daily nebraskan
; page 5
Wednesday, february 20, 1980
Frosty atmosphere
War rhetoric chilled with ironies
BOSTON-This has been a week when Cold War
rhetoric chilled our campuses and our kitchens. By now,
the atmosphere is frosted with ironies.
We have seen that the most pro-military of our public
speakers are the least likely to want women drafted. We
have heard Ronald Reagan brag over the airwaves that he
was in favor of arms-racing "before it was popular.' We
have witnessed Phyllis Schlafly, that undauntable hawk,,
cooing like a dove over women. -
When news came over the wire that President Carter
proposed to register women, Schlafly accused him of
"stabbing American womanhood in the back." Well, the
history of Schlafly as Dove is a brief one. Anyone inter
ested should wade through years of her breathtaking pro
military commentary. "
Once, in a single sentence, she called on the govern
ment to "go ahead on the B-l bomber, assure the continu
ed production of Minuteman 3 missiles, remove the
artificial limits on the range of our cruise missiles and start
production of mobile missiles."
Her sudden efforts to keep women at home on ground
zero do not make me feel safe or sound.
At the same time, Afghanistan seems less and less like a
. flawless victim. If the latest reports are accurate, its
rebellion began when the government tried to enforce wo
men's rights. That was the worst in a series of changes
dealt from above.
The government issued ordinances allowing women to
marry whomever they wanted and then instructions invit
ing women to marry whomever they wanted and then in
structions inviting women to meetings. It was this last
straw that apparently promoted rebellion.
The Russians were not liberators, Lord knows. They
weie invaders and wrong. There is an ancient argument
against even those tyrants who impose "progress."
. Nevertheless, there is some irony in thinking that our
own young women could be drafted and sent to defend
the rights of Afghan men to deny the rights of Afghan wo
men. My own attitude toward registration for a draft
remains the same. If we need to register, I can see no
justification for a male-only list. But the word "if blinks
in neon at the very front of my brain.
I just don't think the timing of the situation is right for
a draft. I don't think we should register our young people
as a way for Carter to register his opinion.
I am told that attitudes about the draft depend on
whether our reference point is World War II or Vietnam,
the "good war" or the "bad war." Buy my reference point
increasingly is nuclear war.
There is a similar and subtle shift in many attitudes this
week. The , public joy in the fact that we are not just
standing there but Doing Something has been replaced by
nervousness at just what it is we are doing.
People who were comforted by the notion that Carter
was at least not militaristic are shaken in that security. He
is too comfortably wrapped away from campaigning and
criticism in that mantle of crisis. George Bush's fuzzy
reputation as a "moderate" is riddled by his rather casual
reference to the "survivability" of a nuclear war.
Perhaps he thinks his fitness grants him immunity.
Last weekend, in the midst of all this anxiety, doctors
and scientists came to a symposium at Harvard to talk
about the unthinkable: "The Medical Consequences of
Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear War." They read from John
Hersey's "Hiroshima" and from a detailed report on what
would happen in the event of a nuclear bomb. As Nikita
Khrushchev once said, "the living would envy the dead."
Dr. Robert Jay Lifton of Yale put it in this way: "In a
nuclear war there are no winners or losers. It's not like
conventional war .where armies fight, one side wins, the
other loses and everybody , goes home. Nuclear war is a
mutual unleashing of gendcidal forces . . . ."
War, said Dr. Howard Hiatt, dean of the Harvard
School of Public Health, must be dealt with as an unbeat
able epidemic for which there is only one approach-"that
of prevention."
In this new and frigid atmosphere, that is still the only
reality.
(c) 1980, The Boston Globe Newspaper Company
The Washington Post Writers Group
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