Tens of thousands of women visited Greenham in the first few years. Most, having made their protest - and been changed - went away again Only a hard core of protesters stayed. By 1985, after another mass eviction, press coverage was dying away That winter was a hard one. A woman from Blue Gate, on the other side of the base, was murdered by a travelling salesman who had given her a lift; CND's annual conference offered "negligible" support for Greenham (according to a public statement by the remaining women); the Greenham Common Peace Camp campaign office in London closed down.The momentum never really returned. In 1987, Yoko Ono visited the base and helped the women to buy land nearby in which to rest and recuperate But by then the women were falling out with one another.

It is hard to establish precisely why the Yellow Gate women fell out with the rest of the peace movement, but all parties agree that "the split" began then. The simplest interpretation is that they were the hard core, who believed in continuing the Greenham camp come hell or high water. The "moderates", who remain on friendly terms with CND, believe in a more flexible approach to continuing the struggle, which includes returning to careers, homes and families elsewhere; hence the name of the network to which many of them now belong: Greenham Women Everywhere. Both factions see themselves as guardians of the original Greenham spirit; neither can pretend that the quarrel has been helpful to the cause.Nor, on the face of it, was the thawing of the Cold War.

In the early Eighties, when East and West had missiles primed and trained on one another, fear of a nuclear holocaust was strong enough to attract 150,000 people to a CND rally in Hyde Park. Then treaties were signed, the Soviet Union fell apart, and - despite any number of remaining nuclear threats from criminals, terrorists and other power blocs - everyone seemed to stop worrying. As Katrina says: "Once a lot of women started thinking that there was no longer the danger of a nuclear war tomorrow, they stopped acting." When, in 1989, a 22-year-old Welsh woman called Helen Thomas - one of a handful of new recruits to the Yellow Gate camp since the split - was hit by a police horse-box and killed during a protest in 1989, many people thought the Greenham dream was approaching its bitter end.But it wasn't. Even when the Americans and the Cruise missiles left Greenham in September 1992, the women remained, simply turning their attention to the Atomic Weapons Establishment, eight miles down the road at Aldermaston and Burghfield, where warheads for the Trident nuclear system are made. Aerobics had arrived in Tonga and the King was in crusade mode, leading his subjects on a get-fit regime.