Books, Arts & Manners: Nuclear Co-options

An evening with William Sloane Coffin and Jonathan Schell is somewhat like an evening in the ozone hole. I’d rather listen to crematorium music. The experience, nonetheless, can be instructive. Coffin and Schell, after all, head America’s disarmament lobby. Schell got famous by doing for nuclear winter what Charles Dawson did for Piltdown man. Coffin, president of the newly merged sane/ freeze, has been making “five or six” speeches a day across America. He will “barnstorm” Europe and Russia as well. With his styptic, puff-adderish attack, Coffin has refurbished the peace movement (moribund recently, according to Schell), and given it some kind of vox pop charisma. Any Coffin Schell scenario for disarmament and world peace is so utopian, so absurd that—if you didn’t know better—you might think their brain stuff had become solid cubic zirconia. But Coffin Schell have an ulterior motive: they intend to impair American power and resolve. And they mean to do that by co-opting conservative ideas.

Reagan Co-opted. Gorbachev did that first and brilliantly. His see-your nothing-and-double-it response to Reagan’s zero-option challenge was blackbelt psychological karate. (Zero option, Schell and Coffin contend, originated with a Dutch peace-movement proposal. Reagan was trying to co-opt the Dutch.) Though Schell and, particularly, Coffin parboil Reagan for Iranscam and Reaganomics, they are protective toward INF and his courtship of Gorbachev. Reagan, Schell will insist, “is an avowed abolitionist in his fashion. And Gorbachev, too. We should take them at their word.” (Of Gorbachev, Coffin said: Russian “reformers come rarely and rarely last long. It behooves us to . . . sign as many arms-reduction treaties as we can in the coming months.” This logic is specious and scary, of course. If Gorbachev has such a short life span, who will honor all that contractual commitment?) But Schell and Coffin are most dependent on Reagan. Only a conservative President can move with flank speed toward disarmament. By “coming months” they mean whatever is left of this lame-duck Administration.

DK

About the Author

D. Keith Mano

D. Keith Mano was a TV screenwriter and author of ten books, including Take 5, recipient of the 1987 Literary Lion award, and columnist at National Review magazine for 17 years.

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An evening with William Sloane Coffin and Jonathan Schell is somewhat like an evening in the ozone hole. I’d rather listen to crematorium music. The experience, nonetheless, can be instructive. Coffin and Schell, after all, head America’s disarmament lobby. Schell got famous by doing for nuclear winter what Charles Dawson did for Piltdown man. Coffin, president of the newly merged sane/ freeze, has been making “five or six” speeches a day across America. He will “barnstorm” Europe and Russia as well. With his styptic, puff-adderish attack, Coffin has refurbished the peace movement (moribund recently, according to Schell), and given it some kind of vox pop charisma. Any Coffin Schell scenario for disarmament and world peace is so utopian, so absurd that—if you didn’t know better—you might think their brain stuff had become solid cubic zirconia. But Coffin Schell have an ulterior motive: they intend to impair American power and resolve. And they mean to do that by co-opting conservative ideas.

Reagan Co-opted. Gorbachev did that first and brilliantly. His see-your nothing-and-double-it response to Reagan’s zero-option challenge was blackbelt psychological karate. (Zero option, Schell and Coffin contend, originated with a Dutch peace-movement proposal. Reagan was trying to co-opt the Dutch.) Though Schell and, particularly, Coffin parboil Reagan for Iranscam and Reaganomics, they are protective toward INF and his courtship of Gorbachev. Reagan, Schell will insist, “is an avowed abolitionist in his fashion. And Gorbachev, too. We should take them at their word.” (Of Gorbachev, Coffin said: Russian “reformers come rarely and rarely last long. It behooves us to . . . sign as many arms-reduction treaties as we can in the coming months.” This logic is specious and scary, of course. If Gorbachev has such a short life span, who will honor all that contractual commitment?) But Schell and Coffin are most dependent on Reagan. Only a conservative President can move with flank speed toward disarmament. By “coming months” they mean whatever is left of this lame-duck Administration.

DK

About the Author

D. Keith Mano

D. Keith Mano was a TV screenwriter and author of ten books, including Take 5, recipient of the 1987 Literary Lion award, and columnist at National Review magazine for 17 years.