A Letter From The Publisher: Nov. 30, 1981

When TIME Senior Correspondent William Rademaekers returned to Europe last spring after a four-year absence, he was struck by the profound changes in European attitudes toward the Atlantic Alliance and the U.S. Growing numbers of people, mostly young, were protesting the deployment of new U.S. missiles on European soil and voicing their concern about the mounting hostility between the two superpowers. Rademaekers talked with idealistic youths in and out of the peace movements; with members of the postwar generation coming to positions of influence in business, politics and teaching; and with government leaders who were apprehensive about the drift to pacifism and neutralism in their countries. “In the span of a year,” says Rademaekers, “they have emerged as a powerful lobbying force.” The challenge of the peace movements and the responses of the Reagan Administration and the Soviet leadership are the subject of this week’s cover story in the World section and also of the Nation section’s lead story.

The size and intensity of the peace protests impressed those who worked on the project. Rademaekers found the leaders of the peace movements “intelligent, knowledgeable, persuasive and, above all, convinced of the Tightness of their cause.” London Correspondent Mary Cronin, who attended a huge anti-nuclear demonstration in Hyde Park, compared “the solemnity, the pervasive anger and anxiety, the grim determination to stop what they see as disaster” with U.S. protests against the Viet Nam War. For Bonn Bureau Chief Roland Flamini, the controversy on nuclear defense in West Germany was both ubiquitous and cacophonous: “It swamps the pages of newspapers and washes in huge waves over television,” says Flamini.

“With its stentorian overtones, there is nothing quite like the sound of a German obsession in full cry.”

The cover story, checked by World Head Reporter-Researcher Ursula Nadasdy de Gallo, was written by Associate Editor Henry Muller. As TIME’S European economics correspondent based in Brussels, then as Paris bureau chief for four years until last summer, Muller watched the antinuclear movement take root and grow in The Netherlands in the

late ’70s, but he admits, “It never occurred to me then that it would spread the way it has.” As Rademaekers sees it, “This is only the beginning of the European peace movement story and its impact on the alliance. We will hear much more.”