Epilogue

Abstract

From the first murmurs of anti-nuclear campaigns in the mid-1970s to the apex of a very diverse movement in the early 1980s to the petering out of the movement’s popularity in the Cold War’s twilight years, the story of anti-nuclear activism in the United States was one characterized by experimentation, compromise, and difference. Not surprisingly, as this book has illustrated, anti-nuclear activism comprises a vast array of interests, each contributing to a movement of disparate voices that has, essentially, continued to exist since the first atomic scientists opposed the development of the bomb during the Second World War. In the 1970s and 1980s, from radical collectives of feminist resistance to political lobbying campaigns, anti-nuclear activism was in many ways defined by what Douglas Waller has called “an amalgam of personalities, forces, energies, and activities, which were fomenting, bursting, simmering, diverging, converging.”¹