---
title: "Anti-nuclear movement"
chunk: 12/15
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:22:20.182369+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

On 9 December 1982, Norman Mayer, an American anti–nuclear weapons activist, was shot and killed by the United States Park Police after threatening to blow up the Washington Monument, Washington, D.C., unless a national dialogue on the threat of nuclear weapons was seriously undertaken.
On 10 July 1985, the flagship of Greenpeace, Rainbow Warrior, was sunk by France in New Zealand waters, and a Greenpeace photographer was killed. The ship was involved in protests against nuclear weapons testing at Mururoa Atoll. The French Government initially denied any involvement with the sinking but eventually admitted its guilt in October 1985. Two French agents pleaded guilty to charges of manslaughter, and the French Government paid $7 million in damages.
In 1990, two pylons holding high-voltage power lines connecting the French and Italian grid were blown up by Italian eco-terrorists, and the attack is believed to have been directly in opposition to the Superphénix.
In 2004, activist Sébastien Briat, who had tied himself to train tracks in front of a shipment of reprocessed nuclear waste, was run over by the wheels of the train. The event occurred in Avricourt, France, and the fuel (12 containers in total) was from a German plant, en route for reprocessing.

== Impact ==

=== Impact on popular culture ===

Beginning in the 1950s, anti-nuclear ideas received coverage in the popular media with novels such as Fail-Safe and feature films such as Godzilla (1954), Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), The China Syndrome (1979), Silkwood (1983), and The Rainbow Warrior (1992).
Dr. Strangelove explored "what might happen within the Pentagon ... if some maniac Air Force general should suddenly order a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union". One reviewer called the movie "one of the cleverest and most incisive satiric thrusts at the awkwardness and folly of the military that has ever been on the screen".
The China Syndrome has been described as a "gripping 1979 drama about the dangers of nuclear power", and it had added impact when the Three Mile Island accident occurred several weeks after the film opened. Jane Fonda plays a TV reporter who witnesses a near-meltdown (the "China syndrome" of the title) at a local nuclear plant, which was averted by a quick-thinking engineer, played by Jack Lemmon. The plot suggests that corporate greed and cost-cutting "have led to potentially deadly faults in the plant's construction".
Silkwood was inspired by the true-life story of Karen Silkwood, who died in a suspicious car accident while investigating alleged wrongdoing at the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant where she worked.
Dark Circle is a 1982 American documentary film that focuses on the connections between the nuclear weapons and the nuclear power industries, with a strong emphasis on the individual human and protracted U.S. environmental costs involved. A clear point made by the film is that while only two bombs were dropped on Japan, many hundreds were exploded in the United States. The film won the Grand Prize for documentary at the Sundance Film Festival and received a national Emmy Award for "Outstanding individual achievement in news and documentary." For the opening scenes and about half of its length, the film focuses on the Rocky Flats Plant and its plutonium contamination of the area's environment.
Ashes to Honey (ミツバチの羽音と地球の回転, Mitsubashi no haoto to chikyū no kaiten), (literally "Humming of Bees and Rotation of the Earth") is a Japanese documentary directed by Hitomi Kamanaka and released in 2010. It is the third in Kamanaka's trilogy of films on the problems of nuclear power and radiation, preceded by Hibakusha at the End of the World (also known as Radiation: A Slow Death) and Rokkasho Rhapsody.
Nuclear Tipping Point is a 2010 documentary film produced by the Nuclear Threat Initiative. It features interviews with four American government officials who were in office during the Cold War but now advocate for the elimination of nuclear weapons. They are: Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Sam Nunn, and William Perry.
Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) was a musical group founded in 1979 by Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Bonnie Raitt, and John Hall, following the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. The group organized a series of five No Nukes concerts held at Madison Square Garden in New York City in September 1979. On 23 September 1979, almost 200,000 people attended a large anti-nuclear rally staged by MUSE on the then-empty north end of the Battery Park City landfill in New York. The album No Nukes, and a film, also titled No Nukes, were both released in 1980 to document the performances.
In 2007, Bonnie Raitt, Graham Nash, and Jackson Browne, as part of the No Nukes group, recorded a music video of the Buffalo Springfield song "For What It's Worth".
Filmmakers Taylor Dunne and Eric Stewart are working on a documentary called "Off Country" that looks at the devastating effects of atomic bomb testing on the communities around the White Sands missile range in New Mexico, the Nevada Test Site, and the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado. They were interviewed by Screen Comment's Sam Weisberg in 2017.

=== Impact on policy ===