Comment
Nothing Succeeds Like Failure Even in the upper reaches of the Reagan Administration, where image matters more than ideology and no effort is spared to cast the President's every move in the best...
...Negroponte's familiarity with airpower and his disregard for human rights came to the attention of the Reagan Administration, which rewarded him with the post of U.S...
...But the Government continues to deny responsibility, refuses to award disability compensation, and hides behind such smokescreens as the Air Force study...
...The Air Force acknowledged, however, that these veterans are experiencing skin disorders, liver complications, and possibly hardening of the arteries...
...We've made the improvements and if some contingency arose and we wanted to use them, a lot of the preparatory work would have been done...
...Secretary of State George Shultz was reported to have clung to the notion, against all credible evidence, that the Syrian government as well as the warring Lebanese factions would somehow bow to the rapidly fading authority of President Amin Gemayel...
...One doesn't follow from the other," he adds...
...military intervention in Lebanon was instrumental, especially in this election year, in persuading the Reagan Administration to do what the President had rashly said he would not do—"cut and run...
...military and political intelligence had failed—again...
...But unlike his Cambodia stint, Negroponte's mission to Honduras requires no excessive secrecy or subterfuge...
...None other than John Negro-ponte, who ran the U.S...
...it was based on Washington's egregiously arrogant assumption of what the United States could and should do...
...The soldiers were drinking groundwater, eating fruit, living off the environment to a degree...
...Long ago, labor leaders willingly gave up militant organizing tactics in return for Federal laws and regulations protecting union interests...
...To a man, the Democrats agreed—yes, including Jesse Jackson and George McGovern—that there would be no choice but to use American military power in the Persian Gulf to ensure the free flow of oil...
...This is really not a contest at all: Both Regan and Feldstein are right...
...The better to bomb you with, my dear...
...Kremlinologists and the media forget that even the most entrenched regime cannot squelch popular concerns by simply passing a torch...
...In February, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger sent Congress a progress report providing the first insights into what Midgetman is being engineered to do...
...Nothing presents a greater threat to all humanity than the unchecked, onrushing nuclear arms race...
...Nuclear accidents inevitably raise concerns about safety—safety of the workers who conduct the tests, safety of the residents who breathe the air and drink the water contaminated by the explosions...
...First is the development of "hard-mobile" vehicles—launching trucks capable of withstanding the blast, heat, and radiation of a nearby nuclear explosion...
...policy...
...Union Work The American labor movement has painted itself into a corner...
...that's why it is so vitally important...
...There, the government is providing free transportation to free check-ups for the former soldiers...
...The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which Ronald Reagan has successfully stacked with conservatives, declared in January that a company may close a union plant in mid-contract unless the agreement expressly prohibits such action...
...The program calls for 1,000 of these new toys to be built at a cost of up to $75 billion, with deployment to begin by 1992...
...Without testing, it would be more difficult to expand the technical and scientific horizons of nuclear weaponry...
...And the current so-called recovery has not improved the basic productivity of the economy, nor has it diminished reliance on energy-intensive technologies and socially costly processes...
...A spokesman for a major chemical company—one of seven being sued by Vietnam veterans-said the new study shattered the "casual hypothesis" linking dioxin, a contaminant of the herbicide, to a variety of ills...
...These groups are urging individual and institutional investors—including churches, unions, and public investment boards—to sell all stocks and bonds they hold in companies that produce nuclear weapons: H Nuclear Free America (2521 Guilford Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21218) is calling on the thirty-five "nuclear free zone" communities in Ihe United States to divest themselves of their financial holdings in such companies...
...Midgetman is just one more addition to the line-up that already includes MX, Trident II, and Pershing II...
...That was its greatest danger...
...But the "greatest technical challenge" is to design a guidance system light enough to fly single-warhead missiles yet "accurate enough to hit Soviet ICBM silos...
...All of these explanations (which the press is pleased to call "analyses") miss the point...
...They're available for us...
...And the Administration still hasn't learned...
...Marines were pulled off Lebanese soil, at least a dozen different alibis and rationalizations were emanating from the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon, while Congress and mass media pundits chimed in with lots of theories of their own...
...The economy is so fragile that any effort to cut the deficit—a course the Democrats are now perversely championing—will roll back the gains in employment and beckon a new recession...
...That is why testing is so important to the bureaucracy that feeds on nuclear weapons development, why it is defended so energetically, and why all efforts to bring about a comprehensive test ban agreement have so far come to naught—sabotaged by the U.S...
...When Yuri Andropov obliged a few weeks ago, American television networks and newspapers called in the eager experts: Would Mikhail Gorbachev, the youngest member of the ruling Politburo, assume the leadership position...
...Even if Mondale wins, however, there is no assurance unions will regain their legal footing...
...ambassador to Honduras...
...The real problem in Nevada (and at the proving grounds of the other nuclear weapons states) is not the occasional test u:at misfires but the act of testing itself...
...And, fortunately, the lesson hasn't eluded the American people, either...
...This lesson, which should have been learned in Southeast Asia more than a decade ago, still seems to elude our nation's political leadership...
...The game pieces keep changing, but the aim remains the same—annihilation...
...The AFL-CIO has pledged to do "everything in its power to ensure that Congress corrects the Supreme Court's mistake" in the bankruptcy ruling, but prospects for early remedial action in Washington seem dim...
...But unless the budget deficit is trimmed, a new round of inflation and high interest rates is inevitable...
...Neither the Executive Branch nor the Supreme Court has any intention of maintaining the traditional "balance" in which unions were allowed to win one every once in a while...
...Whoever occupies the White House for the next four years, whichever party dominates the Congress, the Vietnam syndrome—that searing memory of what can happen when an empire insists that might makes right—will continue to be our best and, perhaps, sole defense against the lunatic military excursions that seem to hold our leaders in thrall...
...privately, he may be hoping that its adverse effects will not come calling before election time...
...The lack of public support for U.S...
...Even as it disengaged the Marines from Beirut, it was preparing for new military misadventures in Central America and God knows where else, while the loyal Democratic opposition offered pathetically little in the way of assurance that it would pursue a more responsible course...
...Rainier Mesa was just the latest in an unending progression of nuclear weapons tests...
...On the morning of December 18,1970, an underground nuclear weapons test codenamed "Baneberry" blew a hole in the southern Nevada desert floor and spewed a mushroom cloud 8,000 feet into the air, releasing deadly fallout that was detected as far away as Pocatello, Idaho...
...Though this new direction of the peace movement may not bankrupt the likes of General Dynamics and McDonnell Douglas, it does draw long-overdue attention to the hidden actors that promote and profit from the arms race, just as the 1970s' campaign against companies and banks investing in South Africa exposed the economic bulwarks of apartheid...
...While the British fulfill their responsibility to aging veterans of a war fought forty years ago, the U.S...
...From the Lucky Dragon to Baneberry, from Oceania to the Urals, the supersecret nuclear tests conducted by the United States and other governments have been marked by occasional accidents too spectacular or too damaging to be covered up...
...Our Government's attitude stands in stark contrast to the diligent efforts under way right now in Britain to track down World War II veterans who may have contracted an infection while interned by the Japanese as prisoners...
...It was dubbed Midgetman, and it won swift support in Congress...
...There were sundry allegations that U.S...
...Unfortunately, the Administration pulled back only after the squandering of more than 260 young American lives, after the killing of uncounted Lebanese by American bullets, shells, and bombs, and after any solution that may eventually emerge in Lebanon had been postponed by the U.S...
...Government is turning Honduras into a launching pad for attacks on the Nicara-guan government and the Salvadoran rebels...
...Nothing would do more to stop that race than a simple agreement to cease all further testing of warheads...
...After all, why strike an empty silo...
...Regan, the starchy, button-down veteran of Wall Street, is playing the heretic: He is willing to live with the deficit for now...
...During this period, the Reagan Administration has spent $13 million to lengthen the runway at the major Honduras airstrip near Tegucigalpa, which will soon be able to accommodate any bomber in the U.S...
...Did it jeopardize the health of nearby ranchers and villagers...
...Publicly, he expresses confidence that a recovery will gradually eliminate the deficit...
...The facilities are there for contingency use," Ne-groponte told The New York Times recently...
...The field-testing of nuclear warheads is the heartbeat of their development, the activity that makes the nuclear arms race interesting...
...Secretary Regan may well win the dispute over the budget, at least until Election Day...
...Given the stagnant condition of the economy and the careless approach both parties have been taking, it is hardly surprising that the Reagan Administration cannot elude the whips and scorns of conventional policy...
...Paying the Piper The intramural dispute between Donald Regan, Secretary of the Treasury, and Martin Feldstein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, hardly qualifies as competitive sport, but there is something about the match that arrests the spectator's attention for a while—as in watching the charade of television wrestling...
...In fact, as The Washington Post reported, "the word 'failure' was used privately by many Administration officials...
...But what was it, exactly, that failed...
...It wasn't withdrawal of the Marines that signaled the failure of U.S...
...By demanding an end to the arms race and repudiating the bullyboy belligerence of the Reagan Administration, Americans can give Soviet peace activists some breathing and jockeying space...
...Now he is running that country as if it were his personal fiefdom...
...A year ago, President Reagan's Scow-croft Commission seemed to hint that the game may have gotten out of hand...
...Most important, they must stop thinking of the Government as the vehicle of their salvation...
...McFarlane, Shultz, and other officials supposedly fed their contradictory but invariably cheery assessments to President Reagan, who dithered and dilated until there was no option left but hasty "redeployment" of the Marines...
...The Pentagon is also expanding five other airstrips and installing sophisticated radar systems in this country the size of Tennessee...
...Without field-testing, there would be less challenge in the nuclear weapons program—less excitement, less growth, less money...
...I think everyone is terrified by the scenario of people hanging off helicopters," said one official who recalled the 1975 evacuation of the U.S...
...As these have diminished, the unions have suffered a commensurate decline in their ability to invoke the support of the Government and the courts...
...But the military and the chemical industry quickly camouflaged such sickness and suffering...
...Just two years ago, the Pentagon had placed only eight members of the U.S...
...The journalistic proclivity for soap-opera renditions of Politburo intrigue obscures the real story of Soviet succession...
...However indirectly, the people of the Soviet Union do have a voice in shaping policy—and even Americans can have an impact on the decisions made in the Kremlin...
...Several organizations have recently come up with a significant new approach, one aimed directly at the economic underpinnings of the arms race...
...As for the NLRB, labor hopes to elect Walter Mondale and put pro-worker appointees back on the Board...
...And now there has been another noteworthy accident...
...According to the report, the 1,269 pilots and crew members who sprayed millions of gallons of Agent Orange on Vietnam are today suffering "minor or undetermined" ailments...
...The Department of Energy concedes that one test in ten (at least forty in the last two decades) has sent airborne radioactive dust beyond the borders of the Nevada proving grounds...
...The last recession was more painful than usual: A study released by the Census Bureau in February revealed that the number of Americans living in poverty jumped from fifteen million in 1979 to almost twenty-three million in 1982...
...They remember Vietnam, and they exerted pressure to take the Marines out of Beirut...
...The new divestment campaign, still in its infant stages, addresses precisely those forces...
...If Mobilization for Survival (853 Broadway, Room 2109, New York, NY 10003) is calling on its local affiliates to join a nationwide disinvestment drive against nuclear arms makers...
...The exertions center on the question of what to do with the ballooning Federal deficit...
...Rainier Mesa" will be remembered as the site in the U.S...
...But the most pertinent question about the exercise has not even been asked: Was this test necessary...
...Now organized labor is trapped by its own bargain...
...The failings of the report have largely been ignored...
...U Nukewatch (315 W. Gorham Street, Madison, WI 53703), a project of The Progressive Foundation, is sponsoring an "Invest in Peace" campaign that targets the fifty top nuclear weapons firms and offers advice on alternative investment opportunities...
...Government shirks its responsibility to young people injured in a crime committed in the recent past...
...Fortunately, it seems not to have eluded the military...
...Honduran Launching Pad Quietly, with little fanfare, the U.S...
...And that miscalculation was not based on Washington's assessment of what the diverse Lebanese interests, the Syrians, or the Israelis might or might not do...
...it was their insertion in the first place...
...Air Force flacks are touting the study as the last word on Agent Orange, contending that it gives a clean bill of health to servicemen who were exposed to high doses of dioxin...
...Their "peacekeeping" mission was ill-defined or undefined, and their bivouac at the Beirut airport was indefensible...
...How extensively these rulings will increase union-busting bankruptcies or accelerate plant-closings remains to be seen, but there is no doubt about their symbolic importance...
...Many questions need to be answered about Rainier Mesa: Did the test expose the workers at the site to new dangers...
...embassy in Saigon...
...Labor's prerogatives were always founded on more tangible strengths: numbers, broad popular support, a vigorous program, and organizational activism...
...Labor has been given the clearest signal to date that the Federal Government has abandoned all pretense of neutrality for an unabashedly anti-union approach...
...The Aim of the Game Nuclear weapon designers, like members of an exclusive club who share a fascination with ingenious methods of committing suicide, tend to get carried away by the thrill of the game...
...We meet and march, educate and demonstrate, write letters and sign petitions, publish, vote, and win an occasional small victory...
...Union leaders must turn their energies to the task of rebuilding a movement in decline by rekindling rank-and-file activism and restoring shop-floor militancy...
...But until we change our own Government's policies, it is pointless to expect any significant shift in the Soviet Union's...
...today, it has permanently stationed up to 1,700 soldiers there...
...The crisis in Lebanon, the larger crisis in the Middle East, and the many other crises around the world, real or imagined, in which the United States takes an interest for better or worse, cannot be resolved by dispatching a few hundred Marines or by deploying the full panoply of American military might...
...In its stepped-up nuclear weapons production program, the United States is now detonating underground nuclear blasts in Nevada at the rate of one every three weeks—many of them unannounced...
...What's to be done...
...But after that, he or his successors will have to pay the piper...
...Media consumers were spared an overdose of such drivel when the Politburo mercifully arrived at a quick decision and tapped Konstantin Chernenko, seventy-two...
...Agent Orange: Still the Fog The cloud of misinformation hanging over Agent Orange grew thicker when the Air Force recently released a "reassuring" study on the health of veterans exposed to the herbicide...
...military in Honduras...
...It recommended development of a new and less destabilizing ballistic missile—a small, single-warhead device which, as The New York Times reported, would more likely be "viewed by the Soviet Union as a retaliatory weapon, not one for initial attack...
...By the time the U.S...
...Stocks and Bombs The question most often asked within the peace movement is, What is to be done...
...None of the candidates so much as hinted that human life might conceivably be more precious than oil...
...They submerged themselves in the political mainstream, never doubting that unions would remain strong enough— and the Government liberal enough—to make the system work...
...Who is orchestrating this massive buildup...
...But the rush toward Armageddon continues and we wonder what strategies remain to be tried, what tactics have not yet been tapped...
...The Tea-Leaf Readers Every passing of a Soviet leader rouses that curious breed of scholars known as Krem-linologists, who earn a dubious livelihood predicting and analyzing the demise of Moscow's helmsmen...
...Not Presidential politics, not nuclear-freeze resolutions, not SALT or START negotiations will bring a halt to the arms race, for such activities leave untouched the economic forces that fuel it...
...Was This Test Necessary...
...During the New Hampshire "debate" among the Democratic Presidential contenders, they were asked how they would respond if the war between Iraq and Iran were to precipitate closure of the Straits of Hormuz...
...An Air Force official declared that he would not hesitate to use Agent Orange in the next war...
...They plan ever more costly and elaborate ways of extinguishing life...
...nuclear weapons establishment...
...And it reported that the infant death rate among children of the veterans is three and a half times higher than among those fathered by other men in the same age group...
...Nothing Succeeds Like Failure Even in the upper reaches of the Reagan Administration, where image matters more than ideology and no effort is spared to cast the President's every move in the best possible light, hardly anyone made a serious attempt to depict the fiasco in Lebanon as a triumph of U.S...
...And last year, Vietnamese scientists released a study-based on a survey of 40,000 families— which suggested that offspring of men exposed to dioxin run a high risk of being born with birth defects...
...arsenal...
...Did it violate the U.S.-So-viet agreement limiting the explosive yield of nuclear warheads...
...Still, the Kremlinologists continued their ponderous speculations and predicted with the usual certitude that there would be no noticeable shift in Soviet policy, at least for a while...
...But union backing may be hurting Mondale as much as it helps, and no one can assume that Reagan will be denied a second term...
...policy in Lebanon...
...embassy in Cambodia during the Nixon-Kissinger secret bombings...
...Thirteen Chicago-area congregations affiliated with the Roman Catholic Sisters of Charity have already sold off $1.3 million in stocks and bonds they held in nuclear arms companies...
...Feldstein, on the other hand, holds to the traditional conservative notion that deficits cause inflation to rise and interest rates to spiral, making it more difficult for business to procure credit needed for expansion...
...And the city of Takoma Park, Maryland, has passed an ordinance forbidding it from doing business with such manufacturers...
...It was said that the President's national security adviser, Robert McFarlane, had totally misjudged the capabilities of the ragtag Lebanese army...
...Department of Energy's Nevada proving grounds where a subterranean rock formation crumbled after a test explosion in February, injuring a dozen workers, one critically...
...They're saying, 'If these guys don't have any symptoms, why should we worry about the guys on the ground?' " says Tod Ensign, director of Citizen Soldier, a New York-based GI rights organization...
...But times and the political climate have changed...
...Like their American counterparts, many Soviet citizens worry about the perilous arms race and the unproductive economy...
...Or would the Old Guard resist the upstarts and hang on...
...As the National Academy of Sciences warned when the Air Force first proposed the study several years ago, the survey sample was small, the investigative period was too short to detect some forms of cancer, and the researchers had a vested interest in reaching upbeat conclusions...
...In the spring of 1954, when the atomic age was still in its infancy, an American hydrogen bomb explosion in the South Pacific dusted the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon with radioactive fallout, alerting the world for the first time to the dangers of nuclear weapons testing...
...There are lots of things you can do with a bayonet, but you can't sit on it," said one Defense Department official—implying that if the Marines had not been compelled to sit on their bayonets, they could have done "lots of things...
...There are ample grounds for anxiety...
...Regan fears that raising taxes or reducing Government spending will dampen consumer demand and wilt the recovery...
...It was reportedly the first time any of the Department's Nevada workers had sustained serious injuries...
...That bus left long ago and won't be back...
...As many as 250,000 Americans may have been exposed to Agent Orange...
...Research on lab animals has shown that long-term exposure to low doses of dioxin poses a serious health hazard...
...military intrusion...
...While big business pursues an aggressive new anti-union strategy, labor leaders cling to the informal "social contract" adopted after World War II: They are still looking to the Federal Government to protect workers' interests...
...There we have it: another first-strike weapon...
...There was, for example, the simplistic observation that the Marines had been assigned an impossible task in an unsuitable locale...
...January's 0.6 per cent increase in the cost of living only presages future leaps...
...According to the report, two major technical challenges confront the Midgetman...
...A month later, the Supreme Court decided that a bankruptcy court may allow a firm to scuttle its union contract even if there is no proof that labor costs would force the company out of business...
...This puts labor in a tough position...
Vol. 48 • April 1984 • No. 4
