"Into the Street"

After four days of frenetic debate, the Bundestag voted to equip the West German army with nuclear weapons. But far from silencing the ban-the-bomb hoopla, the decision only stirred up a whole new series of eruptions.

Even before the final vote was taken, 1,000 workers walked out of the Henschel engineering plant to parade the streets in protest. A delegation from the Council of Protestant Churches called on Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in an effort to persuade him to change his stand. Later, 2,500 cheering partisans jammed into Frankfurt's Kongresshalle to hear Socialist Leader Erich Ollenhauer call for unrelenting opposition on a nationwide basis. "The Bundestag has decided!" he cried. "But it is not too late. We must act!"

In Hamburg the executive committee of the powerful Trade Union Federation met for seven hours in an emergency session. Though it refused to call for a general strike (as some had urged), it called upon its 6,000,000 members to stage demonstrations against nuclear arming, came out in favor of a plebiscite on the whole question. As 48,000 names were added to an antibomb petition circulating through twelve universities, 500 students from the Hamburg Engineering School marched silently through the Old City with placards saying "Remember Hiroshima!" Dock workers in Hamburg and auto workers in Brunswick went out on token strikes, and 936 Hamburg physicians solemnly warned that the people of West Germany had absolutely no defense against an atomic attack.

The government stood firm. Any attempt "to carry parliamentary controversies into the street," warned Bundestag President Eugen Gerstenmaier, "must be opposed in the interest of order in a constitutional state." As the U.S. Army almost casually announced that it already had guided antiaircraft missiles all over the country--in addition to scores of 600-mile Matadors that can be armed with either conventional or atomic warheads--Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss went ahead with his plans to buy 24 U.S. Matador missiles for his own army.

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