The big bangs
Editorials
STAFF Editor: Margaret O'Brien Steinfels Executive Editor: Paul Baumann Managing Editor: Patrick Jordan Production Editor: Tiina Aleman Senior Writer: Robert G. Hoyt Business Manager: Gregory...
...According to newspaper reports, "Joshua," the play's main character, is a contemporary Jesus-like figure said to have sex with his disciples (off-stage...
...And they need not...
...Commonweal 5 June 19,1998 I n keeping with Commonweal's usual schedule, only one issue is published each month during J u l y and August...
...Many think something ought to be done...
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...STAFF Editor: Margaret O'Brien Steinfels Executive Editor: Paul Baumann Managing Editor: Patrick Jordan Production Editor: Tiina Aleman Senior Writer: Robert G. Hoyt Business Manager: Gregory Wilpert Poetry: Rosemary Deen Design: Emil Antonucci Screen: Richard Alleva Media: Frank McConnell Stage: Celia Wren Columnists: John Garvey, Abigail McCarthy, E.J...
...Sanctions can be a blunt instrument, but the other four nuclear powers should join in some form of economic isolation of India and Pakistan...
...Can they---can we--curb the genie loosed from its bottle fifty years ago...
...Commonweal is indexed in Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, Catholic Periodical Index, Index of American Periodical Verse, Book Review Digest, and Book Review Index...
...Finally, one cannot ignore the potential for a fatal misstep in nuclear brinksmanship, especially in the vast disparities of class in Pakistan and caste in India...
...He fits right in...
...In 1994, North Korea negotiated a freeze of nuclear-weapons development...
...3,16, Sidney Baldwin...
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...p. 6, Ross, Rothco...
...p. 26, Schwadron, Rothco...
...Russia and the United States drag their heels in reducing their own nuclear arsenals, and Russia, the United States, and China have connived in laying the foundations for Pakistan and India's nuclear capabilities...
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...Donohue called for changes in the plot and urged donors to withhold funds from the Manhattan Theater Club...
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...3, 18, Joan Marcus...
...Anti-Catholicism is said to have become the last respectable form of bigotry...
...He sank his teeth in and didn't let go until the show was two-months dead...
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...3,12, Ray, Rothco...
...Most of us heaved a sigh of relief and forgot the Bomb...
...And it may be that atomic attack is no more likely today than it was May 10, the day before India conducted nuclear tests and provoked Pakistan two weeks later into doing the same...
...Even so, the grim possibility of nuclear war once again seized our attention...
...Canada, $81...
...Indeed, so secure do we seem to be that we conduct our own disagreements in public...
...and his boisterous self-promotion do more to reinforce anti-Catholic stereotypes than to remedy them...
...Well, someone is doing something...
...Can either deploy its weapons soon...
...Then he created a media blitz so that the play is now never mentioned without the League's objections appended...
...Having declared themselves nuclear powers, does either country have the wherewithal to produce a sufficient number of nuclear weapons to change the balance of power in the subcontinent...
...In a remarkably instructive study of "cooperative threat reduction," Leon Sigal shows how this was negotiated (Disarming Strangers, Princeton University Press, 1998...
...Illustrations: Cover, p. 14, Antonucci...
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...http://www.commonwealmagazine.org The big bangs he cold war ended and the nightmare of nuclear war slipped from our waking minds, the grip of its terror receded from our bellies...
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...he is as much in the business of shutting up his fellow Catholics as of shouting down non-Catholics...
...Following the initial shock of atomic saber rattling and the imposition of economic sanctions, both India and Pakistan expressed willingness to talk...
...p. 24, Punch, Rothco...
...p. 8, Baloo, Rothco...
...for Pakistan, it is the loss of Kashmir and East Pakistan...
...Donohue is on the attack once more against a yet-to-beproduced play, Terrence McNally's Corpus Christi...
...Catholics are the largest religious group in America...
...In both countries, unstable political coalitions could make the deployment of nuclear weapons the bottom line every political party will boldly pursue...
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...Will the rest of the world pay attention long enough to press India and Pakistan to an agreement...
...Donohue's tactics, more swagger than suasion, have put him on the talk-show circuit where the decibel level is always set on shrill...
...bank...
...People who would never make a disparaging remark about a minority group or religion don't hesitate when it comes to Catholics...
...Yet he laments how "even now the [U.S.] foreign policy establishment resists drawing appropriate lessons from the success of diplomatic give-and-take: that it is possible to reverse a state's decision to 'go nuclear,' that inducements work, that cooperation is far less costly than coercion, and that the international norm against nuclear-arming facilitates cooperation, not only among those trying to prevent proliferation but also by the would-be proliferator...
...The show managed to convey a sense of the sacramental and incarnational, and its characters resembled real people in a real parish, but it wasn't Donohue's idea of Catholicism...
...There are first of all questions about the nature of the threat nuclear India and nuclear Pakistan can credibly make...
...William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, has become unrelenting in chasing down the running dogs of anti-Catholicism...
...Fax: (212) 662-4183...
...his crude analogies, especially to anti-Semitic and anti-black stereotypes...
...But next fall, it will attract critics and an audience, thanks to Donohue's hyperventilating, eager to see what McNally's "Joshua" is really all about...
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...Last fall his attacks on "Nothing Sacred," the TV series about the comings and goings at an urban Catholic parish, helped to attract admirers while discouraging advertisers...
...If true, it is a Jesus that Christians of all sorts will find offensive...
...We forget that some nations, South Africa, for example, have given up possession of nuclear weapons, and that others have forgone their development...
...I believe in moral suasion," he told a New York Times columnist...
...Commonweal 6 June 19,1998...
...I believe in whipping up public sentiment to isolate the offender...
...This is troubling, not the least because it is corrosive of a sense of pride and of belonging, especially among the young...
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...These sobriquets may be more nationalist than religious, but it would be foolish to ignore the sense of vindication they reflect, particularly in other Islamic nations, pointing downward on the path to nuclear proliferation...
...But uncertainty about how much damage either country could inflict on the other, or how likely either is to try, should not obscure a second set of issues just as chilling: the political and religious climate in which the tests were carried out...
...foreign, $50...
...For India, it is Pakistani insurgency in Kashmir and border conflicts with China...
...Were the tests as successful as claimed...
...p. 28, Chariot...
...In the United States, especially, we seem to have forgotten that it is we who brought this terrible scourge into the world, and it is we who must bear the greatest burden for containing it...
...we are not a persecuted minority...
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...There is merit to the charge by "wannabe" nuclear powers that we who possess such weapons and have tested them to a faretheewell are hypocritical in banning nuclear testing and then imposing sanctions when the ban is broken...
...The nuclear nations must work with India and Pakistan to keep more nuclear weapons from being deployed while again taking up the task of getting rid of many more of their own...
...Canada, $47...
...Well yes, we are hypocrites, but the nuclear burden that sticks to us like tar should make us humble and rational, not stupid...
...We think Catholics can be more discriminating in the fight against discrimination: more suasion, less swagger...
...Donohue has his fans, those who think that rhetorically hitting people over the head is the way to fight anti-Catholic bigotry...
...Both need aid and investments...
...And indeed, who among us has not heard or read some demeaning comment about one or another aspect of Catholicism...
...columnist portraits, Elaine Mills...
...neither can sustain a prolonged economic siege...
...p. 22, Ad6 Bethune...
...We are not among them...
...The decision to resume nuclear testing in both countries was taken by minority governments that made political capital from a rebuff to world opinion...
...In two countries always struggling to feed and support so many people, why would political and military elites feel any compunction in exposing hundreds of thousands of people to nuclear attack...
...clearly not the Jesus of faith, tradition, or history...
...the two are inextricably linked, at least in Nexus...
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...The next issue w i l l be dated J u l y I 7. SHUT UP, HE SAID sustained and serious international attention should work to resolve those conflicts...
...This is not impossible...
...Add to that the powerful feelings symbolized by talk of an "Islamic bomb" and a "Hindu bomb...
...Or in a mode of any military significance...
...But responsibility does not lie only with India and Pakistan...
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...In Pakistan, opposition parties played a pivotal role in forcing a hesitant government to approve the tests...
...I believe in putting on a lot of pressure...
...Now we have been reminded of what too easily slips from memory...
...Microfilm from Vol...
...That too earns Donohue's wrath...
...We think his bullying tactics...
...p. 20, Handelsman, Rothco...
...The economic sanctions should be employed as leverage in bringing both countries to settle their political conflicts and to agree to forgo deployment or further testing...
...India and Pakistan have done themselves no good, but they have done the rest of the world a great favor in reawakening the dormant fear of nuclear war...
...And then there are the sanctions, now imposed by the United States...
...1, 1924, to current issues available through University Microfilm, 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, M148106 and on Microfiche from Bell & Howell Wooster, OH 44691...
...Inattention and festering political conflict feed the pursuit of nuclear weapons...
...Can that be a good thing...
Vol. 125 • June 1998 • No. 12
