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University Daily Kansan, October 25, 1982
Opinion
Freeze poll benefits all
A Douglas County district court judge ruled Thursday that a Lawrence man showed insufficient injury in efforts to prevent a nuclear freeze opinion poll Nov. 2.
The ruling did not settle questions of whether the city could authorize such a vote or whether the poll would impede Lawrence citizens in casting regular state and national ballots.
The ruling did, however, remove the most immediate obstacles faced by the poll's sponsor, the Lawrence Coalition for Peace and Justice. Given this, Lawrence residents on both sides of the issue should take advantage of the opportunity to have their views heard.
Obviously, the Lawrence Coalition has strong opinions about the nuclear freeze issue. But its members have asked specifically for people who disagree with them to help man the polling booths on the day of the election. Having this help can ensure
that the poll is administered fairly and that no "electioneering," or encouragement to vote one way or the other, takes place near the booths.
Those who disagree with the proponents of a nuclear freeze need not stifle the poll to protect their interests. The results of the poll will be sent to Washington, D.C., regardless of whether voters support or oppose a freeze. A vote for a freeze could add strength to the growing number of freeze proposals coming from around the nation. A vote against a freeze could be a powerful statement to counter those proposals.
The chance to vote on an issue as crucial — no matter which side one stands on — as the nuclear freeze movement is an unusual opportunity. But one thing is certain: If the poll is to mean anything, people of all opinions must participate in the voting.
New East German pacifists risk jail in support of freeze
By ADAM HOCHSCHILD
New York Times Syndicate
SAN FRANCISCO—Almost unnoticed, the most significant development since Solidarity is unfolding in Eastern Europe. It is a brave, resilient, entirely homegrown peace movement that has mushroomed suddenly in one of the most rigid, loyal Soviet satellites; East Ger-
I do not mean the long common, officially sponsored race rallies in the Eastern bloc in which party faithfulness march in support of the latest government line. Rather, what is happening in East Germany, I found on a recent trip, is something entirely different:
Several hundred young men are estimated to be receiving jail terms for refusing to serve in the armed forces.
— Church groups, in the forefront of the amorphous peace movement, have been openly calling for unilateral disarmament moves by the Warsaw Pact. The Synod of the Protestant Churches in Saxony, for example, has passed a resolution calling for reductions in the number of Soviet SS-20 missiles and tanks in Eastern Europe.
— Since January, thousands of East Germans have signed an outspoken petition, the Berlin Appeal, which calls for the removal of all nuclear weapons and all American and Soviet "occupation" troops from both Germanies. The petition also suggests bans on military parades, civil-defense drills, paramilitary training in schools and children's war toys.
— 5,000 young people gathered in a Dresden cathedral in February for an anti-war meeting and candlelight march. Many wore homemade headbands with the words "Frieden schaffen ohne Waffen" — "Make peace without weapons." Police of 60 of the demonstrators in forensic mode on the new day. A similar masting of 3,000 took place at an East Berlin church in late June.
- Throughout East Germany, hundreds of people are wearing the forbidden emblem of this movement, a patch showing a man beating a sword into a plochawe.
In my week of discussions with the new pacifists, no one wanted to talk about capitalism or communism. For them, as for their Western counterparts, the main issue is how to cope with two superpowers that are making ever-greater preparations for nuclear war. And just as President Reagan has been upset by nuclear-free advocates here at home, the Pulibarou in East Germany is in a total quandary about what to do about the peace movement there.
To let the pacifics continue unhindered is to open a gap through which could pour a dammed-up food of popular dislike of East Asia into the ocean, and cause sums it spends on maintaining a large army.
But to crack down on the activists, who obviously are willing to go to jail for their beliefs, risks creating martyrs that an unpopular government can ill afford. The result has been ineffectual stern warnings, slap-tashing, one-on-one arrests and intermittent barrages of propaganda.
In a closed society, it is impossible to calculate what percentage of the population supports the movement. Certainly only a minority does so openly, but it is a minority clearly far larger than the handfuls of independent peace activists in Hungary and the Soviet Union. The East German Protestant churches, for example, have been a major source of patches before the government ban, a sizable but unknown number have been distributed since then.
And in a country where one needs permission even to print a leaflet, get 5,000 people to come to a risky, unauthorized demonstration in Dresden is the equivalent of getting many times that number to New York City or Bonn. West Germany, well aware of this, takes the new book out and hands it to all the subject the subject of hundreds of news reports, and two books on the subject appeared this summer.
What are the implications of all this for American policy?
First, it should lead the Reagan administration to re-examine its idea of the communist world. Eastern bloc countries may be totalitarian; Western countries must monolithize immune to all internal dissection.
Usually any country becomes more monolithic in the face of an adversary's militance; the remarkable thing about East Germany's pacificist strategy is that it has never even while America is beginning a vast military buildup. If that buildup continues, it can only strengthen the hand of hard-liners in East Berlin and Moscow. Prospects for an independent state would be in the East then become much more difficult.
If, on the other hand, the United States made genuine, dramatic gestures toward disarmament, Eastern bloc countries would be under immense, possibly irresistible, popular pressure to do likewise. President Reagan's strategies would do well to ponder this as they conduct missile and troop-reduction talks with the Soviet Union.
Adam Hochschild is a contributing editor to Mother Jones magazine. This column is based on the book *Mother Jones*.
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Alternate Designs for the Vietnam Memorial:
THE TOM HAYDEN-JANE FONDA PROPOSAL
THE VIETERANS ADMINISTRATION PROPOSAL THE GENERAL LEMAY PROPOSAL
Finally, Vietnam vets honored
Americans are constantly reminded of past war exploits of the United States through various forms.
A few daily reminders of past wars can be found on the University of Kansas campus.
For example, the Campanile honors students who died in World War II, and the Museum of Natural History displays remnants from the General Custer era and the Civil War Plaques. The Museum also houses artifacts that can be found in the Kansas Union, and other smaller, personal memorials dot the campus.
But to the families of the 57,142 soldiers killed and to the millions who served in Vietnam, the war was a very real experience. They wanted to be remembered by the nation as past veterans had
Most cities also have memorials honoring past veterans. Washington, D.C., is filled with the names of the fallen.
But until recently, the casualties of Vietnam were left unhonored.
Vietnam veterans were different from any other returning veterans. When they finally arrived home, there were no ticket tape parades or heroic speeches. Soldiers who came home in body bags were quickly processed through the military system. Those who could walk from airplanes, or be rescued in mainland hospitals, were branded as child-murderers and criminals.
It was 1972, and the American public was tired of casualty counts, war expenses and a lack of progress. The public wanted to forget the war ever existed.
Finally in 1979, a project was begun to construct a monument honoring those who
served and died in Vietnam. It was not started by the federal government or the Veterans of Foreign Wars, but by a small group of Vietnam veterans.
They eventually raised $7 million and persuaded Congress to donate 2 acres between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, which caused a contest to find a design for the monument.
The design was chosen by a panel of nonartisan artists and architects, and all shadows were created by hand.
TOM HUTTON
Instead, the wounds that had healed from the war were soon snit wide open.
The winning design, a black granite creation with the names of the dead inscribed, became the icon for the new show.
It had been designed in accordance with the contest's strict rules and was the clear choice of the professional judges. But there was one problem in the minds of some of the financial contributors — the memorial wasn't designed by a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male. The designer was instead a Yale undergraduate who was female and Chinese.
It didn't matter that she was born in the United States, or that her parents had fed China to avoid the oppression of communism. In some veterans' eyes, she was a gook.
Unfortunately, the people who chose to look past the design and focus on the designer were rich and powerful men. They had contributed the bulk of the money for the monument, and they demanded that its design be altered to something "more traditional."
What these men had in mind was to include a statue of three soldiers standing around an American flag. The addition was supposed to go in the middle of the original design.
Pressure was exerted on the government to withdraw the permit for construction of the monument, and another battle, seven years after the end of Vietnam, was waged.
James Watt, secretary of the interior, sided with the rich and powerful foes of the monument and threatened to delay the dedication of the monument until the changes were made.
Watt and the monument's joes have been subdued for now, and dedication ceremonies are
The dedication should be viewed as a victory for the more than 3 million people who served in southeast Asia. They have begun to overcome the negative attitudes they were forced to endure and should not turn this victory into intolerance and quarrels about the beauty of the monument.
The monument, at least from the pictures I've seen, is beautiful because of its simplicity and beauty.
That line seems to have been a bit overused since its introduction during the peak of the funniest episodes.
There is no inscription about Vietnam being a "war to end all wars" on the new monument.
Official statements on KU reactor conflict
To the Editor:
The $38,000 figure 1 quoted as the annual operating cost of the KU research reactor was "exaggerated"? What an interesting statement for Harold Rosson to make!
Three months ago, Rosson told a Lawrence Journal-World reporter that reactor operation and maintenance costs were about $35,000 a year.
In February 1980, Rosson's department and the school of engineering submitted a statement of financial considerations to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in support of the pending license renewal application for the KU research reactor. The reactor's annual operating expenses for fiscal year July 1979 to June 1980 were estimated at $2,900.
Now Resson claims that annual expenses are $14,000. Have costs dropped so dramatically? No Resson has merely decided not to include the fuel and power nuclear reactor operator in the total operating costs.
More important are KU reactor officials' statements concerning decommissioning procedures. In recent articles, Rosson has mentioned the cost as the cheaper and preferred method.
However, KU reactor officials did not list entombment as a decommissioning option in their statement of financial considerations. And apparently the NRC knows nothing about the United Nuclear Industry site survey that listed entombment as an option. KU reactor officials are just trying to downplay decommissioning costs.
Reactor officials also failed to mention that entombed reactors in effect become new sources of nitrogen.
Rosson spoke of "slightly radioactive" material that would have to be disposed of if the reactor were dismantled. The statement of financial considerations states, "Five years cooling time after the removal of the fuel is desirable before dismantling the core structure and portions of the wall." Activated material is more than "slightly contaminated."
In fact, according to the school of engineering's statement, the expensive part of the decommissioning process will occur five years after the fuel is removed. Costs for the removal and disposal of the fuel were estimated at $33,000. All other costs will be incurred five years later.
Costs, therefore, should be estimated in 1988 dollars, not 1979 dollars. This assumes that fuel costs are based on the same basis.
Nowhere in the article did KU reactor or administrative officials cite a single, specific action that they were willing to take. A vague quote from Robert Bearse was the only reference made to the most crucial aspect of the entire issue.
Also, the group "calling itself" the Students' Anti-Nuclear Alliance: Committee for Radiation Safety, has been a registered student group for two years.
Charles Barnes
SANA: Committee for Radiation Safety
Truisms foster buildup
To the Editor:
Pafu Longbach a self-contrardict letter (Oct. 15), in which he claims to believe it is right to seek peace in the world and yet is simultaneously unsympathetic to the peace movement, and in which he maligns fear as a weapon, aroused in me a strong sentiment: fear.
I am very much afraid of people who are either not smart enough or not well-informed enough to be frightened by the new buildup of American nuclear arms. Fear is certainly a strong motivation for the current peace movement, but Longbach and others like him should become aware that it is a fear based on knowledge. One reason why we should be afraid has simply been to promote information. There are too many untrue truisms going around that only contribute to the problem. A few examples:
Trumis: Building /more weapons makes us more secure.
Fact: Our present arsenal of weapons contains enough weapons in any one of three basing
groups — land, air and sea — to destroy every living person on earth several tens of times over. None of these can prevent an attack. They are only to be used for revenge if we are attacked. They thus provide security only as a psychological deterrent. It is important to understand that if the Soviets thought one of our nuclear systems deliberately going to be used, the psychological deterrent would not be an incentive, because if they strike first, their chances of survival may be slightly increased.
Truism: There's nothing I can do about it, so I'd rather not even think about it.
Fact: Not doing anything about it leaves the field for people who d'also rather not think about it, but who do have some immediate access to the information or publicity, from continuing the arms build.
Truism: The Russians would be the first to push the button.
Fact: The most likely cause of nuclear war today would be accident. Both the United States and the Soviet Union rely on computer systems for early warning of attack. A situation in which the computer warns that the Soviets are about to attack is called a first alert. One source says, "The bombing year before last, most of which were due to computer error. Fortunately, there is some time between warning and response to verify the errors, and minutes to spare for negotiation. However, the arsenal of nuclear weapons approved by Congress last year includes several types of weapons that can respond. These weapons can do nothing but increase the likelihood of nuclear holocaust.
Truism: Our government would never ask us to support the building of weapons that are unnecessary, much less as dangerous to ourselves as they are to our enemies.
Fact: They already have. All because too many people, even in the highest, most critical positions, are willing to believe trusms.
Aren't you scared yet?
Mary Anderson Lawrence graduate student