Dreams for a Decade: International Nuclear Abolitionism and the End of the Cold War. By Stephanie Freeman

Stephanie Freeman’s book, Dreams for a Decade: International Nuclear Abolitionism and the End of the Cold War, sheds new light on the late Cold War, grassroots antinuclear activism, and superpower arms control negotiations in the 1980s. Freeman is a historian at the State Department, and she spent about a decade researching, writing, and revising Dreams for a Decade. It is a well-written, readable monograph based on archival research conducted throughout the United States and Europe. Freeman has written an international history that is aimed at an academic audience, and she focuses on ideas and policy, particularly the interactions between government and grassroots actors. The book begins with the demise of détente in 1979 and concludes in December 1989, when President George H. W. Bush acknowledged the end of the Cold War in Malta.

Dreams for a Decade posits a fresh argument about the end of the Cold War. Scholars who emphasize human decision making during this period tend to fall into one of two historiographical camps. Some historians adopt a bottom-up approach, arguing that ordinary people ended the Cold War through forceful peace demonstrations and by calling for Europe’s reunification. Others use a top-down paradigm, claiming that Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan decided to end the Cold War on peaceful terms. Freeman’s hypothesis is more ambitious: she fuses the bottom-up and top-down approaches into a single argument. Grassroots antinuclear activism ended the Cold War by shifting discourse between U.S. and Soviet policymakers from arms limitations to reductions, she concludes, and by demanding the dissolution of the blocs that separated Cold War Europe.

Freeman’s argument is nuanced. U.S. and European activists participated in peace movements for different reasons, she clarifies, and they prescribed dissimilar goals, strategies, and tactics. She acknowledges the difficulty of defining “nuclear abolitionism,” which was “not a single, unified vision but rather a broad spectrum of ideas, sometimes overlapping and oftentimes conflicting" (4). In addition, Dreams for a Decade explains that the Reagan administration, Gorbachev government, and antinuclear demonstrators disagreed over how to approach the nuclear arms race. It also goes to great lengths to highlight the role played by non-governmental actors during the Cold War’s endgame. For instance, Dreams for a Decade argues that peace activists accelerated Reagan’s timeline to engage the Soviets in arms talks, affected the substance of U.S. and Soviet arms control policies, and helped bring about Europe’s peaceful reunification. Gorbachev’s decision to pursue a separate agreement about Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF), Freeman writes, was influenced by peace activists as well.

Despite its sound source base, smooth prose, and adroit analysis, Dreams for a Decade exaggerates the impact that grassroots actors had on superpower arms control policies. For example, the Reagan administration rejected the goals and strategy advocated by the U.S. Freeze Movement in arms negotiations with Moscow. It never wavered from the pursuit of the zero option, a proposal to eliminate—not freeze—U.S. and Soviet ground-based, intermediate-range missiles. Reagan and his aides also ignored the Freeze Movement’s call to halt the production and deployment of new nukes. Instead, they stationed hundreds of cruise missiles and Pershing IIs in Western Europe, which created bargaining chips that were traded away to liquidate Soviet INF. Equally important, Dreams for a Decade underplays the Reagan administration’s strategic rationale for signing the INF Treaty in December 1987. For Reagan and his advisors, the agreement was not just about reducing nuclear stockpiles, a goal supported by U.S. and European peace activists. Instead, the accord verified the death of Soviet INF programs that imperiled Western forces and bases throughout Eurasia with unprecedented on-site inspections, a defining feature of the treaty that Reagan had called for since March 1978.

Dreams for a Decade is a valuable contribution to the University of Pennsylvania Press’s Series on Power, Politics, and the World. It is well researched and persuasive, making a compelling, novel argument that challenges the conventional wisdom about the end of the Cold War and the breakthrough in superpower arms negotiations in the late 1980s. It also reveals Freeman’s expertise on important topics, such as U.S.-Soviet relations, transatlantic diplomacy, and peace movements and will interest academics, policymakers, and the public. “Although grassroots and government nuclear abolitionists have yet to eliminate nuclear weapons,” Freeman concludes, “they deserve credit for playing a pivotal role in ending the Cold War struggle that dominated international affairs for nearly a half century” (13).