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2024-07-19
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has rejected comparisons between the Biden administration’s plans to station long-range missiles in Germany and the 1980s Euromissile crisis, which brought the world to the brink of annihilation. Are there any similarities? Here’s what happened forty years ago:
European NATO allies took delivery of hundreds of US Pershing II ballistic and Tomahawk nuclear cruise missiles in 1983, in accordance with a 1979 pact to deploy weapons that could reach the USSR if Moscow did not eliminate its intermediate-range missiles. Moscow had scoffed at the demand that it, a European land power, should make concessions of a kind that the US – separated from Europe by an ocean, did not. The deployment sparked the Euromissile crisis – resulting in the largest peace protests in Europe in over a century. US peace movement historian Lawrence Wittner estimates that five million people worldwide took part in nuclear disarmament demonstrations in October 1983, three million of them in Western Europe. German historian Benjamin Ziemann called the campaign “one of the biggest popular mass movements in modern European history,” which “in terms of the number of people it brought to the streets and the degree of unrest it expressed and channeled…is perhaps only comparable with the revolutionary movements in 1848/49.” Among the protesters demonstrating against the prospect of instantaneous nuclear annihilation was a younger, bushier-haired Olaf Scholz, who was deputy chairman of the SPD’s youth wing at the time. The fears caused by the Euromissiles were not mere paranoia. In November 1983, Moscow put its nuclear forces on hair trigger alert in preparation to respond to NATO aggression after the alliance kicked off its Able Archer war games, which simulated an all-out attack on the USSR. NATO didn’t recognize the seriousness of the nuclear danger caused by its provocations until many years later.Visa ditt stöd till det informationsarbete Carl genomför
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