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, 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. END Publications 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. Détente from below 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