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In 1981, Karmen Thomas, a young mother from Wales,
heard on the radio that in the event of a nuclear attack,
she would have four minutes' warning.
Four minutes to act, four minutes to find her children,
four minutes to say goodbye.
The stark reality of a world where human life could end.
A world with no future.
It was a nightmare that had to be prevented.
We have spent more than two billion dollars
on the greatest scientific gamble in history.
We must learn to live in a world where the enemy of freedom
has the hydrogen bomb.
The Soviet Union ordered its armed forces
into a state of combat readiness,
as a step towards world thermonuclear war.
It will be the policy of the United States
to proceed in developing nuclear weapons
to maintain this superior capability against any aggressor.
Unilateral disarmament is untenable
if the Soviets won't discuss a multilateral reduction
in nuclear weapons.
We maintain the peace through our strength.
Weakness only invites aggression.
In Britain you will find an ally,
valiant and true.
This is the story of ordinary women
who stared down the nuclear superpowers to help end the cold war.
With determination and self-sacrifice, they achieved something extraordinary.
If you want to change something in the world,
then you just go ahead and you try and change it.
With courage, you can achieve anything.
Don't wait for directions. Take it in your own hands.
You just have to keep fighting.
Refuse to live in fear, and it's resist.
These women changed our future.
Yes. I know.
I know it's a very busy time of year. What we'd really like is...
Having children fundamentally changed me.
We weren't content in living in London anymore.
So we bought a place in Wales.
My husband was a carpenter. He worked locally.
So I was very much at home at that time.
The whole nuclear threat was very much out there.
I had that feeling of complete helplessness
in not being able to protect your child.
And the whole idea with Protect and Survive
was this four-minute warning
that the government would give if there was a missile.
I used to think, "My God. I'll never do it in four minutes."
Three days before the feared attack,
the government will order the Broadcasting Authorities
to transmit a series of official films, telling people what to do.
Prop suitcases against the walls,
stuffed with clothes, books,
or anything that might help to absorb the radiation.
When war is imminent, there'll be a four-minute warning.
That was very frightening.
The school that Ben went to was a good two miles away.
It's just not being able to get to him. And then what happens?
You know. Is it better to die in a blast,
or is it better to die of radiation sickness?
It's those sort of dark, morbid sort of feelings.
That used to keep me awake.
Politicians are seeking agreement
on the modernization of their forces,
by the deployment in West European NATO states
of over 500 new American tactical nuclear missiles.
With Russia's apparent superiority in conventional forces,
the Americans argue that the balance of power has tipped in Moscow's favor.
We decided on deploying new weapons beginning this year as a deterrent.
160 missiles are to be based
at two airfields in Britain,
within 60 miles of London.
Greenham Common will be the main operating base.
It is planned that the first missiles will deploy in 1983.
Fired from Greenham Common in England,
you could strike 1,500 miles and place a hydrogen bomb
right in the courtyard of the Kremlin.
The idea that American bases, with nuclear weapons,
would be on our soil...
...is quite insane.
Russia and America were armed to the teeth.
We would be a target.
There's a different angle to the Arms Race then,
because it sort of, like, it seriously does involve us, um...
But with foreign missiles on our soil.
So, like, how does that work?
We'd love people talking about it.
We had to do something. We were young mothers.
How many beds could we have?
And we didn't have much of a voice back in those days.
We knew there was this place called Greenham Common.
And actually, it floored me when I found out
how far away from Wales it was.
And then we decided we'd walk there,
let people know on the way, you know, what was going to happen.
In their quest of public discourse,
the women walked over 120 miles in ten days.
We offered ourselves to sing for them on the march.
And it was a signal concert for us,
because there they were, absolutely exhausted,
and most of them fell asleep during the concert.
And we're saying, "Sing the choruses!" and they're...
It was... it was unique because they had come so far,
and because it wasn't gathered together just for the occasion.
It was on the way to somewhere.
They were actually going to the airbase at Greenham Common.
Near the end, we were actually ringing up, every day,
different contacts we had in the news.
And they just weren't interested. I mean, they weren't interested.
There was, like, far more things going on.
Ching Ching could give birth any time after Thursday.
And it was a case of, "Look, we're going to have to do something
that is different and positive to get some sort of press."
So we came up with the idea of,
"Why don't we do the whole suffragette thing
of chaining ourselves to, I don't know, the base?"
We decided we'd drive ahead,
and then the rest of the march would walk.
We were stepping into the unknown,
and if it meant this, then I had to maybe risk being arrested.
The only person there was this policeman, a local bobby.
Morning, love.
This is an open letter...
It says, "I've come here,
here on behalf of Women for Life on Earth..."
Hold on. Hold on. You're early.
And I went, "Excuse me?"
You don't usually get here till eight o'clock.
You are the cleaners, right?
And I went, "Cleaners? We're not bloody cleaners.
You know, we're... we're here protesting against the siting of cruise missiles."
By that time, they'd managed to chain themselves.
So I walk over to them and I go,
"He thinks we're the bloody cleaners."
"What?!"
We therefore demand a televised debate
between politicians and ordinary people.
Whatever campaign we had, we'd started it now at Greenham,
at the base where the cruise missiles were gonna be, and it had to continue.
We weren't going to give up.
A camp was established,
but after only a week, many women had to return to their jobs and families.
A small group determined to stay until their voice was heard.
So we'll stay here at Greenham
We'll stay here at Greenham
We won't move from Greenham Till victory is ours
I had just got back to the UK after two years in Japan.
After going to Hiroshima, I'd had horrific nightmares.
And I thought I could respond
by focusing my academic research on the bomb.
But when I got to Greenham, I remember thinking,
"Wow, something's happening here,
something that's very strong and powerful, and for change."
It was a women-only peace camp,
committed to non-violent direct action from a feminist perspective.
We were only a small number, maybe 15 or 20 women.
It just felt real.
Life. All that's important about life.
How problems can be solved between people, and...
I said I'd stay for a week,
but by the second day I was thinking, "A week isn't going to be long enough."
Being a women-only space was unique.
It was the first time
that all these women with one purpose had come together.
I put a photograph of my children on the fence.
The reason I was here was to protect them.
If they're living in a world that's...
you know, gonna destroy them and their children,
then you're not doing enough.
It was out of my comfort zone.
I had never done anything like this before.
I left school when I was 15. I went to work in a mill.
I hadn't been involved in any politics, really.
I had to do something.
Today, the nuclear arsenals are bigger than they've ever been.
An average of three tons of high explosive
for every man, woman and child on Earth.
You had to have deterrents.
What they called, "Mutual Assured Destruction"
which had the acronym, MAD.
It was basically the idea
that if both of you were armed to the teeth,
the consequences of actually having a war
would be so horrendous to both sides, that you wouldn't have it.
It is madness because it is a desperately dangerous strategy,
because it might just go wrong.
The Russian delegation walking out of today's talks
on limiting nuclear weapons for just 35 minutes.
The Soviets continue to impose unacceptable conditions.
The summit produced little more than atomic blackmail.
The Soviets want to dictate to us in Western Europe,
intimidate us politically, blackmail us economically...
The only real major threat we face comes from the Kremlin.
The Soviet Union was blamed for everything.
There was a very biased view.
Russia being the big, bad enemy and pointing its missiles at us.
I had a couple of conversations with men who'd stop in cars,
like, "What's going on here? What's the banner about?"
And so you'd have a chat and it's like,
"Oh, that's all very well, but you need to go and tell this to the Russians.
We know what peace is about,
but you need to tell this to the Russians
because their missiles are pointing at us."
And I started to realize I knew nothing about the Soviet Union.
Is next, day wear.
Very nice. Is next, evening wear. Very nice.
Having no choice is no fun.
That's why at Wendy's, every hamburger isn't dressed the same.
In America, it was taken as a given
that the American government and American way of life were superior.
And that we were the good guys, and they were the bad guys.
I took a more nuanced view.
Jean McCollister,
fluent Russian speaker and scholar of Soviet politics,
had twice visited the Soviet Union.
She and Karmen began to work on their shared aim.
To establish trust between East and West.
The Arms Race was between two powers,
and you can't just focus on one without looking at the other.
It's a dance.
You can pressure your own government,
but if you don't have the equivalent on the other side,
where people living in the Soviet Union can pressure their government,
there's a major imbalance.
We need to do something about connecting with our so-called enemy.
I said, "I think we should go to Russia."
She said, "I've been thinking that as well."
I had met the Group for Trust.
They were a true citizens' initiative.
Ordinary people.
They were the Russian counterparts of the Greenham Women.
Here shot secretly and smuggled out of Russia
is the testimony of three Soviet citizens,
who've taken the risk of speaking openly to the West.
Until the atmosphere of relations between East and West will be changed,
there can be no real steps in disarmament.
That's why we have concentrated our activity
on establishing trust between East and West.
The aims and objectives of Moscow Trust Group
was disarmament on both sides.
Our program was about establishing trust.
Simple people, grass root.
There is nothing which existed in the Soviet Union
on the initiative of regular citizens.
It just wasn't allowed.
I'm still afraid that authorities are getting ready to crush our group.
It was in June '82 when we joined the movement.
My husband, Yuri, was the main spokesperson.
And all of a sudden, I'm coming home,
and he's not there, he disappeared.
He just disappeared.
For me, it just became really personal.
This group was regarded as a true citizens' initiative.
For us, it was just a logical extension to want to go and hook up with them.
And then working together,
we could perhaps bring pressure on both powers at the same time
and, you know, break the deadlock.
We said we were going to talk to this independent Group for Trust.
It was like, "Well, who are they?"
Not everybody in Greenham agreed with that.
They said we should not be giving them our support.
Some people decried them as provocateurs,
they were probably put up to it by the CIA.
What happens there is not our business,
we need to attack our own government.
And that started a whole debate about...
whether you should support these people or not,
because if you supported them,
that would get the Soviet government mad.
And that might break down dialogue with the Soviets,
in which you hope to reduce nuclear weapons.
And all this was, like, building up to this feeling of apprehension and...
Like, what on earth are we letting ourselves in for?
Winter was coming.
It grew obvious that unless there was more media coverage and support,
the camp was in danger of dying out.
It was tough. In the sleet, in the rain.
Out in the mud, in the cold.
But imagine what it would be like after nuclear winter.
Life would be so much harder.
We had to do something.
We chose an audacious, crazy action.
We were going to get as many thousands of women as we possibly could
to encircle the entire nine-mile perimeter
of the Greenham Common Air Base.
We called it, "Embrace the base on Sunday,
close the base on Monday."
We estimated it'll take 16,000.
CND and these others, they just said, "That's insane.
You are not going to get 16,000 women in the middle of nowhere.
And December 12th, it's gonna be a mud bath."
Oh, we knew we were crazy, but we had to do it.
We, the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp,
are calling on all women from all around the world...
There was a letter that went out,
and you were asked to show it to either six or eight people,
and ask them to come to Embrace the Base.
We didn't even use photocopiers. We were still using old Roneos.
We, the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp,
are calling on all women from all around the world
to come together...
We'd phone those six people,
and each of those six people would phone another six people.
We, the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp...
We had no idea. We had no way of telling who was going to turn up and who wasn't.
I probably got to bed, I don't know, one, two o'clock in the morning.
And around five, it was still dark.
But something woke me.
And it was like... I wasn't quite sure what I was seeing.
There was loads of women with candles.
And they were completely quiet.
And they were the busloads from Scotland,
and they travelled down through the night.
But they had... this is women, isn't it?
They'd realized that some of us would be sleeping,
that some of us live there.
Oh, my God, it's happening!
I knew if nine coaches of women were coming down from Scotland,
we had our 16,000.
And that's how the day started.
She goes on and on and on
You can't kill the spirit
She is like a mountain
Old and strong
She goes on and on and on
You can't kill the spirit
She is like a mountain...
Women were weaving doves into the wire.
They were bringing photographs of their children, scraps of cloth,
typed up or written out dreams that they'd had.
I brought some pieces of my daughter's clothes.
We brought whatever we wanted to pin onto that fence.
Very festive.
Very exciting. And, uh...
I think very joyous.
You... you can't just stay at home
and not join people of like mind.
If you don't go, you're depriving that particular action of power.
And, and you want all the power you can get.
So you have to go, so as to lend power.
Stand up
Women, make your choice
Create a world without nuclear death
Now together we are strong...
We start the thing going with a squeeze of the hand,
and then you squeeze the hand of the next woman.
And it didn't take very long.
And suddenly I heard this amazing whooping,
and it was like the circle is joined.
The circle is joined!
There have to be 35,000 women.
Stand up, stand up
Stand up
Women, make your choice
Create a world without nuclear death...
I felt like I was home.
Like it was something I'd waited for all of my life, up to then.
I was one of those 30,000.
We all did this together, and it was just...
warm inside.
It was a... It was a heart thing, a heart moment.
"It was a remarkable show of strength of the anti-nuclear lobby."
"Men were excluded from the demonstration..."
"...and told to run the crèche..."
"...prepare the food and keep out of the way."
We are the women of Greenham
And it's for freedom we're fighting
We are the women of Greenham
And it's for freedom...
The Blockade the Base, the day after Embrace the Base,
was about making sure the military couldn't function.
But the mood changed.
We are having to face a range of new approaches
towards civil disobedience, towards public protests,
towards the attitudes of, uh, groups of people,
many of whom have understandable and legitimate concerns,
who are prepared to involve in trespass,
to cause all sorts of disruption
to the normal, uh, peaceful process of society.
The day after Embrace the Base,
the state struck back.
When you see hundreds of police coming towards you...
That was the first time when I was really scared.
Oh, no. Oh, no.
We are women
We are strong, we are strong
We stand up, we stand up...
Stay back!
I think they were being pressured by their superiors,
who were being pressured by Thatcher and the government to sort this out.
It was like, "Just go in there and clear them."
I never ever had anything to do with police before.
I had a really good relationship with the police.
It meant I had to make a big decision,
because if you always sit in your little box
and you always do as you're told and you don't ever question anything,
and if you don't ever try and change anything,
then you're perfectly safe.
And I had been perfectly safe.
You're hurting my arm.
It was the first time I'd ever said no
in a major way.
Well, in any way.
More and more people were saying, "We can't tolerate this."
And the Greenham Women kept pointing out, doggedly,
that if this game of nuclear poker were to go wrong...
we'd be the first to be incinerated.
A lot of the Europeans didn't want to be
under American nuclear protection.
Now, in Europe, they're in the sights of those missiles.
This made it much more personal, much more likely, in their minds,
that their own countries could be fried.
You'd have your theater of war in Europe.
The deadline for US missile deployment in Western Europe
is approaching rapidly.
And on Monday, the Soviet Union said its response is ready.
The Defence Ministry said preparations are underway
to place new tactical nuclear weapons in East Germany and Czechoslovakia.
We're not going to give the United States
nuclear superiority in Europe.
We cannot afford them the possibility of first strike.
Our nerve is being tested. We must not falter now.
To ignore the facts of history
and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire,
to simply call the Arms Race "a giant misunderstanding..."
They are the focus of evil in the modern world.
Reagan's characterization, you know, the "evil empire."
It was very simplistic and very inaccurate.
More and more people needed to have contact
and exchange with people living in the Soviet Union.
And this was how the good relations were going to be built,
this is how the trust was going to be built up.
The trip was costly, funded through Greenham donations.
Special visas were compulsory and difficult to obtain.
For activists, it was also potentially dangerous.
Jean knew where members of the Group for Trust lived.
But had no way of contacting them, or confirming they were safe.
All of us were feeling really nervous.
We were going to see Olga Medvedkov,
whose husband had disappeared.
We really didn't know what we'd find.
We see all those backpacks.
They looked like they just came from some kind of camp, which they did.
- Yeah, they looked different. - Peanut butter.
- But they had the same feelings. - Oh, taboo...
And we just, we just clicked like that.
This group was being relatively open.
You know, this is what we're doing.
We don't feel we're doing anything illegal.
Olga's husband had been released.
But there was a feeling of paranoia.
Everywhere.
The government and KGB consider us dissidents,
because we've been doing something on our own.
I was followed by KGB everywhere.
That's a very unpleasant feeling.
And there was a psychological pressure.
Once they had allies in the West,
that gave them a certain immunity and protection.
So that was why it was important
that Greenham Women recognize them as their true counterparts.
Most of the Group for Trust lost their positions.
They were scientists, they'd had awards, they had status.
That was all lost for them.
On the 6th of August, I was arrested by KGB men...
who accompanied me to a nuthouse.
They want to destroy the idea of peace and disarmament.
They've been putting us in psychiatric clinics, in jail.
It's just been Soviet tools to deal with people
who thought not as they'd been told to think.
There'd been harassment, bullying, violence...
All sorts of things had happened to them.
And it gave us another window into another world of demonstrating.
And then they've been saying to the Western peace activists
that we don't exist and that's mirage of Western propaganda.
We went to visit the other members of the group.
We wanted to hear their point of view, 'cause they were very much part of us.
But it became apparent that there was also a bit of mistrust as well,
because they didn't think we were like them at all.
Greenham Common...
Because the actions of Greenham Women
were on the Soviet news quite regularly.
And they saw our protest like an organized, slick production.
To the point where there was whispers that it was a KGB set-up.
So they didn't connect us with ground-root support.
I'd never even been in a tent before I arrived at Greenham.
It was like living on an alien planet, in lots of ways.
The first thing I wanted to do is go back and live there.
But I was a single parent, so that wasn't an option right then.
My sister came to live at the house,
and I knew the kids would be safe with her.
I shared with them my fear of nuclear weapons.
That I believed that I was their mum and I loved them,
and it was my job to, um...
to try and keep them safe.
And so, it was a decision of...
do I want to take this path,
even though it's something I truly, truly believe in
and it's the right one to take, but there are consequences.
I decided that the risks of doing nothing were greater
than the risks of doing something.
As the numbers at Greenham grew, more camps were set up.
Eventually there was a camp at each of the gates of the base.
The camps were named after the colors of the rainbow.
Each had a unique characteristic
and would attract different types of women.
Blue gate is the corner of a road, and there's some very posh houses.
They didn't seem to have a problem at all facing the nuclear base,
but suddenly there were a bunch of women living there,
and they had a big problem with that.
We don't really think that these sort of dropouts
who live in a squalor like this
are the best people to decide our defense.
We have to put up with these malingerers and vagrants.
And quite frankly, most of us are absolutely sick to the back teeth of it.
The Newbury residents accused the women
of exploiting the camp to further other causes,
such as lesbianism and communism.
They are very anxious to be considered martyrs.
They will never be a martyr in a thousand years.
But I'll tell you who are the martyrs,
and that is the children that they have left behind.
The first time there was an eviction at Greenham,
I was told to get down to Greenham straight away and support the women.
And when I got there,
I was just in time to see one of the caravans
dangling in mid-air,
and about to be put onto a low-loader and carted away.
You're a part of the peace women's movement here,
my love, and you're on the camp.
- Yes. - And our instructions are
to remove you and your assets, and this is a part of your assets.
This is not...
- You're not taking my car. - Who does the car belong to?
- Does it belong to you? - Yes.
Oh, there you are, my love. There you are.
Is it really and truly...
I'm not "There you are, your love" anything.
You're not taking my car.
No. Right. This is your right to say that.
- So what you going to do? Sit in it? - Yes.
Right you are then. So, we'll have to remove you, my dear.
Careful with her, she hurt her legs yesterday!
Stop that. Stop it. Please. Please.
You have no right to do it, you're not a policeman.
- She's a pregnant woman! - She's pregnant. Be careful with her!
We were accused of being violent.
The media was against us now.
It's quite evident to us whose side you're on.
And I felt that this focus on women's sexuality
that was being, by this time, really peddled by the tabloids,
was actually kind of giving the vile aspect of toxic masculinity
a carte blanche.
There was a group of men
that did regularly come and scream and shout and...
They threw a whole bunch of just disgusting stuff.
Blood, and offal, and shit, and maggots.
They would throw stones and fire air rifles.
Two men came and just beat the shit out of two women inside a tent,
breaking the arm of a woman in her sixties.
The Peace Camp was certainly in the news,
but for all the wrong reasons.
All the news about Greenham was us camping and facing an eviction.
We have to bring it back to the nuclear weapons.
We have to take back the initiative.
In August, a group of women occupied
the guard post inside the camp perimeter.
Can you let me in there please? Let me in there. Let me in there.
"Can you please let me in? Let me in!"
Let me have my cigarettes and glasses, if nothing else.
We have to discuss it first, don't we?
You've got to get permission to give me my cigarettes.
Oh, darling. You're joking.
And what about the flask and the kettle?
Suddenly, there's the sound of a phone ringing.
Somebody said, "Oh, have I got the wrong number?"
She said, "No, you've got the right number
but the Women's Peace Camp has taken over the, the sentry box."
And then, there's a kind of... click!
Watch the window!
We were put in the two vans, and then we were taken to Newbury nick,
to the police station.
And I had no intention at all in my mind to be arrested.
They were charged
with behavior likely to cause a breach of the peace.
Our whole defense was about, we're keeping the peace.
We're actually trying to prevent
the nuclear weapons from breaching the peace.
23 women were sentenced to 14 days in jail.
They found us guilty, so they send us to Holloway.
And I was kind of shocked.
The same Holloway that the suffragettes had been incarcerated in.
And this is when I actually feel frightened.
There's been a peace camp on the pavement outside Holloway
since the women were first jailed 14 days ago.
They came out to an emotional reunion.
I feel stronger than ever.
If they don't get rid of cruise missiles,
yes, I'll go back and I'll go back and I'll go back.
They say that the bombs
Were only keeping us free
Now they're underground
And they don't have to be...
Thank you.
The elections have been called one year early
by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
She hopes to capitalize on her own continuing popularity.
The Labour Party, led by Michael Foot, provides the traditional opposition.
We are committed to the unilateral action to get rid of nuclear weapons
and to establish a non-nuclear defense policy for this country.
Some people want one-sided disarmament, the unilateralists.
That would leave our freedom and justice vulnerable.
I'm a disarmer,
but a multilateral disarmer, on all sides,
in a way that is balanced and safe.
And that, I believe,
is what the vast overwhelming majority of our people want.
While in the Soviet Union, Karmen and Jean's goal
was to plan a future trip with more Greenham Women
to meet their Russian counterparts.
But they would have to jump through hoops.
You had to go through official channels.
We had to speak to officials to ask for permission.
And that meant the Soviet Peace Committee,
which are basically just arms of the government.
The leader was a colonel in the KGB,
because they need to control everything.
The peace-loving international politics of our party
and the Soviet state,
which does not experience any political unrest...
Their job is to spout an official line.
It's not to have dialogue, but to tell you what to think.
The peace movement in our country
is a movement of all people.
Tens of millions participate
in mass gatherings of the Soviet peace lovers.
But also the Peace Committee focus
was the repression of Trust Group members
and other dissidents or independent thinkers.
And it's really irritating that we are doing good things,
and we are shrugged off like we're some hooligans.
It was very easy for these officials to say,
"What? They don't exist.
You know, it's a story that somebody made up.
It's fake news."
After negotiations with the Soviet Peace Committee,
Jean and Karmen were granted their meeting.
The day before the meeting,
the women risked attending a peace picnic
in a public park with the Group for Trust.
Well, they were followed there.
You noticed people sitting in cars,
or just kind of hovering around.
And there was sort of a commotion going on
with some of the members of the Group for Trust.
A lot of discussion, a lot of quite raised voices.
And they said, "This meeting you're having
with the Peace Committee tomorrow.
we want you to take one of our women with you."
And we were like, "Really?"
It was certainly provocative, but it was felt that it was appropriate,
and it was something they... they felt was worth the risk.
It gave them a perfect opportunity to talk to the authorities
about their goals, what they were saying,
and their connection with us, um...
And we agreed in the end that it was Olga.
I didn't even think about danger. I knew what Soviet Peace Committee was.
It was an establishment of the government and KGB staff.
I was prepared for anything.
As from tomorrow, the Greenham Peace Women
will face opposition from another women's group,
Women for Defence.
At the head of this campaign
is the gossip columnist Lady Olga Maitland.
Do you honestly believe that we can be protected?
I do think very definitely
that we have to look into the whole history of defense.
With all the opposition we were facing,
I discovered I was a good communicator.
I'd never done media stuff in my life. I didn't really know what I was doing.
But it was just like, "Well, we just have to tell the truth."
But, Rebecca, tell me, how are you going to suggest
that this country shall be properly defended?
It's an idealistic world. We all hate nuclear weapons.
These weapons do not protect us. They make it more likely
that in the event of political conflict, tempers will flare so high,
international relations between countries
will be more insecure, more unstable...
We knew that stuff was going on, and we felt
that things were really dangerous.
Which was again why we really wanted
to stop the cruise missiles even getting brought into Greenham,
because we saw that as a massive escalation.
This one.
After two long years,
nothing had altered government plans to site cruise missiles at Greenham.
Bolder, more decisive action was required.
The first time I cut the fence, there was some apprehension.
But there was excitement.
There was a number of reasons to go inside the base.
One was, when you cut the fence you free the common,
because within that fence was common land, public land.
But it was also to let the military know
that we could come in whenever we wanted.
And we did.
44 women peace campaigners have climbed
over a fence surrounding the base.
The demonstrators gathered near one of the partly built missile silos.
Today's action is a completely new tactic,
and the authorities might well find it worrying.
Taking down fences, it frees you.
- Hi. - Hello.
After going to live at Greenham,
I knew that I couldn't pretend.
Here was a place where you could be anything.
And I could have a voice.
I could have an opinion, I could share it with other women,
I could live in a way
that I've never lived and always wanted to live.
I knew that I was a lesbian.
I had waited for this since I was 11.
It was a long time. I was... How old was I? About 38 then.
It wasn't a safe time, really, to be lesbian or gay.
But being at Greenham, there wasn't that fear.
It...
Brilliant.
Heseltine would regard the women as, politically, his enemy.
His job was to persuade the country that cruise missiles were a good thing.
He made it his job to win the propaganda war,
having been appointed, essentially, to do that by Mrs. Thatcher.
DS19 coordinated the propaganda.
DS19 was put together as a Ministry of Defence committee
to do that in every way they could devise.
Technically it was a secret.
They planted stories in the press, just like any PR operation.
Jane's Defence Weekly,
the publication that keeps up with military matters around the world,
says Soviet-trained agents
have infiltrated the Greenham Common Women.
The women say they believe
the Jane's report is part of a new campaign to discredit them,
and to drive them from their vigil at the gates of Greenham Common.
In the 1983 election, the public firmly rejected
Michael Foot's policy of one-sided disarmament,
and Margaret Thatcher led the Conservative Party
to a landslide victory.
The Prime Minister said, what a great honor, but responsibility,
she felt a second term was going to be.
The missiles were expected to arrive in only six months.
I was arrested on a made-up charge for criminal damage.
But they didn't take me to Newbury nick.
They took me inside the base.
And it was...
It was a really spooky feeling, because it wasn't normal.
I was scared, because I didn't know. I hate the unknown.
Right. What's this?
I knew it wasn't good. I just knew it wasn't good.
There's a right disgusting smell in here.
Stinking lesbian.
I didn't know what to do.
Where do you think you're going? Oi! Don't you move.
Together, their presence was menacing.
She just needs a good shag.
Because nobody was stopping anybody.
They poured hot coffee all over me.
I had my mum's jumper on.
And I... had the scream here,
but I was fighting not to let the scream out,
because then I would start crying as well.
That's enough.
But I didn't cry,
and I didn't scream,
and I didn't show them how scared I actually was.
I decided that they were not going to get away with it.
I told myself I would never stop, and I told them that I would never stop
until they were in court.
And, um, they were found guilty.
"You behaved in a disgraceful manner," from the judge.
"You are a disgrace to your uniform."
State officials at the Soviet Peace Committee
were expecting three women.
They had no idea that there would be a fourth,
a Russian activist.
We were just worried about how we were actually going to get Olga in.
I knew that they wanted to make contact with Olga.
but what I didn't know is
they were going to attempt this whole caper
of going into the Peace Committee with her.
We were late, and they were waiting for us.
There was no, like, check out who we are, check out identity,
we're just straight into the room.
This really was the first time
that Western activists tried to bring in a Soviet activist
into an official meeting.
The goal of our organization is peace.
We were maybe a bit nervous, tense,
we didn't know what was going to happen.
But for Olga...
She was just, like, going into the lion's den.
Our people despise war.
They had no idea who I were.
I'm frozen, OK. I'm in it.
Thank you for agreeing to meet us.
I was looking around and I was thinking...
It's really interesting that I know what's going to happen,
and you guys don't.
We'd like to organize a trip for our group to Moscow
to create a direct dialogue between our people and yours.
All eyes now at me, and they're very, very polite.
I said, "I'm a member of Moscow Trust Group.
We invited you several times for dialogue, but never got response.
But since I'm here, let me lay out our program."
And they... It was such a shock.
He was offended personally and for the country.
How could I?
We just immediately in unison said, "Well, you're gonna talk to her.
Let her speak. Let her say who she is, and what she represents.
How rude. Carry on."
He did not have control over the situation.
But he knew that he had power in the state,
and he could just squash these people.
The same aims as us. Don't look at your watch!
But please...
Don't say anymore that we don't exist
and that we're a mirage of Western propaganda.
And I left.. Voila!
So Kharkhardin, like... ...left at a high speed,
probably to his real headquarters on Lubyanka, KGB,
to report on this incident.
Oh, my goodness. Did that just happen? Did that just happen?
We were sort of elated and whatever but also...
There was a bit of, like, what happens next?
We'd overstepped the mark. We'd overstepped the line.
You didn't argue with people like Kharkhardin.
There was sort of like a knot in my chest.
And there's, um, there's a car behind us,
with all these guys just looking at us.
I've never had a tail before.
I was thinking, "I want to go home now."
We went back to the hotel.
And there were two guys sitting on either side of the door.
And I just said, uh, "Excuse me, is there a problem?"
There was no eye contact,
no eye contact whatsoever.
And it was like, is this the reaction from the meeting?
So, when we got to the airport, we went to, like, check in.
They took our passports, and then they...
They left us. They went away.
And then we're thinking, "Oh, God. We're not getting out of here."
And I said, "If they're going to be like this with us,
what are they going to be with Olga?"
When they came out and told us we could go,
I just knew inside
that this was not going to be the end of the story.
In Britain, the nation's women
are spearheading the fight against nuclear weapons.
Their campaign has struck a chord throughout the world.
Several women's and peace groups are planning
to emulate their British sisters.
The target is the Seneca Army Depot near Ithaca, New York.
The next big action we planned was, in fact,
Women's International Day for Disarmament.
We said, "OK. On this day, we're going to call on women all over the world.
Do something where you live.
Stop nuclear weapons, stop militarism wherever you are."
Listen to the women Listen to the...
You know, outside Pine Gap in Australia,
or where there's a base in New Zealand.
All these American bases around the world.
Listen to the women
Singing out and bringing out...
Probably about a million women around the world
really took that to heart.
Put your body on the line
'Cause it's time to undermine
The diabolic plan of the super macho man
I was asked to go on an all-women delegation. We went to Washington.
Just what is it you hope to accomplish with this trip?
We'd like to convey to the American people
a sense of the enormous distress, anger, bitterness
that is being felt in Europe as a result
of the deployment of American cruise and Pershing missiles in our country.
Imageries of horror, death, agony...
All this came back to me.
We got lots more international women.
They started to come and visit Greenham.
And they started to bring us
the stories of how militarism had harmed them.
We were doing two weeks of action
in support of the struggle for a nuclear-free and independent Pacific.
So one of the issues that I brought was the colonization,
militarization, nuclearization of the Pacific,
and the Pacific peoples and their lives.
The Pacific is out there, over there, Australia and New Zealand,
you know, other end of the world.
People didn't know what was going on.
The atoll of Bikini may be utterly destroyed
come July the 1st.
But to the natives, in their simplicity and their pleasantness,
they're more than willing to cooperate,
although they don't understand what the test is all about.
So, the United States tested 66 nuclear bombs
on the Marshall Islands.
The wind failed to follow the predictions,
and the little islands of Rongelap, Rongerik and Utirik
were in the edge of the path of the fallout.
All Marshallese who were exposed to radiation
are now, fortunately, restored to health.
No person has ever been lost, or even seriously injured.
So radiation contaminated the people of Rongelap.
These people were really remote.
They were living their traditional life.
And suddenly all this snow started falling on their island.
Nothing like that had ever happened before.
A lot of those kids died from thyroid cancers.
And women started giving birth to babies that looked like jellyfish
or very deformed
and nothing like that had ever happened before.
I started talking about that around a fire
and it was the first time that any of those women had heard that.
And they didn't know, really, what was going on.
I didn't, and I still haven't gotten over
seeing the jelly babies that the women were having.
You know, it wasn't just the Americans.
The British had been testing in Australia,
without any thought of the effects on the indigenous people.
How it affected their land and their water.
It took away all their dignity and...
any thought of, of mana
that they had as a people.
It was stripped away.
Titewhai was just, like, uncompromising, you know.
"You have to take responsibility
for what your country has done with nuclear weapons.
You can't just focus on the US, doing it in Europe,
you have to focus on what the UK has done.
This is our experience
of your colonialism and your nuclear weapons,
and you need to take ownership of this.
And you need to bring this into your... into what you talk about," and we did.
On Friday morning, uniformed militia men are posted
all around the entrance to a street
that doesn't even have a name on Moscow maps.
They're here because the trial
of Soviet peace activist Olga Medvedkova is to begin.
Well, Olga got arrested for what seemed a completely unrelated situation.
I was put on trial
on framed-up accusation of beating a policeman.
Which was total rubbish.
She's going to hit a policeman?
Why would she hit a policeman?
She was standing in front of a courthouse.
So it really seemed fake.
Olga, five months pregnant, is a founding member
of the Group for Establishing Trust Between the USSR and the USA.
The alleged assault occurred
at the trial of another member last October.
They pinned that on her.
Why did they try... Because they were having a hard time
dealing with these people from their perspective.
And so that was her charges: hooliganism and assault.
Now the term "hooliganism" in the Soviet sense is serious,
very serious offence, um...
And that's what they charged her with.
He's one of the most prominent lawyers.
I got the lawyer I wanted,
and when I told him the whole story, he said...
"Your sentence is predetermined.
Nothing what I do can change it."
And when he learned that I was pregnant,
he said, "I advise you to have an abortion."
Because you wouldn't see this child for years.
And that was it. I said, "I'm not going to have any abortion."
The state does what it thinks it can get away with.
In the Soviet Union at that time
it was absolutely clear what you couldn't get away with.
And in Britain it was, uh, it was very subtle.
The cruise missiles will be deployed by the end of this year.
The defense of Greenham Common against invasion by protesters
has been prepared with the same meticulous attention to detail
that went into the Falklands campaign.
There are four layers of protection.
The first is outside the wire,
where Thames Valley Police have responsibility.
Inside the wire is layer number two,
Ministry of Defence police supported by RAF and military police.
Behind them is protective line number three,
2,000 soldiers of the Gloucesters, the Light Infantry and the Paras.
And finally, behind the multilayer security fence
surrounding the cruise missile bunkers, is layer number four,
men of the RAF Regiment and the United States Air Force,
some of whom are armed with live ammunition.
Will the Secretary of Defence give us an assurance
that under no circumstances will shots be fired
at the peace protesters?
I categorically will give no such assurance.
When Defence Minister Michael Heseltine assured Parliament
that all sensitive areas of Greenham Common were impenetrable,
he was tempting fate.
Michael Heseltine said in Parliament,
"There is no way that Greenham Women will reach any sensitive areas."
That was kind of waving a bit of a red rag to us.
We cut the next fence, then the next.
We're nearly there.
I just said, "Now stand up and stroll over."
The rifles are there.
I'm just... I have... And I'm also realizing,
"Shit. I'm quite high up, and I'm scared."
And part of the strategy as well was we had to be arrested,
because otherwise they'd deny we'd gone there.
But nothing happened.
So, the next step was, so, do we go in?
So, there we are, having a meeting.
This is Greenham Women for you.
You know, having a meeting about, is this nonviolent?
Is this what we all want to do?
Does anyone disagree? Everyone has a choice here.
And we all agreed. Yes.
We found secret documents
showing the lack of consideration for civilians
in the event of a nuclear accident.
Nobody was coming, and nobody was coming,
and nobody was coming, nobody!
We just thought, "We've got to show them where we are."
Hey! Who's up there?!
- Why are you here? - "We are completely unarmed."
- Get down! - "We've been here for hours.
Waiting for you to notice us. We're very glad you've noticed us.
We are ready to be arrested.
We are offering you no harm."
It really felt like that they'd shoot us,
because they were so frightened, they were frightened boys.
On December 27th,
three of the women protesters cut through the fence at about this point,
then through the concertina wire behind it.
They made it all the way to the control tower, 300 yards away.
They were in the tower for two hours
before they were discovered and arrested.
One of the women had this comment about security here.
I think, you know, terrorists and that could get in
and, you know, sabotage the place.
You know, I mean,
if there are supposed to be cruise missiles in there,
you know, they could really do some harm, you know.
It's really frightening.
The arrival of the cruise missile is imminent.
The first could arrive within days,
and the first could be operational, ready to fire, by Christmas.
In a bold, last-ditch action, Greenham Women crossed the Atlantic.
Some British women went into federal court in New York today.
They are trying to stop deployment of the American cruise missiles
at Greenham Common in England.
I was in New York
because we were expecting
the cruise missiles being brought in any moment.
We were kind of prepared, but we didn't know which date.
The women's case argues that American missiles on British soil
make their families a target in the event of nuclear war.
I want to save my children's lives,
because I think the deployment of cruise missiles threatens us all,
and I think we have very little time left.
A group of us took a court case
against Ronald Reagan and the Joint Chiefs of Staff
to get an injunction to stop the deployment of cruise,
to stop those weapons actually being flown into Greenham Common.
We can make them have to justify
why they want to put first-use weapons into Europe.
Outside, US Attorney Giuliani said
military decisions don't belong in court.
It may be a decision that you could disagree with,
but it's not one in which you should be able to challenge it as being unlawful.
Rationally and intellectually, I knew it was a long shot.
Because we tried so many different kinds of actions.
This was just one amongst many, actually, but this was a legal action.
But then, somewhat to our surprise,
they decided that there had to be another hearing.
The court listened to the arguments and said they'd render a decision
at some point in the future, not yet determined.
And suddenly it was going to take more time.
Well, maybe it might work. We might get a court injunction.
Surely they'll look at it and say,
they can't bring the weapons in because the case wasn't finished.
Tonight, new American intermediate-range nuclear missiles
are more than a subject for talks between the United States and Moscow,
more than a point of protest
for demonstrators across Western Europe.
Tonight, the missiles are a reality.
It was just before nine o'clock
that the plane bringing the first cruise missiles to Britain
came in to land.
Security, always intense, became even more so,
with armed paratroopers deployed in a tight circle around the plane.
The missiles had arrived.
I looked over at the fence,
and there was a massive, huge plane on the runway.
And they were taking things off.
This afternoon, Mr. Heseltine told MPs
what everyone had already guessed.
Earlier today,
the first cruise missiles were delivered by air...
Through secrecy and surprise,
the Pentagon outflanked a tough opponent,
the women of Greenham Common.
There was a British soldier,
and I was just bawling my head off.
And I said, "How could you? How could you?"
It was really scary. You saw these massive star lifter planes
coming in with the nuclear weapons, and you knew that...
For a moment you thought that you'd failed.
I was still in New York.
I felt I'd let them down.
I felt I'd let my sisters down.
Not to be at Greenham...
when it happened was really hard,
because I just wanted to be with the other women.
Out of the darkness
Comes the dread of what's undone
Out of the darkness
Comes the hope that we can run
And out of the darkness
Comes the knowledge of the sun
The tone at Greenham changed.
It really did bring a huge influx of new women,
and a kind of anger that was more intense than there had been before.
They might be in there, but they have to deploy them,
they have to get them out of the base,
and so, well, we'll do whatever we can to stop that.
You know, they're going to have to shoot us, all the way down the line.
The next step was
that they'd actually start taking nuclear weapons
out on our roads.
And it made everywhere a target.
A convoy of unarmed missiles left Greenham Common Base
just after midnight.
We realized we're going to need to build this up outside of Greenham.
And for a long time, there'd been this pressure on,
"Why don't you let men in?"
So, we said, "Look, why don't we make Cruise Watch a citizen's action
for everyone in the areas affected by the dispersal nuclear war exercises?"
And that's what it became.
It came out of the darkness,
and it came really quickly, and it was really big.
It was so menacing.
The missile launcher was everything that I feared.
It was the whole reason why I'd gone there in the first place.
So, it invoked a lot of...
anger for me.
No more nukes! No more nukes! No more nukes!
Everything felt more and more dangerous,
and that a nuclear strike could happen at any moment.
There were ongoing war games and military exercises all over Europe.
And the East German agents were telling the Soviets
that some of what was happening could well be a preparation,
under the guise of an exercise, for a pre-emptive strike.
We were much, much closer to nuclear war in October of 1983
than we were with the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Because of the very aggressive deployments
that were going on as part of this NATO nuclear exercise.
That was a flashpoint time,
even though we didn't know the facts of what was actually going on.
The police are trying to stop us catching up with the convoy.
There's 256 megatons of nuclear weapons ahead.
There's ordinary people in cars here all mixed up. It's incredible.
At the beginning they just kept denying that we'd ever stopped it.
And we were stopping it all the time.
We also started what we call "glooping" it.
Gloop is flour, water and paint.
I started to make paint eggs.
You tap the top of the egg, and you empty it.
So, the family get scrambled egg more than they want to.
And you put a little funnel in, and put paint in.
And you take it out with you, and you throw it at the convoy.
And it's great, because, you know, you can really direct where it goes.
We're on the hill. The convoy has just arrived,
and we've just lit the flares.
Activists have successfully disrupted military convoys
during cruise missile training exercises.
Continuing protests over cruise have forced the authorities
to restrict their plans to take the convoys
on regular full-scale practice runs around the countryside.
We had gone in a car to try and find the convoy.
There was some woods and we heard voices.
It was a bit shocking because I don't think
either of us had probably thought we were going to find the convoy.
We were sort of crawling on our hands and knees, closer.
There wasn't anybody right near the door,
so we tried the door, and it opened.
So I got in, and you have all these dials and all these lights...
And I looked at the button, and I thought about my children.
And...
It was...
I just thought, "That's how simple it will be."
It's not... It wouldn't be...
It wouldn't be a big, complicated thing.
It would be a man pressing a button, and that's all they would have to do.
I was sitting somewhere
where I was a few inches away from doing that.
Peace activist Olga Medvedkova,
accompanied by her husband and parents,
walked down the street towards the courthouse.
Friends greeted her and wished her luck.
Then the militiamen decided we had enough pictures.
Medvedkova's plight has become
the subject of worldwide interest.
She faces three years in prison.
When we heard that she had been arrested and charged,
we just pulled out all the stops.
And sending letters and telegrams.
They put up a huge outcry, the women of Greenham Common,
and all of us did.
I think they underestimated how much support she'd have.
How strong that connection with all the different Greenham Women were.
If she came to the courthouse,
Olga was sure she would be sent to a labor camp.
So, after 11 hours... I was found guilty.
And then judge came back.
And he said that, considering my conditions,
meaning being pregnant...
they are changing prison sentence on suspended sentence.
I just couldn't believe that it happened.
I couldn't believe I was home.
To that extent,
it was a face-saving measure for the Soviet authorities.
You all see, you know, she's a criminal and she's been convicted.
But then they were able to turn around
and let her go back home, which was sort of a concession.
It was basically a guarded message to us.
"This is what happens when you start messing with the way we do things here."
And Olga was like the pawn, in a way.
When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985,
he was determined to restructure the ailing Soviet economy.
The USSR entered a period of radical change.
Mikhail Gorbachev says
he will continue his restructuring program despite opposition.
There was that belief that he could reform it incrementally.
And they were keen on
reducing the armaments because it was a huge cost.
And they couldn't reform their country
unless they had the funds and the people to do it.
The biggest international story this past month
was the Geneva Summit.
The two-day session marked a long-awaited meeting
between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.
- How's the meeting going? - We haven't started.
- How did it go yesterday? - Fine.
- Are you getting along? - You can see that, can't you?
The two sides, two opponents in the Cold War,
got together.
And I sensed immediately
how important this was all going to be,
and how it might develop.
Reagan was clearly feeling pressure from all sides.
There's a chance for us There's a chance for peace
There's a chance for peace...
Our court case finally was dismissed.
It hadn't stopped the missiles arriving,
but it would help our efforts to get rid of them.
I mean, the choice is nuclear war.
People here have seen the film the other night.
And that was just nothing compared with what it will be like.
"The Day After" was about a nuclear war
and how it hits Kansas City.
They gave me this...
ribbon to wear.
But I haven't got any damn hair to put it into.
Reagan had actually been really shocked by it.
I think that some of the difficulties
that the Americans were experiencing at Greenham,
and in Belgium and Holland and Germany...
The message must have...
filtered up.
"It's not actually working,
and the locals are being a nuisance."
After five years, the women were tired.
Constant arrests and court cases were debilitating,
and often came at great personal cost.
We had been charged, and we were going to be going to court.
I was told by the barrister
that we would probably get two years in prison.
So then I had to talk to my kids and say,
"This is what's happening.
This is what may happen to me. I may go to prison for two years."
The thing that terrified me was
if I go to prison, and I don't sort this out,
that they are going to go into care, and they are going to be split up.
And I knew that just couldn't happen.
I tried so many options.
The court date was so close, so I had to settle with my ex.
OK, I'll sign the papers because I-I... they're really...
There wasn't an option really.
So, I signed the papers.
And in the end, we won the court case, so I didn't go to prison.
But by then... my husband had custody.
I've taken decisions in my life that have been,
you know, like difficult decisions
and I've always done them from a... a place of...
wanting to do the right thing and...
wanting there to be a world where my children are safe.
And when you do that it's a cost. Nothing's for nothing.
We are singing...
They started their journey
from the fences of the American base at Greenham Common.
So we went back to Russia.
And from there lots of other trips followed.
Not just with Greenham Women,
but with all sorts of ordinary people
meeting up with their counterparts.
One of our main goals is to wake up the activity
of ordinary people.
Which coincides with the aims of Gorbachev.
The Russians kept an eye on Greenham, because they wanted to know
whether or not it would influence political opinion in their favor.
And I think it did.
We shall overcome some day...
As many as 40,000 people will take part,
linking arms to make up the chain later today.
We all somehow felt so much was beginning to happen.
Sense is beginning to prevail.
The Greenham Women and the Peace Movement of Europe,
we were being taken seriously.
The human chain had stretched
14 miles from Greenham Common...
It was like giving birth. Your baby grows up and whoa.
It's in the world, doing its own thing.
Gorbachev realized
that, you know, the arms race was a dangerous nonsense,
and so was prepared to sign
a big arms control treaty with the Americans.
President Reagan and Soviet leader Gorbachev
today signed the INF Treaty,
banning short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles.
And it took everybody by surprise.
Nobody had told us anything about it.
I thought they were bringing more missiles.
I started running towards the plane.
Two policemen pounced on me and they said,
"What are you doing, Chris? You've got what you want.
They've come to take them. Isn't that what you wanted all along?"
And I said, "Yes!"
And it was...
We did it!
Greenham Women all over the world must have been feeling the same thing.
We proved that politically land-based cruise missiles didn't work.
And the missiles were going.
At the end of the 20th century
we were able to stop the nuclear arms race,
and to give a chance to the world.
There was a major meeting in London
at which Mikhail Gorbachev was coming to speak.
And I went along to that.
And so he was asked this specific question about trust.
"What made you think that you could trust Ronald Reagan?"
Because Reagan had called the Soviet Union the "Evil Empire."
He said, "Well, I didn't think I could trust Reagan,
but I knew I could trust the Greenham Common Women
not to let Reagan use it against him."
That this was what it was. It wasn't Reagan he trusted, it was us.
To hear that come from him was really powerful.
And that actually impelled me to put my hand up, to actually say,
"Well, actually I was one of those Greenham Women."
He looked straight at me, in his reply,
and then it was translated to me as, "Thank you so much."
He said, "It was the Greenham Common Women
that helped the INF Treaty become possible."
Which led to the end of the Cold War.
Gorbachev has just actually publicly acknowledged,
you know, that Greenham Women made a real difference.
You don't get the INF Treaty
just by focusing on the missiles themselves.
But you get treaties when the nature of the regime changes,
when civil society is allowed more freedom,
when the political prisoners are released.
When groups like the Trust Group appear, and are able to function.
This inspires more trust in the other side,
more belief that they're not capable of, of firing these weapons.
Then it was very easy.
The Peace Camp continued until the year 2000,
when the women reached their final goal.
Eighteen years after the camp was formed,
the Common was returned to the people.
What started at a kitchen table in Wales
inspired a global movement.
The Greenham Women, their friends,
and hundreds of thousands who joined them...
gave us a future.
They had achieved the extraordinary.
It'd been almost 20 years since I'd been back to Greenham.
And so, I decided I would go to camp.
So I wanted to go back to the beginning.
I wanted to come full circle.
I went to where we used to sleep, where we put the tents.
And just remembering, really. Not only me, but all of the women.
I couldn't see them, but I could feel them all.
And I guess how I had developed as a woman, as a person,
because of Greenham.
And that I owed it so much.
I really, really feel and believe right in my heart,
that I feel like I was born when I went there.
When I went there, I became me.
Whenever there's an anniversary, tenth, twentieth,
I do take a moment to think about, yes...
what we actually started, I suppose, um, in that kitchen.
We had no idea whatsoever of it turning into what it turned into.
It's people, ordinary people, who can go round
and maybe decide they're not having this any longer,
and they're going to do something about it.
It's the pressure we put on our own governments,
and it's also the pressure we brought to bear on the Soviet governments,
letting it be known that, well,
yeah, we know, we know, we know what you're doing,
and we're not OK with it.
We also sent a message to the British public,
the Western public, which is, well,
you know, maybe these peaceniks are not so naive and gullible after all.
So, you know, maybe they're onto something.
And the other major impact is in the hearts and minds
of every single woman who ever got involved.
And all the partners and children,
which includes a whole lot of men, and a whole lot of boys growing up,
who were connected to every single woman who ever went to Greenham.
Whether she went there for a day or she lived there for several years.
Greenham had an impact in how we live our lives.
Don't think you're too little to do big things.
Because they just might happen,
particularly if you pursue them with all your energy, all your heart.
Everybody is big, if they're pursuing big and good ideas.
Thank God for those Greenham Women.
I think we're at the tipping point now where everybody is starting to wake up.
We are strong, we are brave, and we will fight.
Develop a passion,
because there's a lot to be righteously angry about.
We are here to raise our voice. To take action.
The most righteous thing you can do
is shake the table.
Join us to engage in civil disobedience and become one.
We talked about the beginning of a revolution.
Today, the revolution is rolling.
We share a common goal. We want the future.
This is only the beginning of the beginning.
We must know the world belongs to us.
Hand in hand the line extends
All around the nine-mile fence
Thirty-thousand women chant
Bring the message home
Carry Greenham home, yes
Nearer home and far away
Carry Greenham home
Singing voices rising higher
Weave a dove into the wire
In our hearts a blazing fire
Bring the message home
Carry Greenham home, yes
Nearer home and far away
Carry Greenham home
No one asked us if we cared
If cruise should be stationed here
Now we've got them running scared
Bring the message home
Carry Greenham home, yes
Nearer home and far away
Carry Greenham home
Here we sit, here we stand
Here we claim the common land
Nuclear arms shall not command
Bring the message home
Carry Greenham home, yes
Nearer home and far away
Carry Greenham home
Not the nightmare, not the scream
Just the loving human dream
Of peace
The ever-flowing stream
Bring the message home
Carry Greenham home, yes
Nearer home and far away
Carry Greenham home
Woman tiger, woman dove
Help to save the world we love
Velvet fist in iron glove
Bring the message home
Carry Greenham home, yes
Nearer home and far away
Carry Greenham home
Carry Greenham home, yes
Nearer home and far away
Carry Greenham home
Subtitles: IYUNO-SDI GROUP