Dangerous times and peaceful protests

“the dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion.”

That was Abraham Lincoln speaking to the US Congress in 1862 on the eve of the Civil War, and it aptly sums up the response of many to the international scene during the 1980s.

This was a time when there was a growing feeling that the world was a less safe place. Relationships between the two super powers had entered a more hostile phase. This was only in part due to the election of hard line politicians in the west and the elevation of equally conservative leaders in the Soviet Union but also to events across the world where the USA and USSR were engaged in a new round of support for proxy governments.

What made it all the more dangerous was that a new generation of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems had come on stream just as the Cold War deepened and hardened.

The US cruise missile which was being deployed in Britain and West Germany took just 15 minutes to reach its targets in the USSR while American Pershing missiles and the Russian equivalent took just 4 minutes from launch to detonation over the cities of Europe.

I remember travelling across France with a young American back packer from the Mid West who remarked how he had come to see the European perspective to this arms race which from the comfort of middle America had never occurred to him.

Here in Britain the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament saw its membership increase dramatically, there were growing numbers of demonstrations across the country and the woman’s peace movement focused on Greenham Common which was one of the sites of the deployment of US missiles.

Here in Chorlton there were attempts to set up a women’s peace camp on the Rec on Beech Road and on a hot summers day in 1984 hundreds attended a peace festival in the park while the City Council declared Manchester a nuclear free zone.

There were those who derided such actions and  some who  still  scorn this popular response. They point to the demise of the Soviet Union and the other Communist Governments of Eastern Europe for a relaxation in those tensions.

But this is to ignore the genuine belief by countless millions that something had to be done.

Picture; badges from the collection of Andrew Simpson, photograph of the peace festival on the Rec from the collection of Tony Walker