Growing up in the nuclear shadow

For the first half of the 1980s, we gorged on a culture obsessed with the coming nuclear Armageddon. A group of young activists decided enough was enough.

In the fall of 1986, a group of teenagers from Montreal calling themselves S.A.G.E – Students Against Global Extermination – embarked on a cross-Canada Youth Nuclear Disarmament Tour. There were four of them: Seth Klein, Alison Carpenter, Maxime Faille, and Désirée McGraw. One of them had a driver’s license, so they bought an old station wagon, scrounged a bit of money, and hit the road. The plan was to spend the year visiting high schools across Canada. They would meet students, give a presentation on the threat of nuclear war, and talk about how we needed to think creatively about ways in which we could come to a collective solution. 

S.A.G.E  showed up in our grade 11 class in Ottawa that winter, with a camera crew in tow for a documentary they were making about the tour. After their presentation, the floor was opened up for questions and comments. Most of it was tentative, awkward stuff – what are 16 year olds supposed to know about solving the Cold War? – but at one point, our friend Brad got himself up a head of steam. He gave a long, impassioned, lyrical, and totally off-the-cuff speech about how, if only they could understand us, and we could understand them, maybe we could all stop pointing ICBMs at one another. 

It was fantastic. I remember looking over at one of the S.A.G.E presenters, Alison Carpenter I think, and she had a tear in her eye. When Brad was done, the room went quiet for a bit, and then they asked him to do it again – this time for the camera. He gave it a good shot, but he couldn’t recapture the spontaneous magic of the first one. I have no idea whether he ended up making it into the documentary, or indeed, if it was ever made. But that year the four members of S.A.G.E. ended up visiting some 360 schools across Canada and talking to over 100 000 students. A short monograph, Coming out of the Nuclear Shadow, written by Faille and published by S.A.G.E. in 1987, is on deposit at the Canadian War Museum. 

One of my earliest memories of being self-consciously afraid of nuclear war is from when I was about seven or eight. I remember approaching my dad as he sat at the dining room table working one evening, and straight up asking him if we were all going to die. I don’t recall what he responded, but it couldn’t have been all that reassuring, since I remained terrified of being nuked for years to come. 

It wasn’t just me. In the first half of the 1980s, our entire culture was obsessed with the looming threat of nuclear Armageddon, fuelled by American president Ronald Reagan’s decision to end the live-and-let-live detente of the Jimmy Carter era and take a more forceful line on the USSR.  

While Reagan came right out of the gate with his anti-communist belligerence after his election in 1980, it was 1983 when things really started to look grim for humanity. In the spring of that year, Reagan gave a speech describing the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and as “the focus of evil in the modern world.” He then announced funding for the Strategic Defence Initiative, a proposed missile defence system (widely mocked by the media as his “Star Wars” plan) designed to protect the continental United States from a ballistic missile attack. While Reagan’s explicit goal, ultimately, was to make nuclear weapons obsolete, it had the immediate effect of antagonizing the Soviets and ratcheting up tensions between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. 

Around this time, the worlds of pop culture and politics began a strange sort of doomsday pas de deux. Shortly after SDI was announced, the movie War Games, starring Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy, entered theatres. It was about a high school nerd who breaks into a military computer and almost starts a nuclear war. It was a huge hit. Then that September, the Soviets shot down a civilian airliner, Korean Air Lines flight 007, when it accidentally drifted off course into their controlled airspace on a flight from Anchorage to Seoul. After initially denying they had shot it down, the Soviets later claimed the airliner was on an American spy mission.

This was the context in which, two months later, The Day After aired. It was a made for TV movie, with an all star cast (including Jason Robards, JoBeth Williams, and Steve Guttenberg)  about the aftermath of a massive nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was a media sensation. The network, ABC, heavily promoted it before the broadcast, distributing “viewer’s guides” about the dangers of nuclear war. Schools brought in counsellors to discuss the movie with kids, and many television stations hosted live post-broadcast discussion panels with scientists and journalists and other talking heads.

Meanwhile, one of the biggest hit songs of that year was “99 Luftballons” by Nena, followed, in early 1984, by Alphaville’s “Forever Young” and “Two Tribes” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. All were explicitly about global thermonuclear war.  All were massively popular. 

Things went on like this for the next few years, an endless parade of movies and songs and novels and video games and television shows, all devoted to narrating the inevitable global holocaust that our politicians seemed determined to engineer. Even supposedly peacenik Canada played a role: in the summer of 1983, the Liberal government led by Pierre Trudeau approved the testing, in Alberta, of United States Air Force cruise missiles that were designed to carry a nuclear warhead. 

The Liberals claimed that this was simply Canada pulling its weight in NATO, but the cruise missile testing spurred a great deal of public opposition and anti-nuclear activism. In the spring of 1983, a handful of anti-nuclear protesters established a “Peace Tent” on Parliament Hill, a ramshackle teepee-like structure with a rainbow painted on it. The protesters kept it up, occupying the tent for two solid years even through the winter, while in 1984 an art student upset with the testing poured red paint on the only good copy of the constitution in existence. And then in 1986 of course, S.A.G.E came to town.

But ultimately, what impact did S.A.G.E, or any of the other anti-nuclear war protests and rallies and encampments have? On the threat of nuclear war, obviously very little. There are still plenty of nukes around, and the commitment by the nuclear powers to non-proliferation is on shaky ground.

But it’s not even clear what effect that the protests had at the time. The Cold War ended when it did largely because of Ronald Reagan’s belligerence, not despite it. The U.S. effectively spent the Soviets into the ground; Mikhail Gorbachev realised the USSR would never be able to keep pace in the arms race without a fundamental restructuring of the industrial base and the economy. What he didn’t bank on was that it couldn’t be done without the whole totalitarian edifice falling apart. 

On the bigger picture though, it’s interesting to see how some people never stop trying to change the world. What was remarkable about S.A.G.E. wasn’t just that they were activists, it was that they were our age. Seth Klein was 18, Faille and Carpenter were 17, McGraw was only 16, and this was long before Malala and Greta Thurnberg and Craig Kielburger made adolescent activism a thing. While we were sitting in school, or playing sports and going to parties and generally goofing off, the S.A.G.E. kids were out traveling the country, trying to save the planet. 

Alison Carpenter currently works as a psychotherapist in Montreal, while Maxime Faille is one of the leading experts on Indigenous law in British Columbia. Désirée McGraw is a member of the National Assembly of Quebec for NDG, which happens to be my riding. Seth Klein has stayed in the family business of fighting for social justice, like his mother, the filmmaker Bonnie Sherr Klein, and his younger sister Naomi. After founding the Climate Justice Project in 2007, Klein recently published a book entitled A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency. 

As for our friend Brad, he became a poet. 

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Welcome new subscribers! Thanks to everyone who has been reading and sharing these dispatches. I’m not sure where we’ll go next week; maybe we’ll stick with the 1980s for a bit, though I have a few axes still to grind about the nineties. Anyway, we’ll see. Comments very welcome as always, and please if you like this, I’d appreciate you sharing it with anyone who might it enjoyable as well. — ap