Nuclear Consciousness Raising

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Ground Zero Week features a flurry of speeches and happenings

Why was a 5-ft.-long mock-up of a bomb propped up in Tucson's El Presidio Park? Why was there a standing-room-only crowd at a Palm Beach, Fla., high school auditorium for a movie about nuclear-blast casualties? And why, in the middle of Iowa, did 200 residents of Pella (pop. 6,700) gather in the town square to listen to a talk about World War III?

These and hundreds of other improbable events, along with scores of more predictable demonstrations in places like Palo Alto, Calif., and Boston, were part of the largest collective outpouring to date of ordinary Americans' worries about the prospect of nuclear conflict. Ground Zero Week, a seven-day marathon of films and sober teach-ins, performances and lectures, was designed to illuminate issues of nuclear strategy and, more pointedly, the ultimate horror of nu clear war. It was conceived and led by Roger Molander, 41, until last year an expert on strategic arms limitation for the National Security Council.

Ground Zero Week did not feature the kind of emotional mass spectacles that typify the European peace movement, which is largely a creation of pacifists and the political left. Nor did Ground Zero's organizers want any chanting hordes. "If we had a rally with 100,000 people," explained Molander, "very few of them would know more about nuclear war at the end of the rally than at the beginning. I want people to know exactly what the dangers are, because they will be stunned that no one is doing anything about it, and they will be moved to take action."

This deliberately low-key approach produced turnouts in some cities that obviously disappointed the nuclear consciousness raisers. Complained Ground Zero Volunteer Kathleen Conkling of her Tulane University classmates in New Orleans: "This campus is apathetic." Less blase were 250 students at Atlanta's Emory University, who rallied on a chilly night to hear an eyewitness account of the Hiroshima bomb's aftermath. In a campus referendum at Brown University in Providence, 96% of the faculty, staff and student body approved a mutual U.S.-Soviet weapons freeze.

The far-flung variety of Ground Zero participants may have been more significant than their absolute numbers. From Greenville, S.C., to Clackamas County, Ore., local officials issued declarations of support. In 200 of the 650 towns and cities that held Ground Zero observances, markers were installed, each signifying the center of a 12-sq.-rrfi. circle of total destruction that a one-megaton warhead would wreak. Around the Ground Zero spot in Billings, Mont., a mime group per, formed an antiwar piece; in neighboring North Dakota, 600 people in Grand Forks applauded a speaker's suggestion that the Government dismantle one of the state's 300 Minuteman missiles as a symbolic peacemaking gesture.