Freeze!

In Freeze!, Henry Richard Maar III chronicles the rise of the transformative and transnational Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. Amid an escalating Cold War that pitted the nuclear arsenal of the United States against that of the Soviet Union, the grassroots peace movement emerged sweeping the nation and uniting people around the world.

The solution for the arms race that the Campaign proposed: a bilateral freeze on the building, testing, and deployment of nuclear weapons on the part of two superpowers of the US and the USSR. That simple but powerful proposition stirred popular sentiment and provoked protest in the streets and on screen from New York City to London to Berlin. Movie stars and scholars, bishops and reverends, governors and congress members, and, ultimately, US President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev took a stand for or against the Freeze proposal.

With the Reagan administration so openly discussing the prospect of winnable and survivable nuclear warfare like never before, the Freeze movement forcefully translated decades of private fears into public action. Drawing upon extensive archival research in recently declassified materials, Maar illuminates how the Freeze campaign demonstrated the power and importance of grassroots peace activism in all levels of society. The Freeze movement played an instrumental role in shaping public opinion and American politics, helping establish the conditions that would bring the Cold War to an end.

Henry Richard Maar III is Lecturer in History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and California State University, Northridge. Follow him on X @HMaar.

Freeze! will appeal to readers interested in US antinuclear weapons activism and the evolution of the Reagan administration's arms control policies. Maar adds more details to the story of antinuclear activism in the 1980s and demonstrates that private citizens need not let policymakers make decisions about nuclear weapons without public input.

Maar's important examination of the freeze campaign highlights the challenges of that effort but also the ingredients that brought success to the movement: a clear mobilizing narrative, the development of creative grassroots strategies, and an appeal to moral values in partnership with the religious community.

Maar's Freeze! skillfully shows the interplay between activists, public opinion, and political leaders, and should put to rest the outdated notion that social movements cannot and do not influence foreign policy. The book is also well-written and eminently useful for college courses on nuclear weapons, foreign policy, and the 1980s.

Agnieszka Nimark, Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, Cornell University:

Henry Richard Maar III vividly describes American society and the public's concern about the nuclear arms race of the 1980s. In Freeze!, he documents the dilemmas that broad movement posed for the Reagan's administration and demonstrates the effect they had on US arms control and defense policies at the end of the Cold war era.

Amy J. Rutenberg, Iowa State University, author of Rough Draft:

Freeze! is a deeply researched, tightly written political history. Henry Richard Maar III shows how a grassroots movement that, on the surface, failed in its aim of a complete nuclear freeze, transformed political and diplomatic discussions and helped end the Cold War.

Michael Kazin, Georgetown University, author of War against War :

Freeze! deftly explores one of the most influential peace campaigns of the Cold War. Henry Richard Maar III successfully embeds the story of the Freeze campaign within the larger history of US diplomacy, politics, and the mass culture of nuclear weaponry during the 1970s and 1980s.

Jeremi Suri, University of Texas at Austin, author of The Impossible Presidency:

Rigorous and compelling, Freeze! excavates the history of the nuclear freeze movement in its political, social, and cultural dimensions. Henry Richard Maar III clearly shows the impact of the movement on electoral politics, Congress, and elements of American policy-making.