The Freeze Is Still Hot

Old resolutions never die, they just get amended

When House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Clement Zablocki of Wisconsin asked for a vote, all but one of his Democrats and even four committee Republicans said aye to this year's resolution to cap U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals at current levels. Last week's 27-to-9 vote endorsed a "mutual, verifiable freeze on testing, production and further deployment" of nuclear weapons. Passage this week by the full House seems likely.

A victory there would be somewhat deceptive, however, since the resolution is not the same one defeated by House and Senate last summer. In order to attract more votes, the sponsors amended the bill to call for negotiated arms reductions as well as a freeze. Still, Congressman Edward Markey insists that the pristine freeze has not been turned to slush. The new language is a matter of "semantics," says the Massachusetts Democrat. "It's just fiddling. It's not significant." In fact, the loosely worded compromise is a measure of how entirely symbolic the idea of a nuclear "freeze" has become.

Even so, symbols are politically important. "Last year," said Markey, "Reagan thought this was just a quiche-and-Chablis movement that would blow away over the summer. Well, it hasn't." Agrees a White House tactician: "The freeze movement is one of the best-organized grass-roots movements I've seen. It's not a bunch of crazy kids." Even so, Markey concedes, "we don't see the President changing his mind [on arms control] tomorrow."

Probably not tomorrow, certainly not today. In a speech just three hours after the House committee voted, Reagan said, "A freeze now would be a very dangerous fraud," creating "merely the illusion of peace." He and other opponents of an immediate freeze argue that it is a simplistic, unworkable prescription that could hobble U.S. arms negotiators in Geneva. They claim, too, that it would perpetuate the Soviet nuclear advantage that they believe exists. Reagan, who would surely veto any freeze measure Congress passed, had never so bitterly denounced the popular movement. "If you're going to hit hard, now is the time to do it," explained a presidential adviser.

In any event, the Republican-controlled Senate is almost certain to defeat its version of the resolution early this summer. Within a few weeks, however, a vote is due there on Kenneth Adelman's nomination to be Reagan's new director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Freeze advocates are trying to turn that into a test vote on arms control. "[Defeating] Adelman," says Massachusetts Democrat Paul Tsongas, "will be the Senate's equivalent of a freeze."

Organizers of the freeze movement are trying to solidify gains made in 1982.

Last November about a third of the U.S. electorate had a chance to vote on nuclear freeze referendums, and approval was overwhelming: in all, more than 500 , towns, several dozen cities and nine states have adopted such resolutions. Grassroots activity is proceeding apace, with plans for a mass rally this August in Washington, D.C.--although organizers have no hopes of topping last June's spectacle of 750,000 antinuclear demonstrators in New York City's Central Park. Outside the Capitol last week, a crowd of about 4,000 resolution supporters gathered to hear exhortations to keep lobbying for the freeze. On the other side of the Capitol were a tenth as many people at an anti-freeze demonstration, pulled together by Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and other conservative groups.

The call for a freeze, simple and sensible sounding, has been effective as a focus for fears about nuclear war and as a vehicle for legislative action. Yet the very simplicity of the freeze idea--stop building bombs now--makes it inadequate to the technical and diplomatic rigors of arms control. Some in the movement will even admit that their real goal, now that arms talks are under way in Geneva, is not so much a freeze as it is keeping pressure on an Administration that seems reluctant to give any ground at the negotiating table. In that sense, the freeze campaign may be benign, even laudable, but only so long as it never gets what it says it wants. - This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.