Nuclear Disarmament
Danger Unlike Any danger
1957-1985
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On June 12, 1982, the largest protest in American history converged in New York, as an estimated one million protestors marched from Central Park to the United Nations to demand an end to nuclear weapons.
The rally and march were the culmination of a meeting 25 years earlier, amidst the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, when activists met at the Overseas Press Club in Manhattan to discuss how to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The group that emerged, “A National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy,” or “SANE,” inaugurated a widespread peace movement. New York City, with its longstanding pacifist tradition and key institutions of international relations, became the center of the disarmament movement.
The 1982 protest coincided with the second United Nations Special Session on Disarmament. The June 12 Rally Committee engaged in extensive planning with hundreds of organizations, an effort led in part by Leslie Cagan, also active in feminist and LGBT campaigns, African-American radical Jack O’Dell, and peace organizer Cora Weiss. Tensions surfaced over whether to emphasize freezing or reducing the number of nuclear weapons, and concerns over whether the march was truly inclusive. Yet the sheer number of people made June 12 a landmark day in the movement for nuclear disarmament.
New Yorkers remained at the forefront of local and global anti-nuclear campaigns through the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan began to shift his position on nuclear munitions buildup and the Cold War came to an end. Still, the threat of nuclear arms continued to mobilize activists fearful of the weapons’ enormous power for destruction in New York and beyond.
Meet the Activists
Dorothy Day
Dorothy Day
Dorothy Day was a peripatetic New Yorker and lifelong activist. As founder of the Catholic Worker movement, Day established “hospitality centers” for the poor and founded the Catholic Worker newspaper. A lifelong pacifist, Day was an early opponent of nuclear weapons. Day and a small group of others repeatedly went to jail in the 1950s for refusing to take shelter during mandatory air-raid drills that were part of the government’s civil defense campaign to prepare citizens for nuclear attack.
Image Info: Al Amy, 1950s, Courtesy NY Daily News via Getty Images.
Norman Thomas
Norman Thomas
A National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) attracted prominent civic leaders, journalists, and scientists who reflected Cold War-era liberalism. Republican politician Alf Landon, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, cialisfrance24.com union leader Walter Reuther, and socialist Norman Thomas all spoke at SANE’s rally at Madison Square Garden in May 1960, along with pacifist A.J. Muste and civil rights leader A. Phillip Randolph. Absent was New York activist Harry Abrams, who organized the rally but was forced to resign after Connecticut Senator Thomas Dodd accused SANE of communism; the group purged Abrams and others.
Image Info: May 19, 1960, Courtesy Swarthmore College Peace Collection, SANE, Inc. Records.
Harry Belafonte
Harry Belafonte
New Yorker Harry Belafonte is an acclaimed singer, performer, and social activist. Belafonte participated in various activist movements, including the civil rights movement and the anti-nuclear movement. Belafonte joined SANE early in its existence, and after its 1960 rally at Madison Square Garden, he led the march to the UN.
Image Info: Talbot-Giles, 1953-1954, Museum of the City of New York, Gift of Harold Friedlander, 68.80.12426.
Cora Weiss
Cora Weiss
Lifelong peace activist and New Yorker Cora Weiss helped organize the June 12 rally and march in 1982. She also worked with Women Strike for Peace in the 1960s, mobilized against the Vietnam War into the 1970s, and currently leads the Hague Appeal for Peace. Here, Weiss stands at the Central Park rally with civil rights activist Coretta Scott King, who also participated in the peace movement.
Image Info: Photographer unknown, 1982, Courtesy Cora Weiss.
Objects & Images
Facts About Radiation Flyer
Facts About Radiation Flyer
Children were frequently at the center of the nuclear debate. In 1951, the New York City Board of Education designated $250,000 for civil defense, which included “duck and cover drills”—where students hid under desks—and dog tags to ensure identification of each child in case of nuclear attack. SANE had a large chapter in Jamaica, Queens, where the organization participated in a program about nuclear radiation hosted by the Jamaica Parent-Teacher Association (PTA).
Image Info: New York SANE, 1961, Courtesy Swarthmore College Peace Collection, SANE Inc. Records.
Nuclear Testing Menaces Children
Nuclear Testing Menaces Children
Along with SANE, the New York branch of the national group Women Strike for Peace mobilized around the issue of chemical contamination of milk from nuclear testing, raising awareness and staging consumer boycotts.
Image Info: Women Strike for Peace, 1962; New York SANE, 1964, Courtesy Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Women Strike for Peace Records and SANE, Inc. Records.
What Are The Risks Of Tests?
What Are The Risks Of Tests?
After the United States used nuclear bombs in Japan in 1945, fears of total destruction wrought by nuclear weapons permeated mass culture. SANE tapped into this fear when it began publishing a series of advertisements decrying the risks of nuclear weapons in The New York Times in November 1957. This 1962 flyer depicting the ad called attention to health risks associated with testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere.
Image Info: SANE, April 10, 1962, Courtesy Swarthmore College Peace Collection, SANE Inc. Records.
Women Strikers For Peace On 47th Street
Women Strikers For Peace On 47th Street
Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union reached a peak in 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis, the moment the world came closest to nuclear war. Demonstrators in New York and throughout the country cautioned against the use of nuclear weapons. SANE leader Norman Cousins was instrumental in negotiating the subsequent Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, which limited atmospheric testing by the United States and the Soviet Union.
Image Info: Photo by Phil Stanziola, 1962, Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, NYWT&S Collection, LC-USZ62-128465.
Stop The Bomb
Stop The Bomb
Many anti-nuclear groups, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, turned their attention to opposing the Vietnam War. After the Vietnam War ended, longstanding peace advocates joined a new generation of young antiwar activists. Lee Quinones’s 1979 anti-nuclear tags on a subway car are a rare example of explicitly political graffiti art of the era.
Image Info: Graffiti tags by Lee Quinones, 1979, Photograph by Henry Chalfant, 1979, Collection of the Museum of the City of New York.
Ssd Ii Calendar And Map
Ssd Ii Calendar And Map
This calendar and map show the range of political and cultural events taking place around Manhattan in the days before and after the UN Special Session on Disarmament and the June 12 rally, including Bread & Puppet shows, poetry readings, children’s rallies, and plays with the theme of nuclear disarmament.
Image Info: The Mobilizer, June 1982, Courtesy Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Archives, New York University.
Anti-nuke Demonstration On 42nd Street
Anti-nuke Demonstration On 42nd Street
An estimated one million protesters gathered in Central Park and marched through the streets of Manhattan to the United Nations on June 12, 1982, to call for an end to nuclear weapons. March organizers sought to bring together people of different ages, races, and languages to rally against nuclear weapons. While participants came from a range of backgrounds, questions of diversity arose, and the peace movement continued to be seen as mostly white.
Image Info: Mike Lipack, June 12, 1982, Courtesy NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images.
Set The Date
Set The Date
Among the people who came from across the five boroughs and around the world to participate in the “Protest and Survive” rally on June 12, 1982 was a delegation from Japan. The peace movement in New York had long memorialized the dropping of the bomb in Hiroshima by the United States at the end of World War II.
Image Info: Barbara Alper, June 12, 1982, Courtesy Getty Images.
"Arms Race? Or Human Race?"
"Arms Race? Or Human Race?"
This poster was created for and used in the June 12, 1982, anti-nuclear rally and march. Its design acknowledges and attempts to transcend the symbols of the atomic era, including missiles and fallout shelter sign iconography, that appeared everywhere in popular culture during the Cold War period. The poster also reflects the demands of activists for a freeze and reduction of nuclear weapons and “the transfer of funds from military budgets to human needs.”
Image Info: Patti Eslinger, 1982, Courtesy Inference Archive.
No Parking Sign
No Parking Sign
The New York City Police Department posted “No Parking” signs, including this one, to close off Fifth Avenue to cars on the day of the march.
Image Info: June 1982, Courtesy Interference Archive.
Door Knockers And Stickers
Door Knockers And Stickers
These door knockers and stickers show the local and global circulation of anti-nuclear images. The door knockers were created by the War Resister’s League, the nation’s oldest secular pacifist organization, founded in New York in 1923 and still http://acheterdufrance.com/ active today. The smiling sun logo was created in Denmark in 1975 to advocate for alternatives to nuclear power.
Image Info: 1970s-1980s, Courtesy Interference Archive.
Anti-nuclear Buttons
Anti-nuclear Buttons
These buttons refer to the federal government’s 1983 proposal to store weapons at a navy base housed off of Staten Island. Opponents argued that the weapons could cause an accident or make the city a target, and led a campaign to put the issue on the ballot. Courts declared the ballot initiative unconstitutional in 1985, but the initiative never came to pass.
Image Info: 1980s, Museum of the City of New York, Gift of Mrs. Mary M. Cope, 97.102.13, 97.102.16.
Key Events
| Global | Year | Local |
|---|---|---|
| United States government tests first atomic bomb in New Mexico; drops nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, ending World War II | 1945 | |
| 1957 | A National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), still in existence as Peace Action, is founded in New York | |
| Women Strike for Peace formed | 1961 | |
| Cuban Missile Crisis | 1962 | |
| Partial Test Ban Treaty between United States and Soviet Union enacted | 1963 | |
| Escalation of Vietnam War draws attention away from nuclear campaigns to broader antiwar activism | 1965 | |
| First UN Special Session on Disarmament | 1978 | |
| Second UN Special Session on Disarmament | 1982 |
