Editorials
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
The invisible man Ten years ago, no one could have imagined a scenario in which a Soviet leader addressing the UN offers ideas closely resembling proposals advanced by the popes of Rome: greater...
...Pundits warn that "Gorbymania" is already splitting NATO...
...In a city riddled by racial tensions, racial hostility, conscious or not, was probably a factor in the attack...
...the boys are active in organized sports and music...
...If we are to believe Cheney, Brilliant Pebbles now has the inside track as SDI's future component of choice...
...significant steps toward disarmament...
...But these fail and we fail...
...Couldn't happen...
...aims in negotiations over conventional arms...
...one boy's mother struggles to send him to a Catholic school...
...Those objections need to be repeated and applied specifically to Brilliant Pebbles: The system will be vulnerable to Soviet counter measures...
...The same objections that should have collapsed the SDI umbrella when Mr...
...Mikhail Gorbachev is neither immortal nor all-powerful...
...They seem to come from stable, caring homes...
...Four of the six indicted boys do not live in poverty, but in a middle-class building with a doorman...
...Only for the moment...
...Control of military planning and spending appears to be shifting to civilians...
...What should the U.S...
...For an SDI umbrella that he calls the "Brilliant Pebble" project...
...CRIME & ITS REMEDIES How is it then, that, when the psychology of "the group** began to take over-when the teens chased a couple on a tandem or struck a male jogger with a pipe, or gagged the young woman and dragged her off the running path-not one of these promising youths tried to brake the momentum...
...So far Soviet actions do not yet match the reach of its leader's words...
...about the prodigious resources of every kind that can be turned to peaceful, productive, security-building uses when the two overarmed alliances reduce their capacity for war...
...another boy goes to a small alternative high school...
...Other policies are changing...
...Now she lies in a hospital in critical condition and a handful of teenagers are facing charges of attempted murder, their lives derailed...
...no one has measured his capacity for ruthlessness should he decide that failure of his policies calls for aggressive diversions abroad...
...HEAVENLY PEBBLES The Bush administration, through its then-designated Secretary of Defense, John Tower, declared in January that the goal of President Reagan's Star Wars dream was unreachable: You can't devise a full-proof umbrella to protect the entire U.S...
...In his campaign Bush asserted his foreign policy experience as a principal asset After describing the president the electorate should choose, he said, "I am that man...
...So, obviously, was gender...
...it will not be full-proof...
...On the evening of April 19a group of thirty or so teenagers from Harlem set out for some "fun" in Central Park...
...We suggest Secretary Cheney apply the same criteria to his heavenly pebbles.is heavenly pebbles...
...hardliners, replacement of the Lance by an upgraded missile, is seen by the West Germans, along with many others in the West, as an effort to reverse the momentum toward nuclear arms control symbolized by the INF treaty...
...its deployment is likely to encourage rather than prevent a first strike...
...All of the ingredients were there-die ingredients that our society agrees should lead to bright and useful futures for our children...
...It turned into a series of assaults on several bicyclists and joggers...
...Now me real Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, says that the Bush administration will be seeking a mere $4.6 billion for SDr research and development this year...
...Brutality is part of survival in this culture...
...There are a lot of technical problems with it and it is extremely expensive...
...that the West Germans are being enticed into secession from the alliance-overtly out of revulsion against a deterrence policy that makes the two Germanys the nuclear battlefield of choice, but also, say some, out of the reviving dream of reunification...
...then contrition, repentance, and reconciliation are the necessary remedies...
...By 10 P.M., a dozen of the youths had raped, sodomized, and beaten a woman jogger beyond recognition and left her for dead...
...The president has made no public comments about bis attitude toward START negotiations...
...Self-expression can become unbridled license to act any way one chooses, regardless of its effect on others...
...and U.K...
...If the boys had been on drugs or out for cash and credit cards...If they had been poverty-stricken, with criminal pasts and no future to lose, we might be able to understand...
...it will set back other arms control agreements as a result...
...They had decent housing and education...
...Reagan on another Star Wars weapon, a massive X-ray space laser that failed to materialize...
...Cheney indicated he was delaying the procurement of more Stealth bombers...
...Mikhail Gorbachev strides the world stage alone, seemingly in charge of the only microphone that reaches public opinion West or East...
...Our immense capacity to do wrong may be tempered by better housing, better laws, better schools, better parents-may be...
...The stakes are indeed high and the complexity is real...
...it may cause a traffic jam of orbiting materials in space...
...That is short of the Reagan request ($5.7 billion), but up nearly a billion from last year's $3.7 billion appropriation...
...But that man remains as invisible as he has been depicted in "Doonesbury...
...it will violate provisions of the 1972 ABM Treaty...
...interested, hard-working parents...
...People search fruitlessly for explanations...
...The Lance is an expendable quid for which the Soviets may well pay a massive quo-they field far more short-range missile launchers than jjoes NATO...
...Endless policy review is no way to seize the historical moment...
...Why then, does the administration still insist on trying...
...Thus far the answer appears to be "nothing" or "nothing for a while yet...
...More vain efforts at explanation: Peer pressure is always a potent force in adolescence and running as a pack heightens it...
...Politically and militarily, it's a disastrously wrong answer...
...Soviet diplomacy has favored peaceful settlements in Southern Africa and Southeast Asia...
...population from nuclear attack...
...Who knows...
...Reagan proposed it in the first place apply to Brilliant Pebbles now...
...President Bush's thousand points of light gone astral...
...Jewish emigration rises...
...Soviet troops and tanks are out of Afghanistan and on the move (some of them) out of Eastern Europe...
...In this time of uncertainty, some in the West convert the possible failure of perestroika to a near-certainty...
...Everyone pursues rational explanations because to explain is perhaps to control, is perhaps to prevent...
...In his response to West German interest in East-West negotiations over short-range missiles, President Bush has little to say but "No...
...policy in the Gorbachev era...
...Recall the 1985-report of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment that said SDI did not appear feasible and could increase the risk of a nuclear war...
...Wood proposes to throw 10,000 to 100,000 small interceptor rockets into space (plus decoys, perhaps)-each with a keen eye and its own zapping power-to knock out Soviet missiles afterthey blast off...
...The invisible man Ten years ago, no one could have imagined a scenario in which a Soviet leader addressing the UN offers ideas closely resembling proposals advanced by the popes of Rome: greater authority for the UN...
...I'm not comfortable with the program yet," he said...
...Even if the Lance missiles now in place were unilaterally eliminated (not what Bonn is proposing), NATO would still command an enormous and varied array of nuclear weapons...
...But paralysis is not caution...
...At the same time he made his presentation on Star Wars, Mr...
...But finally the want of explanation, of control, of security in this case confronts us with the one element that policymakers and policemen, educators and parents always hope to keep at bay- the human capacity for evil...
...To others, the chance that Gorbachev will succeed, is at least as fearful...
...it will depend on unproven technology...
...He faces problems as massive as the Caucasus: economic stagnation, bureaucratic lethargy, ethnic and nationalist stirrings throughout the Soviet bloc...
...This stance is described as an exercise of caution, made necessary by the administration's ongoing policy review, justified by the high stakes and the multitude of factors involved...
...In the Soviet setting, perestroika and glasnost are new things under the sun...
...about possible U.S...
...be saying...
...George Bush has been at or near the center of power in this country not for months but for decades, with total access to information, with every opportunity and an obligation to think and take counsel about America's future course...
...Each of these may contribute to an explanation of the crime, but they fall short...
...multilateral efforts toward third-world development...
...it will cost more than advertised...
...Soviet military journals discuss such concepts as "mutual defensive superiority," "nonoffensive defense," "minimum nuclear deterrence...
...It is the latest brainchild of physicist Lowell L. Wood, who along with Edward Teller, earlier sold Mr...
...religious families...
...Alienation, despair, and rage against society can run deep among young people, who find themselves surrounded by a violent drug culture that challenges every important value they may have been taught at home...
...There have been deeds as well as words...
...What else does the administration have to say about U.S...
...And they are reversible...
...The NATO policy preferred by U.S...
...Even New York City, so well-acquainted with violence, is bewildered by the brutality and the incomprehensibility of the assault...
...Even now, weeks after the incident, the story has a piercing senselessness...
...Soviet adventurism is out of style...
...Meantime, George Bush, though he now occupies the Oval office, -relaxes at Camp David, and flies about in Air Force One, has not yet risked becoming president...
...Gorbachev himself is not a fully known quantity...
...What does Secretary Cheney want the money for...
...These young men made choices- irrational and inexplicable-for which the law should make them pay, but that is not the final remedy for their wanton act...
...One boy's father is regarded locally as a role model...
Vol. 116 • May 1986 • No. 10
