Reflections

...They may now favor a standstill in the arms race, or even a reduction of each superpower's nuclear stockpile—but they would still insist on the "sufficiency" of what former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara called "mutually assured destruction...

...That would leave in place some 30,000 U.S...

...For years we had been focusing on Vietnam...

...House of Representatives and two dozen Senators have signed on as cosponsors of a resolution urging the two superpowers to "decide when and how to achieve a mutual and verifiable freeze" on testing, production, and further deployment of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, and later to seek "mutual and verifiable" reductions in thermonuclear stockpiles...

...But we saw little likelihood then that thousands— even millions—of Americans would be enlisted in a massive and vocal crusade against nuclear weaponry...

...The freeze is only the first step toward our real goal— the abolition of nuclear weapons The word verifiable in the freeze proposal poses another problem...

...Unfortunately, the Right wanted no part of it, and most of the peace movement, after expressing initial support for the Hatfield Amendment, dropped it in fear that it would jeopardize the chances of ratifying SALT II...

...plans to install new missiles aimed at the Soviet Union...

...As it turned out, SALT II was a dead letter either way...

...That goal may seem remote—and even impossible of achievement—today...

...Verification has served for three decades as a pretext for blocking disarmament proposals...

...The 1946 Baruch Plan stipulated that before there could be any disarmament, the Soviets would have to admit United Nations verification teams to map Soviet territory and inspect military installations...

...When The Progressive devoted most of its February 1976 issue to my article, "The Doomsday Strategy," Editor Erwin Knoll told me that while he was in full agreement with my analysis, he couldn't subscribe to my conclusion that a nuclear holocaust was virtually unavoidable...

...We should regard the freeze as only the first step toward our real goal—and we have a moral obligation not to disguise or conceal that goal...

...But look at what has happened since...

...President Reagan, departing from the prepared text of a speech to the Tennessee legislature in mid-March, warned that the freeze "legitimates a position of great advantage for the Soviet Union" and "would leave us and our allies on very thin ice...

...Sidney Lens, a contributing editor of The Progressive, is a veteran peace activist and the author of "The Day Before Doomsday...

...11 The freeze campaign has reached into such unlikely precincts as rural Loudoun County, Virginia, where the county supervisors unanimously approved a freeze resolution...

...What brought the peace movement to a point where it merited such denunciations...

...That was six years ago...

...II Well over one million Americans— some 500,000 in California alone—have signed petitions calling on the United States and the Soviet Union to adopt "an immediate and mutual freeze of all further testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons and missiles and new aircraft designed primarily to deliver nuclear weapons [as] an essential verifiable first step toward lessening the risk of nuclear war and reducing the nuclear arsenal...

...The petition being circulated in most parts of the country falls notably short, for example, even of matching the language of the Congressional resolution, itself quite a timid document...

...I just can't believe we are headed toward extinction," Knoll said...

...It is the abolition of all nuclear weapons on this planet...

...With that sort of momentum building, about 150 members of the U.S...

...One significant factor, certainly, was the eruption of anti-nuclear demonstrations in Western Europe, triggered by U.S...

...warheads and some 20,000 Soviet warheads, equal in aggregate power to more than a million bombs like the one that devastated Hiroshima in 1945...

...Millions of Americans, buffeted by unemployment, high interest rates, inflation, and drastic cutbacks in social services, have rediscovered the ancient truth that a nation can't have both guns and butter...

...Our goal should be the one stated in the International Peace Petition, which calls on the two superpowers not only to institute a freeze but to "progressively, but quickly, destroy present stockpiles...

...The petition, on the other hand, merely asserts that the freeze "is an essential verifiable first step towards . . . reducing the nuclear arsenal," but suggests no further steps, bilateral or unilateral, to bring about such reduction...

...Secretary of State Alexander Haig and Pentagon officials have also scorned the freeze idea, and in a March 22 editorial headed "Peddling Nuclear Fear," The Wall Street Journal dismissed the freeze campaign as "hysteria" and "apocalyptic ban-the-bomb mentality...

...Four years later, in 1980, the peace movement had grown, to be sure, but it was still by no means a force to be reckoned with...

...But that was a minority position within the peace movement, and an unpopular one...

...That isn't a good enough goal for those of us who care about the survival of the human species...

...Suddenly a revived freeze campaign, organized on the initiative of Terry Provance of the American Friends Service Committee and Randall Forsberg of the Boston Study Group, has swept the country...

...It was, in fact, deeply divided over ratification of the SALT II agreement that had been initialed by Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev in June 1979...

...How did the movement suddenly become the subject of a Time magazine cover, of television specials, of attention in the daily press...

...Before we cheer too loud and long for what has been achieved in recent months, we should take note of some serious problems inherent in the freeze—problems that stem from an excess of caution among its organizers...

...The Progressive, along with the War Re-sisters League, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Jonah House, Pax Christi, and a few other organizations, opposed the treaty on grounds that it would perpetuate rather than curb the arms race, permitting the addition of some 4,000 warheads to each side's nuclear stockpile...

...Perhaps even more indicative of its growing impact, however, is the increasingly shrill opposition...

...The freeze campaign itself could easily be coopted and converted into an "arms control" effort...

...After all, most of the Senators and Representatives who have endorsed the freeze vote regularly and without protest for increased military budgets...

...Another factor was some reckless, almost casual talk by Reagan Administration officials—including the President himself—about the possibility of "winning" a "limited" nuclear war...

...In addition to its Congressional sponsors, the freeze resolution has drawn support from such prominent figures as former Vice President Walter Mondale and former ambassador to Moscow George F. Kennan...

...the majority worked for approval of SALT II, though with misgivings, because it feared that the weapons buildup without the treaty might be even greater than what the treaty allowed...

...Economic considerations also figure significantly in the sudden surge of antiwar sentiment...

...Senator Mark Hatfield, Oregon Republican, introduced a significant new element—a proposed amendment to SALT II that would add a "freeze" provision barring research, testing, development, manufacture, and deployment of new nuclear weapons and delivery systems...

...He offered no argument or explanation...

...Increasingly vocal opposition to the arms race by church leaders in Europe and in the United States—and especially by the U.S...

...At that point...

...he simply felt we would manage, somehow, to head off the holocaust...

...There is, in fact, a real possibility that the organized peace movement—and especially the freeze campaign—will lag behind its natural and potential constituency among the American people...

...The initial demand of the freeze campaign is...

...A freeze alone would simply obligate the United States and the Soviet Union to stop producing or deploying new warheads or delivery systems...

...Here are a few of its manifestations: 11 Initiatives for a freeze have been approved in 159 Vermont town meetings, at twenty-eight town meetings in New Hampshire, at least a half dozen in Massachusetts, and a scattering in several other states...

...At that time, the nuclear arms race had virtually been forgotten—even by the peace movement...

...Antiwar activists were wholly unfamiliar with the arcane jargon of nuclear strategy—"counterforce," "damage limitation," "mutual assured destruction," and the like—and incapable of mounting a factual challenge to the Pentagon's claims...

...It was the question of verification that turned the first SALT agreement for a disarmament plan into a mere "arms control" measure, though the current capability of satellite surveillance makes the notion of verification obsolete...

...President Eisenhower withdrew the plan and substituted an unacceptable verification system...

...But who would have thought, six years ago, that so many Americans would be enlisted in a campaign for a nuclear freeze...

...We cannot be content with a freeze that leaves our future mortgaged to the nuclear monster...

...Our intent was to shift the Left's attention back to the fundamental threat of the arms race—and to some extent we succeeded...

...It was a compromise to which the "left-wing" critics of SALT II— like The Progressive—could and did subscribe...

...And in Kalamazoo, Michigan, 300 residents raised $10,000 to buy a message on seventeen billboards in the Washington, D.C., area: "Hear Us . . . Nuclear War Hurts Too Much...

...therefore, an exceedingly modest one—and one that would barely diminish the risk of a nuclear holocaust...

...One consequence, after "The Doomsday Strategy" appeared, was the formation of a new national peace coalition, the Mobilization for Survival...

...The Congressional sponsors call for negotiations after a nuclear freeze has been instituted, to bring about a reduction in atomic arsenals on both sides...

...In 1955, when the Soviets accepted in principle an American-British-French disarmament plan that would have eliminated nuclear weapons and subtantially reduced conventional forces...

...Catholic bishops-—has made it difficult to put a "pro-communist" label on the peace movement...

...H State legislative bodies in Massachusetts, Oregon, Connecticut, New York, Wisconsin, Vermont, Minnesota, and Kansas have approved resolutions endorsing the freeze, and action is pending in others...

...The danger is that in its eagerness to enlist mass support—and Congressional sponsors—the movement will dilute its demands to the point where they are rendered meaningless...

...They realize that both the United States and the Soviet Union have acquired massive overkill capacity far in excess of any "national security" rationale, and that to add still more to the stockpiles of weapons is not only terribly wasteful but terribly dangerous...