I’m the young Greenham woman who presciently spoke in 1982 of the need to work together to undo Nato’s decision to deploy nuclear-armed cruise missiles, as featured in Jane Corbin’s BBC2 documentary Nuclear Armageddon: How Close Are We?, which was reviewed by Lucy Mangan (18 January).
Sir Julian Lewis (Letters, 22 January) is entitled to his opinion of course – and, indeed, for over 40 years he has been writing letters to the press that attempt to undermine nuclear disarmament developments and rewrite what happened in the 1980s. Readers, however, should be aware that President Mikhail Gorbachev (in a meeting of international security experts in London in 2004) paid tribute to the role played by the “Greenham women and peace movements” of Europe in bringing him and President Ronald Reagan together in Reykjavik in 1986. The Reykjavik summit paved the way for the two leaders to sign the 1987 US-Soviet intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) treaty and eliminate the cruise missiles from Greenham and all the such weapons on both sides of the Berlin Wall.
Mangan was right to pose pertinent questions about nuclear deterrence that got left out of the BBC documentary. Today, humanity stands on the very dangerous brink of nuclear war, with nuclear threats and over 12,000 nuclear weapons deployed by governments involved in today’s wars and armed conflicts, including Russia-Ukraine, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific.
As noted in the closing declaration from the 93 governments that attended UN meetings of the 2021 treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons last November: “Far from preserving peace and security, nuclear weapons are used as instruments of policy, linked to coercion, intimidation and heightening of tensions.”
There need to be more films and media that include how leading non-nuclear governments and civil society are using recent treaties to pull the nuclear-armed states towards reducing and eliminating their nuclear arsenals.
Dr Rebecca E Johnson
Secretary, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons