Rise of the Dynamite Radicals

Okay pigs, now listen and listen good. There's a bomb in the Army Math Research Center--the university--set to go off in five minutes. Clear the building. Warn the hospital. This is no bull--, man.

RADICAL bombers have become rather sophisticated with explosives in the past few months, but on this occasion their timer was off. At 3:42 a.m., less than two minutes after police in Madison, Wis., received the telephone warning, a blast tore through the University of Wisconsin's Sterling Hall, destroying the math center and parts of the school's physics and astronomy departments. In the wreckage were the center's computer, valued at about $500,000, the lifework of five physics professors and the doctoral research of 24 Ph.D. candidates. And because the warning came too late, Physicist Robert E. Fassnacht, 33, was killed, and four other men were injured.

Last week, on the eve of the fall college semester, there were other explosions. A fire bomb hurled through a window gutted the Burlington, Mass., police headquarters. In Seattle, a bomb exploded in an unoccupied building that until four months ago was the state headquarters for the American Legion. At Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, an employee called police in time for them to dismantle a timed fire bomb found in a kitchen. And in Tulsa, Okla., District Judge Frederick S. Nelson was seriously injured when a bomb wired to the ignition of his station wagon exploded.

Political Rationale. Tom Hayden, one of the founders of the Students for a Democratic Society, likes to tell sympathizers that "fear of violence must be overcome. It is part of change. Our violence over the last ten years is equal to striking a match, compared to one bomb from a B-52." But if some radicals are overcoming their reticence to blow things up, other Americans are growing both fearful and impatient with the new Bakuninism that is detonating across the country.

A small minority of radicals is increasingly communicating its politics in the most ancient idiom: violence. In a 15-month period ending last April, there were 4,330 bombings across the U.S. They killed at least 40 persons and injured 384. Right-wing extremists and racists account for some of the destruction. Personal grudges are also involved in many minor bombings. Only two persons have been killed in campus explosions, but the few political radicals who are "into violence" are now practicing it almost routinely--and with increasing expertise--as a necessary instrument of revolution.

After the Wisconsin bombing last week, Governor Warren Knowles angrily pronounced it "an insane act." Whether or not the bombing was clinically pathological, it did have a twisted political rationale. Officials at the math center maintain that they work only on "pure research" projects, nonclassified problems that may be of interest to industry as well as to the military. Although the Army this year allocated $1,200,000 for the center, the university says that most of its staff members are civilians.

The day after the explosion, leaflets entitled "Why the Bombing" appeared on buildings and billboards in Madison. Signed "Life Above the Trees," the leaf lets claimed that the center's "role is to solve military problems, to design triggers for others to pull. Their research has killed literally thousands of innocent people and has developed instruments for delivery of nuclear and chemical-biological bombs." The message pointed out that the bombers had chosen a time when the building was least likely to be occupied--early morning, between scholastic terms--and had phoned a warning to police. Furthermore, the radicals complained rather petulantly in their leaflet that they tried a year ago to persuade the university to close the center: "Then followed seven months of futile protest, ranging from nonviolent marches in November to rock-throwing attacks this May. By ignoring reasoned argument and negotiation, the university's managers provoked rebellion." Ironically, Fassnacht, who was working late on experiments with materials at low temperatures, was opposed to the Viet Nam War. "I'm sure he was sympathetic to many of the discontents here on campus," his father said last week.

Gang's Demands. In the ruins, Madison police, Army intelligence agents and FBI men found fragments of a Ford van that had been stolen from a university parking lot the week before. Police theorized that the bombers had loaded the van either with dynamite or plastic explosives and left it next to Sterling Hall.

A group called "the New Year's Gang" claimed responsibility for the bombing and promised more explosions unless its demands are met by October 30. Among them: removal of ROTC, the release of three Milwaukee Black Panthers charged with shooting a policeman and, bathetically, elimination of parietal hours for freshmen women.

However the bombers style themselves, some experts believe that the Weatherman faction of the splintered S.D.S. was involved in the Wisconsin bombing and has had a hand in most of the 150 major bomb and arson attacks in the U.S. in the past year. "It's going to get worse," Assistant FBI Director Charles Brennan predicted after the Madison explosion.

Last February, Weatherman Leader Mark Rudd ordered his troops to go underground to wage their own "Battle of Algiers" against military installations and police departments in the U.S. The campaign was violently interrupted last March when a cache of dynamite blew up in a Greenwich Village town house, killing three of the would-be saboteurs. The Weathermen devoted several months afterward to learning how to handle explosives properly.

How many radicals are now adept at such destruction is problematic, since almost anyone can learn the incendiary art by studying readily available military manuals. Explosives are easy to steal from construction sites, and many states, such as Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Indiana, have virtually no regulations governing the purchase of dynamite.

Sresham's Law. Nor has anyone taken a census of the Weathermen. Some authorities estimate that there were originally about 1,000. But many more student militants--possibly as many as 5,000--are willing to work with or shield the Weathermen. Experts claim that in 14 months, the Weathermen have thus built up an organization equal in size, though doubtless not in discipline, to the known membership of the Cosa Nostra, a group that was almost half a century in the making.

The vast majority of college students are repelled by violent tactics. But since the Weathermen have in the past been careful to commit crimes against property rather than people--blowing up buildings in the middle of the night, for example--many students have remained somewhat indifferent. The crucial question now is whether violent radicals have turned a corner and may cause more deaths in the future as they escalate their attacks. Should there be a score of deaths in an office building explosion, whatever public and student apathy now exists would abruptly end. Last week some angry Wisconsinites were threatening to come to the Madison campus as vigilantes to protect their children and their tax investments.

"There is a sort of a Gresham's Law in politics," observes Berkeley Psychologist Edward Opton Jr.: "Violent politics drives out nonviolent politics." The deepest fear of moderates and nonviolent leftists alike is that incendiary tactics, if they continue, will call down an era of bitter and genuine repression in which everyone's freedom will be sacrificed for the sake of necessary public order.

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