Anti the Anti-Missile

The pastoral quiet of Lynnfield, Mass., was shattered one night last summer by the nerve-jangling throb of a pile driver. The residents' darkest suspicions were soon confirmed. The Boston suburb was to be the first of 15 localities where the Government plans to build anti-ballistic-missile (ABM) sites. Now, like other communities across the country, Lynnfield is fighting the nuclear intrusion with all its limited means.

Cruel Irony. The ABM Sentinel system is a "thin shield" designed to protect U.S. cities from Red Chinese intercontinental ballistic missiles. Incoming warheads would be intercepted by Spartan missiles outside the earth's atmosphere. If any got through, back-up Sprint missiles would be launched to catch them seconds before they reached their target. The Pentagon contends that the resulting blast would be negligible, but radioactive fallout would be a danger. Critics argue that the Chinese will still not be a serious threat in the 1970s and that the $5 billion Sentinel network is the first step toward a $50 billion "heavy" system designed to protect the U.S. against a Soviet missile attack.

While small towns generally welcome the bases as a boost to their economies, urban dwellers view the ABM more as a magnet to enemy missiles than as a defense against them. On Bainbridge Island, near Seattle, protests are financed by the sale of buttons reading "SCRAM!" --an acronym for Sentinel Cities Reject Anti-Missiles.

In Chicago, an anti-ABM group is suing the Army and the Defense Department to block construction of a site at nearby Libertyville. The town was Adlai Stevenson's home, and at a recent Chicago rally, his son, Adlai III, said that the choice of the site was a "cruel irony," since much of the thinking for the nuclear test-ban treaty was done in his father's house.

The anti-anti-missileers' greatest fear is a nuclear accident in their own backyards. At a Boston hearing last week, four Army generals and colonels were asked what would happen if there were an accident. When the military men quickly ducked the issue, they were confronted by M.I.T. Visiting Professor George Rathjens, who was deputy director of the Pentagon's Advance Research Projects Agency under President Kennedy. "An accidental explosion would cause total destruction for a radius of five miles," he said, though he allowed that any such mishap was "extremely improbable."

Pentagon experts argue that the ABM bases have to be located near the major cities that in most cases they are designed to protect. Curiously, however, the projected ABM site closest to Washington is near New York City, 225 miles from the nation's capital.

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