Global Issues
Chernobyl's radioactive cloud had not yet reached the shores of the Pacific when official U.S. government pronouncements began assuring citizens that there was no danger to the public health. The same message had already been delivered by governments of other countries to their citizens as the radioactive cloud passed overhead.
Socialist and capitalist countries alike could agree that the radioactive release was safe for everyone living outside the immediate area of the Chernobyl plant. Radiation levels increased by more than 500 percent in some areas hundreds of miles away from the accident, but citizens were still assured this was safe. And in what can only be viewed as political double talk, some governments actually told their citizens the air was perfectly safe to breathe, while the fruit and vegetables in the same places might be unsafe to eat.
The Chernobyl reactor meltdown was predictable. The location and time were unknown, of course, but a nuclear disaster of this magnitude was bound to happen once, and unfortunately, it's bound to happen again.
The response of governments throughout the world has also been predictable. Hasty assurances of public safety were followed with detailed explanations of why a nuclear power disaster could not occur in their countries. And most predictable of all was the nearly unanimous silence about the victims of this accident.
The city was still blanketed in early-morning drowsiness. The sun, an orange glint on the eastern horizon, shone through broad-leafed trees. A stooped man in a gray uniform swept discarded candy wrappers and crushed soda cans into a container.
I imagined it was like the start of every other day on Capitol Hill, though I wasn't sure. I had never been there before at dawn.
Some of our small group had spent all night on the east steps of the Capitol. Others arrived at various hours throughout the night to take part in a round-the-clock vigil during the days preceding the second contra aid vote in the House of Representatives.
There was less attention than usual paid to a group of Christians praying for the people of Nicaragua and lifting up the names of the victims of the contra war. As the president had hoped, America's attention was focused elsewhere. It was April 15—the day after the U.S. air strike on Libya.
We were told that the attack was intended to put an end to terrorism. But even the president himself seemed not to believe his words. During the night huge dump trucks were parked across the entrance roads to the Capitol. The orange and white trucks dotted our view and stood as a last line of defense against potential retaliatory suicide-bombing missions on the Capitol by angry Libyans. As the usual flood of tour buses began to enter the Capitol plaza, German shepherds were guided out of police wagons bearing the K-9 insignia and set loose to sniff at luggage compartments for bombs.
Ruth Nettles put down her knitting to listen to a young Salvadoran refugee who said he had fled his home in El Salvador in 1981 at the age of 16 after four family members had been shot to death. He had come to the United States hoping to find a life free from terror and fear. Instead, he was testifying as a government witness in the trial of the very people who had helped him.
"I ran out of the courtroom and went to the bathroom and just cried," Ruth says of the experience.
It was such compassion and heartfelt emotion that brought Ruth, 60, and her 63-year-old husband, Kenneth, to the sanctuary trial, and kept them there. Last December, while passing through Tucson on a vacation from their Florida home--pulling their Airstream trailer behind a white Suburban--they stopped in the federal courthouse to see a bit of the sanctuary trial they had heard so much about. After their second morning in the courtroom, they decided to put their vacation on hold and stay until the end of the trial.
Kenneth Nettles is a Southern Baptist preacher who retired from the Air Force with the rank of major after 20 years as a chaplain. His tour of duty as the chaplain for a bomb squad and at an evacuation hospital, where he saw the mutilated bodies of young men, made Nettles begin to question the role of his government. Years later he began to read about Central America and U.S. involvement there. He had seen it all before. "I felt that if the U.S. persisted, it would be another Vietnam debacle."
On April 14 the United I States finally "did something" about terrorism by unleashing a massive bombing raid against Libya.
This spring more than 200 U.S. religious leaders finally told the truth about Nicaragua.
The importance of a comprehensive nuclear test ban as a first step toward ending the arms race does not end with the Soviet moratorium.
Ronald Reagan's space weapons plan is unlikely to ever block a nuclear warhead in the heavens, but it may prove to be an effective shield against any possibility of an arms agreement here on earth.