 Many governments that came into power brandishing nuclear weapons and talking about waging nuclear war backed off when these massive protest campaigns developed. For example, in Germany during the 1980s, there would be nationwide demonstrations that would draw roughly a million people, or in the United States in June of 1982. The largest political demonstration ever in U.S. history took place condemning the nuclear arms race. These displays of popular protest and the many polls that government officials conducted during these years, the times of popular protest, convinced government officials that they had to back off, that their nuclear ambitions could not be realized. There have been other times when the peace movement has been effective as well. We do know, for example, that the Vietnam War, in which the United States had an enormous military advantage, could have been won militarily by the United States, had the U.S. government used its full military power. The United States was using massive military power, utilized several times the explosive power in its bombing campaigns against North Vietnam that it had used all during the Second World War. Nonetheless, it did not use nuclear weapons during that conflict, although that was suggested to U.S. officials. It did not move further than it did, than the massive violence that had rained down on the people of Vietnam during that war, largely thanks to the fact that there was so much protest against it. In fact, government officials have even said, officials who were national security advisors at that time, for example, they have said the U.S. government simply couldn't use the bomb. That was ruled out of the question thanks to the fact that the people of the United States and the world's public, too, would simply not have accepted the use of nuclear weapons. So here was one more case when the peace movement was reasonably effective in defusing a terrible situation and finally leading the U.S. government to abandon the battlefield when, in many ways, it had done very well on the battlefield. The war was simply too costly, not only in terms of lives and resources, but politically for U.S. politicians.