The Weekend That Was

By Frederick Painton

A peace movement peacefully masses against missiles

All week long, warmup rallies rolled across West Germany with a precision that seemed incongruous for protesters so long nourished on spontaneous outbursts. The hottest week of the long-awaited, carefully organized hot autumn of antimissile protest began on a decorous enough note. On Sunday, hundreds of Protestant and Roman Catholic churches devoted services to the cause of peace and the evil of nuclear weapons, particularly the 108 U.S.-made Pershing II and 464 cruise missiles scheduled to be deployed in Western Europe. Later in the week feminists and women pacifists, many of them in mourning clothes, marched through half a dozen West German towns. Across the country, peace activists presented concerts, pantomimes, films and debates.

All this was a prelude to a weekend of climactic demonstrations. On Saturday some 700,000 West Germans massed in four cities--Bonn, Hamburg, Stuttgart and West Berlin--in an act of dissent they hoped would mark a turning point in their nation's history. On that same day in London, upwards of 200,000 Britons marched through the streets to a rally in Hyde Park. In Vienna, Stockholm, Rome, Paris, Dublin, Helsinki, Brussels and Madrid, as well as in dozens of towns and cities throughout the U.S. and Canada, the worldwide peace movement stretched its legs and shouted its challenges. But the major offensive was in West Germany, which will receive roughly one-fifth of the cruise missiles and all of the Pershing Us. There the postwar political consensus on defense and foreign policy is undergoing deep questioning.

Saturday's extravaganza was intended as a challenge to Chancellor Helmut Kohl's government. Many questioned the continued usefulness of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the wisdom of its strategy for defending Western Europe. No one believed that U.S. and Soviet negotiators would reach an agreement at the Geneva arms talks in time to avert the missiles' arrival (though West German opposition Disarmament Spokesman Egon Bahr last week recommended acceptance of a Soviet position in the talks). Nor did most protesters seriously think that by penetrating U.S. military bases they could block deployment physically. What they sought instead was a display large enough to demonstrate that despite the ambiguity of opinion polls, most West Germans oppose new nuclear weapons on their soil.

Authorities vowed to keep the rallies under strict but peaceful control. As things turned out, the spectacle was impressive, though the total turnout was considerably smaller than the organizers had expected. Both police and protesters acted with restraint, and the whole affair at times took on the air of a nationwide picnic. In Bonn, the nation's capital and the main location of the weekend's activity, some 350,000 people streamed through the streets holding banners and here and there bobbing papier-mache caricatures of President Ronald Reagan. Armbanded marshals kept the river of humanity flowing easily past empty ministries and shuttered foreign embassies. Following meticulous plans, thousands of marchers slowly formed a human star, several miles around, whose points linked the embassies of the world's nuclear powers: the U.S., Britain, France, Israel, the People's Republic of China, South Africa, India and the Soviet Union. The protesters chanted "Hop, hop, hop, Atomraketen stop" and other anti-deployment slogans. Outside the Soviet embassy overlooking nearby Bad Godesberg, hooded men in Ku Klux Klan robes hauled a float carrying six models of silver Pershing II missiles, as four white-faced death figures walked behind. Above a crowd of protesters at the British embassy bobbed U.S. flags on which the red stripes were depicted as missiles and the stars as skulls. Shortly before noon, the demonstrators paused for five minutes of silence.

Once this dramatic gesture was completed, tens of thousands began streaming into the sprawling Hofgarten Park in the heart of Bonn for an afternoon of antimissile rhetoric. The main attraction was former Chancellor Willy Brandt, chairman of the Social Democrats. Brandt told the cheering mass of his countrymen: "In Germany and in Europe, we need not more medium rockets but fewer ones. So we say no to more nuclear missiles." Certain powerful people, he continued, "have got it into their thick heads that deployment of Pershing Us is more important than reducing SS-20s."

In southern Germany another 200,000 protesters were arriving by bus, train, car, bicycle and foot. There too a human chain was formed. This one connected Stuttgart's U.S. Military Command Headquarters with Wiley Barracks in Neu-Ulm some 65 miles away, where peace movement leaders believe that the first of the Pershing IIs will be deployed. In Hamburg, an estimated 100,000 West Germans stood in the city center to observe the requisite five minutes of silence before dispersing for an afternoon of speeches. Here too the demonstration was smaller than expected. A plan for blockading the River Elbe with small boats was abandoned because not enough craft showed up. In West Berlin, only 10,000 attended a demonstration in front of the city hall. But that ceremony would have been more impressive if thousands of West Berliners had not decided to join the far larger demonstrations in Bonn.

The calculated crescendo of peace rallies took off during a week in which the Soviet Union chose to brandish the stick instead of the carrot at the Western allies. In an interview with the West German magazine Stern, Colonel General Nikolai Chervov, a member of the Soviet general staff, publicly acknowledged what Western intelligence sources had long known: Soviet forces in Eastern Europe already are armed with short-range nuclear weapons capable of striking up to 70 miles. On the diplomatic front, after a visit by Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko to East Berlin, the Soviets and the East Germans warned that relations between the two Germanys would suffer "serious damage" once the NATO missiles were installed. Against this chill blast, Reagan sent the protesters a message that fell mainly on deaf ears. Said he: "It is not the U.S. and NATO which threaten peace. We have no intermediate-range missiles in Europe and we're willing to forgo them entirely."

But time is running out. Forty-one missiles are scheduled to be installed by the end of the year. They include nine Pershing Us destined for West Germany, 16 cruise missiles for Britain and 16 for Italy. (The rest are to be delivered over the next four years.) The initial 41 missiles have become the focus of a furor essentially because they are the first U.S-controlled nuclear missiles on European soil since the early 1960s that are capable of reaching the Soviet Union. As such, they have become symbols for larger questions raised by the peace movement.

The missile controversy is the symptom of a revival of patriotism, and to some extent nationalism, among West European leftists, who are increasingly resentful of U.S. leadership of the alliance. That feeling has led to a widespread but mistaken belief that the U.S. is trying to force the new missiles upon recalcitrant Europeans. In fact, the idea was first advanced by former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who in 1977 sought to persuade a reluctant Carter Administration of the need to counter the Soviet nuclear missile threat in Western Europe. Although his Social Democratic Party lost the elections last March, in part because of the missile issue, Schmidt remains convinced of that need. "I have nothing to regret or alter," he told TIME last week. "I was the one who first stood up to the whole problem of the [Soviet] SS-20."

In its campaign against the Pershing II and cruise missiles, the peace movement uses a variety of arguments, some of them matters of legitimate debate, but some deeply flawed. Protesters charge, for instance, that Pershing IIs leave the Soviets vulnerable to a surprise, first-strike attack. Yet even if all 108 single-warhead Pershing IIs are deployed, they face 243 SS-20s with triple warheads in the European part of the U.S.S.R. Such a first strike on the part of NATO would make military sense only if it could wipe out Soviet retaliatory power completely, an impossible task even for U.S.-based intercontinental missiles. Nor has the peace movement accepted the fact that it was deployment of the SS-20s that upset the missile balance in Western Europe.

That puts the movement at apparent odds with much of the general public. According to a poll commissioned by TIME and conducted by SCOPE, a Lucerne-based market research firm, most West Europe ans have closed ranks with their govern ments on the missile issue. Indeed, most people li ving in countries where missiles will be stationed approve of NATO'S dual-track strategy (see chart). West Europeans clearly perceive a serious military threat, not so much from the tough-talking Reagan Administration but from the Soviet SS-20s. The consensus over deployment, how ever, is both precarious and volatile. Public attitudes toward nuclear weapons in general are increasingly ambivalent, as is public confidence over the future of NATO.

Most activists in the peace movement tend to see their struggle as a campaign more against the U.S. than against NATO, and only remotely against the nuclear policies of the Soviet Union. In the words of one organizer, "That is because we can't influence the Soviet Union, but we can influence decisions here." In the long run, the movement probably will have an impact. A decade ago, nuclear strategy could be carried out by a small priest hood of strategic theologians who made their decisions in blissful solitude. No longer. As last weekend's demonstrations showed, the peace movement may be overly emotional and at times ill-informed, but it has given many West Europeans the notion that they have a right to shape those decisions and a belief that they know enough about the issues to make their views relevant. Long after the autumn of protest has turned to the winter of deployment, that notion is likely to endure.

--By Frederick Painton. Reported by Gary Lee/Bonn and William Rademaekers/ Brussels, with other bureaus

With reporting by Gary Lee; William Rademaekers This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.