
          Protest and Survive. Edited by E.P. Thompson and
Dan Smith, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981 $4.95.
          By Tullos, AllenAllen Tullos
          Vol. 4, No. 2, 1982, p. 4
          
          Protest and Survive is a powerful gift from European
Nuclear Disarmament (END) to the growing American movement. The book
originated as a reaction to "Protect and Survive." a take-cover
pamphlet prepared in 1980 by British civil defense. The U.S. version
contains historian E.P. Thompson's "A Letter to America," and 11 other
essays exploring the current arms race, nuclear war, military
bureaucracy and the prospects for peacemaking.
          The introduction by Daniel Ellsberg details the secret history of
U.S. nuclear threats against other governments since the 1945 bombing
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The instances include Korea, Berlin, Cuba,
Vietnam and Iran. "Every president," writes Ellsberg, "from Truman to
Reagan, with the possible exception of Ford, has felt compelled to
consider or direct serious preparations for possible imminent
U.S. initiation of tactical or strategic nuclear warfare, in the midst
of an ongoing, intense, non-nuclear conflict or crisis." Most
recently, the threats have appeared as public policy in the Carter
Doctrine endorsed by the present administration, which would start
World War III to protect Western oil interests in the Persian Gulf.
          Emma Rothschild opens her essay with the observation that "the
United States may buy itself two things with its $1 trillion defense
budget of 1981 to 1985. The first is an economic decline of the sort
that comes about once or twice in a century. The second is a nuclear
war." She examines the destructive costs of the American arms boom.
          A former U.S. War Department analyst, Henry T. Nash, writes about
his job with the Air Targets Division of the Air Force in the 1950s
and 60s. He tells of the secrecy and professional competition existing
in the bureaucratic preparation for mass homicide. Ambitious young
analysts select and justify targets in the Soviet Union appropriate
for receiving our nuclear warheads. If an analyst's proposed target is
selected for the official "Bombing Encyclopedia," he may merit
promotion and entree into even deadlier, more classified
information.
          Having left the Air Force project and become a teacher, Nash is now
visited by "haunting memories of his work." "What," he asks, "enabled
us calmly to plan to incinerate vast numbers of unknown human beings
without any sense of moral revulsion?" He describes some of the
"forces within the system that work against such self-examination."
          Amid insane circumstances worthy of all despair, the present
disarmament movement now stirs on an international
level. Protest and Survive is one sign that there is
still a chance to save ourselves from ourselves. That the chance is
genuine we can believe from the history of one of the nuclear threats
which Dan Ellsberg recounts. In November of 1969, Henry Kissinger
conveyed the warning to the Vietnamese at Hanoi "that Nixon would
escalate the war massively, including the possible use of nuclear
weapons, if they did not accept his terms." Hanoi didn't accept the
terms and Nixon didn't carry out his nuclear threat. Why not? As Nixon
himself records in his memoirs, there were already too many Americans
in the streets protesting the U.S. war policy.
          
            Allen Tullos is a native Alabamian who is now completing
his doctoral dissertation in history at Yale University.
          
        