‘Wars Begin in the Minds of Men’: Psychiatry and the Cold War Antinuclear Movement

This article analyzes the history of psychiatrists’ entwined efforts to understand the psychological effect of nuclear war’s threat and to disseminate those findings as a contribution to the antinuclear movement. The sub-specialty of ‘nuclear psychiatry’ sought: (1) to expose how avoidance, denial, and dehumanization set the conditions for the arms race and, potentially, nuclear war; (2) to explain the psychological consequences of nuclear war’s threat, particularly on children and adolescents. By enlightening leaders and the public about delusional, distorted thinking on the nuclear question and the rise of nuclear anxiety, psychiatrist-activists hoped to leverage their expertise for political ends. Connecting developments in the United States with those in Great Britain and the Soviet Union, this article draws on previously untapped archival and published materials, including research findings, media coverage, and internal documents from profession-based antinuclear organizations from the 1960s through the 1980s. In the process, it reveals the centrality of psy-disciplines to the history of the antinuclear movement and the Nuclear Age.

How to Survive the ’80s

The original bunker fantasy had hinged around the Cuban Missile Crisis; its reemergence nearly two decades later was triggered by several new circumstances. By 1980, the threat of non-wartime nuclear accident had come to the forefront of the public imaginary in a newly immediate way. Ronald Reagan was elected president on a hardline stance towards the Soviet Union, escalating the Cold War to its hottest and most polarized moments since 1962. The nuclear condition now meant more than the omnipresent yet abstract risk of devastating war; by the early 1980s, it included the everyday fact of the infrastructure of electrical power, which became a focus of the antinuclear movement as it crystallized widespread suspicion over the military-industrial complex. The end still served to put the world in focus, but there was no longer any shelter to retreat to, rely upon, or even plead for; the bunker fantasy around 1983 afforded survival only by looking death in the face and protesting against it. Yet for all its stress on the linearity of survival, the fiction of the nuclear 1980s finds utopian moments in the brief opportunities it affords for thinking laterally, beyond or around the blinkered causality that had the world locked into an infinite play of near-annihilation inherited from 1962. In their very extremity, the self-regarding conventions of the ’80s open up their own critical perspective through the earlier Cold War onto the decade’s new survivalism.

A Peaceful Place

Leonard Bernstein had been a vocal activist for nuclear disarmament since the early years of the Cold War, and the growing antinuclear movement in the 1970s and 1980s provided a platform for his advocacy. He renewed his commitment to the cause when President Reagan announced the “Star Wars” program in 1983. For his sixty-fifth birthday, friends and colleagues wore blue ribbons to show support for a nuclear weapons freeze. Bernstein himself gave an impassioned speech calling for an end to the nuclear arms race at a concert in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where he introduced to the audience a young conductor from Hiroshima, Eiji Oue.