* f a "■ i . t l I I Beaverton 4000 S.W. 117th Corbett Fremont 5909 S.W. Corbett 3449 N.E. Fremont Northwest! Open 7 days 9-9 Open 7 days 9-8 Open 7 days 9-8 2 Clinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1987 DINING OUT Cascades 333 N.W. 23rd Avenue, Portland, (503) 274-2305 On Portland’s power alley of dining, hard by cholesterol palaces where pastrami and cinnamon rolls still hold sway, there’s a monument to trimmer, more up-to-date dining. Cascades, originally conceived as an emporium of “spa cuisine!’ is one of the healthiest and tastiest nqw places in the city. The fare was inspired by that o f luxurious fat farms, where pampered guests dine on nutritious and gorgeously prepared food. Modified for tastes not exactly Spartan, it’s a far cry from yogurts, grains and other deprivations o f health-food enthusiasts. Cascades does much o f its cooking in non-stick pans requiring little oil. Salting is minimal; grilling, steaming and roasting are favored. Presentations are striking— splashes o f color that jostle each other for attention: ruby, jade, gold in an enameled setting. Under the category of “small plates” are such California refugee^ as fresh mozzarella with fire-roasted peppers, and briny clams steamed with peas and fresh mint. All dinREPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF PACIFIC ners come with soup or salad; the former is inevitably chockablock with integrity. Here’s a restaurant whose several vegetarian dishes have little relation to our conventional images of vegetarianism. Squash enchiladas with an avocado-and-red-onion salsa are heady with fresh coriander; the city doesn’t possess a better Mexican dish. A more ordinary entree is a succulent roast chicken with 40 garlic cloves. A lasagne stuffed with duck and wild mushrooms is a rich new treatment o f an old favorite The scallops in orange sauce and duck breast in blueberry sauce speak for themselves. A small, carefully selected dessert tray keeps the quality high throughout A poached pear in burgundy is most fitting, though for those who feel to restrained by such modesty, a chocolate hazelnut torte in an intense raspberry rsauce is just the thing. Decor is simple, even self-effacingly plain, a kind of Denny’s with a touch of class. The hedonism-cum-health is a signal of what’s ahead when fresh, local ingredients fuel the right-minded intentions of a virtuous kitchen. —Roger Porter in Portland NORTHWEST MAGAZINE - JUNE 1987 Cascades NORTHWEST REGIONAL CUISINE 333 N.W. 23rd Ave., Portland, OR 97210, 274-2305 BREAKFAST • LUNCH • DINNER—DAILY M U S IC the whole world round Bo Diddley Boys of the Lough Bluegrass Cowpersons OboAddy Croup du Jour Kim Robertson women artists African pop Japan traditional John Prine Steve Einhorn Jean Redpath Holly Near Kate wolf Bob Dylan Tom Waits Bonnie Raitt woody Guthrie Los Lobos Bruce Cockburn (503)232-8845 3522 SE Hawthorne Muddy waters The Chieftans Howlin'wolf iaj Mahal Penguin Cafe Sukay G.s. Sachdev Salsa Gamelan Reggae Native American Eastern Europe Celtic and lots more!!! Guitars Conga drums Percussion Recorders Mandolins Fiddles Sitars Bodhrans Marimbas Hammer dulcimers Mon.-Sat. 10:30-6 VISA/Mastercard ARTICHOKE MUSICSI
SUMMER 1987 / t i l F L f e VZo-Editors David Milholland Lenny Dee Associate Editors Jim Blashfield, Paul Loeb Washington State Coordinator Judy Hines Bevis Art Director David Milholland Designer Tim Braun Guest Designers Candace Bieneman, Laura DI Trapani Contributing Artists John Callahan, David C. Kane, Stephen Leflar, Carel Moiseiwitsch, Lee Mueller, Paul Ollswang, Pander Bros., Jana Rekosh, Robert Williamson, Matt Wuerker Contributing Photographer Laura Di Trapani Account Representatives—Oregon Dru Duniway, Rhonda Kennedy Account Representative— Washington Sandra Ferguson Ad Production Stacey Fletcher, Qualitype Robert Williamson Typesetting Harrison Typesetting, Inc., Lee Emmett, Marmilmar, Qualitype Camerawork Laura Di Trapani, Craftsman Lithoplate, Inc., Pacific Color Plate Cover Photographer Michael Seidl Cover Separations Portland Prep Center, Inc. Printing Tualatin-Yamhill Press Office Assistant Michele Hunt Intern Lianne Hirabayashi Thanks Judy & Stew Albert, Dave Ball, Randy Clark, Helen DeMichiel, Jeannine Edelblut, Maria Kahn, Craig Karp, Paul Krassner, Deborah Levin, Peggy Lindquist, David Madson, Julie Mancini, Theresa Marquez, Melissa Marsland, Doug Milholland, Kevin Mulligan, Julie Phillips, Sherry Prowda, Jeremy Rice, Julie Ristau, Missy Stewart, Jim Styskel, Sandy Wallsmith, John Wanberg, The Clinton 500 Volunteer needed for Portland CSQ office. Please call 222-6039. ON THE COVER ;f a M t Artist Jana Rekosh, a frequent CSQcon- tributor, lives in Seattle. Her recent ’5^: work, “ The Traveler’s Tango,” has just f-Jr- been up at Ravenwood’s. Portrait by Lee f j K Mueller of Seattle. ---------■ • The Clinton St. Quarterly is published in • j Oregon, Washington and National e d i- ! t tions by CSQ—A Project of Out of the ! Ashes Press. Oregon address: P.O. Box i 3588, P o r tland , OR 97208 —(503) I 222-6039. Washington address: 1520 I Western Avenue, Seattle, WA 98101— | (206) 682-2404. Unless o the rw ise j noted, all contents copyright ®1987 I Clinton St. Quarterly. Farewell to Arms Control-^ Mark Sommer & Gordon Feller W Taking the initiative back from the experts—a process to defuse tension and make peace the priority. Far from Vietnam— । Sharon Lynn Pugh | ‘ J A look at some of our newest set- t ie r s—a r t as a re f le c t io n o f cu ltu res coping w ith extreme change. Fidelio Sleeps— Paul Ollswang For conspiracy theorists fevet^ where—scratch only when you know the players. ^ 7 o o d Germans—a phrase w ith powerful resonance this summer of Klaus Barbie, Robert McFarlane and Ollie North. “ I was just following orders” is the timeless rationalization for involvements ranging from the criminal to the abhorrent. From our distance, i t ’s easy to imagine ourselves righteously standing up to denounce them, or refraining from pv tic ipa ting at the very least. Yet only 4L years after Auschwitz and less then 20 since My Lai, individuals are still found to perpetrate behavior no culture could consider civilized. And more times than not, they look just like the boy next door. The Good Germans responded to a disorderly world of rampant inflation, shortages and incipient chaos with a government that will horrify humanity as long as history exists. Ordinary c itizens looked the other way while millions of their people were exterm inated. Here, the far right has plans for branding AIDS victims, selling off our national patrimony, e lim ina ting reproductive rights and rewriting history and science from a “ moral” point of view. We should not forget that these positions, once isolated on the fringe, have entered the political mainstream in a very brief time. Our way of life has long been dependent on a worldwide apparatus of re0 . . GisternachtfLast Night)— Pander Bros. / I J Our travel feature to a rarely seen nightspot—don’t visit unless you can take the heat. Forgotten—Ross Evan * 1 West / / The War to End Wars remem- bered, lest we forget. Bearing Witness— Doug Marx Poet Carolyn Forche reveals ner sources—of vision, political ins igh t and a non-e thnocen tric world-view. pression and imminent extinction. The Contra forces in Central America and the bomb are business as usual here. It ’s our tax money and elected officials who keep them rolling, not just a few bad presidents and their avid henchmen. Yes we’ve had our bananas, and kept much of Latin America under our thumb in the process. And the sweat shops of the Far East we underwrite politically, from Seoul to Singapore, keep us clothed and running. The sun is now rising over Japan, flush with capital from our years of foo t loo se consumerism . But th is young U.S.A., an empire for less than a century, is loathe to yield up the mantle of power. So we cling to the elusive hope that good times are “ just around the corner.” They aren’t all that bad ye t, fo r most. We’ re exho rted to tighten things up a bit, use our Yankee ingenuity and stop buying all those damn imports, at least those things that are still made here. Oh yeah, and figh t the Commies too. We want it every which way, and like the restless adolescent we most resemble, find it hard to come to grips with painful choices. Presidential candidates from the middle to the far right are buzzing with “ visions" of a renewed U.S., even as we abruptly surge into first place in the ranks of the world’s debtors. It's not KA Sexuality, the Neighbor Lady and the Fam ily^) f y BobSawatzki 11 j What to do when your Hfe becomes an item from the National Enquirer. Col. Ollie—Matt The firs t Docucomic takes yod behind closed doors and inside the shredder. Fawn’s hairdresser doesn’t know this much. Callahan Unbottled— John Callahan A fitting sequel to Paralyzed for Life—alcoholism from the inside out. clear that any other nation has the combination of economic power, military depth or sheer chutzpah to outflank us completely. World power will instead become increasingly frag mented, which seems only logical as we approach the millenium. The future is truly up for grabs. That leaves us in the interregnum, sitting in limbo. This nation needs to examine carefully its next few steps. We're in over our heads in the Middle East where the Reagan presidency has been pitiful when not frightening. In our own Central American back yard our policies have finally resulted in U.S. casualties, and threaten worse. And though impeachment seems the logical extension of developments in Washington, the upshot is George Bush. Good Americans have traditionally made it through with creative schizophrenia, willing to countenance unethical, contradictory behavior if the overall package looks and feels good, especially in the pocketbook. We’ve had our tradition of civil liberties and a largely free press, at least at home, to fo res ta ll potential despots. Those rights are only guaranteed by practice, however, and we must struggle to amplify and defend them, or we’ ll never know what hit us when they’re gone. DM Clinton St. Quarterly— Summer, 1987 3
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SUMMER COOL-OFFS FoodFron! C O O P E R A T I V E G R O C E R Y Open to All 9 am to 9 pm Daily NW Thurman at 27 th Avenue TriMet Bus Routes 15 and 17 The City’s Neighborhood Grocery LOOKING GLASS B O O K S T O R E 318 S.W. Taylor 227-4760 LIDA CARR O L LB K U R T Z B E N E R GYBTRANS FORMATIO N B 5 0 3 B 2 87 B 1 7 2 0 READINGS C LA S S E S DAY &EVENINGCLASSES IN INDONESIAN KUNG FU FOR WOMEN, MEN&CHILDREN 1 5 1 5 S . E . 3 7 t h A V E N U E P O R T L A N D , O R E G O N 9 7 2 1 4 5 0 3 - 2 3 1 - 1 9 9 9 Natural Fiber Clothing from Around the World La Paloma Folk Art • Jewelry • Gifts AN INTRIGUING, AFFORDABLE BLEND OF CONTEMPORARY & ETHNIC FASHIONS Hillsdale Shopping Center in SW Portland 246-3417 PANACHE JOHNS Landing’s OWN Delicatessen En trees Sa lads D esse r ts Prepared in Our Kitchen from fresh Natural ingredients In th e W a te r Tow e r C a l l 2 2 5 -0 2 9 5 • C a fe • C a r ryO u t • C a te r in g Open 7 days a week Clinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1987 5
6 Clinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1987
FAREWELL ARMS CONTROL: INITIATINGAN INDEPENDENT PROCESS BY MARK SOMMER AND GORDON FELLER / / There are systems, ” • • wrote Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1979 o f arms control, “that exhibit.. .properties producing the opposite o f their intended outcome, with the consequence that intensifying the effort to achieve the desired one achieves even more * * o f the undesired. / / Despite what were often the sincerest of first intentions, the tragic reality is that arms control as practiced by the superpowers has not only failed to control the arms race but has in real sense legitimated and even accelerated it. Arms control has been captured by the very forces it was sent out to capture. The dominant figures in the arms control establishment have always been either defense intellectuals or defense bureaucrats, despite the early involvement of some disarmament activists in the formulation of arms control policy. The pattern of thinking which equates more security with more arms set a permanent imprint on all efforts to control arms. These two contending and largely contradictory conceptions—security through arms and security through negotiation—could not both govern policy, and the odds in the argument were uneven from the outset. Despite the best hopes of arms controllers and an expectant public, arms control has never mounted an effective challenge to a militarized definition of national security. Proposed in the first instance as a brake on a pair of recklessly driven vehicles, arms control has become, in the hands of its drivers, a steering wheel veering towards the cliff’s edge. All that it has succeeded in curtailing have been those obsolescent weapons already deemed least useful and those technologies too expensive and unpromising to merit further development. And, as in the case of missile defenses, when those technologies do become more feasible, the treaties of earlier years become as disposable as yesterday’s diapers. A Tale of Two Treaties: The Limited Test Ban and SALT II To appreciate how this reversal of first purposes came about, it may be useful to review the tales of two treaties, one enacted and often celebrated as arms control’s highest achievement, the other aborted /n utero, in a late stage of pregnancy. Despite strong international opposition to atomic testing voiced in the “ Ban the Bomb” movement in Great Britain and elsewhere during the 1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union refused to agree to a test ban until the early 1960s. In the meantime, each raced to increase and improve its arsenal in order to gain a decisive advantage before the onset of the ban. Even when they did agree, not all test sites were outlawed: each reserved the right to continue testing underground. “ In 1963 the Test Ban was signed,” writes Johan Galtung, the Norwegian political scientist, “ only because there was, literally speaking, a hole in it: the permission to continue underground testing. The ultimate effect of the Treaty was the legitimization of the testing.” Through this gaping hole poured the arms race. At the time of its enactment, the Test Ban was thought to have accomplished three goals—protecting the atmosphere, braking the advancement of military technology, and establishing an essential foundation for further arms reductions and a comprehensive test ban. Assessed with these purposes in mind, the Limited Test Ban has failed sadly in its mission. As protection for the atmosphere, the Test Ban has become, in the apt phrase of McGeorge Bundy (President Kennedy’s national security adviser at the time of the negotiations), no more than “ a pollution control device.” The fact that the three signatories have ceased atmospheric testing is indeed a significant contribution to public health. But testing is only one of more than two dozen phases of the nuclear cycle in which poisons are released into the human and natural environment. These are the same poisons which so concerned the public in the 1950s—strontium 90 and cesium, among others. Public health threats have by no means disappeared. Cancer-related death is significantly higher among uranium miners than among the general population; shipyard workers who handle nuclear materials develop cancer at six times the normal rate. The Advisory Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation of the National Academy of Sciences estimates that one million Americans will develop cancer from man-made sources of radiation during their lifetimes. Leakage of radiation into soil and air from underground test sites presents still another hazard. A far greater danger is the growing number of nuclear weapons among non-participants in the Treaty. The U.S. Department of Energy conservatively estimated several years ago that by 1988 another thirty nations will have joined that most exclusive of international associations, the nuclear club. None is under any compulsion to join the Treaty or to abide by its provisions. The second intention of the Treaty was to slow weapons experimentation, the qualitative arms race. There can be no question that research and development is the technological engine of the arms race. But the Treaty’s massive exception of underground tests has permitted the development of far more lethal, speedy, and accurate weaponry. Since the Treaty was signed, at least a dozen new delivery systems have been developed and deployed—MIRV, Cruise, and the MX among them, all highly destabilizing to an already unstable strategic balance. Since the Test Ban failed to regulate delivery systems, research continued apace and rapidly outstripped any restraints testing could have provided. The third intention of the Limited Test Ban was to generate the political momentum necessary to achieve a comprehensive ban on testing, above and below ground. Instead, the Test Ban disarmed the disarmers, dampening public opposition to nuclear weapons by removing only the most visible environmental hazards while concealing many more menacing trends from public oversight. Anxious to believe that a significant step had been taken, the great majority of those who had been pushing for a Test Ban relaxed their pressure on the superpowers, prompting without which no progress would ever have been achieved, and thus allowed to be robbed from their pockets what their hands had just received. Indeed, we may even have lost more than we gained in the transaction. The price of banning weapons testing in the atmosphere was the codification in international law of the unlimited right to test underground. Like the Limited Test Ban, the SALT II process was widely viewed by arms controllers and the liberal community as an important step in the right direction. But, like the Test Ban, SALT II had the unintended effect of weakening rather than strengthening the institutions of collective security. The use of bargaining chips and the continuing race for relative advantage were institutionalized by the agreement, propelling expenditures and destructive capacity far beyond what they were prior to entering into negotiations. SALT II left untouched— and in fact made untouchable—the laying of any foundation on which alternatives to militarized forms of security could rest. SALT II contained “ no limitations of significance,” writes Senator Moynihan. It couldn’t limit significant weapons, writes John Newhouse, a SALT I negotiator: “ Stability demands that each of the two societies stand wholly exposed to the destructive power of the other.” He lists three goals or “ themes” of SALT: 1) parity, or comparability, as it is sometimes called; 2) crisis stability; and 3) mobility, implying a move from fixed-site to shiftingsite ICBM’s. Nowhere do we hear mention of reductions! The SALT treaty, writes Moynihan, brought “ an end not only to the hope of arms limitation but to the SALT process itself.” The seeds of SALT’Sfailure were planted long ago. By all accounts, the technological loophole which unravelled the SALT process may have been the failure to outlaw development of MIRV (“multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicle”—many warheads on a single missile) delivery systems in the SALT I agreements. It was an extraordinarily short-sighted arrangement, as Henry Kissinger himself admits in retrospect. Yet there may have been little choice at the time.. Without that exclusion it is questionable that the Joint Chiefs of Staff would have given their support, loathe as they would be to give up the prospect of gaining a unilateral advantage. But the adoption of MIRV technologies, first by the United States and then by the Soviet Union, has vastly enlarged both offensive arsenals, to the ultimate detriment of both sides. Indeed, the “window of vulnerability” so much dreaded by proponents of the MX was opened largely by the Soviets’ mimicry of our “ MIRVing” . A creature of deterrence theory whose first premise is mutual threat, SALT II turned a blind eye to all improvements in offensive weaponry and thus allowed, even abetted, the ominous drift towards first- strike technologies and strategies. In designating “ national technical means of verification” as the only acceptable instruments for monitoring SALT II agreements, the treaty ignored the innovative French proposal for a United Nations-instituted International Satellite Surveillance Agency, which might have provided a means for the rest of the world to better monitor compliance. Such transnational institutions and procedures hold out some promise of moving the world towards a more dependable and demilitarized security system, or perhaps even towards a genuine peace system. But no ideas or institutions of this sort were in the minds of the SALT negotiators. Moving human society towards disarmament by conflict resolution techniques and technologies is not presently, nor in the future, on the arms control agenda. What Went Wrong? Why has arms control failed? SALT II was an agreement between two sets of superpower policymakers together comprising no more than a large roomful of men and representing no more than a tenth of the world’s population, while everyone else— American and Soviet citizens and the other nine-tenths of the world, all nearly equally affected by their deci- ’ sions—sat out the game, without so much as a ticket in Ti m B ra un Clinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1987 7
the stands. This exclusiveness has no doubt strengthened the resolve of some aspiring Third World governments to join the nuclear club and thus garner a place at the table by the only apparent means available. Traditional negotiation and verification processes have made it easier for the Soviet Union and the United States together to hold the world hostage to a war system of their own devising. Arms control is finally the tool the superpower elites use to perpetuate and even to codify their dominance of the world. Though finding little to agree upon among substantive issues, they share a mutual distaste for restraints upon their freedom to develop and deploy new and more lethal weaponry. As Alva Myrdal tellingly documents in her classic study of postwar disarmament negotiations, The Game of Disarmament, Soviet and American negotiators have in effect if not in actual intention cooperated in a coy two-step shuffle, sidling towards the lip of the chasm to see which can be coaxed first into stepping over the precipice. “You first.” “After you, my friend.” “ Oh, but please, after you!” Each offers only those proposals it knows the other cannot accept. And if one is (God forbid!) unexpectedly accepted, the offer is summarily withdrawn. This paradoxical behavior is not as inexplicable as it might at first seem. Although arms control is represented by superpower spokesmen and understood by the general public to be a means of terminating the arms race, the negotiators themselves view it as a means of managing a conflict they neither expect nor fully desire to see disappear. Managing, in this instance, means making the existing system of competing military blocs safer, cheaper, and more efficient—eliminating obsolete or infeasible technologies and rerouting funds to those systems most likely to yield a relative advantage in future negotiations or conflicts. Managing means keeping the race running hard enough to justify maintaining and expanding a prosperous military establishment but not so hard as to exhaust one’s own resources. Managing means reaping the benefits of preparation for war without unduly risking war itself. Arms control is at best a distraction from disarmament, and at worst a disguised military tactic, an obstacle placed before those who would challenge the legitimacy of the war system of which it is an element. It sustains that system by legitimizing the very structure, institutions, and belief systems that it was ostensibly designed to displace. Government-sponsored arms control betrays a persistent attachment to the notion that security is solely a matter of weapons, a technical problem. In the lexicons of both arms racers and arms controllers, security is understood to be primarily national and military. Nowhere in such a world-view is there menProposed in the first instance as a brake on a pair of recklessly driven vehicles, arms control has become, in the hands of its drivers, a steering wheel veering towards the cliff’s edge. tion of other forms of security which might supplement and ultimately supplant our desperate dependence on arms, a set of processes and institutions capable of handling conflict in more constructive ways. It is thus all too readily appropriated by the dominant war system for its own ends. Arms control is a reactive rather than an active strategy, the negation of a dynamic and profitable enterprise rather than the assertion of a more dynamic and effective alternative. Nations will not disarm into a vacuum. Before relinquishing the unlimited right to possess and develop the hardware of unilateral defense, governments and peoples will both need to feel fully assured that their security (and profit) can be better guaranteed by other means. A peace system is not simply a modified war system. It is a synthesis of freshly conceived and mutually reinforcing elements in an integrated system where the machinery of war is replaced by the coordinated mechanisms of international peacekeeping and a’complex web of less formal arrangements. These mechanisms would center around constitutionally established global organizations vested with the necessary authority and capacity to inspect and enforce international law and to settle disputes without resort to armed force. “ Nations don’t distrust each other because they are armed,” concluded Salvador de Madariaga, sadly observing the failure of early disarmament negotiations. “They are armed because they distrust each other. And therefore to want disarmament before a minimum of common agreement on fundamentals is as absurd as to want people to go undressed in winter.” Somehow we must begin to deal with the intangible and irrational roots of the conflict. We must find ways of meeting one another halfway, in settings where politics don’t pollute the process. We must make occasions for working together—ip space, iqaid to drought- and famine-stricken refugees, and most of all, in establishing a broader range of direct communication channels between us. What Else, If Not Arms Control? Having surveyed the wreckage of our best intentions in two treaties—one a Pyrrhic victory, the other a miscarriage—and having reviewed the causes of our failure, where does this leave us with government- controlled arms control? Has arms control as we have known it anything left to offer us? Arms control today is a means of managing the arms race. If practiced differently it might well become an important element, though never the entirety, of a comprehensive peace. Somehow a process less susceptible to diversion and subversion must be invented, a process less easily captured by the very interests and trends it was designed to control. It needs to take negotiations out from behind closed doors (where agreements to evade agreement may be reached) and .place them in the global public realm, where those most affected by the decisions may watch and participate. Nearly a quarter century ago, a psychologist by the name of Charles Osgood proposed what he called “ an alternative to war and surrender” : a carefully conceived set of non-military policy initiatives undertaken by a government independently and without prior agreement SUBSCRIBED R e c e iv e FREE With a 2 year subscription “These are the lost 1971-72 sessions, when he was just returning from obscurity, and they’re the basic, raw stuff that he’d been playing for years. Essential for any fan of the man or blues piano.” New York Daily News “Lusty, vibrant sessions featuring the late piano innovator in some of his finest, syncopated, wallbanging performances.” San Francisco Examiner Professor Longhair; House Party New Orleans Style SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIPTION FORM SUBSCRIBE SEND $16 per subscription Name: Address: C i t y : S t a t e : _______ Zip: □ VISA □ MaiterCharge □ CHECK Credit Card? Exp. Date SEND TO: Clinton Street Quarterly Box 3588, Portland, OR 97208 8 Clinton St. '—Summer, 1987
from its adversary in order to break out of the two-nation waiting game (in which each party seeks to do nothing while forcing the other to make concessions), and to generate pressure and incentives for reciprocal action. Viewing the arms race as a “ tension-increasing” system in which each party’s threats provoke an equally threatening response in an escalating spiral, Osgood proposed that one party, after carefully reviewing its entire range of non-military options, introduce a series of “ tension-decreasing” settlements to outstanding disputes, to begin a disarmament process and to construct a non-military system for resolving conflicts. “An arms race in reverse,” Osgood called his policy, “GRIT, a graduated and reciprocated, unilaterally initiated, tension-decreasing system” [Osgood, An Alternative to War and Surrender. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1962] He specified several ground rules for his strategy. Unilateral initiatives must, he said: 1. “be graduated in risk according to the degree of reciprocation obtained from opponents; 2. “be diversified in nature, both as to sphere of action and as to geographical locus of application . . .cultural, scientific, economic, political, legal, as well as disarmament initiatives; 3. “prior to announcement, unilateral initiatives must be unpredictable by an opponent as to their sphere, locus, and time of execution; 4. “unilateral initiatives must represent a sincere intent to reduce and control international tensions. . . . If we are really not sincere. . . then this will soon become apparent to both allies and enemies alike; our unilateral initiatives will be reacted to on these terms, and nothing will be accomplished by an intensification of the cold war; 5. “unilateral initiatives must be announced publicly. . .before their execution and identified as part of a deliberate policy of reducing and controlling tensions; and they should include an explicit invitation to reciprocation in some form; 6. “unilateral initiatives must be continued over a considerable time period, regardless of immediate reciprocation or events of a tension-increasing nature elsewhere.” Osgood stressed that while an initiative policy seeks the same ends as negotiated disarmament and might indeed provide the essential momentum negotiations otherwise lack, GRIT “ is more like courtship than marriage, more like a conversation than a prayer. Rather than marching in unison, the players of GRIT move in complicated steps of their own, each keeping his eyes on the moves of the other, and leading or following, now one, now the other” [Osgood, p. 34], Shortly after Osgood’s book was published, the Kennedy Administration undertook a brief flurry of independent initiatives which seemed to confirm the validity of Osgood's premises. Shaken, perhaps, by the previous autumn’s Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy announced, in a now famous “Strategy for Peace” speech at American University, a unilateral U.S. moratorium on atmospheric nuclear testing. The Soviet response was immediate: five days after Kennedy’s speech, Premier Khruschev ordered a halt to the production of strategic bombers. Following the American example, the Soviets agreed not to test weapons in the atmosphere while a treaty to the same effect was being negotiated. Soviet and American negotiators reached agreement on the installation of a "hotline” between them within ten days of Kennedy’s initiatory speech. Many of the dozens of gestures proffered during this sudden thaw in superpower relations were more of a psychological than a strategic importance; neither party yielded anything that would foreclose future options. Yet on the psychological level (which is of no small significance in such matters), something quite extraordinary occurred—so extraordinary, in fact, that the very pace of events apparently frightened both NATO allies and certain sectors of the domestic American polity. By autumn the peace race began to stall. “The rea- “In 1963 the Test Ban was signed, only because there was, literally speaking, a hole in it: the permission to continue underground testing. The ultimate effect of the Treaty was the legitimization of the testing.” sons were many,” wrote Amitai Etzioni, the well-known sociologist, in The Kennedy Experiment. “The Administration felt that the psychological mood in the West was getting out of hand, with hopes and expectations for more Soviet-American measures running too high; allies, especially West Germany, objected more and more bitterly; and the pre-election year began, in which the Administration seemed not to desire additional accommodations.” Indeed, it appears from Etzioni’s analysis that the problem was not that the initiatives failed but that they succeeded too well. “While the warnings of the critics were not realized, a danger that seems not to have been anticipated by the United States government did materialize: the Russians responded not just by reciprocating American initiatives but by offering some initiatives of their own, in the spirit of the detente. Washington was put on the spot: it had to reciprocate if it were not to weaken the new spirit, but it could lose control of the experiment.” Losing control: no doubt such a prospect troubles the sleep of both sets of superpower policymakers. And it is no doubt for this reason that both have so strongly preferred negotiated arms control, a process whose dynamics and outcomes they themselves can control and limit. This mixed lesson in initiative strategies yields a few important insights. The first is that there appears to be great potential momentum in an initiative strategy. McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s National Security Adviser during the life of the experiment, attests that he himself did not hear of GRIT until quite recently and that Kennedy had no initiatives in mind beyond the American University speech. Yet yearnings for peace were so much in the air that he was simply swept up by events. Even Khruschev, whom few would describe as “ soft,” must have felt stirrings of some sort to have acted as he did. If an initiative strategy so minimally planned and developed succeeded in spurring such spontaneous excitement throughout the world, then it is clear we are tapping deep currents of feeling in the global body politic which, once released, may sweep more than a few stray leaves aside. But the second lesson, following hard on the first, is that no such open process will be permitted to continue for long in the absence of a sustained and broadly based public lobby to insist upon it. As Etzioni records, the Kennedy experiment was terminated rather abruptly on the American side when it began threatening to require more of both superpowers than either was willing to yield. Any effective process to control and reduce arms must be initiated by and remain the initiative of independent groups beyond the two sets of superpower policymakers. This is not to say that officially sponsored initiatives are not central to the success of the strategy. As the protagonists in the conflict, the great powers remain its chief actors and enactors. Such changes as must occur in order for the conditions of peace to be established will necessarily be performed by and through them. But the impetus for change and the sustained pressure to enact it must come from elsewhere, from every conceivable source o the r than the superpower leade rsh ips themselves. This observation is not intended to demonize these leaders. The blame for our failure to bring the arms race under control extends well beyond any single class of persons: it is in the largest sense the failure of the entire civilization, an entire species. But the temptations of great power are such that it is most difficult for those who have struggled all their lives to gain it to consider relinquishing any portion. 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found himself ultimately accelerating it. Only those social forces independent of such temptations and pressures can hope to sustain the will to ensure the enactment of genuine disarmament. The Freeze and What it Teaches Fortunately, there are numerous precedents for such an indep nd nt a broadly based initiative movement, though not yet of the diversity and scale that will likely prove necessary. The nuclear freeze proposal (“ a bilateral halt to the testing, production, and deployment of all nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles” ) was developed five or six years ago by a group of associates for whom one highly determined woman, Randy Forsberg, became the principal formulator. The idea was framed as an initiative presented in public referenda throughout Western Massachusetts during 1981-82. It was, of course, no longer quite the habit of a New England town meeting to consider issues of global import. But they had been enough disturbed by recent events that they decided to state their views in any case. First one, then another passed the freeze resolution, and by mid-1982 more than 400 town meetings in the region had debated and passed the initiative. The emergence of the freeze coincided with the rise of peace advocacy organizations among lawyers, realtors, artists and others, which, clearly inspired by the example of the stout New England villagers and Helen Caldicott’s energetic resuscitation of Physicians for Social Responsibility, asserted their right and authority to speak out on The tangible nature of the term “ freeze” provided a reference point in ordinary human experience for many who had never found anything remotely real about discussions of nuclear issues. issues of global import. By autumn of that year it had been brought before voters in ten states and several dozen major cities, comprising more than a third of the total U.S. electorate. It had also passed the House of Representatives as a non-binding resolution. The United Nations, the Soviet Union and a plethora of other citizen organizations and political bodies also endorsed the concept. In short, the freeze had been placed on the global political agenda. The most striking aspect of the freeze “ phenomenon” is that the idea came from altogether outside and beyond the boundaries of traditional political discourse. It was neither the lead campaign proposal for an aspiring politician nor the favored strategy of a political party. Far more adventurous a concept than any politician was yet willing to risk advocating, the freeze was a phenomenon in which politicians found themselves chasing after the bandwagon. They were only able to associate themselves with the idea because an awakened public had already cleared a space for it in the realm of mainstream political discourse. The freeze was remarkably well-timed for success. Reagan Administration statements about the acceptability of limited nuclear war and its systematic preparations for “ protracted global conflict” provoked such intense anxiety on both sides of the Atlantic that popular feeling positively ached for expression. In its startling simplicity, the freeze provided an apparently commonsense concept that even those unschooled in the intricacies of nuclear negotiation could readily grasp. It was like saying, “ Stop it already! Enough is enough!” The tangible nature of the term “ freeze” provided a reference point in ordinary human experience for many who had never found anything remotely real about discussions of nuclear issues. Indeed, it was this very simplicity that critics ultimately held against the freeze: it's not simple, they said, but simplistic. In its heady early days the freeze was a profoundly empowering experience for those who participated in one of its myriad campaigns. The organization, if so it could be called, was entirely decentralized and selfresponsible; the main office was known as a “ clearinghouse,” as if to emphasize its non-executive nature. This dispersal of authority left local organizations free to establish their own ways and. means of promoting the initiative and thus accorded them the respect due independent and self-reliant institutions. Yet the freeze appeared to melt. One must first credit the adroitness of the Reagan Administration in derailing the momentum by a variety of shrewd diversions. Surely its most imaginative entertainment has been the selling of Star Wars as a “ defensive measure,” a superbly crafted inversion of the truth which in addition restakes its claim to the moral high ground. In addition, the freeze may have been damaged by its own success. Americans are well-known to be susceptible to fads—this week the freeze, next week Cabbage Patch dolls. By the time it reached a vote in the House of Representatives, the media had decided the freeze had already “ lost” the attention of most voters, even though freeze coordinators successfully raised record numbers of citizen lobbyists to pressure the politicians to approve it. indeed, the initiative had already been voted on in so many places and by so many people that a few benighted souls must have assumed the freeze had already been enacted. The melting of the freeze at the public policy level cannot be attributed entirely to the perplexity of the American voting public. Their ambivalence reflects American’s twin concerns—nuclear weapons might kill them but the Russians might also. Their reluctance to step into the vast unknown territory beyond nuclear deterrence demonstrates the incompleteness of the freeze as an alternative to the present system of international relations. The freeze says, "Stop right there! Don't move another inch!” It does not, however, say, “Go this way instead. It’s much safer.” Of course, this one initiative was never intended to answer all questions; it was intended, rather, as a way to begin asking them. But in the absence of a comprehensive design for an alternative structure of relations between East and West, this or any other single initiative seems more like a protest than a plan, a first step in a direction where we cannot see the next. Freeze theorists are fully aware of this problem and have been working hard to provide an itinerary for the journey of which the freeze is but the first stride. Defining a Middle Way We can begin to draw a few provisional conclusions about how n initiative strategy would need to be conceived. Initiatives can only succeed if leaders and followers both lend their support. The issue is now on the political agenda of the entire planet. Whether it is finally kept wilt depend on our will to persist to “ the last full measure.” Initiatives must be balanced in what they ask of the parties to the conflict, making equal demands of equal powers. Both the test ban and the freeze were balanced in this respect, requiring identical conditions of both superpowers, and neither could have gained public acceptance without that perceived balance. Any initiatives arising from independent sources must demonstrate this sense of basic fairness if they are to stand a chance of gaining broad public acceptance. Individual initiatives should delineate a comprehensive design for an alternative system of peace and security to replace the war system in which we are now entrapped. Although libraries have been written about both arms control and disarmament, only passing references have been made to the nature and operation of an integrated peace system. A peace system would need to remain independent of the war system it seeks to replace. We must first conceive and imagine it in all its variegated complexity, a task of considerable magnitude in itself. Our inventions must be based not simply on abstract logic or wishful thinking but on the disenchanting lessons of actual experience. We must make a careful reading of history and a shrewd judgment of human motivations and the personalities of the parties in conflict. And finally, initiatives should be, whenever possible, visible to and verifiable by a global viewing public. Initiatives should be framed in such a way as to require nations to perform tangible acts, acts that cannot easily be neglected or left undone. To most of the planet’s residents, the arms race is a non-event: it can neither be watched nor heard, only heard about. Its invisibility effectively shields it from public scrutiny. One aim of the initiative process must be to give disarmament the high profile it deserves, to give us events we can actually witness: “ Disarmament by deeds instead of words.” One could imagine, in the manner of Admiral Noel Gayler’s innovative “ deep cuts” proposal, a series of warhead-dismantling ceremonies, held on neutral ground between East and West (perhaps in Austria or Switzerland), open to inspection by all interested observers and televised (at least in the early events) to a much vaster global public. One could equally well imagine an individual superpower undertakirig a series of public dismantling events, inviting friends, foes, and all between, and using the ceremonies as a means of pressing for tangible reciprocation by its adversary. Either crisis or concerted public pressure might sufficiently warm the atmosphere for such a development. Evidence of a spontaneous initiative movement has been emerging these past several years in a hundred forms and a thousand environments. Besides those already discussed, its larger and more visible manifestations have been the awakening of mainstream churches (including the debate arising from the Catholic bishops’ A self-aware independent movement, global in scope, pluralistic in background and belief, and widely varied in its chosen actions, could introduce into the highly partisan debate between East and West an entire alternative agenda for peace. pastoral letter on nuclear war), the Five Continents Peace Initiative, the proliferation of peace camps and direct actions at weapons facilities, the nuclear free zone movement and its recent triumphs in New Zealand and Australia. Then there is the Western European peace movement, emerging first in the Netherlands, and spreading across the Continent and the Channel, and its faint, brave echoes to the East, the "independent peace movements” in Hungary, the East German Lutheran churches, and even (very briefly) in the Soviet Union itself. All have sought to open a space to stand between the superpowers, beholden to neither, insisting on a settlement of equal benefit to all parties. Nor should we forget the original and still most significant precedent for independence from the superpower argument: the Non- Aligned Movement. Though beset by internal frictions, it has nevertheless likely prevented a bad argument from growing a great deal worse. By opting out of the contest, the nations in the Non-Aligned Movement have sought to remove themselves as fuel for the fire. Being a spontaneous phenomenon, this initiative movement is unlikely ever to coalesce into a few identifiable institutions. Let us hope not, in any case. The world does not need yet another ideology for which to slaughter the innocent. But it would no doubt bolster our manifold efforts if we were to recognize and build upon their commonality. A self-aware independent movement, global in scope, pluralistic in background and belief, and widely varied in its chosen actions, could introduce into the highly partisan debate between East and West an entire alternative agenda for peace. This independence is not to be mistaken for neutrality. Working from its own understanding of peace and its own varied strategies for achieving it, an independent initiative movement could provide the sustaining impulse and the mediating presence that have always been utterly absent from traditional arms control negotiations. An independent middle way would by its very existence and process serve to democratize the debate. Like the marvelously crafted system of checks and balances that has more than once saved American democracy from incipient tyrannies, an independent middle way could serve as a counterpoise to the abuse of authority on both (and all) sides of the nuclear contest. As increasing numbers of citizens and governments opt out of the argument between East and West, they migrate to that high middle ground between the contestants, and there establish an “ everyman's land” hospitable to innocents of all sides. Cultivating that common ground is an essential task in the years to come. Co-Authors Mark Sommer and Gordon Feller live in the Bay Area, where both have spent years consulting on issues of global security. Artist Robert Williamson lives in Seattle. This is his third illustration for CSQ. 10 Clinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1987
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