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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World

The warnings from Greenham Common’s women are as pertinent as ever

RAF Greenham Common airbase, the site of continuous women's peace protests from 1981 until 1991.
RAF Greenham Common airbase, the site of continuous women's peace protests from 1981 until 1991. Photograph: PA

I’m the young Greenham woman who presciently spoke in 1982 of the need to work together to undo Nato’s decision to deploy nuclear-armed cruise missiles, as featured in Jane Corbin’s BBC2 documentary Nuclear Armageddon: How Close Are We?, which was reviewed by Lucy Mangan (18 January).

Sir Julian Lewis (Letters, 22 January) is entitled to his opinion of course – and, indeed, for over 40 years he has been writing letters to the press that attempt to undermine nuclear disarmament developments and rewrite what happened in the 1980s. Readers, however, should be aware that President Mikhail Gorbachev (in a meeting of international security experts in London in 2004) paid tribute to the role played by the “Greenham women and peace movements” of Europe in bringing him and President Ronald Reagan together in Reykjavik in 1986. The Reykjavik summit paved the way for the two leaders to sign the 1987 US-Soviet intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) treaty and eliminate the cruise missiles from Greenham and all the such weapons on both sides of the Berlin Wall.

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