120 CALM PLEAS FOR PEACE IN A NUCLEAR AGE

The inconclusive end of the Iceland summit becomes a loud tick on that midnight-approaching clock the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists began carrying on its cover many years ago.

For Dennis Paulson in Santa Barbara, the summit stalemate is all too perfect timing for the appearance this week of his book, “Voices of Survival in the Nuclear Age” (introduction by Carl Sagan; Capra Press, $8.95 softcover, 272 pp.).

The book is a compilation of comments on the nuclear threat from 120 world figures, from Pope John Paul and the Dalai Lama to William F. Buckley Jr. and Viktor Afanasyev, the editor of Pravda. Every corner of the world and every shade of opinion is represented and there is agreement only on the urgency of the problem.

Paulson has been soliciting the statements for the last four years. He has written or contacted more than 4,000 of what he considers the most potent voices in the world, and he has enough responses for several more volumes, which he hopes to publish through a nonprofit corporation.

Paulson is that other kind of zealot, neither fiery-eyed nor loud-voiced but calm, gentle-voiced and controlled--and relentless as a glacier in his steady march toward what he believes in.

He has recruited Michael York and Dudley Moore to his cause. York joined him at the American Booksellers Assn. convention in New Orleans earlier this year to help promote the book and both performers are making radio and television appearances to spread the message of the book.

“Our lives now hang by a rather fraying thread,” Paulson said not long ago. “Every thinking person fears nuclear war. Along with Andrei Sakharov and a growing number of others, I’ve come to believe that the problem of lessening the danger of annihilating humankind in a nuclear war carries an absolute priority over all other considerations.”

Paulson likes to quote Shelley (“Writers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”) and Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Some day, the demand for disarmament by hundreds of millions will, I hope, become so universal and so insistent that no man, no men, can withstand it.”

Paulson’s chief hope in the book is to counteract the numbing, paralyzing fear, which he thinks was the net result of “The Day After,” for example, and to prove the existence of grounds for hope. The chief ground, it is clear in “Voices of Survival,” is a shared concern that transcends all political boundaries.

In all this, Paulson says, “The work’s important; who I am is not.” What he cares to say is that his family published newspapers in Ohio and that he got his first impression of nuclear war when he visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki while he was serving as a U.S. paratrooper in Asia.

He attended Ohio State and went briefly into the family trade, editing a newspaper at 21. Subsequently, he says, he was drawn to Eastern philosophies, studied them in Tibet, has visited 60 nations and done a variety of things, including teaching Tibetan meditation in Switzerland and elsewhere.

In the other part of his present life, he runs the Fasting Center in Santa Barbara, advocating a therapy better known in Germany and Scandinavia than here for weight-loss and detoxification through juice-only diets, strictly supervised.

“Voices of Survival” is more and a good deal more interesting, than a large assortment of pious good wishes. Despite Paulson’s intention to find the wellsprings of hope and action, the honesty of his choices delivers some tough talk that arrives like cold wet towels in the face.

William L. Shirer writes bleakly that, “I believe that unless we are terribly lucky, the Soviet Union and the United States will destroy the planet before we get into the 21st Century.” Among Shirer’s suggestions: “Elect a President who conceives the danger and the threat, and is willing to do something immediate and drastic about it.”

Retired Berkeley physicist John W. Gofman, co-discoverer of U-232 and a hard-liner, wrote that “The human problem, as any survivor of the Khmer Rouge, Auschwitz, or the Gulag will attest, is bully-removal, not hardware-removal.” The natural wish for survival, Gofman declares, is being manipulated “by those who present the false choice: nuclear holocaust (suicide) or pacifism (surrender).”

In a long and thoughtful statement, Andrei Sakharov leaves no doubt that nuclear war would be collective suicide, and that nuclear disarmament talks should be continuously conducted, aiming toward parity in conventional weapons. “The passionate, inward aspiration for peace in both the Western and socialist countries,” he says, is real and important, but it does not “by itself exclude the possibility of a tragic outcome.”

Olaf Palme, the recently assassinated Swedish prime minister, felt a cautious optimism in the involvement of millions of people in the struggle toward disarmament. “It is a considerable political force and already has influenced events. It is very unlikely that disarmament will ever take place if it must wait for the initiatives of governments and experts.”

Ronald Reagan did not respond to Paulson, but Vice President George Bush contributed a guarded statement. “The Administration is determined to seek significant reductions in all major weapon categories. It is persuaded, however, that unless we see to our own security needs, negotiations will be fruitless,” Bush replied in part.

The Oxford-educated Dudley Moore offers his own wry reservations: “The passion for disarmament has to go hand in hand with the re-education of anarchists! This issue is the one thing that makes me hesitate. . . . Ideally, I’m a pacifist. I advocate non-intervention. But reality steps in and demands adult ambivalence . . . . But perhaps to realize that there is no solution is a way to building a solution.”

That may be as profound as anything said in what Paulson calls his “global polylogue.” The appeal of the book is its transcendent openness, the freedom from a bias of left or right, East or West, the global reach of its urgency. It is not a comforting browse, and it jolts like the week’s headlines.

Impossible not to admire the writer’s solitary zeal that produced the book. What waits to be seen is whether a book from a small West Coast publisher can shore up the fraying thread we hang by.