Freeze Gets the Cold Shoulder

In the House, the Administration's START policy prevails

The timing was both fitting and macabre. Last Thursday the U.S. detonated a nuclear bomb in the 20-to 150-kiloton class under the desert of Yucca Flat, Nev. The test blast was the eleventh this year, but it came on the eve of the 37th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and on the day the U.S. grass-roots nuclear-freeze movement faced its first real test of political strength.

The weapons test was a success; the freeze movement suffered a setback, though not by much. In a 204-to-202 vote, the House of Representatives endorsed an Administration-backed resolution that supports nuclear arms reduction in theory but shies away from backing a policy of freezing U.S. and U.S.S.R. arsenals at present levels, as proposed by the competing resolution of Wisconsin Democratic Congressman Clement Zablocki. While purely advisory in nature, the vote was regarded in Washington as a symbolic test of support for the President and his policies.

With that at stake, the Administration trotted into position its biggest guns. Eugene Rostow, director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, briefed Republicans in the House. Secretary of State George Shultz and National Security Adviser William Clark lobbied individual Congressmen, and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger trekked to the Hill to buttonhole members. From Switzerland, retired General Ed Rowny, chief U.S. negotiator at the recently begun Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) in Geneva, telephoned key Congressmen. And the President chipped in. In an address to the Knights of Columbus in Hartford, Conn., Reagan attacked an immediate freeze; on his return to Washington, he placed last-minute calls to try to persuade undecided members.

The Administration's argument was already well known, however: the Soviet Union has the edge in nuclear superiority and a freeze would favor the enemy. "If we freeze now," declared Representative Henry Hyde, Republican of Illinois, "it's like freezing with their hands at our throat." If the Zablocki resolution passes, warned New York Republican Jack Kemp, "you can just tell the negotiators in Geneva to pack their bags and come home."

The Administration's resolution, sponsored by Michigan Republican William Broomfield, supports the START negotiations and urges the US. and the Soviet Union to reach an agreement to freeze nuclear weapons at "equal and substantially reduced levels." But backers of the Zablocki resolution argued that Washington and Moscow are already roughly equal in nuclear arms and that a delay in freezing the arms race only increases the chance of nuclear war. Said New York Democratic Congressman Tom Downey of the Administration's approach: "That's a Hollywood freeze. It's not a real freeze."

The last word before the vote belonged to Speaker Tip O'Neill, who related how, as a young Congressman in 1953, he had witnessed two nuclear explosions on test sites in Nevada. But that personalized testimony seemed not to sway many votes. On the contrary, by week's end some supporters of an immediate freeze were blaming the narrow loss on the failure of the House Democratic leadership to endorse formally the Zablocki measure.

Undeterred, freeze advocates vowed to press on. The Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign says that it now plans to target individual Congressmen "for defeat in November." One of its targets could be obscure Pennsylvania Congressman Lawrence Coughlin, who switched his vote in a last-minute confusion and actually broke a 202-to-202 deadlock. Coughlin seemed unimpressed by his moment in the limelight. Said he: "What we pass in Congress [on this issue] doesn't mean an awful lot." But for the time being, at least, last week's vote was the end of the freeze movement's efforts in the House.

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