The happy warrior
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington The President did not deliberately time the announcement about the neutron weapon to coincide with the anniversary of the dropping of the atom bomb on Nagasaki. He is not one to inflict petty knife-cuts on finer sensibilities, not that there are many finer sensibilities. No large, potent or broadly based anti-nuclear weapons organisations exist. Statements of misgiving about 'the enhanced radiation warhead' (enhanced has a salubrious connotation) filter in from Europe, but even so the general tenor of the reports we are getting here is that the responsible, sound, dependable, liberty-loving types overseas understand, sympathise and essentially agree, although it may not be convenient for them to say so just now.
Here there are no protests, no opposition the Administration has to worry about. The Pentagon people have correctly pointed out that they are essentially assembling the parts of a bomb that Jimmy Carter had ordered to be manufactured. Congress has approved, and if the Democratic Party is not supporting this property-respecting weapon, you'd never know it from the silence of its most important figures. • The American anti-nuclear movement, if `movement' can be accurately applied to such sluggish agglomerations of people, consecrates most of its energies to protesting against nuclear power plants. In theory at least, power plants have peaceful purposes. When they blow up and injure someone it means they're not working correctly. When a radiation enhanced bomb does the same, it means it was in perfect running order, but the antiNukitarians have elected to do battle against remote dangers first, and proximate ones later. It's almost as if the power they fear the most is their own if they should ever blunder into obtaining some.
The neutron bomb, as it has since the Carter days, continues to carry the idea that it is something special, a small step forward against man's inhumanity to real estate, because it is supposed to kill people without breaking windows. To listen to them talk, it sounds like the perfect instrument for frying the inhabitants of the Third World: curls the little blighters' toes and burns nappies off Hindus without in the least damaging copper mines and port facilities. How can you argue against a device that gets you strategic minerals and gets rid of their owners with the same radioactive puff of grapeshot?
Caspar Swineberger, as the Secretary of Defence is called by those who love him most, has stooped to a bit of jingoistic sticking out of the tongue in the course of explaining the reasons for the bomb — or at least the reasons now. He's been saying that the Europeans won't be terribly pleased with it at any time, so we might as well do it now because we can't have you lads and lassies from the Old World dictating defence policies to the New World. On the other hand, Ed Meese, the President's closest policy adviser and collaborator, has been trotting about saying that it was the Europeans who protested when Carter pulled back on the decision to assemble the bomb parts. Ergo, by building it we are acceeding to European preferences and, of course showing the `consistency' so lacking in the foreign policy of this administration's immediate predecessors.
All of which boils down to the fact that they wanted to build it, that they have no serious opposition and that it isn't worth the bother to think through a well worked out public apologia for it. The easiest way to smother any dissenting murmurs is to utter whatever thoughts happen to enter whoever's brains. Therefore you can hear any argument you want to hear on the subject. There's the well-worn line about `send `ern a clear signal of our intentions and our will to use these weapons.' A certain type of conservative American can make himself hagridden by the thought that the rest of the world doubts our moral capacity — or should it be immoral incapacity? — to detonate one of these toys over heads of living persons. Six Americans out of seven have got their history so conf .sed they are close to believing it was the Japanese who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. The traditional Oriental disregard for the sacredness of human life, you know.
They've also employed the argument about 'bargaining chips'. This one has grown a white beard it's been around so long. Whatever this year's new horror weapon may be, the line is, oh, we'll never build it and if we do build it we'll never deploy it. It's just a bargaining chip for the disarmament conference. But the disarmament conference is to Europe what 'the Camp David peace process' is to the yokels. The Reagan administration has promised, of course, to have a disarmament chat with the Russians as soon as we can get 'ready'. `Ready' is defined one way by Alexander Haig, who, lord save us, is now regarded as the leading `moderate' and another by Caspar Hamburger, a man who proves you don't have to foam at the mouth to be a dedicated fanatic. He's a soft spoken fellow without the least glint of wildness in his eye, but, man oh man, does he love those big cannons. The underlying reason why we can't make a disarmament deal with Russia is that you can't make a deal with somebody who you don't trust. No American administration has completely trusted the Russians but the Nixon people, for instance, thought it was possible to make deals with them. Events have proved Nixon right, but the Reagan people, at least thus far, are convinced that the Russians are too slimy. It was all the Reaganauts could do to sell Moscow some wheat. Beyond that they cannot bring themselves to trust them, so that the chances of the neutron bomb getting locked up in the closet full of scourges and miseries, never to be used, are only mild. This is an administration that wants to take things like the anti-ballistic missile out of the closet where it had been consigned by Nixon and Brezhnev.
It's not doomsday machines but flying machines which have been occupying the country's attention, however. The Prestident has been hailed for his handling of the miscreant air controllers who violated the oath they took, on accepting Federal employment, not to strike. Much of the cheering had to do with the dammed-UP irritation at all public employees who've been striking and getting away with it for the last ten to 15 years.
The air controllers have been outstandingly inept at getting their case across to the public. They have sounded like a group of people making 30,000 dollars to 50,000 dollars a year who want whopping raises and a 30-hour-week. To this, the reaction of most Americans has been, `so, who wouldn't?'
When the President sacked 11,000 or 12,000 air controllers (the numbers are never the same two days running) much cheering could be heard. When the union officials were fined the applause was a little softer, but it slacked off when the government started throwing people in jail. Eight actually went behind bars, but then were let out when a judge ruled that, since Mr Reagan had sacked them, they were no longer employees and it was, therefore, hardly equitable to keep them behind bars for failure to report to work.
In the last couple of days, the government's case has been chipped away to some extent. The Secretary of Transportation, Drew Lewis, has volunteered the opinion that the government hadn't treated the air controllers well, that it has been 'a bad boss to work for.' At the same time it turned out that this strike has been long in making, and that the government had started planning for it more than a year ago during the Carter administration. Apparently that is the reason it's been possible to keep so manY planes flying. But if Mr Lewis is correct in categorising the strikers' grievances as `legitimate,' one wonders why, instead of correcting matters, the administrators pushed the air controllers to the point that 12,000 of them risked losing their livelihoods rather than stay to take the treatment that went with their jobs.
Previous page
