How Did the 1980's Nuclear Freeze Movement Get Shoved Down the Memory Hole?

If the Russians Love Their Children, Too - (2:34 min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocJv8tun6gk

by Steve Sailer • May 15, 2016 https://web.archive.org/web/20180825172546/https://boston.craigslist.org/gbs/pol/d/how-did-the-1980s-nuclear/6680579511.html

One of the more eyebrow-raising examples of media power to control the contents of public thought space is the near disappearance of any recollections of the huge leftist Nuclear Freeze movement of the early Reagan years. “Nuclear Freeze” doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia topic.

Here’s the New York Times’ usage of the phrase “nuclear freeze:”

The phrase “nuclear freeze” hasn’t appeared in the New York Times in the current decade.

“Nuclear freeze” is kind of like “nuclear winter” or other similar not-quite moral panics that we undergo from time to time. Others that I can recall was the “Save the Whales” issue of the 1970′s, the “Ozone Layer” in the ’80′s, the “Save the Rain Forest” of the ’90′s, and so on and so on, not to mention true moral panics like the Satanic Child Care thing in the ’80′s.

It seems like, at any time, there has to be a collective notion of the Hand of Doom about to destroy us, perhaps some kind of primitive throwback to religious or superstitious manias in earlier times (which reminds me: was the “Dancing Mania” anything like Disco?) but which from a sociological standpoint is probably a reflection of collective guilt, shame, sin.

I don’t think the media drives these things. I think they rise up more or less spontaneously. It would be interesting to know that they could be “created” because then political interests could create them at whim. In the case of the “nuclear freeze” however, I don’t think it really helped either party; I know it was aimed at Reagan but clearly no one bought it: except a lot of academicians I knew at the time who were in tears when KAL 007 went down, because they really were convinced that “the bombing will begin in 30 minutes.”

The other point I would stress is that to really get a handle on this whenever you study something in history, you have to hunt down and look at the cultural ephemera. It helps provide a proper context for evaluating actions, and, for that matter, great literature.

Wikipedia had a Nuclear Freeze article from 2004 to 2011.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nuclear_freeze&oldid=423642174

The content was deleted for lack of sources and the page was redirected to “Nuclear disarmament”.



The tv movie 'The Day After' - the nuclear war scene (6:00 min) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VG2aJyIFrA