Comment
COMMENT Peace through Honesty An advertisement placed in The New York Times by Friends of the Earth, the environmentalist organization, urges us to send identical messages to Ronald Reagan and...
...In this, it is the United States alone that is intransigent, arrogant, and insincere...
...It was clear to the ranchers that the Government's carefree experiments in the skies over Nevada were responsible...
...Never mind that the Palestinian people have no place to call home...
...The greater outrage in all of this is that the Government treated its own citizens no better than the unlucky sheep...
...Irving Selikoff, director of the Environmental Sciences Lab at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, predicts 10,000 lives will be claimed by asbestos-related cancer each year until the end of the century...
...After a long trial in 1956, however, Judge A. Sherman Christensen ruled in favor of the Government, which contended that the deaths of the sheep were the work of cold weather, inadequate feeding, and unfavorable winter range conditions...
...Sasway, twenty-one years old, will go down in the books, then, as the first American since the Vietnam war jailed for refusing to register for military induction...
...Senator Percy is, after all, not putting Habib in for a Lasting Peace Prize...
...Never mind that an occupying army remains in Lebanon...
...Future claimants will thus be left high and dry...
...We should heed Judge Christensen's admission, so long in the coming, that it may be unwise to take a pristine view of the integrity of officialdom...
...They have accused insurance companies, some of which say Manville knew of asbestos health hazards in the 1930s, of refusing to honor claims...
...The registration requirement may ultimately fall of its own weight...
...In addition, Social Security lists and IRS files are being cross-checked for the names of American males in their late teens and early twenties who may not have registered...
...Optimism may not be in order, however...
...After two especially "dirty" tests early in 1953, almost 4,500 sheep belonging to a dozen ranchers in southwestern Utah—a short distance east of the Nevada test site— died...
...The judge sentenced him to three years' probation and ordered him to register within ninety days...
...But in its zeal to be prepared, the Navy has outdone itself...
...Selective Service conservatively estimates that close to 700,000 young Americans have not registered—about 10 per cent of those required to sign up since the process began...
...When the state of the art was such that numbers of warheads were important, we led in numbers of warheads...
...The latest episode in the escape scenario, the Chapter Eleven maneuver, is a monstrous affront to the impaired men and women seeking compensation from Manville and other asbestos manufacturers...
...There is no reason for the United States to insist, for example, on mutuality or ve-rifiability as conditions for freezing its own nuclear weapons program...
...But when this contemporary Cassandra announced he had changed his mind and now looked for a drop in interest rates, stock market analysts parted themselves from common sense...
...For the Russians, the nuclear weapons race has always been a game of catchup ball...
...It required a Congressional subcommittee and a Government that had finally felt a twinge of remorse to conclude in 1979 that nuclear fallout "more likely than not" killed the sheep and that the Government in 1956 had "knowingly disregarded and suppressed evidence" linking the deaths to the atomic tests...
...The only prediction we will venture here is that if the Dow continues to climb toward the 1200-level called for by some analysts, it will mark not a genuine economic recovery but a triumph of speculative mania on the part of investors desperate to believe in someone or something...
...The Government already has hundreds, if not thousands, of names...
...In a popular new book, Russian Roulette: The Superpower Game, Arthur Macy Cox proposes a system of nuclear arms control based on mutual restraint: He would have Washington restrain new nuclear weapons systems and the Soviet Union restrain its military ventures in such locales as Angola, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan...
...The judge now concedes that he "took a somewhat pristine view at the original trial of the general integrity of Government officials...
...During the original trial, the Government was able to suppress evidence from laboratory analyses that favored the ranchers because only the Government knew of it...
...By diving under the covers of Chapter Eleven of the Bankruptcy Code, the company puts on hold pending claims from asbestosis victims and their families, and stalls an anticipated 32,000 additional civil actions...
...Though court wrangling may stand in the way of such a dismantlement of the NFL money machine, this experiment could be far more interesting than any recent football season...
...Whether the courts reject or recognize the claims of Manville's victims, such corporations still retain their virtually unchecked control over toxic substances...
...Sasway intends to appeal his conviction as well as the denial of bond, centering his argument on the dubious constitutionality of the registration requirement and on the Government's selective prosecution of those who have not registered...
...Oh, We Like Sheep...
...While legal purists decry the perversion of Chapter Eleven, and members of Congress carry out their threatened inquiry into the Bankruptcy Code, and while asbestos trade groups step up their clamor for a Federal bailout, more people will die from exposure to Manville's product...
...Was some great breakthrough in the offing—comparable, say, to the British discovery of North Sea oil...
...Without exaggeration, it may be said that Sasway is a political prisoner...
...And with players hiring the coaches, setting schedules, and making the rules, the fans would be treated to games at least as good as those they currently get to see...
...Eller said he wouldn't...
...Eller and Sasway have a lot of company in their disobedience...
...Navy: According to a House Appropriations Committee report, the Ticonderoga, the fleet's new $1 billion missile cruiser, is so loaded down with technically advanced, state-of-the-art, Star Wan-type hardware that it can't keep up with the aircraft carriers it is supposed to escort, and what with its poor design, may even be in danger of capsizing in heavy seas...
...Hardly...
...What's clear is that even our economic titans are perplexed by an economy beyond prediction or control...
...Playing fast and loose with the historic record is not the only difficulty with current efforts to equate the behavior of the two superpowers in the nuclear buildup...
...We're pleased with her," one line officer told The New York Times's Richard Halloran...
...Asbestos victims should be compensated...
...End Run With the possibility of a National Football League players' strike hanging over the new season, Ted Turner, the intrepid yachtsman and cable television magnate, has moved aggressively to fill the void...
...Victims currently in court will have to pick at the crumbs—if there are any— doled out by a Federal court...
...That great American crap shoot, which absorbs so much of the time and energy of our best and brightest, defies logical analysis, and we do not intend to attempt any...
...The Government knows who many of the refusers are, because they have written in and declared their defiance...
...But, the reinstatement of registration was clearly a political maneuver on the part of then-President Jimmy Carter, who hoped it would stir Americans' patriotic feelings during his reelection campaign, convince them that the nation was facing an emergency, and make voters believe only Jimmy Carter could pull them through...
...There is no need to petition Brezhnev to accept the nuclear weapons freeze and similar proposals to curb the arms race because he has already accepted them...
...We need not conceal our contempt for the heavyhanded repression practiced by the bureaucracy that rules the Kremlin roost, nor need we defend such brutal Soviet exertions as the direct military intervention in Afghanistan or the indirect intervention in Poland...
...Market Mania Suddenly in mid-August, after months of mostly miserable tidings on the front pages and evening newscasts, the stock market went wild...
...When the jury, after fifty minutes of deliberation, brought back the expected conviction, the judge ordered Sasway held without bond—a harsh measure usually reserved for defendants in capital cases...
...Otherwise, Manville chief executive officer John Mc-Kinney will turn out to have been dead right when he told worried creditors in August, "Our businesses will keep operating very smoothly, we believe...
...In fact, hungry dogs can be counted on to behave much more rationally than the stock market...
...The Government got smarter—and tougher—with its second prosecution...
...Pretending that the Soviets are equally to blame for the nuclear peril that menaces the world distracts us from understanding the real causes of the arms race, which are to be found not in the Kremlin or the contested regions of the Third World but in the jungles of our political, economic, and military system, where the weapons makers have fabricated a market dynamic propelled by its own momentum...
...The unfortunate vessel has grown from 8,900 to 9,600 tons on a diet of such "defensive" impedimenta as rocket-launched torpedoes, antisubmarine helicopters and guns and their support equipment, depth charges, five-inch guns, radar and sonar systems...
...We cannot respond effectively to such utterly cynical, planet-threatening schemes if we permit ourselves to be lured into even-handed denunciation of both superpowers' nuclear policies...
...And why not...
...Ronald Reagan, who denounced and ridiculed the registration scheme during the 1980 campaign, espoused it once he was in office...
...Why, then, the sudden surge of stock market activity...
...The rising groundswell of support for an end to the nuclear arms race seems to prove that the tactic works...
...Angola, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan may provide the pretext for the ferocious pace of America's current nuclear weapons buildup, but they certainly do not provide any justification for it...
...The politics of peace must be the politics of honesty...
...Benjamin H. Sasway went on trial in San Diego, home of retired admirals and unreconstructed Birchers, where prosecutors thought they could portray him as a fuzzy-headed college philosophy major...
...The tactic of assigning equal blame to the Soviet Union sets booby traps that will jeopardize future progress toward disarmament...
...Tut-tut, says the Navy, its enthusiasm for this porker of a ship not in the least diminished...
...District Judge Gordon Thompson refused to hear arguments that the registration law is unconstitutional, nor would he permit Sasway to go into his political motives for not registering...
...No way...
...The Government—including the court system—does not want to treat registration refusal as a political act...
...Industries, governmental bureaucracies, colleges and universities, labor unions, whole regions of the country have been locked into the mindless development, production, and perpetuation of the instruments of mass destruction...
...The Fiber of Justice The nation's largest maker of asbestos has found a creative way to insulate itself from thousands of cancer victims...
...They deserve the full measure of support we extend to those who have been identified as prisoners of conscience under the Amnesty International criteria or the Helsinki Accords...
...The problem, however, goes deeper than Judge Christensen seems to realize...
...It was classified information— classified by a Government interested less in the welfare of its citizens than in that of its bomb-testing program...
...Government deceit went undetected for twenty-six years because of the Federal monopoly on atomic knowledge, a monopoly that continues today...
...Surprising some and confirming the suspicions of others, it now turns out that officials involved in the U.S...
...Legalism has here been refined to a high art for corporate criminals...
...This summer, twenty-six years later, Judge Christensen ordered a new trial, noting that the Government had deliberately concealed evidence and pressured witnesses during the original trial...
...Government's testing of atomic weapons in the 1950s were no great lovers of the truth...
...Nevertheless, he says he found "no broad ulterior conspiracy, no centralized planning in high places...
...There was only a practical desire on the part of the Government officials to continue the atmospheric tests unimpeded by public criticism and legal action...
...The nationwide campaign for a nuclear "freeze" stresses the need for simultaneous action by the United States and the Soviet Union, and most of the freeze resolutions now making their way through state legislatures and public referendums call for "mutual," "bilateral," and "verifiable" steps—hard-nosed terms implying that the United States cannot and should not risk acting on its own...
...and Soviet nuclear weapons stockpiles has much to recommend it...
...intentions and invite or perhaps cofnpel a countermove...
...The market," one of them observed, "acted like a hungry dog grasping for a ragged bone...
...Their freedom must be restored and their dignity sustained—they are among the heroes of our time...
...Judge Christensen's ruling may result in new pressure on Federal officials to settle these and other claims lingering in the courts almost two decades after above-ground nuclear testing ended...
...Prisoners of Conscience Justice Department prosecutors chose unwisely when they selected twenty-year-old Enten Eller as the first person to be put on trial for refusing to register for a currently nonexistent draft...
...Thompson said he feared Sasway might run off to Canada before he was sentenced...
...There is, in fact, only one thing wrong with the tactic: It is fundamentally dishonest, for it distorts the history, the causes, and the current status of the nuclear war peril...
...Somehow, the ad asserts, we must get through to these "two bullies, facing each other down, acting out of pride, machismo, and insincerity...
...It seems that Wall Street's leading interest-rate prognosticator, Henry Kaufman of the Salomon Brothers firm, had predicted a decline of up to three percentage points in long- and short-term rates...
...There were mysterious lesions on the mouths and ears of the sheep, and lambs born that spring were listless and undersized...
...In such a climate, charlatans and gurus flourish and a few players win, while the rest of us watch from the sidelines...
...We wonder why Turner, owner of baseball's Atlanta Braves but a newcomer to pro football, didn't come up with a comparable scheme during last summer's baseball strike...
...One redundant radar piece alone adds seventeen tons and costs $5.6 million...
...There is no possible chance of satisfying a people's need of truth, unless men can be found for this purpose who love the truth...
...GIs assigned to the Nevada test site and heavily contaminated by fallout have brought a suit of their own...
...A company legal hireling beamed that the bankruptcy judge assigned to the case can "address all future claims at one time...
...Republican Senator COMMENT Charles Percy has submitted Habib's name to the Nobel Committee...
...In Judge Christensen's words, the Government had "perpetrated a fraud upon the court...
...For the rest of us, this seems as good an example as any, if any is still needed in this mad time, of how little relation the military's love affair with gadgets and war-game fantasies bears to the peril we live with...
...The Turner plan offers the players an extraordinary challenge...
...Turner has a good idea: It would allow the players to negotiate directly with the stadium owners and, ultimately, to make out far better than they now do under the thumbs of team owners...
...To no one's surprise, Eller was convicted...
...Had the Reagan Revolution achieved stable prices, renewed economic growth, and full employment...
...The Government apparently intends to keep the truth under wraps as long as it can...
...A pending lawsuit brought by 900 Utah residents seeks compensation on behalf of themselves and family members who contracted illnesses (mostly cancers) they say were caused by nuclear fallout...
...There seems to be no compelling reason to believe Washington has more interest in seeing the truth win out now than in 1956...
...COMMENT Peace through Honesty An advertisement placed in The New York Times by Friends of the Earth, the environmentalist organization, urges us to send identical messages to Ronald Reagan and Leonid Brezhnev calling for an end to the nuclear arms race...
...In the minds of Government lawyers, the nuclear program itself was the imperative, not the search for truth...
...And Manville lawyers have even tried to deflect lawsuits by arguing that the corporation didn't exist until last year (it previously did business as the Johns-Man ville Corporation...
...And apparently willing to bring all the rest of us down with them to defend their stuck positions...
...The Ticonderoga is only the first of the eighteen to twenty-four ships of its class the Reagan Administration intends to order (the cost of three is covered in this year's budget), all of them equipped with a new razzle-dazzle system meant to defend carriers against computer-guided weapons such as the cruise missile...
...Why should the Reagan Administration and its accomplices in the nuclear weapons establishment even contemplate such - a contingency—one that could only confirm the Soviets' darkest suspicions about U.S...
...It is intended to neutralize the "anti-American" and "soft-on-communism" epithets that have long been hurled at the peace movement...
...On August 26, the Manville Corporation filed for protection under Federal bankruptcy laws, acknowledging it seeks to escape some 16,500 asbestos-related lawsuits...
...One explanation is that the new Pentagon doctrine entails the expenditure of $18 billion for "hardening" the nuclear weapons command, control, and communications network—an enormous boost COMMENT to the military-industrial-academic complex that already flourishes in that field...
...role in the nuclear arms competition with the Soviet Union's adventurism beyond its borders— especially when that is more than matched, in dollars and troops, by the adventurism of the United States and its allies...
...It cannot make an example of just a few...
...It is the United States alone that is preparing to wage "protracted" nuclear war, just as the United States alone has initiated every major advance in nuclear weaponry and nuclear war doctrine for the past thirty-seven years...
...Instead, the nation saw a clean-cut, polite, ail-American type, articulate and sincere, who kept his defense on religious grounds...
...It is simply untrue, despite the assertions of Friends of the Earth and other wellintentioned allies of the peace movement, that Ronald Reagan and Leonid Brezhnev are equally intransigent, equally arrogant, and equally insincere in the positions they have taken with respect to negotiating limits on strategic arms...
...Now that numbers have reached such astronomical levels as to be meaningless, we lead in the sophistication of the weapons...
...Interest rates had actually begun to decline some time earlier without precipitating any notable market response: Kaufman's pessimism had held stock prices in the doldrums throughout the spring and summer...
...But it was more likely luck than anything else that contributed to this judicial about-face...
...A New Toy for the Boys For the most recent entry in the great-idea-that-won't-float department, we can, appropriately or not, thank the U.S...
...By terms of an accord reached with the players' union, Turner would put together an ad hoc network to televise games featuring six or eight regional all-star teams selected by the players...
...That would, of course, create chaos in the courts and prisons...
...Manville has also tried to limit corporate liability by assigning to its asbestos subdivision 26 per cent of the company's $2 billion-plus total assets: "The company hasn't explained how it arrived at that figure," notes The Wall Street Journal...
...After bowing his head to receive a Medal of Freedom from President Reagan, Habib will look to Norway for the more coveted Nobel Peace Prize...
...The sheep ranchers could not make a case for themselves because the Government possessed all the relevant information and wasn't about to grant the plaintiffs access to it during discovery...
...But gains won by such means, we have learned time and again, are quickly turned into reverses...
...if it prosecutes anyone, it must prosecute all the refusers it knows of...
...By consenting to inflated estimates of the Soviet threat, the peace movement plays into the hands of those who would erect barriers to the unilateral steps—diminishing our vast lead— that could be taken now to ease international tensions...
...Some may consider Judge Christensen's ruling a vindication of the American system, proof that truth and justice will carry the day in the end...
...These are examples of an intensive effort currently being mounted to give the peace movement a boost by putting it beyond domestic politics and beyond domestic controversy—to make it respectable, that is, by assigning equal blame for the arms race to both superpowers...
...It was a time when the United States was still exploding atomic weapons above-ground in Nevada, carelessly letting the wind carry radioactive fallout to the east...
...A church choir sang in his support outside the courthouse, providing a splendid photo opCOMMENT portunity for the television crews...
...So observed the great French moralist Si-mone Weil in 1943, when the atomic bomb was just a gleam in the eyes of a few physicists...
...the lung disease asbestosis, for example, has a latency period of thirty-five years or more...
...It is no service to the cause of peace to depoliticize the issue of disarmament or to render it respectable by running from the truth...
...If the Committee could wash the blood of Southeast Asia off Henry Kissinger's hands in 1973, certainly it can award Habib the same prize for umpiring the Israeli destruction of the Lebanese capital on the President's behalf...
...No amount of rhetoric can gloss over the fact that the United States started the nuclear arms race and has always taken the lead in perpetuating it...
...Manville and its accomplices in the mining and chemical industries should be held accountable for their deeds...
...From a purely tactical perspective, this kind of evenhandedness toward dismantling of U.S...
...The health of balance sheets will continue to rank far ahead of the health of mere people until consumers and workers insist on their right to decide how poison products are to be used—and whether such deadly matter should be unearthed in the first place...
...In Kissinger's Footsteps The ambassador from the Bechtel Group Incorporated, Philip Habib, has returned from the shuttle flyways to receive his due for brokering the PLO pullout from Beirut...
...The legal dodge is not Manville's first attempt to duck responsibility for fouling the lungs of thousands of people exposed to the deadly mineral fiber...
...With all this baggage, the Ticonderoga can do only thirty knots floored, as compared to the thirty-four-knot cruising speed of carrier battle groups...
...One illuminating example is the proposal recently brought to light by the Pentagon to implement and embellish the "limited nuclear war" doctrine accepted two years ago by the Carter Administration...
...Can they draw up new team rosters in ways protective of the interests of fans as well as unsung, ordinary players...
...Such "depoliticization" of America's ban-the-bomb movement may account, to some degree, for the increasing support it is receiving from physicians, educators, business executives, mainstream politicians, and others who have historically shunned such causes...
...That kind of peak, if it is reached, may well be followed by a new low for the year, or even a Dow average in the 500-to-600 range, as predicted by Wall Street's last great witch doctor, Joseph Granville...
...The volume of transactions, too, set new records...
...Forget that the war which fueled the battle of Beirut has not ended...
...In the meantime, though, what we can do to help Enten Eller, Ben Sasway, and the others who may follow them to trial and conviction is bring it home to our fellow citizens that these young men are prisoners of conscience in every sense of the term...
...The new policy is supposed to make limited nuclear war more feasible by enhancing our ability to wage it for up to six months...
...They didn't get a shaggy-haired hippie who burned flags and called the American people nasty names...
...Yet not all victims of cancers caused by asbestos know even now that they are afflicted...
...Although the judge has ordered a new trial, the Justice Department is appealing his decision and it could be eighteen months before the U.S...
...The Dow-Jones Industrial Average, the best known if not most significant of the market indicators, took an unprecedented leap...
...There is a temptation, now that the peace bandwagon is rolling, to grease the wheels just a bit by indulging in some old-fashioned demagoguery that will help achieve consensus...
...It's the familiar story of ordinary people placed in extraordinary circumstances, just trying to do their jobs even if they do injury to others...
...Company executives have repeatedly pointed a finger at the Federal Government for allowing asbestos to be used in World War II shipyards...
...But it makes no sense to equate the aggressive U.S...
...How come...
...Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit determines whether there should, in fact, be a new trial...
Vol. 46 • October 1982 • No. 10
