COMMENTS: Winter Thoughts on the Freeze

...The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists noved its clock hands closer to midnight...

...You take up first one, then mother, untwisting, disentangling—will this be the .hread that finally releases the whole clump...

...how far actual disarmament might someday go was left to the future...

...Then, too, many of the "expert" proposals point toward more weaponry—the buildup of conventional forces in Europe, for example, to substitute for the reliance on a "first-use" threat to deter any Warsaw Pact conventional attack, or the deployment of a new mobile, single-warhead missile like "Midgetman" to decrease vulnerability and reverse the belatedly acknowledged dangers of MIRVing...

...The test ought not to be whether such a rallying cry is negotiable in Geneva but whether it fosters a realistic understanding of the nuclear dilemma, as I believe the freeze proposal has, in Peoria...

...At the same time, there are in fact alternative approaches that strike me as equally if not more promising...

...My own reflections have to do with the old problem of reconciling complexity, expertise[ntellectual integrity, if you will—with effective political mobilization...

...Again, frustration...

...The Administration beckoned Moscow to new talks...

...On the one hand, it represents a widespread revulsion from the Administration's apparently open-ended and casual commitment to further nuclear armament...

...Converged, but never coincided...

...There was no reason why one couldn't endorse the freeze idea generally—as the Catholic bishops did—and urge that a variety of other measures be pursued as well...

...American peace activists looked to the '84 elec:ions...

...Second, that the superpowers' arsenals were sufficiently matched for deterrence to work...

...panic about the U.S...

...Yet despite the distance between the grass-roots antinuclear movement and the elite dissidents, there was little reason for direct conflict...

...European demonstrators regrouped...

...It then was brought to a boil by the Reagan administration's announced belief in Soviet strategic superiority, in the "window of vulnerability," and in prolonged nuclear war fighting...

...THE CONVICTIONS THE FREEZE NURTURES strike me as essentially sound: • First, that the way out of the superpowers' nuclear tangle has got to be mutual—no other word in the freeze litany was so important in garnering widespread support...

...or as Churchill said, safety is made the sturdy child of terror...

...First come, first served...

...This last conflict notwithstanding, there is something preposterous about commentators warning that the freeze is "unrealistic," when they are themselves totally unrealistic about achieving arms control without some such broad, morally compelling appeal that can mobilize great numbers of citizens...

...What cannot be ignored, however, and it kept coming to my mind during that panel discussion, is that none of these allegedly more realistic arms-limitation proposals would even be on the political agenda were it not for the grass-roots movement that had been galvanized by the simple, direct message of the freeze...

...It only demanded a halt in fur141 ther armament...

...A momentary calm, deathly calm perhaps, allowed for ;ome reflection...

...In fact, the freeze has always been under pressure, generated both within and outside its ranks, to move toward a unilaterist stance...

...it opens the door to all 140 sorts of demagoguery...

...None of this is likely to sit easily with anger at high military spending and with suspicion that such fancy arms-control measures as SALT I and II had made things worse rather than better...

...To my mind, this approach made more sense than criticism of the freeze for the difficulties it might pose for negotiating or implementation...

...In the case of nuclear arms, the two components, popular and elite, neatly converged...

...but rather on the kind of political conviction it reinforces in the citizenry...

...by the end of 1983, it seemed .hat each possibility had ended in yet another inyielding knot...

...Clearly, the freeze was congenial to many people who do not reconcile themselves to nuclear weapons at all and therefore balk at deterrence as a permanent or semipermanent fact of life...

...This crisis had been brewing ever since the increased accuracy of weapons threatened the premises of deterrence by Mutual Assured Destruction...

...What was surprising, at least to me, was the distinct coolness that influential liberals, who hold no brief for the Reagan arms policies, )ften manifested for the mainstream of the antinuclear effort and its political centerpiece, the freeze...

...they also seem to offer dangerous leeway for obscure alterations that gut their ostensible purpose of restraining the arms race...

...This ambiguity in turn raised the hackles of those who believe that a clearminded commitment to deterrence is the beginning of all serious thinking about nuclear weapons, including all serious criticism of the Administration's grandiose designs...

...Their technical labyrinths not only leave the public glassy-eyed, dampening the moral fervor without which no reform movement accomplishes anything in America...

...Liberal critics would have been much wiser to urge resistance to this development than to question generally an effective vehicle of political education and organization...

...in any case, the constant pressure of emerging weapons made negotiations difficult, and some of the weapons threatened to make verification impossible...

...This coolness was expressed in scolding editorials and columns in such places as the New York Times, the New Republic, and the Washington Post...

...This is the criterion that allows us to distinguish between constructive and demagogic appeals all of which will inevitably be rather simplified and sweeping by the standards of the New Republic or the Kennedy School of Government...

...About deterrence, the freeze movement was in principle neutral...

...But those resigned to living with the former paradox can hardly reject the latter one out of hand...

...At the same time, an extraordinary division arose among the strategic specialists, the defense elite...

...In addition, and this is really my central point: a politically effective initiative like the freeze deserves to be evaluated not only, perhaps not primarily, on its technical merits (aren't the specifics always reshaped as such proposals are filtered through the policy machinery...

...I saw it reflected in more than one public discussion—at an arms-control panel last year, for example, where every panelist quickly dismissed the freeze in favor of one or another more "realistic" and relevant measure...

...given the record, the burden of proof—the heavy burden of proof—ought to rest on proponents of any new system...

...For one thing, there has never been any evidence that the broad constituency rallying to the freeze would refuse to support other alternatives that promised a similar breakthrough in arms control...

...in effect, McNamara, Bundy, Kennan, and Smith were challenging a pillar of the East-West strategy they had themselves devised and administered...

...I do not mean to debate the relative merits of these different proposals...

...A system of mutual holocaust is perfected precisely in order to assure that the system is never set into motion...

...And the same problem will be posed: what inevitably simplified, emotionally and morally charged standard can mobilize grass-roots opposition to the arms race without doing dangerous injustice to the complexities of the problem...

...But then—if there is to be a peace movement at all—some other such animating idea will...

...Many freeze supporters have remained wary of complex armscontrol proposals...

...Nor was it surprising :hat liberals distanced themselves from the more innocent activists who dream of dropping all the nukes in the sea tomorrow—were that not ecologically unsound...

...The latter proposition has its problems, to which I will return...

...having to play catch-up was baseless...

...If so, it should not strain the intellects of those who repeatedly insist that we must comprehend the paradox of deterrence...

...WHO KNOWS, THE FREEZE MAY not play the central role in the next phase of the American peace movement that it did in the last...

...SALT II, START, MX, the "reeze, Euromissiles...

...When the right can generate tons of mail over so absurdly peripheral an issue as the Panama Canal treaty, no program of arms limitation will get anywhere without a similarly aroused popular backing...

...Maybe there's a paradox here...

...It was hardly astonishing .hat, in the last two years of accelerating antinuclear agitation, liberals should reject the relatively ;mall segment of the peace movement that showed tself consistently pro-Soviet...

...Third, that new nuclear systems were far more likely to destabilize than control the balance of terror...

...TODAY'S PEACE MOVEMENT is effective because it has operated at two levels...

...Populist thinkers may not like to acknowledge it, but grass-roots movements in America, at least when they question the status quo, badly need exactly this sort of elite and "expert" component, both to legitimate their concerns in the all-important eyes of the media and to translate those concerns into specific measures...

...This revulsion was distilled into the call for a freeze...

...The revolt of the elite was symbolized most dramatically by the "no-firstuse" proposal advanced in Foreign Affairs by four elder statesmen of American defense policy...

...A peace movement is organized around a simple, sweeping goal with the effect that we can achieve more detailed, modest agreements...

...Likewise, elite criticism without a strong grass-roots movement is apt to be only marginally effective if not completely compromised...

...Given sufficient specification and qualification, the freeze can be defended— and there are a number of well-qualified experts who have done so—although it eventually becomes a mere cousin of the sweeping measure that captured public enthusiasm...