THE NUCLEAR DEBATE is now fully joined in the United States. The protest movement against the arms race has produced the Reagan administration’s response in the president’s Eureka College address. The Kennedy-Hatfield freeze resolution has produced the Jackson-Warner freeze proposal. The peace movement can already claim a victory; it has posed the nuclear issue for public debate in a fashion which cannot be ignored. Few observers believe that either the president’s proposals of last November or this May would have been forthcoming without the pressure of the peace movement. It is unlikely that either of the administration’s proposals will defuse the movement but both of them testify to its impact. The debate which is now at full tide has two distinct dimensions: there is a popular movement against the nuclear arms race and there is a policy debate alongside the popular movement.
The popular movement is exemplified in the Nuclear Freeze initiatives, the Ground Zero Week, The Peace Pentecost sponsored on Memorial Weekend and the spate of activities surrounding the U.N. Special Session on Disarmament. The popular movement has produced a “democratization” of the nuclear debate, engaging large numbers of people in a discussion previously confined to government circles and a few research institutes. The popular dimension of the nuclear debate is today a mass movement: it is large, broad-based, non-technical in its pronouncements and pluralistic in its objectives, programs, and methods; thus far it constitutes a fragile but effective alliance of diverse groups focused on reversing the nuclear arms race.
The significance of the popular movement lies in the pace of its mobilization, the character of its constituency, and the signal it sends to the political process. The speed with which the nuclear protest movement has arisen indicates a sea-change in public opinion. In the spring of 1981, it was impossible to find anything but isolated voices in either House of Congress to question the Reagan administration’s philosophy of the need to rearm in order to disarm. By the spring of 1982, challenging defense spending in the name of both budgetary frugality and security was a position most elected officials were willing to espouse. The change from 1981 to 1982 was not generated in Washington; it came from the popular movement of protest. Today the political leadership is seeking to catch up with public opinion on nuclear disarmament.
The power of the popular movement resides not only in its mass appeal but in some particular parts of its membership. It includes groups with a unique capacity to catalyze public opinion. The two most visible examples are religious leadership and medical doctors. Both carry a certain kind of authority and trust in the public mind; engaging that authority in a publicly visible fashion against the nuclear arms race is a major political event. It has already had its consequences. The symbolic significance, already evident, is the demonstration that a constituency exists in the American political process which is committed to reversing the arms race. Anyone familiar with efforts to pass SALT II or to move through the final steps of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty will recognize the value of a constituency for arms control and disarmament. Opponents of SALT and CTB have always been able to show opposition to both which seemed stronger than any public sentiment which arms-controllers could produce. The new popular movement has created a critical mass of public opinion which could have long-term political consequences.
The capacity for long-term impact may lie, however, with a strategy to link the popular movement to the policy debate now emerging on nuclear strategy. The policy debate has traditionally been an elite discussion, closed and consensual in character. It has involved a relatively few actors who accepted a set of well-defined premises. Administrations could change, political parties could come and go, but the fundamental ideas of U.S. nuclear strategy remained unchanged. Today, the consensual character of the policy debate is being threatened. The threat comes not from the popular movement but from within the policy community. It is best exemplified in the recent Foreign Affairs article co-authored by McGeorge Bundy, George F. Kennan, Robert S. McNamara and Gerard Smith. These four names epitomize the elite consensus on U.S. nuclear policy; they have shaped the policy, implemented it and defended it in negotiations with European allies and Soviet adversaries. In the Foreign Affairs article they call for consideration of a “No-first-use pledge” by the United States. This proposal as they note, is a challenge to NATO strategic doctrine of the last 33 years. This kind of proposal by these personalities opens a new stage in the policy debate; the challenge here is to fundamental principles not tactics. The consensual character of the policy debate is stretched to its limit by this proposal.
Presently the popular and the policy dimensions of the nuclear debate move on parallel tracks. The popular proposals arc so broad and general that most in the policy community keep their distance. The Foreign Affairs article proposes an increase in NATO conventional forces that many in the popular movement would not find appealing. This parallel relationship keeps the peace between the popular and policy communities, but it is not a long-term strategy. There is a need to probe the possibility of intersection, of the capacity for complementary action. Catholic moral teaching on warfare has always had a dual objective: to set the right terms for policy debate and to form the conscience of the public. Because we relate in this way to both dimensions of the nuclear debate, we should ask more insistently than we have thus far how the popular and policy proposals can be related to their common goal of reversing the arms race.
