Chants For Peace Brought Us Closer To War

On Wednesday, three women loaded their belongings into a van and rolled away from their encampment near Newbury, England, a town about 50 miles due west of London.

To the uninstructed eye, there was nothing very remarkable about them. But in their day, they had been very remarkable. These were the last remnants of the Greenham Common women, who had tried throughout the 1980s to paralyze one of NATO's most important nuclear bases by sleeping and living in tents alongside it.

Even in their heyday, there had been something ridiculous about the Greenham Common protesters, from their bizarre chants ("I am a strong woman, I am a story woman, I am a healer!") to their weird dances. By the end, they were forthrightly absurd, characters out of Monty Python. The last nuclear weapons were withdrawn from Greenham in 1991, pursuant to the Start II arms-control treaty.

Greenham Base closed in 1998 -- the ground was sold for one pound to the Newbury town council, which is redeveloping it as housing and office buildings. But for two years after the base disappeared, the last of the Greenham Common protesters lingered on, constantly rejiggering their demands, until they reached the last one: They wanted Newbury to erect a statue to them.

But it's a great mistake to believe that silly people never can be dangerous. In the movies of the 1940s, Nazi Fifth Columnists always could be identified by their smoothly suave menace, by their faultless clothes, chiseled features and impeccable manners. In real life, however, all kinds of people can do terrible things -- the foolish as well as the cunning, those who wear anoraks as well as those who wear an enemy uniform.

The Greenham base was a storage facility for cruise missiles. In an actual crisis, the missiles would have had to have been driven out by truck to the launch sites before they could be used to deter or halt a Soviet attack. The Greenham Common women camped in front of the base with the intention of blocking those trucks. No nuclear emergency ever arose, but even without it, those women provided critical aid to the old Soviet Union.

The Soviets well understood what the West too often lost sight of: the vastly superior strength of the capitalist democracies. But the Soviets also understood how useless strength is without self-confidence and morale, and it was these psychological vulnerabilities that they hoped to exploit to win the Cold War. When they deployed SS-20 intermediate-range nuclear missiles against Western Europe in the mid-1970s, they did so not to blow it to smithereens but to intimidate the countries of Western Europe to squeeze money out of them.

When the NATO countries decided to reply to the SS-20 deployment by developing intermediate-range missiles of their own, the Soviets understood that one of the great battles of the Cold War was about to be waged. If they could somehow terrify the electorates of Western Europe into backing away from the deployment, hardline leaders would be replaced by softliners, NATO would split and the Soviet Union could hope to stave off its economic troubles with tribute extracted by blackmail.

That issue -- could democratic governments be bullied into accepting a permanent Soviet military advantage -- undergirded the huge anti-nuclear protests and the crucial elections of the 1980s. The British voters who re-elected Margaret Thatcher in 1983 -- like the Americans who voted for Ronald Reagan -- supported the right side in that great divide. And the women of Greenham Common, like the millions of so-called peace marchers allied with them, took the wrong side. Freedom won the Cold War because the Greenham Common women lost. And it ought not to be forgotten.