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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