The No-Nuke Wind Ensemble

...Though USA is loathe to admit it, being officially committed to the doctrine of atheism, many of the demonstrations involved the active participation of clerics...

...To take but one example, culled from Mobe sources, on May 26, 1978, the Rev...

...Evidently, Afghanistan has fallen under the 1968 Brezhnev Doctrine, which postulated the Soviets' right to intervene in any socialist state-not, in Brezhnev's words, confined to Eastern Europe at all--for the sake of socialist solidarity...

...Thus was a star born...

...In fact, it turns out that since coal contains traces of the radioactive elements radium and thorium, a typical coal-fired plant actually releases more radioactivity than a nuclear plant does, in addition, of course, to the sulfur dioxide and other dangerous effluents normally associated with the combustion of coal and oil...

...As the president of MUSE, Inc., ticked off a list of anti-nuclear demands, the President of the United States, it is reported, took notes...

...only smallness begets nicemess...

...That morning, they had participated in a similar anti-nuclear action in front of the New York Stock Exchange, and had succeeded in getting themselves arrested...

...By invading, the Soviets hoped to prevent these Chinese-backed forces from "nibbling" them to death (as Sovietbacked forces did to us in Vietnam...

...Even here, though, problems abound...

...Previous orders for reactors are therefore indefinitely deferred and new orders are not forthcoming--hence the crisis of the nuclear industry...

...The struggle against the rape of the earth by rich, white males is the same struggle as the struggle against the rape of our bodies and the rape of our lives...

...We are going to rediscover smallness," predicts Ralph Nader...

...Pessimists project much larger land usages...

...According to Michael Harrington, national chairman of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, "the resolution of the current nuclear crisis requires a defeat of the corporate power that has dominated energy policy from the very beginning...

...Still, the kind of invasion was shocking...

...At issue is the simple question: Can the West achieve a measure of energy serf-sufficiency before the Soviet Union and its friends gain control of the Persian Gulf...

...It means transforming our autocratic energy system into a community-owned, democratically operated system...

...As recent events in Iran and Afghanistan have only underscored, the "energy crisis," at the very heart of which lies our THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 I | dependence on oil from the Persian Gulf, is not so much economic as it is political in nature...

...Helpers clambered up on the roof, only to discover that the collectors had been clamped on back to front...

...Has it not always rallied to the People's side in moments of peril...

...Soon afterwards, word arrived that British World Peace Council activist.Peggy Duff planned to visit Boston and "wanted to meet with interested people...

...Hence the appellation chosen by the protestors--the Clamshell Alliance, popularly known as the Clam...

...Was it due, perhaps, to an accumulation of evidence disclosing the unacceptable health hazards associated with the operation of nuclear power plants...

...Not only does affixing a solar collector to one's roof involve the risk of serious accident, but it also requires a knowledge of elementary c e l e s t i a l science which even reasonably well-educated people seem to lack...

...At one point ten entrances were blocked...

...Enraged by so bold an encroachment on what he liked to regard as "liberated territory," the young Lovejoy set hoe and shovel aside and, in the early morning hours of Washington's Birthday, 1974, succeeded in toppling the $50,000 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 9 structure...

...Nuclear power is a feminist and lesbian Joseph Shattan is the Policy Director for the Coalition for a Democratic Malority in Washington, D.C...

...As the Federal Protective Service moved to open other doors, affinity groups*** blocked them and the FPS tried to clear them...

...Russia lashes out for fear of being surrounded by enemies, particularly China, Europe, and Japan in league with America, and this fear is said to be reinforced by a kind of cultural paranoia, the result of having suffered past invasions...

...Blinded by racism and propelled by sexism, proponents of nuclear technology have brought humanity to the very brink of the abyss...

...It is, however, precisely against the utilization of these resources--and especially against the utilization of nuclear energy--that the detritus of the anti-war movement has mounted its determined, well-organized, and lavishly funded campaign...

...A good morning's work behind him, Lovejoy next hitched a ride into town and surrendered himself to the local police...

...If people get back to the earth, they can grow their own gardens, they can listen to the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 7 birds, they can feel the wind across their cheeks and they can watch the sun come up...

...Toward this end, the Russians of late have been building airfields and naval bases in South Yemen, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan, positioning equipment in these countries and in Libya, and recruiting soldiers from these three new Marxist allies to supplement their own troops and those from East Germany and Cuba...

...Only 12.5 percent...

...But if you didn't notice Islamic fanaticism in Afghanistan recently, or the KGB's problem in controlling the Muslims within the USSR, it wasn't without reason...

...Organized in an association known as MUSE (Musicians United for Safe Energy), Inc., they stage frequent concerts, the considerable proceeds of which go to the MUSE Foundation, which, in turn, funds a variety of anti-nuclear projects...

...Enlightened by R~mpel and like-minded "international peace activists," the demonstrators then set off for the Forrestal Building, headquarters of the Department of Energy...

...Unless there is a substantial influx of new orders for nuclear power plants by 1981, warns the former president of the nuclear division of the American Physical Society, Bernard L. Cohen, "there will be massive layoffs in the nuclear industry, and all the experts in various aspects of nuclear systems will find work in other areas...

...As Peck and Mathews tell it, "The meeting with Peggy Duff turned out to be a good follow-up meeting to the one with Sidney Lens...

...Still others might have hazarded the guess that dykes are merely one of many obscure religious cults which dot the American landscape...

...We don't want equal rights in a dead world," she told a crowd of some 70,000 gathered in Washington last May to protest nuclear power...

...So intense was the American Communist Party's commitment to atomic energy, in fact, that in a frenzy of enthusiasm for the dawning atomic age it plunked a tiny atom inside the hammer-and-sickle on its logo...

...More police hovered in the background, while behind them, blocked by barricades, protestors held a huge canvas banner aloft upon which, like some ancient escutcheon, was proudly emblazoned the name of their group: Dykes Opposed to Nuclear Technology...

...Prominently displayed on page four of that proletarian periodical was a photograph of a young woman, her body limp, being dragged across the pavement by two burly policemen of grim mien...

...Anti-nuclear activists have long regarded the U.S...

...Many of these particles are highly-energized, quite unstable, and subject to a process of decay--sometimes gradual, sometimes rapid--which transmutes their very essence...

...Professor Paul Ehrlich, the population control advocate, words the same thought even more strikingly: "Giving society cheap, abundant energy," he analogizes, "would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun...

...In any case, the invasion hardly bodes well for the 1980s, the first decade in history to witness a stretch of Soviet strategic superiority and a new Soviet reliance on oil from the Persian Gulf...

...We ought to be looking for energy sources . . . that don't give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to each other...

...As the opposition to nuclear power gained momentum, serious fissures developed in the original Clamshell Alliance, with one faction, Clams for Democracy, calling for a broadening of the group's theoretical perspective, and another, Coalition for Direct Action, arguing for more vigorous anti-nuclear measures...

...Clusters, in turn, appoint representatives to the Decision Making Body (DMB), the governing Clam council...

...But while nuclear power as a source of energy is less hazardous than existing alternative sources, how does it compare to new sources of power--to solar power, for example...

...C l e a r l y , the anti-nuclear struggle has united the various tribes of the Left, the feminists, pacifists, populists, socialists, zero-growthers, communards, and revolutionaries, who have all discovered that the "war against the atom" (Samuel McCracken's phrase) resonates perfectly with their other passionate obsessions...

...I can think of only one long-term alternative," confesses solar-energy crusader Tom Hayden, "and I still see it coming...

...The newly-formed a n t i - n u c l e a r movement is neither more nor less than an attempt by the protons and neutrons of the Left to resuscitate the Movement of yesteryear, with hostility to nuclear power providing the binding energy that hostility to the Vietnam war provided more than a decade ago.t Nowhere is the transformation of the sixties' anti-war radical into the seventies' ]- As an example of how effectively the Movement can act when all its components pull together, consider the mechanics of the May 6 anti-nuclear demonstration in Washington, D.C., organized on a month's notice: Office space was provided by the Public Resource Center, a spin-off from the Institute for Policy Studies...

...When such an atom undergoes fission, its nucleus splits apart and a variety of "fission fragments" are released...

...This seminal document, which affirms that "the supply of energy is a natural right and should in all cases be controlled by the people," which denounces corporations and "private monopolies" for their failure to meet "the real energy needs of the people," and which demands that" not one more cent be spent on nuclear power reactors," is arguably the most significant pronouncement of the protestors to date...

...In contrast to the Wall Street action, no one was arrested at the DOE demonstration, and plans for monthly meetings between the DOE and Mobe are reportedly underway...

...Here, however, the analogy breaks down...

...If it takes a stray neutron to undo the binding energy holding the uranium nucleus together, it took the end of the Vietnam war to undo the Movement...

...This the good Reverend declined to endorse...

...So the invasion's timing at least may have been related to Defense Secretary Harold Brown's traveling to China, although it probably had more to do with our diplomats' languishing in Iran...

...Why should it be otherwise today...

...active constitutive groups of the Movement found that, on their own, they amounted to less and less...

...Photo shows police taking it out on one of the participants...

...A student at Amherst College during the sixties, Lovejoy was caught up in the turmoil of those years and ended up going to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade...

...A mass meeting protesting the growing arsenal of death was held in New York...

...During the mid-sixties and early seventies, the Left, preoccupied with more exigent concerns, permitted atomic energy to fend for itself...

...Duly brought to trial, the self-confessed saboteur argued that he had acted pro 4~ono publico, a contention echoed by the anti-war activists who served as character witnesses for the tower's docked decker...

...Few, however, could have divined the precise connotation of that sexual sobriquet, and none could have known that, organized in such associations as Lesbians for Love, The Dyke Brigade, and DONT, dykes play a not insignificant role in the burgeoning American antinuclear movement...

...No one ever really answered her question at the time,tt but the rest of this current history details a series of responses...

...j , ,,st what are the Soviets up to...

...Once that happens, it would take a very long time to reassemble them...

...Perhaps it would help to conceive of the Left as the nucleus of a fissionable atom, an atom of uranium, let us say...

...It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we might do with it," he admonishes...

...If a uranium nucleus consists of protons and neutrons, our hypothetical Leftist nucleus consists of the numerous socialist, pacificist, and revolutionary groups which, in their collectivity, made up "the Movement" of the sixties and early seventies...

...Explained the caption underneath: "U.S.A...

...The following account of Tom Hayden's tribulations with a solar collector, which first appeared in the Village Voice, does not inspire confidence in either the technology or its boosters: The man who proposes to lead California into the Solar Age proudly affixed a collector to the top of his and Jane's house...

...Acquitted after a seven-day t~rial on a technicality-his indictment had been faultily worded--the once-obscure communard was obscure no longer...

...Arriving at the Forrestal Building, they attempted to block its numerous entrances...

...The demand for "participatory democracy," first broached by Hayden in 1962 when he drafted the "Port Huron Statement" for SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), remains his political cynosure to this day and has become perhaps the theme most often repeated in the anti-nuclear litany: "We the citizens of this great country can take the power to govern this country ourselves," claims biologist-cure-politico Barry Commoner...

...Returning to matters atomic in the mid-seventies, it discovered that nuclear plants were producing some 12.5 percent of America's electric power...

...It is...

...For the past couple years, Chinese advisors in Pakistan have been helping to train and equip Afghan rebels, who first fought the Afghan Marxists and who are now fighting Soviet forces...

...At present, however, the dispute is somewhat moot, inasmuch as the technology in question remains prohibitively expensive...

...Participants voiced their demand to reduce military expenditures and to give up the nuclear arms race...

...Many people spontaneously joined us, including a Grey Panther in a wheelchair...

...Indeed, Russia has been the rapacious invader as often in history as the victim of invasion...

...Mrs...

...Next day, Jimmy Durham of AIM (American Indian Movement) presented the then United States Ambassador to the UN, the Rev...

...For when the Soviets move militarily, they move massively...

...Soon he became a living legend to thousands, a name to conjure with...

...For better or worse," Lovejoy observes, "a lot of people refer to me as the Trotsky of the no-nuke movement...

...What began in the sixties--a rising demand for a voice in the decisions controlling our lives--will spread to every sphere, particularly to the corporate world where so much life and death power is concentrated in so few hands...

...The World Peace Council is a Soviet front...

...Hayden's "Port Huron Statement," for example, was a veritable paean to the peaceful atom...

...In the Clamshell Alliance, affinity groups appoint "spokes" who meet with other "spokes" in a "cluster" to decide policy...

...Unabashed by the mishap, Tom then tried to equip his Santa Barbara ranch house with another batch of collectors...

...Although theoreticians of feminism have been quick to grasp the inner connection between dykes and nukes, others note a causal relationship between nuclear technology and racism...

...But the water stayed cold...

...Andrew Young, with a petition demanding a total halt to all U.S...

...A game of cat and mouse ensued," writes mobe member John Miller in WIN magazine...

...Nonetheless, they managed to show up for the Washington afternoon demonstration, thereby expressing what a Mobe press release dubbed "the solidarity between the two actions...

...Here, in 1977, 1,414 protestors were arrested after illegally occupying the site designated by the Public Service Company of New Hampshire for its proposed power reactor...

...The answer to that question depends very much on our willingness to exploit our vast coal and nuclear resources...

...The question of why the Soviets invaded Afghanistan is best referred to their designs in the region, which have been clear since the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939-1941, when Stalin's Foreign Minister Molotov demanded that the area "in the general direction of the Persian Gulf [be] recognized as the focal point of the aspirations of the Soviet Union...

...His path in life now laid out before him, tirelessly did the young evangel preach the gospel of "direct action" in the hamlets and communes of New England and California...

...and "front money" was donated by the Stern Fund, a friend of "progressive" causes...

...I just thought.it was so obvious and so symbolic and just stuck there so succinctly that I just knew it would end up tipping over," he later explained...

...t t t Dellinger had been in Washington just a month before to attend the Palestine Human Rights Conference, where he declared that he would take "personal responsibility" for seeing to it that a speaker for the PLO appeared at every anti-nuclear rally...

...Stranger things have happened...

...At the same time, demonstrations were held in many U.S...

...As Soviet and Cuban moves on Angola in 1975 and Ethiopia in 1977 and 1978 have again made clear, Moscow has no patience for such a strategy of gradual escalation as the U.S...

...Only the song of the lark, rising above the industrial din, can dispel the fog of false consciousness fostered by "corporate hype...

...Yes, there is opportunity in America...

...The surprise of the Soviets' invasion of Afghanistan was not so much in degree as in kind...

...Returning to the United States after his stint in the sugar-cane fields, he settled in a communal farm in Montague, Massachusetts, the former headquarters, as it happened, of the Liberation News Service, the Movement's answer to Reuters...

...demo, but they did make the pages of Pravda...

...But that, as we know, is not quite how the Left reacted...

...While this assault is conducted under the banner of "environmentalism," its fundamental animus is directed at American society-its values, its institutions, and, above all, its power (which is why those who oppose nuclear power plants today so often oppose nuclear weapons as well...

...As anti-nuclear author Sheldon Novick ruefully concedes, "The Soviet Union, the American Communist Party, and most of those on the Left publicly claimed that a military monopoly of the atom was stifling its enormous civilian potential...

...In 1973, that utility had decided to build a nuclear power plant in Montague, of which the tower was but the first auspice...

...Although it appears most unlikely that solar power will ever replace nuclear energy, solar collectors may well supplement nuclear or coal-fired power plants in the near future...

...Moreover, Soviet training maneuvers last summer and operational moves 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980...

...As it so often does, deliverance appeared in a most unlikely form--in this instance, in the guise of a 500-foot weather monitoring tower erected by Northeast Utilities Company on the very outskirts of the commune...

...Not only had the trial been reported by the New York Times, but friends of Lovejoy's at Green Mountain Post Films--an establishment closely associated with the Montague Farm--had decided to make a movie of the entire episode, to be entitled, aptly enough, Lovejoy's Nuclear War...

...Some 800 demonstrators assembled at noon by the Capitol, where they heard, among others, Werner R~mpel, Secretary-General of the East German Peace Council, who lauded Soviet party chief Leonid Brezhnev for offering to withdraw 1,000 tanks and 20,000 troops from East Germany...

...Even Pete Seeger took up the tune: "When nations build the Aswan dam so deserts turn to green, And atom power builds a world the likes we've never seen . . . . Then we'll have peace...

...With the success of the Seabrook occupation--construction of the power plant was temporarily halted--other antinuclear alliances sprang, into existence, with names like Catfish (Alabama), Oystershell (Louisiana), Prairie (Illinois), Northern Sun (Minnesota), Sunflower (Kansas), Lone Star (Texas), Cactus (Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada), Crabshell (Washington), Headwaters (Montana), Shad (New York), Paddlewheel (Kentucky), and Abalone (California...

...Once again," said Riimpel, " i t was the Soviet Union that made a new proposal of good will...

...This from a technology capable of powering whole cities, of industrializing the world...

...Several times police radios reported that no doors were open...

...As the somewhat prolix Jim Haughton of Harlem Fightback sees it, nuclear power is simply "the logical extension in the area of technology of American racism...

...anti-nuclear radical more clearly evident than in the career of 33-year-old Samuel Holden Lovejoy...

...Perhaps Kenneth L. Adelman served as Assistant to the Secretary of Defense (I976-1977) before becoming Senior Political Scientist of the Strategic Studies Center of SRI International...

...The most recent Mobe protest was held in Washington on October 29, 1979, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the stock market crash...

...10 THE AMERICANSPECTATOR MARCH 1980...

...For Tom, it seems, the sun rises in the north...

...For the necessary influx of orders to occur, however, utilities must be convinced that nuclear power plants, once ordered, will come "on-stream" relatively soon--otherwise, they will hesitate to tie up the huge amounts of capital which the construction of a plant entails...

...President of MUSE, Inc., and consultant to the MUSE Foundation, is Samuel Holden Lovejoy...

...The difference between the Petrograd and Seabrook insurrections, however, merits comment: The former was undertaken in the name of the downtrodden proletariat, victims of "capitalist exploitation...

...The ecumenical extravaganza was undertaken to induce the religious community to "raise a passionate c r y . . , against the threat of nuclear destruction...

...Of the various health comparisons undertaken thus far, virtually all have been favorable to nuclear power...

...Yet even as the Clam splits apart, others rush to take its place...

...And yet--strange to report!wthe Left was not always anti-nuclear...

...Others may have reasoned that dykes are an occupational category, like plumbers or electricians...

...In her typically direct way, laced with a stiff dose of Scottish brogue, she asked, 'Well, what are you folks going to do about it...

...People trying to get in--including Pentagon officials and workers returning from lunch--went from door to door and finally gave up...

...With nuclear energy," it declared, "whole cities can easily be powered, yet the dominant nation-states seem more likely to unleash destruction...

...This is as true today as it was in 1968 when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia...

...On the contrary, after World War II it pervaded the entire Left...

...It seems scarcely credible that groups like the Clam, Mobe, MUSE, and DON'T could accomplish the destruction of America, yet the concatenation of circumstances is such that they just might...

...In the absence of a national consensus on the need for nuclear power--an absence brought about in no small parr by the industrious efforts of the anti-nuclear movement--utilities have no such assurances...

...If the Left's hostility to nuclear power does not stem from that technology's inherent risks, does it derive, then, from a sober evaluation of comparative risks, from a belated recognition that the operation of a nuclear power plant, however benign, is still more hazardous than coal- or oilfired plants...

...But how can society cast off its corporate shackles, and how can Americans liberate themselves from their enslavement to a materialism at once insidious and insipid...

...It means revolutionizing our industrial economy...

...the latter was undertaken on behalf of a local clam colony, threatened by "thermal pollution...

...nuclear weapons programs...

...Having by now attained the status of an anti-nuclear Nestor, Lovejoy was among the half-dozen organizers of the May 6, 1979, No-Nuke Rally invited to the White House the next day to share their concerns with President Carter...

...And this fear may have entered into the "go" decision on Afghanistan...

...Never before, since the Bolsheviks secured power, have Russian troops been actively and massively engaged outside Eastern Europe in peacetime...

...Here power, not religion, prevails...

...That events have taken this course seems, on the face of it, almost inevitable, hardly worth remarking...

...The mechanism instantly broke and flooded the premises with tepid water...

...We want equal rights in a living world...

...For the Venceremos Brigade veteran turned organic farmer turned nuclear saboteur turned movie star turned corporation executive, it must have been a moment to savor...

...Wrong again...

...The Iranian crisis provided cover for this move, much as the Suez crisis did for the Soviets' 1956 invasion of Hungary...

...But, as Russian scholar Richard Pipes has noted, no state becomes a superpower and a vast empire spanning 11 times zones by enduring repeated invasions...

...The dykes from DONT didn't make the D.C...

...Among those taking part in the Washington protest were noted war-resisters Dave Dellingerttt and Daniel Ellsberg, as well as American Indian spokesperson Madonna Thunderhawk of WARN (Women of All Red Nations...

...To the demand for a community-owned and democratically operated energy system, Friends of the Earth official and "soft energy" proponent Amory Lovins couples a call for zero-growth...

...Protons, being ignorant particles of matter, have no recourse but to suffer in silence...

...By supporting and maintaining the oppression of blacks and other third world people, people become dehumanized by virtue of their own racism and can't perceive their own interest...

...Pronuclear advocates like Hayden now took to the hustings to denounce nuclear power, pro-nuclear artistes like Seeger became fixtures at anti-nuclear rallies, and the American Communist Party quietly excised the atom from its sickle...

...After all, is not the Left the party of Humanity...

...The health hazards posed by nuclear power plants are not nearly so great as, say, those posed by cigarette smokers to their neighbors...

...The campaign against nuclear energy, then, besides being inextricably connected to the struggle for sexual and racial liberation, is also, according to its votaries, part and parcel of the effort to reverse the maleficent momentum of industrial civilization...

...They credit Sidney Lens, radical gadfly and former member of the Trotskyite Revolutionary Workers' League, with drafting the original call for an anti-nuclear organization after meeting with "a number of Cambridge academic peaceniks" on Thanksgiving Day, 1976...

...Rather, the hostility originates in the social dynamics of the Left itself, in its manifest need to maintain its cohesion and effectiveness in the face of adversity...

...Jackson Browne, the Doobie Brothers, John Hall, Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, Carly Simon, Chaka Khan, Bruce Springsteen, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Jesse Colin Young, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Peter Tosh, Poco, Avis Davis, and Joy Rider--these are but a few of the rock, punk rock, and disco stars who have lent their not inconsiderable talents to the anti-nuclear crusade...

...While feminist and "Third World" ideologues probe the psychological origins of the pro-nuclear impulse, anti-capitalist thinkers try to place the anti-nuclear movement in a broader political and social context...

...In the absence of further data, what Soviet readers made of this photo, and of the accompanying caption, must remain a matter for conjecture...

...Stopping these reactors," he notes, "means battling the most powerful corporations in the world...

...cities to protest the development of the neutron bomb as part of International Action Week, designated by the World Peace Coun. . . . Waal, waa' arrr yifawks gewin tidew aboot i t ? " "I't Perhaps no one understood it...

...In fact, all evidence indicates that the amount of radioactivity emitted by nuclear reactors is considerably smaller than the harmless doses everyone normally receives from uranium-bearing rocks on the surface of the earth or from medical x-rays...

...That .is our rightful power, our duty-let's do it...

...I f Lovejoy is the movement's Trotsky, then the quiet coastal town of Seabrook, New Hampshire, is its Petrograd...

...These entities are known as radioactive wastes...

...organizational expertise came from Ralph Nader's Public Interest Research Groups, and from the Mobilization for Survival, of which more later...

...There hasn't been any...

...While Lovejoy's career, despite its emblematic character, is but the odyssey of a single individual, the history of the Mobilization for Survival--an "environmentalist" group which holds that "nuclear energy and nuclear weapons are merely different sides of the same coin' ' - illustrates the transformation of an entire section of the anti-war movement into an important component of the anti-nuclear movement...

...Sometimes he would advocate no more than a sit-in at the local nuclear power plant...

...But, even as the highly energized subatomic particles of the uranium nucleus are subject to decay, so, too, the hyper...

...The origins of the "Mobe" are chronicled for posterity in the July 1977 issue of IVIN magazine by two of its charter members, Clark University sociologist Sidney Peck and Harvard Employees Organizing Committee member Kathy Mathews...

...as the champion of reaction and the citadel of counterrevolution, and the current drive against nuclear energy is merely the latest in a series of efforts aimed at dealing American power a deathblow--this time, via the economic route...

...Nor was this enthusiasm for atomic power an idiosyncracy peculiar to Hayden and his coterie...

...The measure of the anti-nuclear movement's success may be gauged by the fact that the American nuclear industry currently hovers near the point of collapse...

...Perhaps they came to fear that history was passing them by...

...His message varied as the spirit moved him...

...Some, no doubt, leapt to the conclusion that dykes are an oppressed American nationality, distant cousins, perhaps, of Yakuts and Uzbeks...

...Abzug's remarks, it is reported, were greeted with "wild applause...

...Envisioning "the industrialization of the world," it said that "atomic power plants must spring up to make electrical energy available," and it lambasted the American political establishment for its short-sighted preoccupation with the mi/itary uses of atomic power...

...That the pro-solar Left evinces such a touching faith in the ability of modern industry m solve the problems associated with solar power, while simultaneously advocating the destruction of 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 modern industry in the name of smallness, seems not a little paradoxical...

...Not only have these groups modeled their "direct action" strategy on the Clam, but their ideology, such as it is, is likewise based on the Clam's "Declaration of Nuclear Resistance...

...issue," she explained at a protest sponsored by the Clamshell Alliance in 1978...

...Notes that periodical's August 1978 issue: "The Mobilization for Survival initiated a nationwide campaign against nuclear weapons in memory of the bombing of Hiroshima...

...cil . . . . More than 200 'teach-ins' were organized at universities and colleges throughout the nation...

...Not that the Kremlin isn't fearful, especially of the Chinese...

...A f f i n i t y group is a common Movement phrase, used to designate any small group of protestors acting as a unit in a demonstration, sit-in, etc The term was coined by the Iberian Anarchist Federation in pre.Civil War Spain...

...These disputes have rendered the future of the Alliance "probclamatic" at best...

...practiced militarily in Vietnam and as it is now practicing again, politically and economically, in Iran...

...More fashionable and enduring is the "encirclement theory...

...In its most sophisticated form, it holds that the Soviets moved on this Muslim country to prevent religious fanaticism from spilling over into the USSR, where, demographers tell us, the Islamic population is growing inordinately fast...

...He did, however, join in the Mobe-sponsored rally then in progress...

...most intriguing is the theory of "aggressive defense" which suggests, in its crudest form, that the Russians invaded Afghanistan for stability...

...How to account for this strange reversal...

...Here, experts differ...

...Optimists believe that a photovoltaic system, generating as much electricity as a typical nuclear power plant, would occupy no more than 50 square miles of land, so that powering the entire country with solar energy would require little more than the surrender of the state of Oregon...

...then, does not stem from a serious evaluation of alternative energy sources, nor does it derive from the health hazards inherent in the technology...

...other times he would urge the severance of the infernal machine's transmission lines...

...En route, they were joined by a contingent of Grey Panthers, fierce oldsters who had just concluded their national convention...

...Veteran anti-nuclear publicist Harvey Wasserman concurs...

...Shoveling one form of biomass and ingesting another (it was an organic farm), the peripatetic Lovejoy could not have found rural life stimulating, yet there might he have vegetated his youth away had not Fate come to his rescue...

...According to anti-nuclear feminist Laurie Holmes, this is as it should be...

...Human beings, not quite so ignorant, can act to change their destinies--and act they have...

...More recently, Bella Abzug has pointed to the ineluctable link between the anti-nuclear movement and the Equal Rights Amendment...

...After the war, the groups which constituted the nucleus of the Movement went their separate ways--some to communes, some to law schools, and some into "straight" electoral politics...

...The Left's current hostility to nuclear power...

...It was Peggy Duff who impressed her listeners with the historic importance of the UN Special Assembly on Disarmament scheduled for late May, 1978...

...Paul Mayer, who heads the group's Religious Task Force, led a procession to the UN, there to display "the Jewish ritual blowing of the Shofar, the soulforce of the Black Church, the prayers of Bishops and Evangelicals, the chanting of Buddhist monks from Hiroshima, the Mother Earth rites of American Indians, and the silence of contemplatives...

...True, it did wax wroth, but instead of arguing, as it had in the past, that nuclear power was vastly underuti/ized, it argued that it was perilously overuti/ized...

...It is hard to say, but any number of theories, of varying merit, have been advanced...

...The responses, a series of anti-nuclear demonstrations drawing on "the active political network" of anti-war protestors across the country, have been favorably commented upon in the scholarly Soviet journal, USA: Economics, Politics, Ideology, published under the auspices of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow...

...Indeed, during the fifties and early sixties it was among the staunchest supporters of peaceful nuclear power...

...9 For a detailed and lucid discussion of other putative hazards associated with nuclear fission --waste disposal, accidents, weapons proliferation-see Sam Schurr, et ai., Entrgy in Amorica's F.tHre: The Choices l~fore Us, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979...

...Judging by its earlier attitude, one might well have expected the Left to wax wroth...

...Not at all...

...More than I00 marches, demonstrations and sit-ins took place in 36 states--most of them at military bases connected with the Pentagon and nuclear power stations...