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The nuclear freeze movement’s lessons for taming AI.

AI is, in many ways, unprecedented. ChatGPT was adopted faster than any past consumer software. Anthropic’s revenue grew faster than any company at its scale. And the megaprojects of the past, Manhattan and Apollo, utterly fail to capture the scale of what I call the Obsoleting Project: the companies racing to replace us with machines. But stopping that Project doesn’t require us to reinvent the wheel. Instead, we should look to one of the most remarkable and overlooked mass movements of the 20th century.

In the 1976 primary, Ronald Reagan discovered that stoking unfounded fears about the Soviet Union’s looming nuclear supremacy made for great politics. While he still lost to Gerald Ford, Reagan had landed on a strategy that would contribute to his landslide victory four years later (running on the slogan “Make America Great Again”). He entered office in 1981 a longtime critic of détente and arms control. Reagan’s administration repeatedly indicated nuclear war wasn’t unthinkable. In one infamous comment, a defense official said the US could fully recover from an all-out nuclear war in “two to four years.” He promised, “Everybody’s going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around.”

Nuclear war appeared to be a real and present danger. It was into this belligerent climate—months before Reagan entered office—that Randall Forsberg, a defense analyst and MIT doctoral student, published a “Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race.” This bilateral freeze between the US and the Soviet Union would be enforced by a “ban on all further testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons and nuclear delivery vehicles.” Considering what the four-page manifesto set in motion, it makes for dry reading. But the actual ask was straightforward, especially compared to past advocacy efforts: “The vast majority of the public avoid ‘single weapon’ campaigns…which involve technical and quantitative arguments and which consist of unilateral measures.” The simplicity, ambition, and bilateral nature of her plan were assets—and she knew it: “Such a proposal would attract overwhelming popular support.”

Her confidence, it turns out, was well-founded. Just over two years after Forsberg’s call was published, an estimated 1 million people marched to New York’s Central Park to rally for a nuclear freeze—then the largest protest in American history.

The ultimate big-tent, grassroots movement had started small. In 1980, as Forsberg’s freeze proposal began circulating, Massachusetts-based Vietnam draft resister Randy Kehler and other local peace activists placed a freeze proposition on the ballot in three western Massachusetts state Senate districts. It was approved by 59 percent of voters in districts Reagan carried, demonstrating the idea’s bipartisan appeal. Subsequent ballot propositions passed almost everywhere, in votes covering roughly one-third of the American electorate, then the largest referendum on a single issue in the country’s history.

While Freeze emerged out of leftist anti-war and antinuclear advocacy, it consciously sought bipartisan support, using widespread education campaigns to reach well beyond its base. According to Henry Maar’s history of the movement, Freeze!, the easy-to-understand concept radically democratized a nuclear debate long dominated by white guys with technical degrees. The president played an unwitting role, too. Reagan’s militarism inspired an improbable coalition—mainstream Democrats alongside radical pacifists, retired admirals alongside........

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