Nuclear Freeze Movement, With Eye on ’86 Elections, Renewing Its Fight for Peace

Three years after the nuclear freeze movement swept the nation in a wave of anti-war fervor, discouraged disarmament activists are seeking new goals and new tactics to help them regain dwindling public attention and support.

Frustrated leaders of the movement admit that they have achieved few arms-control goals during the Reagan Administration, even though about 370 city councils and 15 state legislatures in 1982 and 1983 passed non-binding resolutions calling for a freeze on testing, production and deployment of nuclear weapons.

“The freeze idea is definitely fading and may be dead,” said David Cortwright, executive director of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, known as SANE, the oldest and largest of more than 1,000 disarmament groups. “Its time may well have come and gone.”

“I agree the freeze is no longer a primary tool of the arms-control movement,” said Jill Nelson, executive director of the Boston-based National Jobs With Peace Campaign, which has chapters in 25 cities. She said the disarmament movement is at a crossroads.

‘Roundtable’ on Peace

About 70 peace activists, academics, clerics and others discussed the movement’s new directions last month at a “Boston Round Table on Security, the War System and Peace Mobilization” at the Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge. The five-day conference was sponsored by the Nation Institute in New York and the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.

In interviews, prominent peace activists called for a shifting of emphasis away from mass protests and local ballot initiatives and toward efforts to influence specific congressional races in 1986, increasing lobbying in Washington and broadening the grass-roots movement’s appeal to minorities and other groups.

Several activists said they intend to press Congress and the White House to consider the recent Soviet proposal of a joint moratorium on nuclear testing. In July, Soviet officials said they would halt nuclear testing from Aug. 6 until Dec. 31, and offered to extend the moratorium indefinitely if the United States also stopped testing.

The Reagan Administration rejected the offer, saying that a series of Soviet tests had recently been completed and commenting that “the history of moratorium proposals documents that they have been made for propaganda purposes.”

“My feeling is we aren’t going to have another chance like this,” said anti-war activist Daniel J. Ellsberg. “The Soviet offer gives us a five-month window of opportunity to end nuclear testing. It’s the best opportunity we’ve had in years.”

Only One Lobbyist

Ellsberg also called for beefing up the nuclear freeze lobby in Washington, which has only one paid lobbyist. “I would say it’s been derelict and inexcusable for us not to have a strong Washington presence,” Ellsberg said. “That’s a symptom of our problem.”

Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader, urged that the activists find common ground with apartheid opponents in South Africa. He noted, for example, that in September 1979, U.S. officials suggested that the Pretoria government had tested a nuclear bomb.

“South Africa, with nuclear potential--indeed a nuclear bomb--must be considered a threat to the whole human family everywhere,” said Jackson, an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination last year.

(The South African government has denied testing a nuclear bomb and has said that the indications of an explosion detected by a U.S. satellite could have been caused by an accident aboard a Soviet submarine.)

The freeze movement’s current search for new goals and tactics reflects its political dilemma since President Reagan’s 1984 landslide reelection over Democrat Walter F. Mondale, a freeze supporter.

Derailed by Summit Plan

The activists contend that 70% of the American people support the concept of a nuclear freeze, but disarmament leaders admit that Reagan has undercut their support by pressing plans for the Strategic Defense Initiative anti-missile space defense system, which the President says could end the nuclear war threat. The activists say their movement also was derailed by the resumption of arms control talks in Geneva and the promise of a U.S.-Soviet summit Nov. 19-20.

Nevertheless, peace groups hope to draw public attention by presenting Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev with more than 1 million signatures of petitioners demanding a weapons freeze in Geneva. Disarmament groups also will try to raise their visibility in the 1986 and 1988 elections, according to Betsy Taylor, a freeze leader now on a fellowship at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She said disarmament groups will devote money and workers to 1986 congressional races in California, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, Wisconsin and other states.

“We have a lot of bright people who are political amateurs,” she said. “We’re learning a lot from the right wing. They’re brilliant at getting their message to the media and the public.”

3 New Senators Cited

In 1984, Taylor headed National Freeze Voter ‘84, one of four nuclear freeze political action committees that raised more than $1.5 million for pro-freeze candidates. She said the freeze issue was “a key factor” in the elections of three Democratic senators in 1984--John Kerry of Massachusetts, Tom Harkin of Iowa and Paul Simon of Illinois--as well as in eight House races.

“We believe the biggest enemy we’re facing right now is despair and a sense of powerlessness,” said Barbara Zheutlin, issues coordinator for PRO-Peace, a Los Angeles-based group that hopes to recruit 5,000 persons to march across the country in support of disarmament for nine months next year.

“We have to re-engage the American people.”