REVIEWS

The real ‘Amerika’
story is revealed

TO WIN A NUCLEAR WAR:
The Pentagon’s Secret War
Plans. By Michio Kaku and
Daniel Axelrod. With fore-
word by Ramsey Clark. Availa-
ble at the People’s Co-op
Bookstore.

To Win a Nuclear War: The
Pentagon’s Secret War Plans, a
history of U.S. nuclear politics
from Truman to Reagan, is
based on recently declassified
top secret documents obtained
through the Freedom of Infor-
mation Act.

The book traces how USS.
policy makers in more than a

“dozen episodes — including the
Korean and Vietnam wars, the
crises in Quemoy and Matsu,
Berlin, Cuba, the Middle East,
and so on — have threatened
to initiate nuclear attacks. These
documents show in startling
detail that, in contrast to official

statements concerning mutual
deterrence, the Pentagon has
drafted plans — from opera-
tions Broiler, Sizzler and Vul-
ture to SIOP-6 — that have
always aimed to win a nuclear
war.

And while ABC-TV can only
fantasize sick melodramas about
the USSR occupying the US.,
authors Michio Kaku, a profes-
sor of nuclear physics at City
Univerity of New York, and
Daniel Axelrod, a physics pro-
fessor at Ann Arbor, bring to
light the U.S. plan to attack and
occupy the Soviet Union —
Operation Bushwacker.

This history of nuclear stra-
tegy and weapons systems, and
of the men from the Council on
Foreign Relations and_ the
Committee on the Present
Danger who have developed
these strategies, provides a
glimpse of the real history of the

post-war era. The book also
places the Star Wars program in
the context of U.S. first-strike
policy, uncovering its deeper,
hidden meaning.

In his foreward, Ramsey
Clark, former U.S. attorney
general, wrote that the book
“records as fully as we are likely
to find what has gone on in the
minds of American leaders and
nuclear strategists on this awe-
some subject during these fate-
ful 40 years. It is an appalling
story ... (that) compels us to
re-think and re-write the history
of the Cold War and the arms
race.”

The Disarm Education Fund
says To Win a Nuclear War is
one of the most important
books on nuclear issues and is
planning a major campaign
around the unformation it pro-
vides.

— People’s Daily World

U.S. artist-activists ‘stir

WASHINGTON — Ed Asner,
a short, stocky, straight-talking
actor, must be giving Ronald
Reagan nightmares. In the cause
of peace and justice, Asner and
other Hollywood actors and sin-
gers are out-communicating the
Great Communicator.

While Reagan uses his Holly-
wood skill to spread the lie that all
is well in the U.S., just like the
Hollywood potboilers he starred
in, Asner and fellow actor Martin
Sheen represent artists of a dia-
metrically opposite viewpoint.
They stir the conscience, demand
that we confront unpleasant reali-
ties, and take action to change
them.

Asner and Sheen, both fiery
speakers, visited Washington re-
cently. Asner, former president of
the Screen Actors Guild, spoke at
a news conference of the April 25
Mobilization for Justice and
Peace in Central America and
Southern Africa, coming directly
from a Detroit rally where he had
urged 6,000 peace protestors to
ride buses to Washington for
April 25.

While in Washington, Asner
received a public service award
from the AFL-CIO Building and
Construction Trades Department.
“I was delighted to be honored by
the AFL-CIO,” he told the Peo-
ple’s Daily World. “I hope it’s an
indication of the turnout we’re
going to get from organized labor
April 25.”

Political activism among per-
formers, he said, “‘comes in cycles

ED ASNER AT HALIFAX PRESS CONFERENCE ...

actors

mobilizing against Reagan's foreign policies.

and we’re now in an up cycle. But
whether you’re talking about
actors or the labor movement or
both we have the same problems:
heel dragging, acceptance of offi-
cial diktat as truth.

“These are the very things we
have to change. He who accepts
evil without protesting it is really

co-operating with it. We’re here
to send a message of opposition

to Ronald Reagan and his admin- -

istration.”

Asner does not accept evil
with-out protest. His militant
opposition to Reagan’s war on El
Salvador caused Kimberley-Clark,
owner of a toilet paper plant in El

fhe conscience’

Salvador, to cancel its sponsor-
ship of the Lou Grant program,
forcing termination of the award
winning TV series Asner starred
in for many years.

Sheen came to Washington
last month tospend a frigid night
sleeping on a heating grate to
demand that Congress enact a
$725 million bill to provide shel-
ter for the homeless. He has been
campaigning on behalf of: the
homeless since he portrayed a
homeless activist in the Mitch
Snyder Story, a TV movie.

Sheen came here directly from
the Nevada test site, where he
was arrested in a protest against
nuclear weapons testing. He
called upon onlookers at the
Grate Sleep In “to join us as
guests of the homeless, to spend
just one night finding out how
they live every night.”

Later, as he prepared to bed
down on a heating grate near the
Library of Congress, Sheen told
me, “I’m concerned about all
issues of social justice. It is all
interconnected. Here we are fight-
ing for a bill that provides $725
million to shelter the homeless
and we are told it is too much. Yet
every day we spend $200 million
on the military budget. How can
we separate these issues?”

Sheen decried Reagan’s res-
umption of nuclear testing and
hailed Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev’s peace proposals.
“Gorbachev’s offer last week is
the most hopeful sign yet,” Sheen
said. “I don’t see how Reagan can

refuse it. I hope and pray we get
an arms conrol agreement ...
We're talking here about human
survival.”

Singer Stevie Wonder may
have launched this new wave of
activism among performing artists.
For several years he summoned
the people to demonstrate in
Washington on Martin Luther
King, Jr.’s birthday. A demon-
stration on March 15, 1981, less
than a week before Reagan’s first
inauguration, drew 30,000 people
and was the first mass demon-
stration against Reaganism.

Wonder ended the rally with
his haunting “Happy Birthday,
Martin.” That mass_ struggle
culminated in passage of the King
National Holiday bill. Similarly,
singer Harry Belafonte and actors
Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee
played important roles in the
fight for passage of a law curbing
corporate investments in South
Africa.

Singers Bruce Springsteen and
Willie Nelson staged concerts in
solidarty with jobless steelworkers
and farmers who are threatened
by bankruptcy. Actresses Joanne
Woodward, Sissy Spacek and
Jane Fonda staged a women’s
conference here against Reagan’s
nuclear buildup and to demand a
“meaningful summit” between
Reagan and Gorbachev.

Something new is blowing in
the wind in the world of the per-
forming arts.

— Tim Wheeler
People’s Daily World

10 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, MAY 6, 1987

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