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Aucbvax.1801 fa.arms-d utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!MARCUS@USC-ISIF Wed Jun 17 11:51:08 1981 Council for a livable world >From Council for a Livable World, bulletin, June 1981:

If you visit the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library at Columbia Point in South Boston, you will see a film about the partial nuclear test ban, the most successful treaty ever negotiated between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. This treaty, signed and ratified in 1963, banned nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water. Kennedy was president at the time. Remarkably, this agreement came into force less than one year after the superpowers confronted each other in the Cuban missile crisis which almost ended in nuclear war. The treaty is still in full force. The film shows a scene in early 1963. John Kennedy looks silently out of the window of the oval office. It is raining. A voice is heard, the voice of Jerome Wiesner recalling the event. Wiesner was science adviser to the president. He is now the retired president of MIT. Wiesner tells his story: "I remember one day when he asked me what happens to the radioactive fallout, and I told him it was washed out of the clouds by the rain. And he said, looking out of the window, 'You mean it's in the rain out there?' And I said, 'Yes'. He looked out the window, very sad, and didn't say a word for several minutes." What was John Kennedy thinking? Of his children Caroline and John? Of his own lost childhood? Of his mortality? President Kennedy could have found experts on both sides of this question. The dangers to human health of fallout were minimized if not denied by many in those days. Were we fortunate that Wiesner was there? Or did the President make the decision out of his own visceral reaction? The late Justice William O. Douglas wrote in his autobiography that at the very start of his career on the Supreme Court, Charles Evans Hughes, then Chief Justice, told him "You must remember one thing. At the constitutional level where we work, ninety percent of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections." You don't have to be an expert to have your say on public policy. You can go with whatever level of information you have. For too long, the American people, the Russian people, and indeed all the peoples of this earth have been intimidated by the military technocrats on nuclear weapons policies. These fateful questions have been monopolized by the strategists and designers of military hardware. They have created their own language and developed their lunatic scenarios of such complexity that the mere citizen feels excluded from the debate. We cannot allow this situation to continue. The basic issues of catastrophe and survival are well withing the capacities of the average citizen and are generally understood. The technical details of the awful weapons are not the keys to basic policy. Like President Kennedy, we must restore our gut reactions to a place of honor. We must not suppress our instinctive revulsion and moral outrage to these games of death. We must prevent the technocrats from playing with our survival. -------

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