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PEACES
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1986-08-14
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16KB
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398 lines
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.h: 640 words
Putting Away the Terrible Toys
Lewis Thomas
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
New York
.he
Two years ago, I felt in my bones that we
were in for World War III, and that it
would be fought with thermonuclear
weapons. I had no idea when it would
come, or how, but I was sure it would
come, sooner or later. My highest hope
was that I wouldn't live to see it.
Everyone knew the numbers: 1.1 billion
killed outright, another 1.1 billion dying
in the aftermath -- all told, about one
half the human species. Yet, despite our
endless discussions of arms limitations,
no one talks seriously about abandoning
this malignant weaponry, giving it up,
throwing it away.
Of course, everyone says they will never
be used. They are not even intended to be
used. They are here in order to prevent
the other side from using them against us.
Do not worry about evaporated cities, we
are told. At the same time they add, in a
lower voice: but we must keep some of the
big ones on hand, just in case something
goes wrong.
I have never heard of a war in which
things did not go wrong, usually as
incalculably wrong as possible. The truth
is that there are people with excellent
minds and good public manners who wish
mightily to preserve nuclear weaponry. To
them, and to others of us, there is
something terribly attractive about
missiles and bombs. There they are,
buried like polished jewels in wonderfully
engineered silos, or aircraft, or submarines.
At the touch of a finger they ascend
smoothly into space beyond the
stratosphere, curve over the earth,
descend toward a target and destroy by
blast or firestorm any city they like.
They are the most marvelous toys ever
devised by man, triumphs of the human
intellect. Our fate at the hands of these
sleek, magnificent engines seems assured.
But there is a paradoxical reason for
optimism. The weapons turn out to be not
just homicidal or genocidal. Nuclear
winter makes them suicidal as well.
The way it works is embarrassingly simple.
It is smoke that does it. The scenario
holds that a full-scale nuclear war would
ignite enough cities and forests to
produce a cloud of soot and dust over the
entire northern hemisphere. The TTAPS
report (named for authors Turco, Toon,
Ackerman, Pollack and Sagan) predicts
that a war with 5000 megatons (less than a
third of existing arsenals) would in a
matter of months drop the temperature of
earth's surface as low as -25 degrees
Centigrade, freezing all fresh water
bodies and destroying most species of
plant and animal life, including, most
likely, most human life.
The only way to avoid the catastrophe
would be to avoid setting fires,
especially in cities, but this is what
nuclear bombs are good at. The TTAPS
report suggests that an exchange under 100
megatons might be safe, but that is a
guess. If true, a sensible arms control
approach would be to negotiate a reduction
from 18,000 to 100 megatons as soon as
possible. One hundred megatons should
still be enough to make the hairs stands
on end in all the streets ofthe world, but
perhaps not enough for extinction.
If predictions are correct, or anywhere
near correct, the revelation of nuclear
winter will come to rank, I believe, as
one of the great scientific achievements
of this century -- or, considering what is
at stale, of any century.
So I am astonished that the press and
television news programs have paid so
little attention to the story. Their
silence in the face of what, for me, is
the hope of the earth, is a stubborn and
stony silence, an unwillingnesss to face a
set of probable or even possoible facts
that should make the whole discussion
ludicrous. The weapons simply cannot be
used, and that, I think and I pray, is
that.
# # #
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[THREE VOICES FOR PEACE]
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1.
Of Life, Of Lies,
And a Call to Action
Linus Pauling
Linus Pauling Institute of Science and
Medicine
Palo Alto, CA
There is little doubt among scientists
today that our civilization would be
destroyed in a nuclear war. Discussion
during the last few years about nuclear
winter has shown that in addition to
deaths by blast, fire, immediate radiation
effects and fallout, survivors of the war
would probably all die of cold,
starvation, and pestilence.
In my Nobel Peace Prize lecture in 1963 I
asked if there were not some actions that
could be taken to decrease the existing
great danger of outbreak of nuclear war.
It was a tragedy, I said, that so much of
the world's wealth is waste don
militarism. Most of the economic problems
we have suffered in recent years has been
the result ofw asting somuch money.
Glenn Seaborg and I recently participated
in a press conference, at which Seaborg,
foprmer head if the Atomic Energy
Commission, said that the Soviet Union was
eager to make a comprehensive bomb test
treaty,but that the Administration had
instructed U.S. negotiators not to agree
to such a ban, which would hamper the
development of new weapons.
In April 1986, President Regan refused to
meet with President Gorbachev to discuss
such a treaty. Paul Warnke, former
negotiator at these talks, said that
"since 1981 the Reagan adminsitration has
made it clear that they have no interest
in a comprehensive test ban. This is a
lost opportunity to curb the arms race."
For a while I was willing to excuse
President Reagan and to accept the
apologies of others in the White House who
would say "The President misspoke himself,
but it doesn't really matter." But on 16
January, 1984, I heard him state: "Over
the past ten years, the Soviets devoted
twice as much of their gross national
product to military service."
This is a clever statement, cleverly
worded to mislead almost all hearers, who
will conclude that the Soviet Union is
spending twice as much on military
expenditures as we are. Reagan should
have added that the gross national product
of the Soviet Union is only half what
ours is -- and so military expenditures
are essentially the same in the two
countries.
This is not a trivial matter -- it
involves wasting hundreds of billions by
misleading the American people.
On 18 April 1986 a letter appeared in the
New York Times by Roland J. Wall, with the
headline "Of Whoppers, Tales and Mr.
Reagan." Mr. Wall criticized an editorial
referring to "America's 'good-natured'
acceptance of President Reagan's fondness
for whoppers."
"It is bad enough we have a head of state
who consistently gets his facts wrong on
public statements and that we have a
public so hoodwinked by hype that it gives
this habit 'good-natured' acquiescence,"
Mr. Wall wrote. "It is worse by far that
the nation's foremost newspaper gives Mr.
Reagan's misstatements, misinterpretations
and outright lies the wholesome sounding,
down-home label of 'whoppers.'"
Not long ago an old friend of
mine died, at age 82 -- George
Kistiakowski. George had worked in
the explosives division of the National
Defense Research Committee during World
War II and afterwsard was head of the
explosives division at Los Alamos. Later
he was Science Advisor to President
Eisenhower. Upon retiring he devoted
himself to working for world peace.
His last article said that the
construction of the first atomic bomb began
the alliance between nuclear physics and
what was to become known as the "military
industrial complex."
"As one who has tried to change these
trends, working through official channels,
I tell you as my parting words: Forget
the channels! There is simply not enough
time before the world explodes.
Concentrate instead on organizing a mass
movement for peace such as there has not
been before. The threat of annihilation
is unprecedented."
And so, Kistiakowski told us, we must now
take unprecedented action to save the
world.
I believe the world can be saved, that it
exists to be saved. But to save it we
must have the great mass movement
recommended to us by an old friend.
# # #
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[THREE VOICES FOR PEACE]
2.
When Peace Is a Risky Word
Betty Bumpers
Peace Link
Little Rock, AR
.he:
I wasn't part of the peace movement in the
Sixties -- I was a housewife and mother of
three in Charleston, AK (pop. 1,700) then,
and I was busy with more mundane things.
I do remember teaching "duck and cover" --
having the kids crawl under their desks to
protect themselves from nuclear attack.
Only even I knew better than that, so I
told the kids it was a "tornado drill."
When my husband was elected Governor in
1970, I found myself almost accidentally
involved in a major public health effort.
I led a statewide immunization drive that
succeeded in immunizing 98 percent of the
state's children, using a coalition of
existing groups working together in their
own communities. In the process I learned
a thing or two about grass-roots
organizing.
One day my daughter Brooke and I were
driving back from washington and suddenly
Brooke asked where we would regroup in the
event of nuclear disaster. I idly mused
we would gather in Arkansas. "Wrong,
mother," Brooke told me. "There won't be
any Arkansas." She listed the military
installations and missile sites across the
state. She was right.
And I began thinking -- the more I added
it up, the crazier it all came out. I
knew that, as a newly-elected Senator's
wife -- a position I use shamelessly for
good causes -- I could reach other women
who were coming to the same conclusions I
was, that our children are in jeopardy.
I spoke with a group of friends in
Washington who regularly met around the
kitchen table to discuss issues. One
woman remembered how her young son,
watching a scene from the Mideast on the
news, burst into tears. "I'm afraid a
nuclear bomb will go off and I'll die at
school, away from you and Daddy," he
cried.
Back in Arkansas I started putting the old
grassroots network together again, this
time focusing the peace issue. Groping
for a name, we suggested Peace Links, and
one of us objected that peace was too
risky a word. "If peace is a word we
can't use, then something's really wrong
in this country," someone else said.
Peace Links came into being not as just
another organization, but as a network to
put peace issues on the agendas of other
organizations -- everything from garden
clubs and PTAs to League of Women Voters
and American Association of University
Women chapters. Other Washington wives,
Republican and Democrat, did likewise, and
by the first Peace Day in October 1982,
six months later, over 20,000 people in 10
states participated.
One incident marred that day -- Sen.
Joshuah Denton (R-Ala.), charged me on the
Senate floor with being a Communist dupe.
But other Senators made clear that the
time was past when redbaiting would be
tolerated.
Peace Links is not just a women's
organization -- men are welcome, and many
have joined in support. But because
women's voices gave gone unheard in the
past, it is especially important that
they be heard now. Women think
differently from men -- not better
necessarily, but differently. We think
relationally, about our children and
families, and what will become of us.
Our leaders, by their nature, attempt to
reassure, but this country's troubles
almost always stem from a blind acceptance
of false or misleading assurances. Even
Harry Truman admonished people to ask the
hard questions and demand honest answers
from their leaders.
That's all Peace Links is, people working
together to make their concerns heard. It
is democracy at its best. I say, let's
keep asking the hard questions.
# # #