SANE--and Others

Whenever their babies come down with the colic or break out in bumps, thousands of U.S. mothers turn to the unworried advice of Dr. Benjamin Spock. Yet Dr. Spock has his own anxieties, and last week they were written all over his kindly face as he appeared, with a little girl, in a full-page advertisement in the New York Times. Said the ad written by Spock: "I am worried. Not so much about the effect of past tests but at the prospect of endless future ones. As the tests multiply, so will the damage to children--here and around the world." The ad, which cost $4,800 in the Times and is being reprinted in some 60 other papers, was sponsored by the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE). Claiming 25,000 members in 125 chapters, SANE is the biggest of a number of organizations that have been trying to stir public opinion against this week's resumption of U.S. nuclear tests in the atmosphere. Among these groups. SANE is also one of the most respectable.

"We Try." It has not always been that way. After its 1957 founding (cochairmen: Saturday Review Editor Norman Cousins and Quaker Leader Clarence Pick-ett), SANE became a haven for crackpots and leftists of all stripes. In its policies, it always seemed to condemn the U.S. while rarely criticizing the Soviet Union. Publicly denounced by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, SANE's board was badly split over how to deal with the organization's fellow travelers.

Finally, 37 far-leftists were forced out of SANE, the New York chapter was dissolved and reorganized with a screened membership, and the organization adopted a policy of criticizing the U.S.S.R. as well as the U.S. When Russia's Khrushchev-insisted on a troika to supervise a test ban last year, SANE took ads to say: "We believe that such a three-man council, operating with a veto, cancels out the very purpose of control." When Khrushchev later boasted about firing a 50-megaton bomb, SANE accused him of "an act of nuclear madness" that "contemptuously defied all decency and morality." SANE coordinated the picketing of the Soviet Union's U.N. headquarters in Manhattan by some 2,000 persons.

SANE has long argued for a "workable" step-by-step disarmament and a "realistic" test-ban agreement--both controlled by an on-site inspection system. It has applauded President Kennedy's disarmament proposals (Cousins called last week's U.S. plan "imaginative, reasonable and responsible"). Says Executive Director Homer Jack: "We are not pacifist, and we are not for unilateral disarmament. We're not fellow travelers and we're not softheaded.

We know the problems the President faces. We try to be constructive."

"New Approach." This relatively mild approach has caused SANE to lose ground on U.S. college campuses. Says Jay Greenberg, editor of the University of Chicago's Maroon: "SANE is on a decline. The peace groups that have emerged are more activist. Students seem to desire a new approach." The largest campus group is the Student Peace Union, which has about 70 chapters, mostly in the East and Midwest, is big on peace marches and demonstrations against civil defense. Norman Uphoff, head of S.P.U.'s University of Minnesota's chapter, criticizes SANE for its official stand against "civil disobedience" in peace demonstrations, adds: "SANE will not challenge the Government, and therefore can accomplish very little." Some colleges have local peace groups: Harvard's Tocsin, which claims 1,000 supporters, sent 500 students to a peace march in Washington in February; M.I.T.'s Rational Approach to Disarmament and Peace nearly elected a student-body president and is seeking a "peace research center" on the campus; the University of Massachusetts' Synthesis, which has branches at Amherst, Mount Holyoke and Smith, uses pickets to protest compulsory R.O.T.C.

For all its efforts to improve itself, SANE's remedies still seem less than realistic. SANE would throw the whole Berlin problem into the hands of the United Nations, gradually demilitarizing all of Germany and policing it with U.N.

troops. SANE opposes all fallout shelter programs, contends that President Kennedy plans to resume tests not for military but for "political-psychological reasons." It urges Kennedy to hold off on testing until he is absolutely certain that the Soviet Union will not sign a test-ban treaty--as if the U.S.S.R.'s refusal were not already perfectly plain. SANE's general outlook is reflected by kindly Dr. Benjamin Spock.

Wrote he in his ad: "There are others who think that superior armaments will solve the problem. They scorn those who believe in the strength of a just cause."

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