The Nuclear Crisis: The Arms Race, Cold War Anxiety, and the German Peace Movement of the 1980s - Paperback

by Christoph Becker-Schaum (Editor), Philipp Gassert (Editor), Martin Klimke (Editor)

In 1983, more than one million Germans joined together to protest NATO's deployment of nuclear missiles in Europe. International media overflowed with images of marches, rallies, and human chains as protesters blockaded depots and agitated for disarmament. Though they failed to halt the deployment, the episode was a decisive one for German society, revealing deep divisions in the nation's political culture while continuing to mobilize activists. This volume provides a comprehensive reference work on the "Euromissiles" crisis as experienced by its various protagonists, analyzing NATO's diplomatic and military maneuvering and tracing the political, cultural, and moral discourses that surrounded the missiles' deployment in East and West Germany.

Author Biography

Wilfried Mausbach is the Executive Director of the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) at Heidelberg University. He is the coeditor of The American Presidency: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (2012) and of Changing the World, Changing Oneself: Political Protest and Collective Identities in West Germany and the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s (2010).

Marianne Zepp was Program Director for Contemporary History at the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Berlin. She is the coeditor of Politische Gewalt in Deutschland: Ursprünge - Ausprägungen - Konsequenzen (Göttingen: Wallstein 2014).