BOOKS

...In Trinity's Children, the developers and managers of the nuclear highway come in for heavy lumps for their shabby treatment of the landowners, for endangering workers and messing up the environment, for arrogance, extravagance, and other crimes and misdemeanors...

...Cabinet and Congress...

...Why did the authors tailor their account of Rocky Flats and Wyoming MX resistance to the persona of two young middle-class women, one with "long, blonde hair" (Pilcher) and the other with a "traffic-stopping figure" and "a million-dollar smile" (Kirkbride...

...dictates...

...288 pp...

...by Samuel H. Day Jr...

...On that anguished note, the editor and his staff began their coverage of the forty-three-day Persian Gulf war and its aftermath...

...Tom Fox got his start as a journalist in Vietnam, where he spent the late 1960s and early 1970s as a volunteer working with children and other victims of the war...

...I mention Pilcher and Kirkbride not to minimize their roles or to quibble over apportionment of the credit but to illustrate a flaw in the widely practiced technique of humanizing a story by shaping observations and analysis around heroic figures...

...16.95, paper...

...29.50...

...Iraq recounts NCR's efforts to expose the hidden side of the story—the fate of the victims, the values of Islamic heritage and culture, the stifled voices of American dissent, the moral doubts that Catholics and others suppressed in their surrender to the well-orchestrated war fever...

...A revolution needs an armed populace, he concluded...

...It's because, for a popular expose of this type, they were the sources most visible, most approachable, most appealing, and most compatible with stereotypes of respectable nuclear resistance...

...The militarism that grew up over half a century and that came to bear on Iraq in 1991 is the subject of two recent books by professional journalists embodying vastly different perspectives and approaches...

...For the cool, objective, professional investigators of American militarism there seems no escape from the nuclear highway nor a reason to seek one...

...Counterrevolution masquerading as democracy...

...That question, central to many on 1-25 long before the rise of safety and environmental issues, is as fuzzed over in Trinity's Children as are the nameless, faceless "protesters" who occasionally flit through its pages...

...America's imperial hubris was no aberration...

...Bartimus and McCartney could have had an answer from the nuns and priests, the Mennonite volunteers, and the patient peace activists whose lives of quiet and unglamorous opposition up and down the highway bespeak a resistance to militarism itself...

...As we prepare to endure a new period of history, already marred by raging interventionism and unbridled capitalism, it may be useful, if hardly comforting, to look backwards for wisdom...

...Guatemala faces genocide stemming directly from the coup of 1954...

...foreign policy in recent decades, is, in fact, to assure that the United States will never be truly 'secure.' There will always be another war to fight to protect U.S...

...The decision to destroy a government goes deeper than the Cold War crisis mentality that linked—falsely—Arbenz's reforms to Soviet power...

...Trinity's Children gives us fascinating glimpses of nuclear weapons developSamuel H. Day Jr., a member of The Progressive's Editorial Advisory Board, is a free-lance writer and antinuclear activist in Madison, Wisconsin...

...advisers rescued their reputation and revived their morale...

...Almost paralyzed with anger and disbelief, Fox rose to his feet, fighting back tears...

...One such victim was Peggy Pond Church, whose New Mexico ranch was condemned to make way for the wartime Los Alamos laboratory and who, brokenhearted, vented her sorrow in poetry and eventually committed suicide...

...If the nuclear highway leads to Armageddon, how do we find the nearest exit...

...When the CIA's rag-tag army invaded, Arbenz vacillated...

...These "character witnesses" against the militarization of 1-25 have been selected to keep the discussion within narrow limits...

...They reveal a lot not just about the military in the United States but also about the nature of journalism itself in relation to militarism and national security...

...The Americans taught them not only the techniques of modern counterinsurgency, but also the elements of esprit de corps...

...Saul Landau (Saul Landau is a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C...

...Red Jacobo" looms as a tragically flawed character, unable to summon the will to act during the fatal week when his own and Guatemala's destiny were decided...

...This is a story of good guys and gals against good guys and gals...

...Here, like a flea flicked from an elephant's back, a vulnerable old world felt the impact of the new...

...But an angry, God-fearing reporter has checked out the highway and concluded that it leads to hell, ¦ Guatemala's Tragedy SHATTERED HOPE: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954 by Piero Gleijeses Princeton University Press...

...The reader of Shattered Hope will come away with an understanding of the foundation of a great historical tragedy...

...And when the CIA tried to repeat its Guatemala performance seven years later at the Bay of Pigs, Castro's militia awaited the agency's army with weapons in hand to repel them...

...It must end its aspirations, which mock its democratic traditions and instincts, to 'control' the destiny of the planet...

...But this emphasis on human-interest stories is a weakness as well as a strength of the book...

...citizens, are failing to understand the nature of U.S...

...The Johns Hopkins University historian questions the now-accepted interpretation of the ouster of democratic government as a product of collusion between the CIA and the United Fruit Company...

...When all is said and done, is the nuclear highway a good thing, too...

...armed forces...

...Iraq, by Thomas C. Fox, editor of the National Catholic Reporter, examines the impact of military might on America itself...

...We visit the laboratories and factories, the test ranges and proving grounds, and the subterranean bunkers of a military instrument geared for annihilation...

...The evil stems not from the hearts of these people, but rather from decades of policies aimed at achieving some kind of antiquated 'national security' long after the planet has entered the global age...

...Ambivalence and fatalism are not the hallmarks of Iraq, which looks at militarism not from the giving end in the labs and factories and command posts of 1-25 but from the receiving end in the villages and cities of the Third World...

...To continue the pursuit of'national security,' as it has been defined through U.S...

...In New Mexico, we find bright young technicians working on a long-range laser beam machine (called MIRACL) that, chillingly soon, could put Star Wars weapons in the hands of the Pentagon...

...She did indeed play an important part, but she would be the first to pass the credit on to others, such as Sister Frances Russell, the nun who organized Lindy Kirkbride, and Richard High, the crusading Wyoming newspaper editor who furnished the vital information—players barely mentioned or ignored in Trinity's Children...

...He has traveled and reported extensively on 1-25 and other nuclear highways...

...Of course, they had no external enemies, leaving them with only their own people to victimize...

...In the early 1950s, anticommunist demagoguery created an atmosphere fostering hoodlums dressed as ambassadors: Pistol Packing John Peurifoy running through the capital threatening Guatemalan officers, CIA officials commanding an air force to bomb and drop propaganda—a scenario reen-acted several times in ensuing decades...

...Bartimus and McCartney bring this complex and half-hidden subject to life by focusing on personal stories...

...In search of heroes or heroines, the authors come across Jan Pilcher, a Denver-area publicist who helped rally opposition to the Rocky Hats plant on environmental grounds...

...Through the story of another victim, Don Gabel, a worker fatally irradiated at his job at the Rocky Flats plutonium bomb factory near Denver, Bartimus and McCartney recount the abysmal record of government and the nuclear-weapons industry in workplace contamination and environmental pollution—and the heroic resistance of a few...

...9.95, paper...

...The reader of Susanne Jonas's book The Battle for Guatemala will find a brilliant and detailed analysis of the stages of that counterrevolution, a process that, in Guatemala, has been infinitely more cruel than revolution...

...Angry and impassioned, the book goes well beyond the bounds of traditional objective journalism to make a point that is both searing and hopeful...

...If we pause during this shockingly rapid yet blurry transition era, we may well reflect on how much progressive thought and action have revolved around Third World liberation and revolution...

...He also admits that national-security arguments were dogma at the time...

...But the Chilean president chose a more heroic, or perhaps more poetic, path...

...He chose death, bringing down with him the Chilean state and any possibility of forced continuity...

...He tells the story of the ten exciting years of democratic reform in Guatemala between 1944 and 1954, and of the painful weeks when the CIA engineered a coup to overthrow President Jacobo Arbenz and replace him with Colonel Castillo Armas, a figurehead whose virtue lay in his eagerness to submit to U.S...

...When covert operations are planned, no one asks: What will be the consequences...

...He learned the language, melted into the culture, became an antiwar activist, and returned home to pursue a career which led to the editorship of the National Catholic Reporter, a liberal weekly, and the unshakable belief that the United States would not blunder into another Vietnam...

...While taking us inside the labs and proving grounds and command posts, all throbbing with a sense of duty and mission, the authors also introduce us to victims who live along the nuclear highway...

...Pilcher, a relative latecomer to the fray, would be the first to resist the characterization of herself as the leader or personification of the struggle to close Rocky Flats...

...Gleijeses closely examines the CIA's claims and discovers that the facts contradict the slick professionalism that "boastful operatives" have attributed to the coup...

...The origins of the coup, he writes, stemmed "from the relationship between the metropole and the banana republic...

...He finds, rather, a pattern of blundering and faulty intelligence that has plagued the agency for decades...

...Here the nuclear age was born, and here stand its awesome offspring...

...Arbenz, as Gleijeses shows, was a prisoner of his times, a military man with great intellectual curiosity, a reformer drawn to the personality of communists— a fact well-noted and exaggerated by the CIA intelligence reports...

...In 1973, Allende could have fled with his family in an airplane to a neighboring country, as Arbenz did...

...militarism in the late Twentieth Century," Fox warns...

...Fox musters the familiar economic and political arguments against the Persian Gulf war, and adds a powerful condemnation of "just war" doctrine which still lends itself to the murderous enterprises of the state...

...But what about the question—the crime, if you will—of the weapons development itself...

...However, the author maintains, American imperial assumptions which long predated the Cold War enabled the United Fruit hustlers and CIA adventurists to prevail...

...Just as the CIA's campaign ran into difficulties, he failed to summon the energy needed to organize and mobilize...

...The nation's officers behaved like cowards in 1954, but U.S...

...Other people—Che Guevara, for example, who was then a minor official in the Guatemalan health ministry—raced madly through the capital trying to foment organized resistance...

...In Colorado, we meet Seymour Cray, an octogenarian computer genius, hard at work on his new $42 million number cruncher for the military-industrial complex...

...Is this a model of what is to come in other places...

...They have seen that critics probably never win, even though sometimes they are proven right, and that even today we don't know all the environmental and safety dangers...

...42.00, cloth...

...Power by Susanne Jonas Westview Press...

...The men who decided to invade Vietnam and the Dominican Republic in the 1960s, those who conspired to overthrow Allende in the 1970s, the reckless interveners in Central America, Grenada, and Panama in the 1980s, and the architects of the technological massacre of Iraq in 1991, all lacked the most primitive notions of morality...

...When President Vinicio Cerezo took office in the late 1980s, the U.S...

...As Jonas documents, the U.S...

...All of us, as U.S...

...The people of the Nuclear Highway have learned that no army ever retreats, that living next to the Bomb can be hazardous, that you can't put the genie back in the bottle," the authors conclude...

...That belief was shattered on January 16, 1991, the twentieth anniversary of his marriage to Hoa, a Vietnamese woman, when a portable radio blared the news of the U.S...

...430 pp...

...Gleijeses concedes the influence of United Fruit stock held by key figures in the U.S...

...From the white sands of southern New Mexico to the windswept grasslands of eastern Wyoming, a thousand miles of highway forms the front line of America's global military might...

...American power stood for counterrevolution, and it would make its will felt...

...control of an open supply of increasingly dwindling resources...

...ment—from the first atomic-bomb test (called "Trinity") near Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 1945, to the current deployment of MX missiles under the cattle ranges of Wyoming, their multiple warheads pointed at distant targets...

...It preceded Truman and continued well beyond Eisenhower...

...State Department proudly declared that, finally, democracy had arrived in Guatemala...

...policymakers...

...It was not in his character to do so...

...The company's propaganda campaign and access to the White House did help persuade President Dwight Eisenhower to authorize the operation...

...But the authors' ambivalence on the moral issue, and their unexamined faith in peace through strength, lead them to a different answer...

...From the deserts of Saudi Arabia to the teeming valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, an equal distance marks the most recent application of that might...

...And we come face to face with likable Pete Piotrowski, who worked his way up from humble beginnings to become the "general in the mountain," boss of the North American Air Defense Command, headquartered in a hollowed-out mountain near Pikes Peak...

...Yet at the same time, the people of this place that has been on the front lines of momentous history have learned that there is always a silver lining when nuclear weapons work...

...Also, they were the safest sources and the most creditable witnesses for the case the authors want to make...

...It sure helps pay the bills, it can stretch the frontiers of science, and it probably helps keep us out of World War III...

...Salvador Allende also reflected on Arbenz's experience...

...Ironically, her three sons all wound up working for the nuclear establishment...

...nationalsecurity apparatus, not brilliant fact-gathering and analysis, held the secret of success...

...The United States must rejoin the global family with a spirit of cooperation...

...In Wyoming, we share an underground missile-launch capsule with two young Air Force officers whose fingers hover over the nuclear button...

...Jonas shows that hundreds of thousands of deaths and the destruction of a civilization resulted...

...The overwhelming power of the U.S...

...THE BATTLE FOR GUATEMALA: Rebels, Death Squads, and U.S...

...While other media put Americans into military briefing rooms and into the cockpits and nose cones of high-tech weapons fine-tuned along America's nuclear highways, Fox and his newspaper poked among the corpses on the ground...

...Trinity's Children, by Associated Press reporters Tad Bartimus and Scott McCartney, sketches the birth, growth, and proximate impact of modern weapons development along the "nuclear highway"— Interstate 25—that skirts the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains...

...Iraq also casts light on how the self-defined objectivity of mainstream journalism distorts the world by viewing it through a nationalist prism...

...publications that unequivocally opposed Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, NCR pulled out all stops to buck the jingoistic tide and tone of the mainstream media...

...advisers turned the hapless semifeudal Guatemalan armed forces into one of the world's most bloodthirsty armies...

...Sometimes, we are blinded by the good people we know who are part of the U.S...

...192 pp...

...In Shattered Hope, Piero Gleijeses offers a historical road map that may serve as a guide for future generations...

...Good history can offer clues— especially during times of counterrevolution...

...Gleijeses adds spice by describing the interplay of personalities among Guatemalan leaders and U.S...

...Of course, the murders continued, as the armed forces maintained their power behind the presidential facade...

...One of the few U.S...

...IRAQ: Military Victory, Moral Defeat by Thomas C. Fox Sheed & Ward...

...Trinity's Children does not let such questions get in the way of a good story...

...It is the informative, readable product of experienced writers utilizing the skills and techniques of mainstream investigative journalism...

...Likewise, Lindy Kirkbride, a rancher's wife, emerges as the embodiment of grassroots resistance to MX deployment in Wyoming...

...Fidel Castro, then in a Cuban political prison, studied the details of the Guatemala coup...

...bombing of Baghdad as he watched his son's high-school wrestling match...