War Toys on a Comeback; Opponents Put Up a Fight : <i> Hit it till it stands no taller than dust . . . rubble strewn wasteland is his idea of beauty.</i> --From the box of Hasbro’s toy “Bonecrusher”

If you wander down the aisles of today’s huge toy stores, past dizzying shelves of video “robeast” blasters and electro-laser stun guns (“with blazing lights and sounds”), you will hear the voices. Very young voices:

“But Jason down the street has one of these.”

“But, Mom, if I can have one of these I’ll never ask you for anything again. Ever, ever, ever.”

War toys are selling well these days. Extremely well. From olive-drab bicycle horns that look exactly like hand grenades, to Rambo LZ-10s (“The ultimate weapon--electronic sound of gunfire”). They constitute a $1-billion-a-year industry.

“Their sales have gone up 600% since 1982,” said Carol Jahnkow, peace education coordinator at the Peace Resource Center of San Diego.

Some people aren’t worried.

“Heck, it’s the year of Rambo, isn’t it?” Michael Buckley, 23, remarked recently as he was buying a Doom Blaster for his 4-year-old son in Carlsbad’s Toy’s R Us store.

Others, however, worry a great deal about the new, sophisticated war toys. Can it really be good for children to play with something that reproduces the exact sound of a battlefield in their own living room?

Research collected by the Peace Resource Center indicates that no, it isn’t.

“Playing with war toys desensitizes children to the dangers of violent behavior,” said Arnold Goldstein, director of the Center for Research and Aggression at the University of Syracuse.

“The degree that youngsters are learning to take pleasure from aggression decreases their ability to learn empathy, negotiation and cooperation.”

Because of growing public interest in the topic--”We’re getting calls for our ‘Values Through Toys’ brochure from all over the country,” Jahnkow said--the Peace Resource Center is trying something new: an outreach program for interested schools and organizations.

The program, also named “Values Through Toys,” is run by Jahnkow and five enthusiastic volunteers. It focuses on alternative toys that encourage creative problem solving. For example, kites and Frisbees and Slinkies. Aquariums and clay. Puppets and musical instruments.

“There are so many great toys in the stores now,” said Debbie Simons, a Rancho Penasquitos kindergarten teacher who chairs the “Values Through Toys” committee. “But it’s the war toys the manufacturers are promoting.”

Manufactured war toys are not exactly a recent invention. The first ones--bright tin toy soldiers--were stamped out in the latter half of the 19th Century. “All three of my grown sons played with war toys when they were children,” Lindy Thaanum of Cardiff said when questioned about the issue at the downtown Cardiff shopping center. “And none of them have developed into anything gross!” she added, echoing the comments of many parents.

“When we speak to groups we try to answer the ‘but-I-played-with-guns-and-I’m-OK’ question before it’s asked,” said committee member Lawrence Hess. Hess, a real estate broker whose own children are 13 and 8, said that he played with guns himself as a child.

“But that was 30 years ago,” he said. “Times have changed. We now have the power to destroy the world. That’s something very different.”

Hess said he hasn’t really had much of a problem keeping war toys out of his own household.

“Sometimes a friend of Elliot’s--Elliot is the 8-year-old--will bring a gun over. We just tell him he’s very welcome but to please leave his gun in the entryway.”

What has been far more of a problem in his house, he said, are the commercials the toy manufacturers show during television cartoon shows.

The National Coalition on Television Violence estimates that, in one year, the average American child watches 250 episodes of violent cartoons. During these shows, there are 800 commercials for violent toys.

“A common pattern is for a new cartoon to be introduced, closely followed by toys based on the weapons used by the cartoon characters,” Jahnkow said. “Or little models of the characters themselves. The action toys.”

G.I. Joe is an action toy. So is the Rambo doll, and the Arnold Schwarzenegger commando toy.

In their plastic-bubbled packages, they jostle for space on the toy store shelves with the fantasy action toys from the leading cartoons. The Gobots. Voltron. Masters of the Universe. The Transformers.

Strange creatures, some half-human/half-robot, they wander, in their cartoon life, through surrealistic landscapes obliterating the opposition with high-tech weapons.

The San Diego group is not alone in its concern.

In West Germany, and in some of the Scandinavian nations, the sale of war toys has been banned. There was a demonstration at New York’s International Toy Convention in February. During that same month, Los Angeles war toy protesters held a “No Rambo Doll” candlelight vigil in front of Sylvester Stallone’s home in Pacific Palisades.

The memory of the campaign to remove war toys from the shelves during the Vietnam War still lingers.

“It worked,” Jahnkow said. “In 1976, G.I. Joe only earned $6 million.” He was gone for five years. “But he’s back. And he grossed $100 million in 1984.”

Toy manufacturers are aware of the “unrest within the ranks” of parents and teachers. Jane Beckwith, a senior representative of Fisher-Price toys, said her firm asked mothers what the next logical field would be into which they could expand their Construx line.

“They told us the military area would be of great interest to children,” she said.

In a letter to Cinda Gorman--wife of the minister of Fletcher Hills Presbyterian church in El Cajon--Beckwith wrote:

“We encourage parents to help set the stage for play with military toys by explaining to children what conflict is all about, then letting the children act out a theme. We suggest parents discuss what just happened with their children and ask such questions as, ‘How else can problems be solved?’ ”

(Jahnkow said this is akin to bending over the body of a victim your child has just shot and murmuring, “Hmm, yes dear, but how could you have handled this differently?”)

Held in churches, schools and colleges--”We’ll go anywhere we’re asked,” Hess said--the “Values Through Toys” presentations run for 20 minutes to three hours.

The group has found, Jahnkow said, that the people who attend have a real need to talk about this issue. “They can get really excited when they discover they are in a whole room full of people who share their concerns,” she said.

“Parents need all the support they can get!” said Simons, who has a 3-year-old son, Evan.

Sometimes, Simons said, a parent who is reluctant to let her child play with such toys as a chillingly accurate replica of a .38-caliber pistol can feel out of step with most of society.

“Evan and I were in the supermarket a couple of weeks ago, walking through the toy section,” she said.

“There was a little boy there, about Evan’s age. He was pulling an Uzi submachine gun down from the shelf.

“Evan ran over to him and said, ‘We don’t play with guns. Guns kill people. Right, Mom?’ ”

Her feelings at that moment, Simons said, were rather ambivalent.

“I was so pleased that he’d said it. I was nodding my head and saying ‘Right! Right!’ But the other child’s mother was looking at me so strangely I couldn’t help feeling embarrassed.”