COMMENT
COMMENT SALT: On to the dark ages The Middle Ages, as Barbara Tuchman reminds us in A Distant Mirror, her epic book about the calamitous Fourteenth Century, were a time of ferocity and agony,...
...See "Nagasaki's Other Victims," on Page 21...
...But Kennedy's record in this area is troubling...
...Some 110 million acres — an area larger than California — will be set aside for national parks, wildlife refuges, and wilderness...
...Most notably, the land will be protected not just from commercial development but also from oil and mineral exploration — activities that do little damage initially but pave the way for future exploitation...
...But these are not the considerations that make the death penalty a horrible offense against human sensibility...
...The industry would still do a $10-billion-a-year business in maintenance alone...
...We have approached a point of historical convergance and two paths confront us," says Hatfield...
...In the long run, the success of the movement against nuclear power will depend on organization of a coalition against nuclear power and nuclear arms...
...Development of an alternative transportation system, which would do more to alleviate the energy crisis than any other single solution, would undermine a major source of profits for many of the most powerful corporations...
...And we were doubly fortunate that the Yemeni, who occupy a hot corner of the Arabian peninsula, worked things out among themselves, shunning the use of American "assistance...
...If the criminal code is to be reformed in the way it deserves, this can best be done not by private deals among well-intentioned legislators but on the basis of full public understanding and appreciation of the importance of the issues...
...The debate over SALT itself has the same surrealistic quality...
...Civilian nuclear power is integrally connected to the nuclear arms race and to powerful forces in the U.S...
...Many critics have found fault with it, to be sure, in terms of the Soviet-American strategic balance it envisages, but by common agreement SALT II expresses a willingness to risk — if not to invite — nuclear war, as if the worst that could result would be a return to the grim but endurable Middle Ages...
...After all, the time of ferocity and agony also produced Oxford and the Sorbonne, erected mighty castles and cathedrals, and fertilized the soil for the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment...
...The objectives for which McNamara labored in Vietnam and elsewhere had widespread support until well after the shooting started...
...Mercifully, S. 1 was defeated...
...But the Vietnam war is over, and McNamara, as president of the World Bank, says the only war he cares about nowadays is the World Bank's war on poverty...
...When it destroys a human life, whether in war or in a ghastly execution chamber, the state presumes to act in our behalf...
...If that were indeed the worst that could be expected from the continuing accumulation of nuclear weapons, it might be easier to live with the outcome of the present debate over how such weapons should be controlled...
...economy...
...Application of the doctrine signifies a growing public sentiment that the social costs of nuclear power production should be borne by the private corporations that reap the profits...
...But the effort to depict nuclear war in commonplace terms inevitably has helped make nuclear war itself seem commonplace — and thus it has given ammunition to those who oppose SALT II on grounds that nuclear war should be made more winnable...
...To terminate this energy investment without reallocating it would bring dire economic consequences...
...On March 7, shortly before he left for Egypt, President Carter signed a "waiver" granting himself emergency powers to accelerate the delivery of $390 million worth of fighters, tanks, and armored personnel carriers, accompanied by U.S...
...But surely the ferment will continue as the SALT "debate" unfolds, illuminating the nearly identical paths of a long and ever quickening journey into nuclear madness...
...What will our military instructors on the spot be up to now...
...Even economic elites not directly tied to the nuclear industry have a heavy stake in continued nuclear growth...
...military instructors, to North Yemen, then fighting a border war with Soviet-backed South Yemen...
...It also marks an important victory over economic interests long accustomed to having their own way in national land-use questions...
...It must deal with the economic ties that bind the two...
...With as many as 165 million Americans dead as a result of an all-out nuclear attack (the toll projected by the OTA study), and with the rest probably condemned by radiation, the survivors and their descendants would be lucky to see another Stone Age...
...It took an unsuccessful war — and the near-destruction of that country — to expose the strategic, economic, and political objectives that underlay the humanitarian rhetoric...
...Yet in recent years every proposed "reform" of the Criminal Code has caused more problems than it has cured...
...The Wall Street Journal reports that 7 percent of all U S. capital spending in 1978 was for nuclear plants...
...District Judge Frank G. Theis of Oklahoma ruled that her employer, Kerr-McGee Corporation, is absolutely liable for injury to her resulting from plutonium contamination off the job...
...resolve" in the Middle East following the collapse of the Shah of Iran...
...Public understanding would be aided by disclosure of the misgivings that led to rejection of S. 1437 last October...
...Yet the record might have been badly marred by a little-noticed sequence of events last March...
...they go to the heart of our economic and political system...
...Are the John Kennedys and the Robert McNamaras to be considered irredeemable, as Susanne Hoebner Rudolph, chairman of the University's political science department, put it, just because they prosecuted the Vietnam war...
...Whether or not the maintenance or resurrection of a nuclear first-strike capability remains the objective of American policy makers, it is clear that SALT II, like SALT I, places no serious restraint on the nuclear weapons programs of any nation...
...Civilizations come and go, and the world has endured chaos before...
...Yet, as before, there are danger signals...
...Historically, military research gave the nuclear industry the basic concept of the light water reactor, now the standard commercial design...
...Still, on March 19, the Pentagon reaffirmed its military commitment to North Yemen...
...Kissinger should know...
...So why the uproar from so many students, faculty, and others over the award of a peace prize to McNamara...
...Perhaps that was the purpose of some who gathered on the campus to taunt the former Pentagon boss by reminding him of his wartime role...
...Though nuclear investment is an inefficient way to create jobs, it is a centralized technology which, unlike some solar technologies, is amenable to centralized corporate control...
...True, the late University trustee was well known for his opposition to war, while McNamara is best known for his conduct of a war...
...Another hopeful sign, despite its tragic human dimensions, is the growing awareness among Americans of their own vulnerability to the effects of nuclear war and of the efforts of their Government to cover it up...
...The Soviets could hardly expect better, given this nation's considerable superiority in deliverable nuclear firepower...
...Civil liberties will be advanced only if we hold Congress to strict standards all along the way...
...That it creates the possibility of monstrous and irreversible miscarriages of justice should be evident to the most bloodthirsty advocate of "law and order...
...Now Representative Robert Drinan, the new chairman of that subcommittee, has announced his determination to push another omnibus reform package through the House...
...For reasons which are still unclear, the report has not yet been made available to the public or the committee...
...Until now the requirement that negligence be shown in such damage cases has amounted to a subsidy to the nuclear industry in the form of public payment of the hidden health and safety costs...
...Still, it is deplorable that this nation cannot sustain a journal devoted exclusively to detailed and analytical coverage of the issues most vital to the preservation and expansion of our freedom...
...In addition, eighty-three plants are still being built, and their contribution will increase to 25 per cent the amount of electricity generated by nuclear power...
...Governor Jerry Brown of California gave voice to those frustrations when, with a sizable minority of the University of California's Board of Regents, he called for an unfettering of the University from sponsorship of the nation's two nuclear weapons laboratories...
...After an immensely useful but all too short life of five years, The Civil Liberties Review has been compelled to suspend publication, reduced at the end to only 5,000 subscribers — a third of the number that would have been required to keep the bimonthly alive...
...The benefit will accrue mainly to later generations...
...The significance of the new law goes beyond the size of the area protected and the thoroughness of the protection, impressive though they are...
...Such a course entails more fundamental reforms than some nuclear power opponents are prepared to consider, but nonetheless it offers Americans and the world their only real hope of a nuclear-free future...
...and that, in any case, the peace machinery had not been given a chance to work...
...But not even in the Middle Ages did a small fraction of that number die — nor was as much as one city destroyed — in a single day...
...military intervention had actually promoted a ceasefire...
...A political movement that addresses these basic connections will come closest to eradicating the roots of nuclear power...
...The connections here are not solely technological...
...Last year he opposed all attempts to amend S. 1437, and lately he has been talking about the merits of restoring capital punishment to the Federal Criminal Code...
...The emergency powers Carter granted himself neatly avoided the prospect of a Congressional veto...
...William Turnage, executive director of the Wilderness Society, has aptly called it "the most significant conservation vote of our time, particularly because of the massive industry effort to thwart the preservation of Alaska's magnificent wildlands...
...Government...
...Sale of spare parts and other equipment designed to make reactors safer can be expected only to increase in the wake of Three Mile Island...
...That was perhaps understandable, for a key point of the Arab League's peace plan called for "refraining from intervention in the internal affairs by any side and from any third parly...
...A third sign is the increasing restiveness of many Americans under the political, economic, and social burdens of the country's continuing preparations for nuclear war...
...Jeffrey Stein (Jeffrey Stein writes on national security affairs from Washington for several magazines and newspapers...
...We are not without some signs that a real alternative may be in the making...
...The problem is one we understand all too well...
...Once the doctrine of strict liability becomes the accepted precedent in such cases, people living near Three Mile Island, for instance, could sue effectively if they can establish that radiation escaped in harmful amounts during the March accident or subsequent clean-up...
...It was then that North Yemen suddenly emerged for a few brief weeks as a key arena in global confrontation between the superpowers and a test case for a show of U.S...
...In a war limited to the exchange of no more than a few hundred or thousand nuclear warheads, the report says, "the consequences might be endurable" because the loss of life — twenty million or so — though enormous, would be on a scale that other societies have endured in the past through wars and pestilence, as in the Middle Ages...
...Those who support SALT II, however reluctantly, on the grounds it is better than nothing serve only to undermine the only real hope for something better...
...The loans that strengthen compliant Third World regimes serve the same purposes as the bombs and bullets that "stabilized" Southeast Asia...
...One of them is the fact that former Senator Roman Hruska, a co-sponsor of S. 1, and Ronald Gainer, a high Justice Department official under John Mitchell and Griffin Bell, were asked to lead off testimony favoring a new omnibus bill...
...Corporations with heavy investments in nuclear power — such as General Electric and Westinghouse — are also major military contractors...
...by the legislative skills of Representatives Morris Udall of Arizona and John Anderson of Illinois, who steered the bill to victory in the House, and by the unified support of virtually every national conservation organization...
...McNamara's new war Albert Pick Jr., the industrialist who died in 1977 leaving a fortune to the University of Chicago, may well have had just such a person as Robert S. McNamara in mind for receipt of an annual $25,000 prize for "contributions to international understanding," the first of which was presented to the former Pentagon chief at a riotous reception in May...
...Like the choice between the Middle Ages and the Stone Age, the choice between SALT II and no SALT II is no choice at all...
...Despite much rhetoric about the viability of nuclear power in the free market, the industry has received more than $17 billion in direct subsidies since the beginning of the nuclear age...
...It would have imposed severe penalties for Government officials who released information deemed "secret" and for journalists who published it...
...Military spending channeled to such firms for research on fission and fusion technologies can play a role, as in the past, in sustaining the civilian reactor program...
...COMMENT SALT: On to the dark ages The Middle Ages, as Barbara Tuchman reminds us in A Distant Mirror, her epic book about the calamitous Fourteenth Century, were a time of ferocity and agony, reflecting a world plunged into chaos...
...The success of the movement will ultimately depend on the breadth of its focus...
...The inherent conflict between an open university and secret weapons labs has also been highlighted by Senator John Glenn of Ohio, chairman of a Senate subcommittee, who recently upbraided the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory for sharing technical information with the public...
...Victory in the wildlands In an act that will best be appreciated by future generations, Congress and the Carter Administration have taken steps to protect an immense area of the Alaskan wilderness from the ravages of human development projects...
...If so, it was pointless...
...Another disturbing sign is that Drinan's subcommittee is rushing into the process of drafting legislation without having heard from its precedessor committee, which, in rejecting S. 1437, wrote a report detailing the problems in omnibus approaches to code reform, including the horsetrading on civil liberties issues...
...It was hoped the study might promote Senate ratification of SALT II...
...Even without an express commitment to the commercial reactor program, the Government can keep the industry alive through military contracts...
...Technologically, nuclear power is essentially an outgrowth of weapons development...
...It is "the people" versus the hapless victim of primitive vengefulness — and by acquiescing in that tragedy, we are all tainted with the mark of Cain...
...The decision could mean that if low-level radiation escapes from a plant the responsible company must compensate those who are harmed even if it can show that it has met all Government safety standards and has been guilty of no negligence in handling nuclear materials...
...It was Kissinger and President Nixon who threatened a nuclear strike against Soviet military targets during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and got away with it, just as President Kennedy had done in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962...
...The public should demand access to this report so that all may become aware of the pitfalls in omnibus reform...
...It was rejected last October by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Criminal Justice...
...Supporters of the treaty, deploring the disastrous consequences that would ensue from an uncontrolled nuclear arms race, propose a controlled but continued buildup of the same weapons as the only effective alternative...
...If Judge Theis's ruling is upheld by higher courts, if will have a substantial impact on the future of nuclear power...
...Casualty The Progressive notes with deep regret the passing of still another periodical...
...To that end, he has pumped more than $4 billion into World Bank loans to the Third World...
...Hundreds of condemned men are waiting on death rows across the country...
...a "hundred years' war" acquired a life of its own...
...Without this subsidy, which finds one expression in the Price-Anderson Act, limiting the liability of a nuclear utility to $560 million in the event of an accident, the nuclear industry could not survive...
...That capital punishment is no effective deterrent to crime has been repeatedly demonstrated...
...They were defeated by the assertive leadership of President Carter and Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus, who have shown unusual toughness on land conservation questions...
...When, fully five days later, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State William Crawford testified before a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee, moreover, he did not mention the specific terms of the agreement...
...The main problem with capital punishment is that it makes all of us accomplices in homicide...
...The irony of this latest study of the effects of nuclear war is that it was undertaken not to minimize the impact of nuclear weapons but to stress their frightful consequences...
...Leaks of plutonium and other radioactive materials have been frequent at facilities designed for the manufacture and testing of nuclear weapons...
...Like its predecessor, it created an Official Secrets Act...
...The real value of the protest was to illuminate and challenge the institutional trappings by which a McNamara — either at the Pentagon or at the World Bank — acquires respectability...
...The movement toward reform must be closely watched at every stage of the Congressional process...
...On March 28, the two former combatants agreed to reunification talks and the writing of a joint constitution...
...Protesting the McNamara award might indeed have been unjust if its only purpose had been to condemn him once again for an exercise in which millions of Americans willingly participated, or to suggest that nothing he can ever do will relieve him of the burden of our collective guilt...
...the bubonic plague took the lives of more than a third of the population between India and Iceland...
...The readers who remained with The Civil Liberties Review to the end will be receiving The Nation in fulfillment of their unexpired subscriptions...
...Bands of freebooting brigands terrorized Europe...
...Then came S. 1437, a bill which, Senators Edward M. Kennedy and John McClellan argued, would remove the worst problems in S. 1. But S. 1437 turned out to be little better...
...Senate Bill 1, the first bill introduced in 1975, reestablished the death penalty for treason, espionage, and arson...
...The standard of strict liability will make private insurance companies reluctant to insure nuclear plants, making the operation of present plants more costly and jeopardizing the financing of future plants...
...An informed State Department officer later contended that U.S...
...But there are signs that the "no-nukes" forces, in their single-minded concentration on the dangers of nuclear power, may be focusing more on treating the symptoms than on curing the disease...
...Today, McNamara serves as the banker rather than the military commander of a Third World "war on poverty" that continues in much the same form, except that the shooting is done by non-Americans...
...Both require the mining, milling, and enriching of uranium, the production of plutonium, the storage and disposal of deadly radioactive wastes...
...Carter's 'Mayaguez' President Jimmy Carter's proudest boast in the conduct of foreign affairs come election time may yet turn out to be, "I did nothing...
...What Carter seems to have done best over the past three years has been to ignore the occasional drum-beating for intervention in Angola, Zaire, and Iran...
...In the meantime, all of us could benefit by concluding that the foresight and fortitude that saved the Alaskan wilderness are exactly the kind of politics that are needed elsewhere...
...The simplest explanation for our demise," Editor Alan F. Westin wrote in the final issue, "is that there were too few civil liberties addicts to keep us going in a time of relative social tranquility...
...The other is to insist that negotiators and officials of both nations be held to far stricter controls over burgeoning nuclear arsenals and changing strategic doctrine...
...The Silkwood victory The decision by a Federal jury to award $10.5 million in damages to the estate of Karen Silkwood is significant not merely because of the size of the award but also because of the legal doctrine that underlies it...
...The nuclear connections The recent massing of tens of thousands of demonstrators in Washington — brought there by the near-disaster of Three Mile Island — attests to the growing vitality of the anti-nuclear power movement as a step toward restoring sanity to national energy policy and rekindling popular participation in broad-based political change...
...Can such stirrings form the ingredients for an alternative to the arms race...
...It must make the case that transfer of funds from arms and nuclear power to such projects as mass transit, conservation, and alternative energy sources will create more jobs and provide a sounder energy future...
...One alternative is to continue the illusion of arms control which will ensure a far more dangerous future for ourselves and our children...
...Nuclear submarine reactors, the prototype of commercial power reactors, present similar health and safety hazards...
...Not many years ago, Vietnam was one of the Third World countries which the United States and other industrialized powers expressed an obligation to lift from the depths of poverty...
...This time, there were no easy Cambodian targets of the kind available to President Ford in 1975...
...Plainly, it will take much more...
...It contains contradictory and overlapping statutes, harsh and inconsistent sentencing provisions, and statutes clearly out of date...
...They could not be in better hands...
...The wildlands will remain untouched, to be enjoyed in perpetuity, because the President and Congress had the courage to stand up to industry-inspired scare talk about gasoline lines, energy shortages, and the "locking up" of mineral, timber, and petroleum resources...
...Oil, timber, and mining interests fought hard for a substitute bill that would have permitted continued resource exploration in the reserved areas and thus left the door open for ultimate exploitation...
...The health hazards are the same in each case — even without the ultimate catastrophe of nuclear war...
...It is widely reported that the execution may open the floodgates to a new wave of official killings...
...Even after the Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that the death penalty "does not necessarily violate the Constitution," it was possible to hope that the states would desist from reviving a savage practice rejected long ago in most civilized parts of the world...
...Perhaps such specters of death and depravity prompted the drafters of a recent Congressional report to reach for a historical analogy in attempting to depict the consequences of modern nuclear war...
...But the debate over nuclear weapons, which now finds expression in the proposed Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II), bears no closer relation to reality than does the notion that a post-nuclear-war world might look something like the Middle Ages...
...All of which goes to show only that a "Mayaguez Syndrome" still seems to infect the foreign policy of the U.S...
...Pitfalls of criminal code reform For more than a decade students of the Federal Criminal Code have agreed that it is in need of reform...
...But when Carter signed the waiver, he knew — but did not tell Congress — that a regional peace-keeping arrangement had been worked out between the two Yemens under the auspices of the Arab League only the day before...
...Yet such a restructuring of the energy industry would be resisted by powerful corporate elites...
...An all-out nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union, said the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, would produce conditions that would be "the economic equivalent of the Middle Ages...
...It drastically extended Federal controls over the right to assemble and protest...
...Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the architect of SALT I, told The Economist of London in a recent interview that, with or without SALT II, the United States must be able to mount a disarming first strike against Soviet missile launchers: "I believe that the side whose only strategic option is to target the civilian population and the industrial capacity of its opponent, and which can define no military objective, will be relying on a strategy that will be psychologically and politically almost untenable...
...The mark of Cain There was reason to believe, a few years ago, that America had at long last abandoned the ugly barbarism of capital punishment...
...When Representative Clarence Long, Maryland Democrat, found out about the sequence of events, he complained in a letter to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance that "Congress was not informed that this peace machinery had been created...
...Nor should we expect that the Federal Government will permit the death — or even the decline — of the nuclear industry, a major source of profits for some of the largest corporations...
...Even if utilities should order no more nuclear plants, it does not necessarily follow that the nuclear industry would collapse...
...One sign is the recent proposal by Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon that the Senate reject SALT II and instruct the negotiators to move directly to SALT III, calling for reduction of nuclear weapons stockpiles...
...That hope was dashed when the life of John Arthur Spenkelink was snuffed out in Florida's electric chair one morning in May...
...Decisions like the Silkwood ruling alert us to the need for greater public control over nuclear power and other industries that contaminate the environment...
...Not being a special-purpose magazine for gun collectors, students of new sex positions, or similar mass-market audiences in America, we were always aimed at a small group of potential readers — those who wanted more writing about civil liberties than was available in the general press or in ideological magazines...
...We are told that Representative Drinan, a long-time friend of civil liberties, has agreed to push the bill in return for Senator Kennedy's promise to eliminate provisions that many civil libertarians found objectionable in S. 1437...
Vol. 43 • July 1979 • No. 7
