Nuclear freeze

...Last March, the "freeze" proposal drew people from thirty four states to a conference in Washington D.C...

...Without muscle, is it meaningless...

...Willens, a wealthy Los Angeles businessman, chairman of Factory Equipment Corp., has been active in various liberal causes, such as the McCarthy and McGovern presidential races, the Center for Defense Information and the Business Executives Against the Vietnam War...

...Scientists are promin-ant among the campaign's endorsements...

...This issue even stirs students from their apathy...

...Despite the singular focus on nuclear dangers and resistance to being classed as just another peace movement, the initiators of this drive come, logically enough, from past war protest-s.The key figures are three...

...Third is Ian Thiermann, a retired Los Angeles businessman, long-time Quaker and pacifist...

...These include: Catholic bishops, a growing number of politically active physicians, scientists including a number of Nobel Prize winners, and environmentalists...

...to propose such an agreement to the government of the Soviet Union...

...Cardinal Timothy Manning of Los Angeles has also spoken out...

...Californians for a Bilateral Nuclear Arms Freeze want no one from government aboard, and no partisan influence...

...It grew from exasperated U.S...

...1 formal start, literature was printed, pamphlets readied, a logo devised, organizations planned, supportive endorsements gathered...

...We felt that humanity's survival is the greatest moral issue of our time and that only a citizen's movement that reached past governments could pressure governments to put down nuclear weapons...

...The first is well along...

...It is not a "peace" movement...

...Remarked Pam Nichols, who left the Sierra Club to become northern "freeze" manager, "Just being born gives one a stake in opposing nuclear weapons...

...MARY ELLEN LEARY (Mary Ellen Leary, a previous contributor, is a journalist who lives on the West Coast...

...He has already appointed three new diocesan employees to educate parishes and parochial schools full time on the nuclear threat and on the "freeze" initiatives...

...Well, the yeast has spread...

...The marches, parades, and speeches appealed to governments to forbear, But quite as much, they aimed to awaken world opinion...

...or, rather, of a public hope, at a time when hope is on the decline...

...Senator and new layers of other state officials promises to be intermeshed with the nuclear weapons issue...

...He considers the "freeze" proposal an indirect boost for the Soviets, a subtle assault on President Reagan and an erosion of U.S...

...Next summer, while Congress struggles with the national budget and attention is sharpest on military spending, California's quest for new governor, new U.S...

...All have exceptionally strong bases in California...

...Quite unlike the Vietnam war protests, the drive starts out with an air of respectability...

...To most Americans it still may seem so...

...It focuses simply and exclusively on the horror implicit in mounting numbers of nuclearweapons and asks a bilateral end to this fuel for world incineration...

...military readiness...

...Normally, volunteer efforts fall by the wayside...

...The California outcome, either of signature-gathering by April 22 or of vote-winning by November 1982 is unpredictable, though insiders are aglow with confidence...

...Not all peace advocates supprt the "freeze" initiative...

...A ferment is at work...

...In refusing to participate in such pre-planning, the physicians have replied that the request makes a false assumption, misleading the public, by its implication that any treatment would be possible after a nuclear exchange...

...to fashion strategy for a four-year drive to build public support...

...As first step, it asks the government of the U.S...

...certain suicide...

...Everything...

...Beyond formal endorsements, they have provided volunteers, organizers, and funds...

...But that new presidential overture and even the present arms control negotiations do not satisfy "freeze" advocates...

...Francis of Assisi, had an electric effect, not only on the astonished congregation in his great Cathedral (who rose spontaneously to applaud) but on many others in the church...

...Two steps are involved...

...We saw that governments were locked into face-saving positions of rivalry they could not escape...

...military readiness...

...But quite apart is his passionate repugnance at nuclear weapons...

...But public response looks promising...

...folly of unbelievable dimensions...

...For instance, in Berkeley Robert Pickus, president of World Without War Council, which works to enlarge international understandings, scoffs at such a movement, built so obviously on fear...

...As Harold Willens put it, "It became clear if we relied on governments to end the arms race, humanity would be obliterated...

...But the view of its supporters is that such an expression has an innate power of its own and can influence world opinion, as the demonstrations have done...

...The teaching of the church is clear nuclear weapons and the arms race must be condemned as immoral...

...This is the first time political action on this issue of nuclear weapons has been brought to the level of the ordinary voter...

...Catholic bishops are not the only religious group involved, only the most unexpected...

...Willens...

...Although Archbishop Quinn was not the first Catholic bishop to voice alarm at the nuclear arms race as a "crime against God and humankind," his remarks on Oct...

...Second step will be pursuit of favorable votes, once the proposal is on the ballot...

...They are qualitatively of a whole different order of destructiveness...

...Obviously the whole move anticipates other steps would follow: gradual nuclear disarmament, more negotiations, perhaps a diminished militarism...

...Raising this cry in the context of the on-going military rivalry would seem absurd, if it were not so universal a sentiment, so elemental a cry by mankind for survival...

...The measure states that there exists "substancial and growing danger of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union which would result in millions of deaths...

...So, "to reduce the threat of nuclear war'' it calls on the leadership of both nations to reach an agreement "to halt the testing, production and further deployment of all nuclear weapons in a way that can be checked and verified by both sides...

...This film and the intervention of the medical world is a powerful factor in the California drive...

...Such was apparent when those involved in the initial announcement at a state capitol press conference included San Francisco's Archbishop John R. Quinn, University of California Nobel Laureate Donald Glaser, along with one of the "freeze" initiators, Mr...

...Working with him are Steve Ladd, San Francisco head of the War Resisters' League, a far younger activist whose University of California involvement in Vietnam war protests led him to a life-time dedication...

...Campus backing is a given...

...Funds, roughly $200,000, are being raised...

...It prompted large town-meetings in New Hampshire and Vermont...

...Stop right now...

...Efforts are underway to engage minorities, a logic the military budget underscores...

...Weigel's group would entice the Soviets into step-by-step conciliations, but it is still occupied with framing the steps...

...Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy...

...Some points to note: This is a bilateral appeal, not a call for unilateral action by the U.S...

...and the USSR...

...4, the Eight Hundreth anniversary of St...

...Core of the campaign is a religious network: the American Friends' Service Committee, the Ecumenical Peace Institute, Clergy & Laity Concerned, Pax Christi, a host of Unitarian, Lutheran, and Episcopal churches and numerous Jewish groups...

...So moved was Thiermann at the doctors' calm catalogue of the catastrophe inevitable after a nuclear bomb blast, that he with the aid of his film-maker son, super-imposed actual photgraphs from Hiroshima and Nagasaki over the taped track of conference speakers and the results was the overwhelming documentary, The Last Epidemic, which has gripped audiences all across the country and shocked the media into attention...

...Nuclear weapons are not simply conventional weapons on a large scale...

...They persist in calling for a complete halt in new weapons development, in testing, in deployment...

...Admittedly, the nuclear "freeze" initiative has no enforcement leverage...

...The very locale of the campaign's headquarters suggests another layer of support, it is at 5480 College Avenue, Berkeley, where the store-front offices neighbor other "cause" and "issue" centers, along with wine and cheese shops, antique stores, bike and ski stores, all in the hospitable university ambience...

...In California, where law-making by popular will is the style and easy recourse to the ballot with powerful social issues has often pioneered national political movements, petitions are circulating now to put before voters next November a call for a bilateral "freeze" on all nuclear weapons by the U.S...

...In its own fashion the American response to nuclear hazard is taking shape...

...This expansion environmental group, and its rival, Friends of Earth, have recently committed themselves to the "freeze" drive...

...Some maniac of a man," he said, may press the proper buttons, "and there will come an end to all time, for all the living and the dead...

...Certainly American opinion...

...support to get favorable resolutions through the Massachusetts and Oregon legislatures and win unanimous approval in the New York state assembly...

...The "freeze" idea has been circulating among various states for the past couple of years...

...That shape promises to be political, it could prove more potent than peace marches...

...In World War II as a Japanese translator for the U. S. Marine Corps, he was among the first Americans to view Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombs fell...

...Archbishop Quinn's commitment to work for a bilateral end to nuclear weapons and his specific advice to his own diocese to undertake work and prayer in that direction dramatized the church's involvement...

...Archbishop Quinn urged Catholic hospitals in his diocese to consider that response themselves...

...The one group rejected as sponsors - politicians...

...Whether or not some element of Soviet self-interest lurked in the background, the basic sincerity of those demonstrations affected German opinion and Bonn leadership and led President Reagan to his olive-branch speech, so unexpected the world is still weighing its import...

...The power of that instinct is what the California campaign aims to rally and the ballot issue becomes a substantial instrument, a unifying center...

...Many think so...

...The issue hovered noticeably over their recent meeting, so many bishops have already protested in other states against "this madness...

...Nevertheless, the stark simplicity of the "freeze" appeal reaches past political nuance and subtleties of international bargaining to stir a primitive clamor for humanity's survival, which may be the only response adequate to the apocalyptic threat...

...Several local units of Physicians for Social Responsibility have refused a Pentagon request for systematic identification of hospital and medical facilities in their area available in the event of future military need, which the government anticipates, in its request, would be more massive in numbers and in trauma than ever before experienced in the U.S...

...Other, though not all, California bishops have joined...

...Attention was riveted on the totally contradictory thrust of the new administration, sizing its military budget dramatically upward, intent on reversing the slippage in weaponry, wariness, and nuclear sophistication which President Reagan perceived as the careless legacy from previous administrations...

...I was deeply moved at the time," he says...

...The National Conference of Catholic Bishops meanwhile have a study of nuclear war underway, due to be completed next fall...

...Even if overwhelmingly approved, it has no legal status in Washinton or in Moscow, It is merely an expression of the public will...

...It does not ask disarmament nor even touch upon the issue of conventional arms, of defense budgets, of conscription, of the morality of war, of defense expenditures versus social needs...

...Ready to go with "petition parties" around the state in December, volunteers are seeking half a million signatures...

...This combination, together with recruitment of minorities, labor, women's groups and businessmen provides a network reaching far beyond the habitual zealots and campus activists expected to figure in peace movements...

...In addition, the drive includes many of the usual liberal organizations, the American Civil Liberties Union, various Democratic clubs and some labor unions...

...Another World Without War activist, George Weigel of Seattle, columnist for the Catholic Northwest Progress, derides the "peace bishops" for repeating "errors of a failed peace movement" and for "fracturing" the Catholic community...

...Their tremendous explosive force, as well as their enormous and terrible side effects, will irrevocably alter our ecological system, genetic structure for generations to come, and the fundamental fabric of our social system...

...At this level, the common man may wish to cast a vote...

...California referendum NUCLEAR FREEZE BISHOPS & NOBEL LAUREATES PART OF THE MESSAGE in those surprisingly large demonstrations in Europe against super-power nuclear rivalry pitched on the mid-continent turf was exasperation that the American public does not show parallel concern about the likely outcome of a nuclear buil-up...

...Even before the Dec...

...Getting so many names in so large a state is a staggering task...

...This arsenal it says reduces national security rather than increasing it...

...But I didn't realize until later just how moved...

...The event hardly figured as news...

...But European governments took seriously the alarms expressed by their citizens and in November President Reagan also responded...

...Last summer, such a proposal would have seemed impertinent and naive, given the pell-mell rush to enhance U.S...

...The idea has already drummed up enough U.S...

...Down the street is Berkeley's Sierra Club office...

...delegates at the UN's 1978 special session on disarmament...

...Is there no stopping this madness...

...Thiermann's rare contribution came as a response to a conference stage by Physicians for Social Responsibility, a fast-growing national organization of the medical fraternity speaking out to prevent massive human damage which they recognize would be beyond doctors' ability to heal...

...But the single focus here is on getting a halt, a "freeze...

...A number of forces converge at this moment to propel the "freeze" campaign, forces not usually united in a voter appeal...

...California law requires 346,000 properly registered voters must endorse a measure, to qualify it for the ballot: the half-million names will cover inaccurate or unregistered signers...

...A 'just' nuclear war is a contradiction in terms," he said...