How Sane the SANE?

Sprouting out of the New York Times one morning last week was a full-page advertisement that showed a mushroom cloud, huge, horrific, indistinct. WE MUST POSTPONE OUR COMING TESTS, proclaimed the ad's sponsor, an organization called the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy--ACT NOW FOR MAN'S SAKE. The way to do that, said the committee, was to 1) write President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon; 2) write Congressmen, editors and commentators; 3) "organize a group" or work with existing groups "in your community." The point to make: the U.S.'s summer series of nuclear weapons tests at Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific ought to be suspended right now. "Scientists warn," the committee warned, "that thousands of babies will be malformed because of tests to date . . . We must stop the contamination of the air, the milk children drink, the food we eat . . ."

Even more imposing than the committee's mushroom cloud was the committee's list of well-heeled and influential supporters. Among the signers of the Sane Nuclear Policy declaration: Committee Co-Chairman Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review; former Democratic National Committeewoman India Edwards;

Protestant Theologian Paul Tillich; Author Lewis Mumford; the Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, pastor emeritus of Manhattan's Riverside Church; Pollster Elmo Roper; National Farmers Union Boss James G. Patton (who runs N.C.S.N.P. material free in N.F.U. publications); Sociologist David (The Lonely Crowd) Riesman; Librettist Oscar (South Pacific) Hammerstein II; and the committee's scientific anchor man, Caltech's busy chemist and busy politician, Dr. Linus Carl Pauling, longtime supporter of Communist-line fronts,* whose ideology was never noticeably shaken by the suppression inside the Soviet Union for years of his own Nobel Prizewinning discovery about the resonance theory of chemical bonds. Among the signers of an earlier nuclear policy committee declaration and still standing foursquare behind the mushroom-cloud ad: Alabama's Rev. Martin Luther King.

Surrender Is Better. As is customary before U.S. nuclear tests but rarely before U.S.S.R. nuclear tests, various mutations of the anti-nuclear movement were burgeoning worldwide. In West Germany the organization was the Fight Against Atomic Death. In Japan it was the Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs. In London the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament mustered up a 50-mile protest march to Britain's atomic-weapons research center at Aldermaston. The marchers' inspiration, dinned in mass meetings and magazine articles, was the view of Philosopher Bertrand Russell and Writer Philip Toynbee, son of the famed historian, that nuclear disarmament will probably bring Communist domination, but that domination is preferable to the prospect of nuclear war. The London Daily Telegraph, speaking for millions of Britons, called the demonstrators "a motley."

Meanwhile, across the Pacific, four pacifists headed westward toward the Eniwetok Proving Grounds aboard the ketch Golden Rule, sponsored by the pacifist-led Non-Violent Action Against Nuclear Weapons Committee. The Atomic Energy Commission barred unauthorized U.S. citizens, meaning the pacifists, from the proving grounds. But the pacifists warned everybody via ship-to-shore radio that they meant to sail on after a stopover at Honolulu for supplies, "come what may." And the U.S. Navy quietly made ready to tow them out of the danger zone if necessary.

Tests Are Best. At one point in the uproar, the New York Daily News paid its respects to the Sane Nuclear Policy Committee signatories: "Far be it from us to charge the above-named persons with consciously trying to do a job for the Kremlin. We merely think that as regards nuclear weapons tests they are as nutty as so many fruitcakes."

Even famed Physical Chemist Eugene Rabinowitch, editor of the authoritative Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and longtime believer in controlled disarmament, now thought that in the wake of Russian missile successes "one finds no convincing reason to oppose tests needed to develop defensive atomic weapons with reduced fallout." Harry Truman added characteristically: "Propaganda and unilateral declarations of intent will allay no one's fears . . ."

But the folks who listened to the horror stories without listening to evidence on fallout, to say nothing of survival (TIME, April 7), the religious-minded who doubted that the ends of liberty and peace justified the means of nuclear deterrence, were all stepping up the pressure as the crucial Eniwetok tests drew nigh. It seemed to matter not at all that this was precisely what the sworn enemies of religion, liberty and peace itself were telling them to do.

* "Professor Pauling," reported the House Committee on,Un-American Activities in 1951, "has not deviated a hairsbreadth from this pattern of loyalty to the Communist cause since 1946."

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