Author Urges Anti-Nuclear Role for U.S.

The threat of a nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan may reignite a political movement to eliminate nuclear weapons from the globe, a leading author told a Pasadena church audience Sunday.

Jonathan Schell, who has written two books examining the origin and danger posed by nuclear arms, said the recent atomic weapons tests in South Asia come as a “sharp slap” that a nuclear threat cannot be ignored.

But Schell said the tests also create a historic opportunity in a post-Cold War world for the United States to lead an international campaign to reduce the arsenal of nuclear weapons--and one day eliminate it.

Schell urged an enthusiastic, standing-room-only crowd between Sunday services at All Saints Episcopal Church to get involved in a grass-roots movement to turn the world away from the threat of nuclear war.

“The United States is far and away the greatest conventional nuclear power in the world,” he said later in an interview. “We have the least of any nation to fear from getting rid of nuclear weapons and we have the most to gain.”

The New York-based writer said it is a fundamental mistake for anyone to believe that tensions between India and Pakistan are just a regional problem. “If it’s a regional matter, the region we have to consider is the whole world,” he said.

Schell said the potential for a nightmarish nuclear confrontation involving an area with more than 1 billion people represents “the greatest environmental threat of them all.”

And it demonstrates “the impotence of the great powers” to halt the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

However, rather than being dejected about the latest developments, Schell said he sees an opportunity to avoid “an unparalleled catastrophe.”

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War eliminated the ideological conflict that led the United States and the Soviet Union to build vast stockpiles of nuclear weapons. That arsenal led to a doctrine of nuclear deterrence based on the threat of “mutual assured destruction.”

For the first time since 1945, since the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ushered in the nuclear age, Schell said there now is a chance to engage in a serious effort at reducing and eliminating nuclear weapons.

“As long as we are content to hold on to nuclear weapons forever, we have severely limited power . . . to restrict others from having nuclear arsenals,” he said. “If we embrace the goal of abolition for ourselves, suddenly we become powerful and the whole international community becomes powerful in preventing others from obtaining them. So, paradoxically, the way to become powerful is to disarm.”

To those who say the abolition of nuclear arms would be not only foolhardy but a practical impossibility given international politics, Schell said the abolition of slavery in the United States once seemed an unreachable goal--and the fall of the Berlin Wall once seemed unthinkable.

In preparing his second book on the topic, “The Gift of Time,” Schell spent hours talking with Gen. Lee Butler, a former chief of the U.S. Strategic Air Command’s bombers. He said Butler now advocates the elimination of nuclear weapons, beginning with taking land and sea-based ballistic missiles off nuclear alert.

Schell said he is hopeful that the nuclear weapons tests in South Asia will give rise to a new movement that--like the nuclear freeze movement of the late 1970s--sees a moral imperative to the elimination of nuclear weapons.

“The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union has created . . . a situation in the world in which the leading objections to eliminating nuclear weapons have disappeared,” he asserted.

“Even before the Indian tests, you had the seeds of a popular movement. In Vermont and New England, this issue is going to be brought to town meetings,” and it will be before a summer gathering of Catholic bishops in Philadelphia, he said.

While the nuclear tests are “in themselves a very discouraging development,” Schell said, “they hold the potential for arousing the missing piece in the puzzle . . . a large and powerful public movement.”