BAN THE BOMB
Lens, Sidney
BAN THE BOMB BY SIDNEY LENS In an astonishingly short time, a remarkably large number of Americans have recognized the danger of the nuclear arms race and embraced the idea that it must stop. On...
...that the United States must first "catch up" with the Soviet Union before it can begin to contemplate a freeze or cutback...
...Protests against nuclear weaponry are part of the mainstream coverage on the evening newscasts right alongside Henry Kissinger's speeches to the Foreign Policy Association...
...But the aim of the U.S...
...The media are suddenly full of features on the damage Sidney Lens, The Progressive's senior editor, is the author of "The Day Before Doomsday," among many other books...
...That may have been just as well...
...The Reagan Administration's attempt to Finlandize the Soviet Union rests on a three-part strategy: H A military buildup that far exceeds any effort mounted in the past, moving in less than a decade toward an increase of 400 to 500 per cent in annual spending...
...The hundred or so Pershing missiles in West Germany will be able to strike the Soviet Union within four to six minutes of launch...
...the B-l and Stealth bombers, and the Mark 12-A reentry vehicle...
...In Bonn, too, record crowds had turned out...
...The Trident submarine will be able to direct its warheads at Moscow from a distance of 4,000 miles...
...It persists in its plan for a five-year, $1.6 trillion military buildup, allocating almost $200 billion to weapons that It's time to revive a basic slogan will pose critical new threats to human survival on this planet—the M-X, cruise, and Pershing missiles...
...But economic measures that injure U.S...
...The space shuttle will place satellites in the sky capable of immobilizing Soviet command and navigation...
...Our answer must be to escalate the opposition to nuclear weaponry and give it a strong moral base...
...Some of the marchers who had come from hundreds or thousands of miles away were never able to get within sight or earshot of the stage...
...The Reagan Administration has, of course, not been moved...
...H An imposition of McCarthyite restraints at home, so that no effective opposition will rise against the Government policies...
...The Administration has reason to fear that if France, West Germany, and other Western nations were to become dependent on the Soviet Union for much of their natural gas, they would not continue to steer a hard anti-Soviet course...
...But they insist against all logic that they require more nuclear weapons so they can fight an unwin-nable war, if necessary...
...That is why the first steps toward repression have already been taken—in restoring the CIA's franchise to engage in domestic spying, for instance, and in curbing the right of Americans to travel to Cuba...
...From the big stage in New York's Central Park, the massive crowd that assembled on June 12 seemed endless...
...In these circumstances, Washington hopes, the Finlandization of the Soviet Union will be achieved...
...They want what Sir Solly Zucker-man, the British Nobel laureate, has described as the best kind of victory—one in which the enemy surrenders to superior force without a shot being fired...
...But the Administration assumes that the movement will be in no position to do so—that it will fade away without attaining any of its goals...
...done to the psyche of young children by the fear of nuclear holocaust...
...Big-city mayors assemble in Minneapolis and call for less military spending and more money for human needs...
...That was also the message of the 1,600 nonviolent protesters arrested while committing civil disobedience in front of the U.N...
...Earlier, outside the United Nations, Monsignor Bruce Kent, the leader of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, reported that his movement's London demonstration on June 10 had been the largest ever...
...The commitment at the great peace demonstration was visible and deep, and it encompassed Americans of all ages, classes, races, and interest groups...
...But the factional squabbles that typically characterized some of the planning for the rally were overcome...
...Every recent public opinion poll has affirmed that a substantial majority wants the arms race ended...
...It was estimated to number more than 700,000, perhaps a million, and it was the largest turnout ever for a political demonstration in this country...
...Advocates of disarmament, dismissed not long ago as kooks and political pariahs, enjoy new respectability...
...On this issue, it now seems clear, the Government of the United States no longer represents the American people...
...allies are likely to encounter political resistance abroad, just as the Administration's foreign and domestic policies are meeting with more and more resistance at home...
...Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and others now concede—in a departure from some of the most alarming statements issued during Reagan's first year in office—that "we don't believe a nuclear war can be won...
...In this age of peril, business as usual is a luxury we can no longer afford...
...Special Session on Disarmament...
...Similarly, we will soon face the challenge of moving from the goal of a nuclear "freeze" to the demand for total abolition of all nuclear weapons...
...To complete its encirclement of the Soviet Union, the United States plans to consolidate its alliance with the People's Republic of China, which has already tested a 7,500-mile-range missile and a four-megaton hydrogen bomb...
...They don't explain how more weapons will provide more security, in light of the certain destruction that awaits all participants in any direct nuclear confrontation...
...The aim is to Finlandize the Soviet Union...
...1 A tighter and tighter squeeze on the vulnerable Soviet economy...
...Most of the Reagan policy planners have shown themselves to be quite adept at personal finance...
...The Reagan Administration's petty denial of entry visas to hundreds of Japanese peace activists helped kindle a militant spirit...
...Administration officials have mounted an energetic counteroffensive against the reborn peace movement...
...Ann Landers, whose syndicated advice is dispensed to some seventy million readers, devotes a full column to a plea for a nuclear freeze...
...It is time to revive the slogan "Ban the Bomb," and to devise a strategy of resistance to a Government that would march us down the road to nuclear extinction...
...The massive popular mobilization against nuclear arms that turned out so forcefully in June can prevent this comprehensive Reagan program from being put into effect...
...But he asserted that his peculiar process of arms-reduction-by-arms-buildup was the only way...
...After years of disuse, the old, discredited McCarren Act of 1952 was dusted off by the Administration to bar several hundred Japanese visitors from attending the U.N...
...In the lexicon of the American Right, Finlandization is the process by which the Soviets intimidate a weak nation— Finland—while leaving it with a modest measure of autonomy...
...But they are clearly willing to invest trillions of dollars—and billions of lives—in an arms race that is a sure loser...
...Throughout the Western world, the message in June (and before and after) was simple and direct: End the nuclear arms race and end it now...
...missions of the five nations known to possess thermonuclear weapons, and of the similar number arrested a week later at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories of the University of California, while demonstrating against weapons work...
...Why...
...The economic squeeze on the Soviets is being tightened directly, too—by raising the cost of Western bank credits, for example, and denying export licenses for such high-tech goods as the gas turbine blades needed for the Russians' 3,700-mile natural gas pipeline to Western Europe...
...By the end of this decade, the Reagan Administration hopes, the Russians will be at such great technological disadvantage that they will have to yield...
...Government—not only of the Reagan Administration, but of its predecessors for three decades—is to subject the Soviets to Finlandization by arraying against them so formidable a nuclear threat that they will have no choice but to bow to Washington's will...
...Surely not to trigger an actual nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, with all the horror and devastation that would entail...
...In Europe, attempting to soften the hawkish image that has generated a new surge of anti-American sentiment, President Reagan stated over and over that he understood and sympathized with the concerns of the disarmament demonstrators...
...There was none of the chanting and cheering, little of the spark that marked the great anti-war rallies of the late 1960s and early 1970s...
...the Trident submarine and missile...
...But even if it isn't, the cost to the Russians of attempting to keep up with arms escalation will put severe strains on the Soviet economy and severe hardships on the people of the Soviet bloc, leading to what George F. Kennan, author of the "containment" policy of 1947, has called "the breakup and gradual mellowing of Soviet power...
...During the Vietnam war, the peace movement shifted from a demand for "negotiations" to a demand for "withdrawal," and from tactics of peaceable assembly to tactics of confrontation and civil disobedience...
...Though there were notable exceptions (including Helen Caldicott and Randall Forsberg), most speakers were neither especially inspiring nor even informative...
...strategic planners are not suicidal psychopaths, after all...
...The military expansion focuses on new weapons against which the Soviets have not yet developed any effective defense...
...But they do have an objective they call victory, and what they mean by that is the power to organize the world to suit the interests of corporate America and to rule it without interference from the Soviet Union or from "Soviet-inspired" Third World regimes...
...And they are waiting, hoping to outlast the wave of public concern, expecting the movement to succumb to demoralization and disintegration, certain that they will be able to perpetuate the endless cycle of escalation...
...Not one of them, we can assume, would invest a single dollar in a business that had been demonstrated to be a sure loser...
...There were sixty or eighty speeches—I lost count—and few of them stayed within the three-minute limit...
...The thousands of cruise missiles soon to come off the assembly lines will be launchable from B-l and Stealth bombers, and will travel to their targets at low levels invisible to radar...
Vol. 46 • August 1982 • No. 8
