BOOKS

...The bureaucratic and antiseptic term "low-intensity conflict" masks a shift of crucial importance...

...While the frost of the Cold War seems to be melting, another war is heating up: the U.S...

...While MAD is a chillingly appropriate acronym for the strategic posture of the great powers —"mutually assured destruction"—Ronald Reagan's attempt to escape the nightmare via the Strategic Defense Initiative is even less rational, born of a naive faith that scientists can do anything if they really try-^the Wizard image...

...It is not that they are all too craven or too stupid to face reality (though some surely are...

...With such credentials, it should come as no surprise that his attitudes and values are those of the liberal wing of the scientific establishment...

...It was no ordinary street crime...

...bombing of North Vietnam was directed solely at military targets and was surgically precise and accurate...

...At a Capitol Hill press conference, the questions posed by ordinarily cynical reporters revealed a deepfelt hope that our puny ad hoc organization might be the germ of a great international movement of scientists that could force governments to abandon the arms race...

...In a nuclear war soldiers could no longer stand, in the words of our national anthem, "between their lov'd homes and the war's desolation...

...His reconstruction of the Chinese Communists' Long March is likely to be the most informative account we have of that historic episode...

...The anti-bomb testing campaign of the 1950s chose fallout, rather than the weapons themselves, as the target...

...The atomic bomb made its literary debut in 1908 in Anatole France's Penguin Island...

...The cavalier attitude of the AEC weapons division toward this problem has left us with a cleanup task that may cost hundreds of billions...

...Others, like Amory Lovins, are after the corporate economy...

...work directly to help us understand the world, to cherish it, and to improve it...

...Either way, science can free humanity from sickness, toil, and want...

...Such people, whether artists or scientists or ordinary citizens, setting aside their fears of nuclear energy...

...military establishment, and a renewed commitment to employ force in a global crusade against Third World revolutionary governments and movements," Michael T. Klare and Peter > Kornbluh argue...

...that to live we do not need to destroy...

...Along with Richard Bar-net, they point out how these potentially disastrous engagements abroad also jeopardize the fundamental democratic premises of our society...

...He also regards conservation as having pretty much run its course, and solar energy as inherently too diffuse to be cost-effective—positions that are certainly open to challenge...

...An ideological commitment to privatization led to a proliferation of reactor designs, and to overselling the utilities on the ease with which they could be operated...

...But the peace movement, too, has found that manipulation of images can be a two-edged sword...

...The White City would be free from the grime of coal-generated steam...

...Hence Three Mile Island, an economic disaster rather than a menace to public health...

...It is that images can be manipulated by those dedicated to continuing the arms race...

...This movement has spawned some harmless silliness...

...Then Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times went to Hanoi to see for himself, and his dramatic dispatches, published in December 1966, helped arouse the consciousness and conscience of Americans...

...Off the Team CHOOSING SIDES: Unions and the Team Concept by Mike Parker and Jane Slaughter Labor Notes and South End Press...

...His reporting on bigotry and racial violence in Birmingham, Alabama, led to the U.S...

...24.95...

...The Atomic Energy Commission, bent on promoting the "good-face" image of nuclear energy, rushed into the power business with a scale-up of Admiral Rickover's submarine engine, rather than allowing a civilian nuclear technology to develop at a natural pace...

...Strategic Shift LOW-INTENSITY WARFARE: Counterinsurgency, Proinsurgency, and Antiterrorism in the Eighties edited by Michael T. Klare and Peter Kornbluh Pantheon...

...There is no logical end to a nuclear arms race, for no level of quantitative or qualitative superiority can bring security...

...At its best, it reveals a healthy skepticism toward the role of rational thinking as a prime mover of history...

...Becoming more aware of the pernicious clutter in our attics is a modest first step...

...In the Cold War climate, there is a sort of Gres-ham's law whereby bad policy drives out good...

...The crime remains unsolved, but Gallagher, who has done prodigious research on the murder and on Tresca's engrossing life, offers some persuasive speculation and a fascinating explanation of apparent official reluctance to track down Tresca's killers...

...Such studies are currently in vogue among academic historians, especially in France, where they are called histories of mentalites...

...Nuclear Fear does contain one important historical error: the claim that the Safeguard ABM was killed by the ABM treaty...

...by Robert H. March Spencer Weart believes that when the President gives a speech justifying nuclear weapons, a general picks their targets, a Congressman votes to fund them, and a pacifist lies down in the path of a train carrying them, they all have something in common...

...321 pp...

...There were unrealistic promises, in part designed to quiet opposition to the Bomb...

...Life of a Journalist A TIME OF CHANGE: A Reporter's Tale of Our Time by Harrison E. Salisbury Harper & Row...

...Late in the evening of January 11, 1943, Carlo Tresca was gunned down on a New York City sidewalk...

...Using the speed-up and peer pressure, the team concept amounts to "management by stress," they conclude...

...He was a labor organizer, an editor, an antiwar agitator, a man around whom romantic legends were built...

...243 pp...

...Wells hoped that scientists would hoard the power of the atom, assuming the mantle of a benign technocracy that alone could save humanity from its folly...

...The bright side was the promise of great liners crossing the ocean on a thimbleful of fuel...

...In this second volume of his memoirs—the first, published in 1983, was called^ Journey for Our Times—Salisbury deals with the years since his expulsion from the Soviet Union in the mid-1950s...

...229 pp...

...Weart details how cold warriors serve their ideology (and in some cases their pocketbooks) by alerting the public to imaginary menaces...

...Weart is a physicist, historian, and chief archivist for professional societies in physics and astronomy...

...Radwaste carries a built-in source of energy that can frustrate the most sophisticated efforts to confine it, and demands reliable caretaking on a time scale long compared to the history of human civilization...

...19.95...

...Supreme Court's landmark libel decision in Sullivan v. New York Times...

...19.95 hardcover, $8.95 paperback...

...At the other end of the spectrum, antinuclear activists often use the wrong arguments to attack the wrong targets, with consequences that can be self-defeating...

...The emanations of the philosopher's stone could transform sick to healthy flesh, as well as base metals to gold...

...That's the message of this vitally important book...

...So, in 1963 the tests went underground, and the arms race, free from the public scrutiny, went into high gear...

...Of equally ancient lineage is the quest for forbidden knowledge, whether driven by Pandora's curiosity or Faust's lust for Robert H. March is a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and chairman of the University's Integrated Liberal Studies...

...The Soviets were even more slapdash, scaling up military plutonium breeders without insuring that "prompt criticality," a runaway reaction, would be impossible...

...Comprehensive chapters on El Salvador, Nicaragua, the Philippines, and Afghanistan demonstrate the emerging techniques of low-intensity warfare, and an overview by the editors places it all in clear, if disturbing, focus...

...Weart emphasizes that atomic transmutation and radiation have deep mythic connections to both healing and destruction...

...Then more people may come to understand "that the destiny of the citizens of Moscow is the destiny of the citizens of New York and of generations to come and even the fish in the sea...

...Weart's weakest arguments concern the fear of nuclear wastes...

...Companies promise workers a partnership and shared responsibility, but the team concept is a dangerous myth, according to Mike Parker and Jane Slaughter, who have written for The Progressive on labor issues...

...I see little to justify this optimism...

...war against the Third World...

...Weart is particularly hard on the opponents of nuclear power...

...Policy-makers thus fall back on images of the era when the last division thrown into the fray decided the battle...

...The latest trend in labor-management relations is the "team concept"—reorganizing the shop floor into small groups to improve productivity...

...H.G...

...Safety experts paid too much attention to unlikely catastro* phes, and too little to the cumulative effects of small design flaws and bad judgments...

...Excellent case studies of the auto industry and a powerful foreword by Victor Reuther make this indispensable for the union activist and anyone else interested in the labor movement...

...BOOKS BRIEFLY Death off an Anarchist ALL THE RIGHT ENEMIES: The Life and Murder of Carlo Tresca by Dorothy Gallagher Rutgers University Press...

...He ascribes these in part to a revulsion for feces, and insists radwaste is no worse than other toxic wastes...

...Depending on your tastes, the Golden Age will see the Earth covered with shining White Cities, or with self-sufficient homesteads dotting a sylvan arcadia...

...353 pp...

...In our anxiety-ridden century, we get Stanley Kubrick's surreal zaniness in Doctor Strange-love...

...In this era of debate over SDI, it is important to remember that this earlier system simply did not work...

...His insights are often less than profound, but he is a scrupulously honest observer of some of the most important and interesting events of our time...

...The compelling force of that image was made evident to this reviewer in 1969, when I served as spokesman for a group of physicists campaigning against the ABM...

...It is hard to reconcile these facts with heroic images...

...And he had, as Dorothy Gallagher demonstrates in this compelling account, all the right enemies: Tresca was despised by Mussolini's fascist government, by the crime syndicate, and by Stalin's Communist International, all of whom were capable of ordering his assassination...

...Mary Shelley's Frankenstein linked this image to the mad scientist...

...The Johnson Administration's official version, dutifully parroted by the mainstream media, was that the U.S...

...But this image has a counterimage, in which science can "make the deserts bloom...

...Salisbury (who has written for The Progressive) calls his reporting from North Vietnam "the scoop of my life," but it is a life rich in journalistic achievement...

...Many, he feels, are motivated by psychological displacement: If we can't stop the bombs, at least let's get the reactors...

...Thus the first "practical" uses of radioactivity were in medicine, where it proved fortunate that few patients could afford enough radium to kill them...

...It represents a strategic reorientation of the U.S...

...Weart argues with compelling logic that nuclear energy places less of a burden on the environment than the burning of fossil fuels...

...To an alarming degree, the union hierarchy, especially of the United Auto Workers has been all too eager to buy into this scheme, Parker and Slaughter show just how shortsighted that alliance is...

...Thus Chernobyl...

...Weart is equally hard on the reactor builders...

...Important decisions are often made by minds weighed down by the symbolic baggage of culture, caste, and ideology...

...power...

...Weart clearly admires the French who, with a state monopoly, standardized designs, and an elite corps of operators, get 70 per cent of their power from the atom without mishap—so far...

...In control bunkers or submarines, they would sit safe but helpless while their loved ones were incinerated...

...Four decades before Hiroshima the chemist Frederick Soddy revealed that radioactivity represented an unprecedented store of energy, and William Crookes announced that a gram of radium could "blow the British navy sky high...

...The image of unseen poisons in our children's milk was too compelling to resist...

...Nuclear Fears is popular rather than scholarly history...

...Despite all, Weart still dares to entertain the hope that through the efforts of intelligent, socially responsible people of good will, "we can still find our way...

...While teams may be advantageous to the corporations, they come at a dear price to workers and the union movement," the authors write...

...Each is motivated in large measure by images, symbols, and myths that are deeply embedded in our culture, images that have little to do with the grim realities of nuclear weapons...

...Tresca, an Italian-American anarchist, had been a prominent figure on the Left for almost four decades...