Comment
In Another Country There is something solid and satisfying, something hopeful and reassuring about the decision of the Malcolm Shabazz/City School in Madison, Wisconsin, to declare itself a...
...Proceeding from the reasonable assumption that the nuclear arms race presents a threat to all, the nuclear-free zone movement addresses itself to those manifestations of the threat lying closest at hand...
...In building on the momentum of the nuclear weapons freeze movement, and at the same time broadening the movement beyond the confines of bilateralism and a narrow fixation on the weapons themselves, nuclear-free zones present a chance to touch the lives of all Americans...
...Weinberger neglected to point out that good old American free enterprise, not KGB skulduggery, was responsible for the near-breach...
...To be sure, in the cases of Poland and Mexico, the banks found sophisticated ways of rolling over the precarious loans to avoid technical default...
...The prohibition can be broad or narrow...
...Political theatrics cannot make up for economic analysis...
...4. You ask to be taken off the target lists of any governments that produce or contemplate the production of nuclear weapons...
...Each houses a 335-kiloton H-bomb, equivalent to 335,000 of TNT—almost twenty-five times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb...
...Or is this kid merely fulfilling the American dream—practicing to be President some day...
...It is estimated that there are 2,000 pages of documents in a linear foot...
...And then there is the cross-section of the warhead casing...
...Each cone stands forty-six inches tall and has a base width of 18.2 inches...
...The experiment ushered in the atomic age...
...It can include the various forms of commercial nuclear activity and conventional military activity which many regard as inextricably linked with the nuclear arms race...
...Neither Republicans nor Democrats have attempted to prevent multinational corporations from moving jobs across the oceans...
...officials warned members of a trade group meeting in Paris that "an organization of 20,000" is "hemorrhaging" Western technology and data to the Soviet Union...
...At the same time, the nuclear-free zone concept goes beyond the freeze in two important respects: First, it does not make reciprocity or ver-ifiability a precondition for halting the nuclear arms race...
...Nuclear Free America, 2521 Guilford Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21218, or Nuclear Free Zone Registry, P.O...
...The Academy's position will encourage the Government to step up its efforts to classify more and more research, to attach tighter strings to the easy Pentagon money on which universities increasingly depend...
...One New York Times writer referred recently to international banking's "house of cards...
...But the President couldn't have been farther from the truth when he suggested that he can, or even wants to, do anything to hasten full employment...
...Nuclear-free zones come in all sizes and shapes...
...In this sense, Reagan was not too far off the mark when he declined to take all the blame for the economic mess...
...Nowhere in or around it are preparations under way for nuclear war...
...on Thursday, December 2. The ceremony will be part of a two-day symposium celebrating the "contributions" of nuclear energy...
...While the beneficiaries are counting their blessings, let the rest of us remember the victims...
...Scientists who try to reach accommodation with the Government on secrecy matters essentially condone censorship...
...It didn't seem possible at first that the Brandywine protesters could strengthen their political statement by hauling metal cones from rally to rally...
...Mexico defaulted...
...The list had been mentioned in a 1976 Senate report on covert operations, and Navasky felt the disclosure raised some provocative questions: "I was curious as to precisely what sort of book producer the CIA was...
...A casing, again atop a white transport barrel, is the center of attention...
...In fact, the Academy panel which drafted the report went still further "out of its way to avoid seeming to be picking a fight with the Administration," according to one newspaper account...
...Despite the trenchcoat it keeps tightly belted around its publishing ventures, the CIA clearly believes in the importance of the printed word...
...One conception, formulated by peace activists in Wisconsin, boils down to four simple principles applicable to individuals and organizations alike: 1. Your turf is off limits to the design, testing, production, deployment, and use of nuclear weapons...
...The timing of the Weinberger alarum was more revealing than the content...
...Still, there's a basic contradiction in the rising demands for "restraint" on the part of bankers...
...Between (and Under) Covers Code words, covert operations, and undercover agents are the old reliables of any good spy book...
...There has been a substantial transfer of U.S...
...Then came the Malcolm Shabazz School, the first of many Wisconsin organizations and institutions to take action following approval of a statewide referendum calling for a U.S.Soviet nuclear weapons freeze...
...When growth stops, the system falters...
...But collectively, such declarations could exert a powerful influence on the United States and other participants in the nuclear arms race...
...Scientists and Government censors are fooling themselves if they think they enhance national security by keeping secrets...
...it was aboard a corporate transport sitting on a runway when Federal agents swooped down on it...
...On October 5, according to press reports, unnamed U.S...
...We can never shrug off these grisly artifacts...
...If you didn't happen to receive an invitation, you should be there in spirit nonetheless, along with other uninvited guests whose lives also have been touched by the atomic age: f The survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
...So could your household, your neighborhood, your school, your workplace, your city, your state...
...There is nothing novel about nuclear-free zones...
...They didn't ask the Government for anything...
...You abandon the shibboleth of nuclear deterrence—the rationale which, on all sides, keeps the nuclear arms race going...
...That has become clear to The Nation's editor, Victor Navasky, who has waged a five-year court battle to learn the titles of 1,000 books on the CIA's 1967 publishing list...
...Second, proponents of nuclear-free zones, while addressing themselves specifically to the problem of nuclear weaponry, consciously make room for those who see an inescapable connection between the warlike and the peaceful atom, and therefore seek alternatives to all forms of nuclear activity, commercial as well as military...
...Several months ago, we reported ("A Separate Peace," July issue) that the Washington suburb of Garrett Park, Maryland, had voted overwhelmingly to ban nuclear weapons from the community...
...In Another Country There is something solid and satisfying, something hopeful and reassuring about the decision of the Malcolm Shabazz/City School in Madison, Wisconsin, to declare itself a "nuclear-free zone" and so inform the United States, the Soviet Union, and other governments openly committed to the use of nuclear weapons in wartime...
...The process is within reach of every citizen...
...Were they hoping to attract the attention of those who remain unmoved by the menace of nuclear war...
...It was competition from the likes of Ideal's Evel Knievel and Kenner's Six Million Dollar Man that first forced Joe out of action in 1974, after a twelve-year tour of duty...
...How about sales, research, and subsidiary rights...
...But such means of staving off default are the devices of desperation...
...Well, the fourth estate didn't quite get it right: The so-called unarmed bombs were, more precisely, discarded casings from General Electric's Mark 12A warhead...
...2. You also withhold your consent from any other activity that you feel supports the development of nuclear weapons...
...While the authors acknowledged that university research scientists had been behind "very little of this technology transfer problem"—they pointed, instead, to commerce and espionage—they more or less echoed the Government line on Soviet scientific parasitism...
...So is London...
...Each new display of the nuclear madness has, for us, a first-strike capability of its own...
...In a speech to another trade organization, he charged that Moscow had "tried to steal a multispectral scanner, which is indispensable to military air and satellite reconnaissance...
...Plant gates would clang shut again...
...Declaration of a nuclear-free zone is a symbolic act, unenforceable against a sovereign nation...
...But the West's inability to sustain its own pattern of growth left Poland—and its creditors—in a perilous state...
...You simply declare yourself a nonparticipant in the nuclear arms race...
...The Uninvited A commemorative sculpture marks the spot on the University of Chicago campus where, forty years ago, Enrico Fermi and his colleagues achieved the first artificially induced, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction...
...The school is just standing there on North Sherman Avenue as it has stood for years, minding its own business— the business of educating kids...
...II The uranium miners, enrichment workers, and others exposed to deadly radiation as laborers for the nuclear weapons-makers and the nuclear power industry...
...A nationwide campaign for nuclear-free zones seems the next logical step...
...Public support of higher education is shrinking in most states, and many an ivory tower has had to remake itself into an institution of advanced research—for which the most plentiful money is weapons-related...
...The word seems to have reached Hasbro Industries, which is bringing back G.I...
...Your own body could be a nuclear-free zone...
...Poland defaulted...
...Snagged...
...What's new is that nuclear-free zones have jumped the Atlantic...
...Drastic increases in oil prices that same year affected the price of plastic, making Joe's twelve-inch frame prohibitively expensive...
...They are a way of transforming vote totals into a living, breathing, growing political constituency for peace...
...If enough of us join in, individually and collectively, we could build a nuclear-free Earth...
...An example: A steel mill borrows from a bank for capital expansion, expecting to sell more of its product to auto manufacturers...
...Moreover, many of today's military jewels—microchips, lasers, satellite hardware—are manufactured by private corporations, which generally sell to the highest bidder irrespective of flag or ideology...
...Brazil, Argentina, and a number of other countries came close enough to defaulting to send tremors through the ranks of multinational bankers...
...The CIA objected on several grounds: It insisted that a provision of the Act makes the CIA director responsible for protecting "intelligence sources and methods from unauthorized disclosure...
...Secrecy Agents The Cold War specter of Soviet cloaks and daggers has again been checked out of the national security prop room...
...It's little wonder they were invited to help celebrate...
...That means the old argument about war toys is sure to be revived...
...Further, they could provide moral backing and perhaps even legal support for those who carry resistance to the nuclear arms race beyond community norms by taking part, for example, in tax resistance or nonviolent civil disobedience...
...In the case of one publisher, the CIA, they're also an important part of producing books...
...At the outset of its move into publishing, the head of the Agency's covert-action staff wrote, "Books differ from all other propaganda media, primarily because one single book can significantly change the reader's attitude and action to an extent unmatched by the impact of any other medium...
...The Academy, unfortunately, did just that: It said that even unclassified research could be submitted for official "modifications" in certain circumstances...
...Splitting hairs over what is secret, as the Academy has done, renders moot its report's sound assertion: "Democracy demands an informed public, and this includes information on science and technology...
...The profits of steel producers decline, and the banks have a problem...
...But it would be better by far if the defaults of 1982 were to serve as a warning...
...To rally support for a space weapons program, the Government will dust off a myth concocted in the early years of the atomic age: The United States has know-how that must be kept from the Soviets...
...f The people of all nations and all generations who may pay the ultimate price some day for our mindless exploitation of the technology unlocked forty years ago...
...Sadly, neither will his Democratic Party counterparts, for their programs, too, fail to address the roots of our crisis...
...Creditors can always extend more credit, even to pay outstanding interest on existing loans, and often they will do so if the stakes are high enough— and if there is a prospect of future repayment...
...in fact, the Reagan program cannot countenance full employment because the President's strategy, much like the course his predecessors followed, requires high unemployment rates to cool inflation...
...Reminders and remnants of nuclear weaponry have, for us, a continuing, spellbinding terror...
...But to their colleagues-in-protest, the casings became a symbol of destruction: Brandywine members argued that the Mark 12A is designed to "take out" hardened Soviet missile silos, and that the nose cones were outward and visible aspects of a technology meant to yield a "first-strike" nuclear war capability...
...The scanning device was reportedly sold for export to the Soviets by a company in Anaheim, California...
...But Joe is not alone...
...Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Caltech, IBM, the Argonne and Lawrence Liver-more national laboratories—such institutions have grown plump from the fruits of the atomic age...
...The city of Manchester, England is a self-declared nuclear-free zone...
...As Edward Teller, often identified as the father of the H-bomb, has said many times, "in science there are very few real secrets...
...The process is rooted in assumptions of perpetual growth...
...In recent times, many towns and cities in Europe have chosen this method of opting out of the nuclear arms race...
...To date, the only material Navasky has received from the CIA is a set of eighty-five documents that appear to be financial data on the Agency's book operations, accompanied by a sixty-page explanation of deletions from the documents, including all titles and authors...
...On November 2, eight other states and the District of Columbia were expected to follow Wisconsin's lead in giving majority support to a nuclear weapons freeze...
...Does a kid who presides over a plastic regiment, sending tiny troops to their deaths, come by military habits of mind...
...The metal cones lent some reality to the Brandywine Peace Community's tireless campaign for nuclear disarmament...
...The large loans by Western banks to the "socialist" economies of Eastern Europe are leveraged to the same capitalist growth process...
...This is a way of pointing out that the remedy to the problem of nuclear weapons lies ultimately in the political and economic soil that nourishes them...
...Box 172, Riverside, CA 92502...
...During the next five years, for example, the military establishment will be developing "the capability to deny the enemy the use of his space systems," according to confidential Government documents The New York Times has seen...
...Economic development need not be so irrational a process...
...Does playing with G.I...
...Ultimately, auto makers respond by building smaller cars that use less steel...
...Shrugging off the bugaboo of "unilateral disarmament," it says we can no longer leave it to others to take the lead in moving the world away from the brink of nuclear oblivion...
...The town of Sykesville, Maryland, swiftly followed suit...
...The agency has been in the publishing business since 1961, but it doesn't like to talk about it...
...How many of their books were fiction and how many non-fiction...
...Consider the President's generous announcement in October that he would accept blame for almost one-third of the record 10.1 per cent unemployment rate acknowledged by Federal head counters...
...But now Knievel and friends are forgotten, and Kenner's exhaustive Star Wars line does not meet all of the toy market demand...
...However, having duly concluded that they present a nuclear threat to no one, the students and faculty of Malcolm Shabazz are asking for something in return: They want to be removed from any and all nuclear weapons target lists...
...Joe and his comrades-in-arms encourage violent and anti-social attitudes...
...Poland, hoping to export more steel to the West, borrowed billions of dollars to modernize its coal and steel facilities...
...What line, if any, was the Agency peddling...
...What also strikes us as sensible is that the students and teachers didn't wait for the Government to negotiate a mutual, verifiable agreement...
...The Return of G.I...
...Joe The sentencing of draft resister Mark Schmucker, a Mennonite who can point to a 300-year tradition as proof of conscience, suggests that pacifism isn't in this year...
...It seems a sensible proposition...
...Two days later, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger gave the conspiracy-peddlers a hand by accusing the Soviets of attempting to "raid our technological base...
...Picture a thousand—a hundred thousand—nuclear-free zones, fusing eventually into nuclear-free communities, counties, states...
...The financial press has been expressing understandable alarm over the state of the international banking system, and especially over the risky loans to overextended governments...
...What did their book list look like...
...The President, then, will not bring the nation much closer to full employment...
...technology—much of it directly relevant to military systems—to the Soviet Union from diverse sources," the writers of Scientific Communication and National Security said...
...If the economy were to begin generating a sustained rise in output, and therefore create more jobs, we could expect to see inflation pick up speed...
...Reagan's perfervid longing for an economy of full employment is hypocritical for another reason: The business leaders with whom he cavorts would not be pleased by such a climate...
...But the CIA had some additional categories: 'publisher' (under whose imprint the book came out), 'language' (in which the book was initially published), 'arrangements' (which CIA division paid for it), and something called 'project cryptogram' (which I guess is the code term for a book's code name...
...Joe, says Steve Schwartz, senior vice president of marketing at Hasbro, is destined once again to be the "number one toy in the marketplace...
...Rather than wait for governments to reach agreement, you communicate directly with the responsible parties...
...Such questions are decided by the inhabitants of each zone...
...Or did they seek to impress the already impressed...
...While its declaration of nonparticipation in the nuclear arms race is directed just as much at the Soviet Union and other nuclear weapons powers—present and potential—as at the United States, the initial impact is designed to be felt at home...
...filling out the ranks is a full line of "antiterrorist" buddies, as well as a squad of bad-guy dolls...
...But the energy crisis, traffic congestion, and air pollution all boost the cost of driving...
...3. You renounce whatever right you have to be defended by the use or threatened use of nuclear weapons...
...When the Agency denied Navasky's request, he sued under the Freedom of Information Act...
...Navasky asked for the list in 1977 when doing research for an article...
...They are a way of challenging the nuclear arms race at the local level, where challenge counts the most...
...Reagan shed crocodile tears for the "cruel fate" visited on those out of work and assured us that he would not rest until every American is back on the job...
...I The American soldiers and civilians who absorbed radioactive fallout as guinea pigs for the nuclear weapons program...
...The Year of Default It may be appropriate to call 1982 the International Year of the Default...
...Protesting militarism in the presence of real warhead casings gave the group's message a frisson of urgency, of terror...
...Still, the Agency may have revealed more than it intended...
...The days of endless growth are done, here and abroad, and the sooner we adjust our economic institutions to that reality, the better...
...In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, Navasky noted that the documents he received suggest "that like real publishers, the CIA keeps regular track of book sales, with quarterly fiscal reports that list author, title, publication date, and number of copies sold...
...Neither Republicans nor Democrats have challenged corporate exploitation of limited natural resources, or insisted on the public's right to set investment priorities— even in those instances when public funds have been extracted from the taxpayers to finance private initiative...
...Especially if the reader has no idea that the book is the work not of an author but of an agent...
...They are a way of giving force to the mandate of the freeze referendums...
...In 1967, responding to fears that the CIA was intruding into domestic affairs, the Agency promised to confine its publishing ventures to foreign countries...
...In another, Brandywine members are singing songs of protest in front of a GE plant in Philadelphia...
...In one photo, a metal cone is perched on its transport barrel in the middle of a suburban backyard...
...Buying into the officially promulgated fear of "dangerous" technology transfer stokes the fires of spy hysteria, and ultimately of the arms race itself...
...The fiction obviously did not explode with the Soviet Union's first A-bomb, though it should have...
...Navasky challenged these arguments at three judicial levels and in two appeals...
...Who were the best-selling authors...
...The world economic order is heading toward a day of reckoning that can't be put off forever by patchwork and tinkering...
...It claimed that the revelation of even a single title on its book list would let the world in on the workings of the publishing operation...
...It's true that no bombs or warheads or any parts thereof are stored in the classrooms, lockers, basement, or elsewhere on the premises of the school...
...Hardware on Display It must have struck a few Philadelphia-area newspaper readers as ironic to learn last summer that a local peace-oriented Christian community had nuclear weapons in its possession...
...Years ago, the entire continents of South America and Antarctica were declared by international agreement to be off limits to nuclear weapons...
...Banks must generate loans and profits, or their competitive position is undermined...
...That applies to international transactions as much as to domestic ones...
...Or it can include some of them...
...The possibility raised late in October that a British translator had leaked highly classified intelligence information to the Soviet Union only underlined the impossibility of legislating secrecy...
...A democracy requires the open exchange of ideas...
...But whether Pentagon chiefs choose to blame the invisible hands of the marketplace or those of shadowy spooks, spy talk remains the lubricant of choice when it comes to greasing the skids of public opinion for a new arms buildup...
...Without the threats of runaway shops, lockouts, and give-back contracts hanging over their heads, workers would demand bigger chunks of the economic pie and, perhaps, fight for more control over working conditions...
...For More Information For more about nuclear-free zones and how to organize them, write to Nuke-watch, 315 West Gorham Street, Madison, WI 53703...
...And it asserted that handing over the list to a journalist could jeopardize the national interest by effectively acknowledging its involvement in clandestine foreign book publishing...
...Joe after a seven-year absence from the toy store shelves...
...To those who jailed the Brandywine members for possessing the cones, the protesters said the casings were harmless scrap metal found in a GE trash heap...
...They are, after all, in business to make money, and they make money by lending money...
...Whatever form they may take, nuclear-free zones are a way of furthering the political momentum generated by the nuclear weapons freeze movement...
...It counts on others to follow the example...
...Its chairman used the occasion of the report's release to excuse an instance of prior restraint: Dale Corson objected to the Defense Department's "process," but not to its intent, when it blocked engineers from presenting at least 150 unclassified papers at a San Diego symposium in August...
...Credit lines would tighten, and another downturn would shatter prospects for recovery...
...They took matters into their own hands—and then they told the Government about it...
...Representatives of some of America's great universities, corporations, and scientific laboratories—all guests of the University of Chicago—will gather at the sculpture at 11:45 a.m...
...This is a crucial part of the concept...
...Allegations of a narrowing American technological lead over the Soviet Union—those anonymous officials said it would take less than two years for Moscow to close the gap—fuel the Pentagon's quest for more exotic and expensive clubs and stones...
...One week earlier, members of the National Academy of Sciences had put out a report that swallowed whole the notion of "damaging" technological leakage...
...We can speak only for ourselves: We were caught...
...He lost, and on October 4 the Supreme Court blocked his last effort by declining to hear the case...
...It conceded to Navasky that its "files and materials relating to books subsidized or sponsored by the CIA . . . vary in size from two linear feet to approximately 200 linear feet...
...Admittedly, banking's house of cards will not collapse today or next week: We can still paper over the defaults and hope that somehow more growth—aluminum for autos, new sources of energy—will cure the ills of previous growth...
...Even if the promise were kept, the CIA would still rank as one of the world's largest publishers...
...Secrecy trusses up an elite stratum of experts, serves to conceal Government mistakes, and helps to sneak foolish and unpopular policy commitments past an unknowing citizenry...
...it is unconditional...
...Economies of Snail Though the Reagan Administration has come up short on economic success, it has consistently been long on political imagination...
...Indeed, the nose cones do look harmless...
...Here at The Progressive, we received photographs and diagrams of Brandywine's find...
...Full employment would give organized labor substantial clout by reducing the current divisive competition for jobs...
Vol. 46 • December 1982 • No. 12
