NEWS FEATURE: Will antinuke activists dust off old campaign?

c. 1998 Religion News Service WASHINGTON _ Across the street from the White House, where the Clinton administration is keeping nervous watch on the nuclear muscle-flexing in South Asia, Concepcion Picciotto has spent more than 6,200 days campaigning to abolish nuclear weapons. Clad in jeans and checkered shirt, the diminutive Picciotto wages her 17-year, round-the-clock […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ Across the street from the White House, where the Clinton administration is keeping nervous watch on the nuclear muscle-flexing in South Asia, Concepcion Picciotto has spent more than 6,200 days campaigning to abolish nuclear weapons.

Clad in jeans and checkered shirt, the diminutive Picciotto wages her 17-year, round-the-clock disarmament battle with petitions, placards, leaflets and newspaper articles she hands to anyone willing to take them.


A decade ago, Picciotto was part of a large movement that brought together millions of preachers, scientists, politicians and just plain folk in a powerful call for peace.

Today, however, she’s an oddity among the bums, skateboarders and tourists who wander through LaFayette Park, or Peace Park, as activists have dubbed it. To many, Picciotto and the handful of other antinuclear activists are quaint throwbacks to earlier, scarier times that have slid to the edges of the nation’s memory.

But last month’s nuclear tests in India and Pakistan may have shattered the sense of security that has lulled many Americans since the Cold War’s end, according to some expert.

As the threat of nuclear proliferation is again debated on the airwaves and in homes, activists are contemplating a modest resurgence in their movement to ban the bomb. “India’s nuclear tests and Pakistan’s response are going to be a wake-up call for a lot of people,”said Bruce Hall, field organizer for the Washington-based Peace Action, a longstanding antinuclear organizations.”We’re faced with a nuclear arms race on the Asian subcontinent that is in some ways more dangerous than the one we all lived through.” The May tests again sent antinuclear Americans marching _ in front of the Indian and Pakistani embassies _ while religious groups issued statements voicing concern at the possibility of a nuclear arms race on the Indian subcontinent. Others called on senators to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, signed by President Clinton in 1996, that bans all nuclear explosions.

In a dramatic show of the heightened concern over the tests, earlier this month the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its famed Doomsday Clock five minutes closer to midnight to mark the new dangers. And 73 U.S. Catholic bishops released a statement saying the policy of nuclear deterrence could no longer be morally justified.

But these events still lack the force of the 1980s protests that sent millions of Europeans and Americans into the streets calling for at least a nuclear freeze and, in some cases, the demand that the world rid itself of all nuclear weapons.

Some analysts say most Americans feel too removed from South Asia’s nuclear parrying to begin marching again and question whether it can recreate a viable, politically powerful movement.


In fact, critics say, the antinuclear movement has already wrought enough damage. They consider the embryonic campaign to eliminate _ rather than reduce _ the world’s nuclear arsenal as dangerously naive. “It’s not only reckless but criminally irresponsible,”said Frank Gaffney, director of the conservative Center for Security Policy in Washington and a former assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration.”It leaves the United States vulnerable to attack, in pursuit of an unachievable goal of disarming the world.” It was a singular event _ the creation of the atomic bomb and its explosion in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 _ that birthed the antinuclear movement. A single sentiment, fear, kept it rolling. “People understood right from the start that this wasn’t simply another weapon,”said Peter Kuznick, director of American University’s Nuclear Studies Institute.”By embarking on this, we were embarking on a process that could ultimately lead to wiping out our civilization.” Housewives called for the end of atmospheric testing, convinced radioactive fallout was contaminating American milk. Scientists warned of a”nuclear winter,”that would wreak havoc on the environment and food production. Doctors described nuclear war as unsurvivable, adding there would be few doctors to treat those who might survive.

And clergy began telling their congregations nuclear proliferation was morally wrong.”To threaten the biosphere was a direct theological challenge, not only to Christians, but to all faiths,”United Methodist Bishop C. Dale White, a prominent antinuclear activist, said in recalling the era.

In 1983, the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops issued a statement condoning nuclear deterrence only if it led toward disarmament. Methodist bishops went further, calling for complete disarmament. And in 1985, the Boston-based International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War won the Nobel Peace Prize.

By that time, Concepcion Picciotto had logged in her fourth year in front of the White House.

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

On a recent June day, Picciotto hands out articles written about her to a group of German tourists.

Does she live in the park permanently? Picciotto nods.”It’s my life,”she said.

It’s a question-and-answer scenario that’s replayed every time Washington tour guide Dagmar Sullivan takes out a group.”She’s been here longer than some of the monuments in this city,”Sullivan says.”I just find what she’s doing commendable.” (END OPTIONAL TRIM)


But few Americans have followed Picciotto’s footsteps. By the late 1980s, Eastern Europe was crumbling, the Cold War was waning and the antinuclear movement was fading from the public spotlight. “People thought that with the end of the Cold War, the danger was over,”said Joseph Gerson, New England program coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee.”The other thing was that people were tired _ it had been hard work.” Activists drifted to other causes: Peace movements in Israel and Central America; the campaign against land mines or the Free South Africa movement. But core members remained active, pushing for disarmament and nonproliferation into the 1990s, sometimes winning key allies. In 1996, Gen. George Lee Butler, former chief commander of America’s nuclear forces, joined 60 retired senior military officers to support a phased elimination of nuclear weapons. “I think the disarmament movement has been beavering away out of the limelight, and has made considerable progress _ from their point of view,”said Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, citing the treaty banning land mines and other agreements.

However, he added,”the fallout is the disarmament community has made the world a more dangerous place.” But both sides agree on one thing: Americans have forgotten they still live in a terribly dangerous world, and, perhaps, the nuclear tests in India and Pakistan will help them remember.

DEA END BRYANT

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