How American and Soviet Women Transcended the Cold War*

Abstract

A single moment in a mother’s life can be the beginning of changing the world. In 1981, a year after a Titan II missile exploded in her home state of Arkansas, Betty Bumpers drove across the United States with her daughter Brooke, a nineteen-year-old college student. As they passed near the construction site for the controversial Clinch River Breeder Reactor in Tennessee, Brooke asked how their family would reunite if they survived a nuclear disaster. Deeply troubled by the question and her daughter’s belief that a nuclear war was likely to happen, Bumpers decided she had to do something. Having earlier led a successful, education-based national drive to immunize children, Bumpers decided to employ a similar strategy to educate Americans, especially women, about the danger of nuclear war, which she decided was “the greatest threat to children’s health.” Earlier she had trusted that her husband, Senator Dale Bumpers (D-AR), and...