The Urgency Is Greater
H., I.
As this issue is being completed, it appears that the Kennedy Administration has finally decided to resume nuclear testing in the atmosphere. This decision, leaked to the press after the...
...Here we need only add that these arguments seem stronger to us now, at the start of 1962, than they did several months ago...
...With one stroke of self-destructive realpolitik, the Kennedy Administration forfeits the moral-political advantages that had accrued to the West when Soviet Rus• sia resumed the testing of nuclear weapons...
...For a moment, it stumbled toward these advantages...
...we stand with those who believe that nuclear testing by any nation drags us closer to the apocalypse of our age...
...We hope for a reversal of policy...
...This decision, leaked to the press after the Kennedy-MacMillan meeting in Bermuda, is to be carried out in the Spring...
...The resumption of testing would be a disaster in its own right...
...In our last issue we presented some of the arguments against the resumption of nuclear testing...
...Kill and over-kill, "deterrence" and provocation, bombs powerful enough to destroy a city and bombs powerful enough to wipe out a nation—the fatal pattern of Cold War is again to be resumed...
...it succumbed to the political psychology of the Pentagon...
...When the Soviet Union first resumed nuclear testing, the Kennedy Administration clearly saw the enormous political-moral advantages suddenly opened to the West...
...It feared to incur the opposition of the political Right at home...
...It is a catastrophic decision, a terrible mistake, and we believe that all liberals and radicals should occupy themselves in the coming months trying to bring public pressure on the Administration to change its course...
...it would also be an ominous portent as to the political course the Kennedy Administration may be expected to follow in world affairs—a course of hollow and false "toughness...
...it reverted to the mania of Cold War militarism...
...And not, mind you, that there are lacking in the Kennedy Administration men of sufficient intelligence to realize how hopeless and destructive this course is...
...For the only consequences of this decision are to intensify the nuclear arms race, to increase the danger to mankind that results from fall-out, to magnify the hysteria which prevents a peaceful resolution of issues, and to enlarge the threat of an "accidental" outbreak of nuclear war...
...but then its weaknesses and opportunism— of the kind graphically described by Paul Goodman, Michael Walzer, and other writers in this issue —took over and it retreated shamefacedly, into the tradition set by itself...
...we urge public protest and pressure...
Vol. 9 • January 1962 • No. 1
