Aucbvax.1801
fa.arms-d
utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!MARCUS@USC-ISIF
Wed Jun 17 11:51:08 1981
Council for a livable world
>From Council for a Livable World, bulletin, June 1981:
If you visit the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library at Columbia Point in
South Boston, you will see a film about the partial nuclear test ban,
the most successful treaty ever negotiated between the U.S. and the Soviet
Union. This treaty, signed and ratified in 1963, banned nuclear weapons
tests in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water. Kennedy was
president at the time. Remarkably, this agreement came into force less
than one year after the superpowers confronted each other in the Cuban
missile crisis which almost ended in nuclear war. The treaty is still in
full force.
The film shows a scene in early 1963. John Kennedy looks silently
out of the window of the oval office. It is raining. A voice is heard,
the voice of Jerome Wiesner recalling the event. Wiesner was science
adviser to the president. He is now the retired president of MIT.
Wiesner tells his story: "I remember one day when he asked me what happens
to the radioactive fallout, and I told him it was washed out of the clouds
by the rain. And he said, looking out of the window, 'You mean it's in
the rain out there?' And I said, 'Yes'. He looked out the window, very
sad, and didn't say a word for several minutes."
What was John Kennedy thinking? Of his children Caroline and John?
Of his own lost childhood? Of his mortality?
President Kennedy could have found experts on both sides of this
question. The dangers to human health of fallout were minimized if not
denied by many in those days. Were we fortunate that Wiesner was there?
Or did the President make the decision out of his own visceral reaction?
The late Justice William O. Douglas wrote in his autobiography that
at the very start of his career on the Supreme Court, Charles Evans Hughes,
then Chief Justice, told him "You must remember one thing. At the
constitutional level where we work, ninety percent of any decision is
emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our
predilections."
You don't have to be an expert to have your say on public policy.
You can go with whatever level of information you have. For too long, the
American people, the Russian people, and indeed all the peoples of this
earth have been intimidated by the military technocrats on nuclear weapons
policies. These fateful questions have been monopolized by the strategists
and designers of military hardware. They have created their own language
and developed their lunatic scenarios of such complexity that the mere
citizen feels excluded from the debate.
We cannot allow this situation to continue. The basic issues of
catastrophe and survival are well withing the capacities of the average
citizen and are generally understood. The technical details of the awful
weapons are not the keys to basic policy.
Like President Kennedy, we must restore our gut reactions to a place
of honor. We must not suppress our instinctive revulsion and moral outrage
to these games of death. We must prevent the technocrats from playing with
our survival.
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gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen <
[email protected]>
of
http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/
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article may be copied and distributed freely, provided:
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The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996
Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.
