The Early-‘80s: A Series of Radical and Creative Actions

The urgency of the nuclear abolition movement greatly increased in the late-‘70s and throughout the ‘80s. In 1979, tensions between the US and Soviet Union showed signs of boiling over, as the US opted to deploy new nuclear missiles and Moscow invaded Afghanistan.(30)

In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president. Although media pundits today memorialize Ronald Reagan's alleged fascination with bring the arms race to an end, Reagan's early term in office was marked by the brazen rhetoric of his administration's many war hawks, who openly discussed the possibility of “fighting and winning” a nuclear war with the USSR.(31) This talk clearly terrified government officials in Moscow, who responded by conducting a massive intelligence operation to detect US preparations for a first strike.(32)

It also terrified a great many of the world's citizens, who responded with the most visible and effective mass mobilizations for nuclear disarmament (or, in some cases, a “nuclear freeze”) in history. The biggest of these occurred in June 1982 in New York City, the largest political rally ever in the United States up to that point, with nearly one million people in attendance. The theme of the protest (depicted on the right side of the UC Nuclear Free banner above) was “Freeze the Arms Race – Fund Human Needs.” This massive action, combined with multiple others around the world (some of which preceded and inspired it), created the undeniable sense within the greater public of a global revolt against nuclear weapons.(33)

While students were, in the words of Lawrence Wittner, a “very sympathetic audience” for the disarmament movement, they were never the driving force behind it. Instead, the movement mostly consisted of people in an older age bracket (25-45), many of whom participated in the civil rights, anti-Vietnam, women's, and environmental movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s. According to Wittner:

“Hundreds of college and university campuses provided the sites for the fall convocations… drawing audiences of 100,000 in 1981 and 150,000 in 1982. United Campuses to Prevent Nuclear War (UCAM) grew out of the fall 1981 convocation and thereafter, promoted the [Nuclear] Freeze, opposed the MX missile, and condemned SDI. Students at the Berkeley campus of UC organized spirited sit-ins at the [Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory]. UCAM never managed to develop more than about 50 chapters and was swallowed up in a considerably larger movement.”(34)

Wittner's assessment of American students at large clearly did not apply to UC students, who were the heart of the movement in many communities in California. The disarmament movement was one of the most vibrant among several intense grassroots struggles waged by UC students during the ‘80s. And the tactics of the student disarmament activists were quickly evolving. By the start of the decade, the students and their community allies had largely concluded that institutional methods – petitions, phone calls, letters, public comment periods at Regents meetings, etc. – were an inadequate means of effecting change within the UC's top-down, virtually totalitarian decision-making structure.(35)

Several instances in the early-‘80s gave testament to that conclusion. In the wake of the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979, an accidental plutonium spill took place at Livermore in April 1980.(36) Reports of high incidence of skin cancer among Livermore lab employees also began to surface (although the DOE and the lab naturally denied any harm done by the lab's operations). Five Northern California Congressmen responded by demanding that all radioactive material be removed from the labs. Lab and university officials refused, insisting there was no danger.(37)

In another case, the Regents were scheduled to undergo their every-five-years ritual of voting on whether to renew their LANL and LLNL management contracts at a meeting in October 1980. Students began organizing for the meeting well in advance. In May, the Board decided instead to vote on the matter at their June meeting, when it would be summer, and mustered up only the barest explanation for the switch. The students responded angrily; at UCSB, for instance, 25 students were arrested during a sit-in of the campus' administration building, Cheadle Hall, to protest the Regents' lack of accountability.

“There's blood on the hands of the UC Regents, and they can't hide it,” one student told the UCSB Daily Nexus. According to another: “The University of California will be responsible if nuclear war occurs.”(38)

Despite the Regents' diversionary tactics, over 100 nuclear disarmament protesters turned out for the June meeting. At varying points during the proceedings, the students interrupted by breaking into chants such as “No Nukes!” and “Sever the Ties!,” standing on chairs and waving banners in the process. At one point, a group of the protestors attempted to approach the Regents' table but were tackled and evicted by university police.

Governor Jerry Brown, who also spoke out at the meeting, said of the students' efforts: “Their presence said something and made an impression.”(39)

The real hub for UC disarmament protestors during the early-‘80s, when it wasn't individual campuses, was the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). The series of non-violent direct actions at Livermore from 1982-83, of which there were 40 in all,(40) were some of the most visible and impactful of the abolition movement at the time. In the first of these protests, in February 1982, roughly 170 people were arrested at the gates of the lab. Many UC students – mostly from Berkeley and Santa Cruz – took part.(41)

In August, a non-violently militant crowd of nearly 10,000 protested at the lab's gates; 1,475 were arrested, one of the largest mass arrests at a political protest in US history.(42)

In June 1983, over 3,000 people rallied and 1,028 were arrested (including 50 UC Berkeley students) at LLNL as part of a national day of action to "protest, halt, and disrupt the design, production, transport, and deployment of nuclear weapons worldwide for at least one working day." Those arrested were detained in tents for over a week, a saga described in detail by Jackie Cabasso and Susan Moon in their 1985 book Risking Peace: Why We Sat in the Road.(43) The mass action prompted Lab Director Roger E. Batzel to recommend that the DOE purchase a new 196-acre “security buffer zone” surrounding the lab property, and the DOE complied.(44)

Back on UC campuses, in January 1983, UC students held a large, coordinated UC-wide day of action, titled “Ban the Bomb – and Ron!” Protestors were arrested in acts of civil disobedience at nearly every UC campus, including over 100 at UC Berkeley and 57 at UC Santa Barbara.(45)

Besides all the dramatic and visible direct actions, students and community members took various other approaches to advance their cause. In 1982, students at multiple UC campuses sponsored appearances by three Japanese monks who were in the midst of a year-long walk from San Diego to Seattle to Washington D.C. to bring awareness to the dangers of the arms race. “One blinding flash will burst upon the earth and then the glory of the planet will be no more,” said Reverend Hiromitsu Kizu, during the monks' appearance at UCSB in January 1982. “Hiroshima and Nagasaki are dress rehearsals for the worldwide holocaust to come without our intervention.”(46)

A group called Student Alliance for Fallout Emergency (SAFE) formed at UCSC in the fall of 1984. The group intended to “personalize the possibility of a nuclear exchange." Inspired by a “suicide pill option” referendum passed at Brown University in October 1984, the group sponsored a similar resolution as part of UCSC's spring 1985 election. The resolution called for the campus health center to “stockpile suicide pills to be distributed on request to registered students in the event that the UCSC campus is exposed to lethal quantities of nuclear radiation.”

The proposal also requested that UCSC administrators provide transportation to local ground-zero sites, as well as construct Radiation Monitoring Stations at each college, “to remind students that our beautiful city on a hill could be subject to lethal levels of radiation exposure – that nuclear war may occur in our ‘backyard' at any time.” The fourth part of the resolution would have required the establishment of burial sites for members of the UCSC community in preparation for extreme radiation fallout.“ The sites would clearly be necessary to cope with such an emergency, and would serve as a constant reminder to the present UCSC community that we must never allow these sites to be used,” SAFE members wrote in an informational packet.

The SAFE resolution lost by less than one percent (60 votes), but it did help convince UCSC Chancellor Robert Sinsheimer to provide the students with funding to put out the above-mentioned information packet regarding the dangers of nuclear war, which was widely distributed.(47)

Navigation

Introduction
Part 1 - Los Alamos: "Born at the Crosshairs"
Part 2 - The First Disarmament Movement Wave and the ‘60s
Part 3 - Challenging the UC's “Mantle of Legitimacy”
Part 4 - The Early-‘80s: A Series of Radical and Creative Actions
Part 5 - The Rise of Faculty Activism
Part 6 - A New Generation Emerges
Part 7 - Moving Forward
Works Cited