2,000 Protest Nuclear Test; 437 Arrested

About 2,000 peaceful protesters converged on the Nevada Test Site for the largest anti-nuclear demonstration in the federal facility’s 36-year history on Thursday, and 437 were arrested by sheriff’s deputies when they crossed the boundary line.

During a four-hour demonstration, the protesters chanted “No more testing!” and took the Reagan Administration’s anti-drug slogan as their own with frequent verses of “Just Say No!”

Despite its size, the protest was orderly. Sheriff’s deputies reported only one skirmish, which occurred when a protester bit two deputies.

Balloonists Arrested

The man, whose name was not immediately released, was booked for battery on a police officer. All of the other arrests were for trespassing, Nye County deputies said. Included were two men picked up by authorities after their hot-air balloon sailed over the test site boundary and dumped them several hundred feet inside the federal grounds, to the cheers of onlookers.

The culmination of weeks of planning, the protest was meant to coincide with the United States’ first 1987 underground nuclear test. The test was seen as important by anti-nuclear activists because the Soviet Union had said earlier that the first 1987 U.S. explosion would trigger an end to Moscow’s 18-month testing moratorium.

But that test, dubbed “Hazebrook” by the Department of Energy, was detonated beneath Yucca Flat on the 1,350-square-mile test site on Tuesday, not Thursday as the demonstrators had expected.

Despite federal denials, protest organizers angrily accused the Department of Energy of moving up the test to detract from the demonstration. But on Thursday it appeared that the early test may have worked in the organizers’ favor.

Chris Brown, executive director of Southern Californians for a Bilateral Nuclear Weapons Freeze, said the 300-member Southern California protest contingent’s ranks were swelled by anger over the Tuesday test.

“The night the test went off, close to 40 people called . . . just the night of the test,” he said.

(In Moscow Thursday, Soviet officials, citing Tuesday’s U.S. test, confirmed that they will resume nuclear testing, although they gave no date for the first explosion.)

Largest Protest at Site

In sheer size and numbers of arrests, the Thursday protest eclipsed any before in the history of the Nevada Test Site, located 60 miles north of Las Vegas.

The largest previous demonstration had brought together about 500 protesters in 1986, and 149 of them were arrested.

The size of Thursday’s demonstration was obvious at dawn, when protesters gathered in the parking lot of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and launched a caravan to the test site.

Headed by 20 buses, it included more than 100 cars from states as far flung as Oregon and Missouri. Other demonstrators, including three men from Rhode Island, traveled to Nevada by plane and caught rides to the test site.

The protesters were addressed by five members of Congress--Reps. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), Thomas Downey (D-N.Y.), Barbara Boxer (D-Greenbrae), Jim Bates (D-San Diego) and Leon E. Panetta (D-Monterey)--who stopped en route to the San Francisco funeral of Rep. Sala Burton, who died Sunday of cancer.

Celebrities Arrested

About a quarter of the demonstrators intentionally crossed a cattle guard marking the site’s boundary line and were arrested by sheriff’s deputies in what amounted to a well-choreographed protest ballet.

Among the first were actors Martin Sheen, Robert Blake and Kris Kristofferson, activist Daniel Ellsberg and astronomer-author Carl Sagan, whose steps over the line were recorded by dozens of still and television cameras and drew applause from other demonstrators.

Sheen, with his arrest, stands to lose the $5,000 he was forced to post as bond after he was arrested last week under a little-used Nevada law against threatening a crime. Sheen had announced on national television that he planned to break the law at the test site, prompting the earlier arrest.

Sheen was warned by Nye County prosecutor Phil Dunleavy before the demonstration that he would have to forfeit the bond if he was arrested.

‘Pray for Peace’

“I’m not here to break the law, I’m here to pray for peace,” Sheen told Dunleavy. “I don’t do this for a living. I do this to stay alive.”

“We just don’t want you to break the law,” Dunleavy replied. “We believe you can make a statement without breaking the law.”

Less noticed than the celebrity arrestees were those like Margaret M. Waybur, a white-haired 69-year-old Sacramento woman active in the anti-nuclear organization “Grandmothers for Peace.”

She stepped over the line, having earlier announced that her fondest wish was that she could have done it on her 70th birthday, which falls on Feb. 13.

“I fail to see how I’m trespassing since I pay federal taxes,” she told a reporter. Earlier, she had circled the scene snapping pictures, including one of a sheriff’s deputy she tried to coax into a frown.

“Why should I?” the deputy answered, smiling. “You haven’t done anything to me.”

Ran the Gamut

The protesters ran the gamut from young to old--babies in their parents’ arms and elderly women hobbling with the aid of canes across the rocky desert soil. What drew them together was a single-minded determination to end the use of nuclear weapons.

Loralee Freilich, a 48-year-old public relations executive from Kansas City, Mo., endured 30 hours in a van with five others to reach the demonstration. It was her first such protest.

“I’m actually doing this for my kids,” said Freilich, the mother of a grown son and daughter. “I’ve thought about it for years. The people in the nuclear freeze movement--I respect them. I just felt it was time to come along.”

And there were also veteran activists like Cynthia Johnson of San Francisco, who on Thursday was arrested for trespassing for the second time. Last June, she took part in a similar, smaller protest in Nevada; trespassing charges against her were eventually dropped.

Protest the Protesters

“We fight cynicism so much,” she said. “I work very hard on this issue (a testing ban). I think it’s something that’s do-able.”

Overwhelmed in the crowd were four Nevadans who said they showed up to protest the protesters.

Carrying signs identifying themselves as “proud Nevada citizens sick of anti-nuke demonstrations,” they bickered with the protesters to no avail.

“We sit and watch and gripe and finally we decided not to just gripe,” said Jean Shockley, 60, who arrived with her husband, Bill, and two friends, intent on starting a countermovement.

She was not disturbed that the four were so visibly outnumbered.

“Adam and Eve were only two people,” she smiled, “and look what they started.”