Nuclear Protest Targets Consulate

In from the warmer reaches of the Cold War comes a generation of activists, drawn back together by an old cause with new life: the fight to contain or eliminate nuclear weapons.

Today, several dozen of the antinuclear campaign’s stalwarts are expected to plant the flag outside Los Angeles’ Pakistani Consulate. Their message: Just because the Berlin Wall came down and Soviet communism collapsed doesn’t mean the world is safe from nuclear devastation.

In fact, as events in recent weeks have proved, the nuclear danger continues to spread and worm its way into some of the world’s most tense conflicts, including the long rivalry between India and Pakistan.

The latest surge of concern has kindled the activism of an American and European antinuclear network that flourished in the 1980s and then largely faded from public view. In those days, the nuclear freeze was movement enough to launch Alan Cranston’s campaign for president, to draw thousands of British citizens to the borders of American air bases month after month and to dominate the political discourse of many college campuses.

For the most part, those days are over. Attention once riveted to the threat of annihilation drifted first to South African apartheid, then on to Yugoslavian civil war, American economic recovery and ultimately White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

But although some wavered and moved on, a few dedicated, earnest activists held the course. Today, they make a return engagement of sorts. The list of protest sponsors reads like an honor roll of the 1980s antinuclear left: Physicians for Social Responsibility, Peace Action, Alliance for Survival, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Southern California Federation of Scientists, L.A. No Nukes. Santa Monica’s Jerry Rubin, an old hand at peace marches, will be at this one too.

“We have a very small group of people who’ve kept this going,” said Jonathan Parfrey, executive director of the Los Angeles office of Physicians for Social Responsibility and one of the protest organizers. “But we’re still here. And we’re still at it.”

In fact, as news of the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests rocketed around the world, the old networks came to life. Once linked by phone and fax, groups in Europe and the United States this time rose to the challenge with e-mail, allowing the effort to move much more quickly.

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From Brussels came word of a planned protest, from Washington a call for a nuclear conference, from Egypt the notion of declaring the Middle East a “nuclear-free zone,” from India, Pakistan and Southern Asia, talk of a regional Catholic movement to protest the threat of war.

“I’m a bit dazed,” said Susan Broidy, coordinator of Abolition 2000, a group focused on trying to eliminate or at least substantially reduce nuclear weapons by the end of 2000. “It certainly has reawakened the peace movement all over the world.”

David Krieger, another longtime antinuclear activist and president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, said the underground blasts a half a world away had had some effect on the peace movement, but probably more effect on the rest of the public. For although he and his colleagues have spent years warning of the threat, much of the world turned away, especially with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The thinking, he and others said, was that once the superpower conflict abated, the abiding threat of nuclear war ended with it.

The past month has proved otherwise.

“We’ve kind of had cold water thrown at all of us,” he said. “We’ve been told that this is a problem that is not going to go away.”

And no less an old anti-nuke activist than Jonathan Schell, who has pounded the issue for decades, senses a rebirth in the movement.

In speeches and interviews last week, Schell called the Indian and Pakistani tests “a very discouraging development,” but added that “they hold the potential for arousing the missing piece in the puzzle . . . a large and powerful public movement.”

Where to channel that energy is the new question being pondered by the region’s antinuclear campaigners.

Schell will champion a series of town meetings in Vermont this summer as one forum for expressing public discontent about the arms race. A Catholic bishops conference in Philadelphia may also address the issue. Physicians for Social Responsibility in Los Angeles is alerting its 2,000 members. Abolition 2000 is using the latest tests to draw new attention to its efforts.

And then, there’s always the protest.

Today’s is set for noon in front of the Pakistani Consulate on Wilshire Boulevard. Organizers stress that the location is not meant to single out the Pakistanis for blame--they were, after all, Southern Asia’s second nation to explode a bomb last month, not its first.

Rather, Parfrey said, the demonstrators picked Pakistan because India doesn’t have a Los Angeles consulate. Since the protest needed a focus and was being planned here, Pakistan was the unlucky winner.

And so a movement tries to gather steam again.

“I think we just keep doing what we’ve been doing, trying to motivate the public to demand a change,” Krieger said. “Maybe now we have more of a platform to speak from.”