between Reagan and Gorbachev, and the numbers came down.

At the October 2025 meeting of Northwest Against Nuclear Weapons, attendees got to experience on Zoom a short talk by Helen Caldicott, https://youtu.be/NHpalgWfxfk?si=nuN_8ip9VurS78Xe followed by some questions and answers. Helen told us some historical facts most people do not know. She was a medical doctor from Australia practicing medicine in America at the time. She and the co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, Ira Helfland, had a talk and decided the buildup of nuclear weapons in the world and the testing of these weapons, what we call the “the nuclear arms race,” was actually a health problem. Helen spoke on the issue in many venues across our country. After her speech in of all places the Playboy Club in Los Angeles, she was approached by Patty Davis, Ronald Reagan’s daughter. Davis asked Helen to talk to her father.

When Helen got to talk to Reagan alone for more than an hour, she convinced him to start meeting with Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union, and the two leaders negotiated the huge decrease in the number of weapons. This was even before the world learned about nuclear winter.

Most of the first above ground nuclear weapon tests were in the desert or on small islands in the Pacific. However if a nuclear weapon were exploded high over a modern city, there would be so much debris and dust than that caused by the first tests, by a factor of thousands, all the dust radioactive, that it would cause that dust to be thrust high into the atmosphere above the stratosphere where the dust would not be pushed around by winds. That dust would block out much of the sunlight for several years, and we would experience a “nuclear winter.” Thousands of men, women and children would die from hunger since agriculture would be disrupted around the world.

In short, we, the nuclear weapons possessing countries, to order to prevent our own suicide, need to start negotiating with each other. We are approaching an important date when the New Start Treaty, the only treaty between the U.S. and the Russian Federation still in force, will expire in February 2026. Most importantly, that treaty allows essential on-site inspections. We need to create a new nuclear abolition movement now, at least as large as the nuclear freeze movement. It was that movement that encouraged Reagan and Gorbachev to negotiate and stop the nuclear arms race. We even got a drawdown. Helen Caldicott told us it was really Gorbachev who made the decrease in the number of weapons happen, but Reagan went along because of a meeting with Helen Caldicott.