Европейское ядерное разоружение: Движение за Европу без ядерного оружия (1982-1991)

European Nuclear Disarmament (END) was a Europe wide movement for a "nuclear free Europe from Poland to Portugal” that put on annual European Nuclear Disarmament conventions from 1982 to 1991.

With movements for nuclear disarmament emerging throughout western Europe and gaining support from social democratic and Euro communist parties, the Russell Foundation, centred on Ken Coates, consulted about organising a massive conference to bring together everyone involved. The first European Nuclear Disarmament Convention subsequently took place in Brussels, Belgium, in 1982. According to historian Lawrence Wittner (1993) END was "the very heart and soul of the massive antinuclear campaign" (p. 234). Most participants considered the convention a success, and Coates's ad hoc conference organising committee became a semi permanent END Liaison Committee, with members from the main west European peace movement organisations and most west European social democratic and Euro communist parties, which organised further END Conventions in Berlin (1983), Perugia, Italy (1984), Amsterdam (1985), Évry, France (1986), Coventry, UK (1987), Lund, Sweden (1988), Vitoria Gasteiz, Spain (1989), Helsinki, Finland/Tallinn, Estonia (1990) and finally Moscow (1991). During these conventions, especially in Perugia and Amsterdam, there was an intensive cooperation with the Dutch Interchurch Peace Council (IKV) and their secretary general Mient Jan Faber and Wim Bartels. Bartels was also the president of the International Peace Coordination Centre (IPCC), a cooperation of 'like minded' movements, which linked their commitment of the struggle against nuclear weapons and the support of independent, dissident peace initiatives in Eastern Europe. Despite this intensive cooperation there also existed some kind of rivalry between the END network and the IPCC. Since most peace movements were present in both, it seemed both networks were doing very similar work.

Thompson, Kaldor and others in the END group in the UK disagreed with Coates's interest in winning the support of political parties and trade union leaders, and in 1983 there was a parting of the ways: Coates and his Nottingham based Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation concentrated on the Convention process, leaving Thompson and Kaldor as dominant figures in the UK END group. From then on, the UK END group was very much a separate entity from the conventions, although it took part in them and was represented on the Liaison Committee. Nationally, END only became a membership organisation in 1985, when the nuclear disarmament movement was ebbing, when it recruited only 500 members. However, when the nuclear disarmament first grew in 1980 and 1981, in some localities local nuclear disarmament groups were founded as 'END groups': Hull END, for example, had hundreds of members throughout the first half of the 1980s. Nationally END played a major role in the British peace movement of the 1980s. END supporters, most notably Thompson and Kaldor, were the most prominent intellectuals of the movement, constantly in demand for public meetings and for opinion pieces in newspapers and magazines (The Guardian, the New Statesman and Tribune were always particularly keen). END also provided the main peace movement organisation, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), with much of its leadership: (Bruce Kent, Joan Ruddock, Dan Smith and Meg Beresford were all END supporters). END's insistence on criticising Soviet militarism made it highly controversial in CND, where communists and pro Soviet Labour leftists were a vocal though small minority – but it meant that it was taken much more seriously by the Labour Party, which had adopted a non nuclear defence policy in 1980. More than 60 Labour MPs signed the END Appeal in 1980, and END supporters, among them Kaldor and Smith, served on Labour advisory committees on defence. END also had significant support among Liberals opposed to nuclear arms (although not among their allies in the Social Democratic Party) as well as among members of the nascent Green party. Even a few daring dissident members of the Conservative and Communist parties lent their support. END also organised regular speaking tours and conferences on various disarmament related themes.

The END Bulletin and ENDPapers series were published by the Russell Foundation, beginning in 1980. Subsequently, British END published a series of pamphlets through Merlin Press and a bi monthly magazine, European Nuclear Disarmament Journal, which was edited by Mary Kaldor. It was published from 1983 to 1988.

What END was probably best known for, however, was its work with dissidents in the Soviet Union and its east central European satellite states. Although the END Appeal had won some support from dissidents in the Soviet bloc at its launch, most were hesitant about the western peace movements, which they felt were parroting Soviet slogans and had no sympathy for people living under communist dictatorship. Václav Havel expressed this view forcefully in his essay “An Anatomy of a Reticence” (1985). Nevertheless, thanks largely to the persistence of END and like minded activists from other countries, who kept up a constant stream of correspondence with dissidents in the Soviet bloc and visited them whenever they could, by the mid 1980s a fruitful dialogue had been established. END had working groups for each Soviet bloc country. The Czechoslovakia group exchanged views with and visited Havel and his colleagues in Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia; the Hungary group did the same with György Konrád, Miklos Haraszti and a small group of young peace activists in Hungary; the Poland group the same with Adam Michnik, Jacek Kuron and many younger activists; the East Germany group the same with Bärbel Bohley and others who were later to be the core of Neues Forum.

Both the END Conventions and the UK END group went into decline in the late 1980s after the 1987 Intermediate range Nuclear Forces treaty removed the weapons that had given the European peace movement its raison d’etre – though the conventions continued until 1991 (in Moscow) and END in the UK turned itself in 1989 into European Dialogue, a pressure group for encouraging the development of democracy and civil society, which is still going. The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation launched END Info (European Nuclear Disarmament Information) in March 2019 in response to the collapse of the Intermediate range Nuclear Forces Treaty and attendant nuclear risks. The Russell Foundation worked with others across Europe to launch a 'Nuke Free Europe' network that campaigns to rid the continent of all nuclear weapons.