2/21 cmissile
DATE: Sunday, February 21, 1999 TAG: 9902240031
PEACE ACTIVISTS' SABOTAGE DESERVED A STIFF SENTENCE
Just because people call themselves ''peace activists'' doesn't mean
their activities do anything to promote peace.
They may be totally deluded, like Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich
in 1938 declaring ''Peace in our time,'' when all he had accomplished was to
fuel Adolf Hitler's insane ambitions.
Or they may merely be suffering from the lingering effects of a common Cold
War delusion, that the world would be a safer place if the United States
disarmed and piously hoped the Soviet Union would do likewise.
Two of this latter persuasion sabotaged a missile silo in Weld County last
Aug. 6, the 53rd anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. On Thursday, a
federal judge sentenced Daniel Harris Sicken to 41 months and Oliver Sachio
Coe to 30 months. They will also have to repay the cost of the damage they
did, $21,300.
''We were trying to raise awareness,'' Coe said. And Sicken said, ''We did
what we did in order to prevent a greater harm.''
In fact, their protest was entirely ineffectual. An American nuclear attack
-but on whom? -would indeed be a greater harm, but temporarily damaging one
missile silo, which has never been used since its construction in 1963 and is
unlikely ever to be used, neither prevents nor reduces it.
And ''raising awareness'' is useful only when people really are unaware of
your issue and moreover will take your side once it is brought to their
attention.
It accomplishes nothing if they already think you're wrong. When my son was
small he would occasionally whine that I didn't understand him. He wasn't
prepared to accept the answer: ''I understand you perfectly well; I just don't
agree with you.''
As long as it remains a possibility that the United States may once again
have to fight a total war against a totalitarian enemy, most Americans have
concluded, they want us to remain prepared to win it.
That the possibility is far more remote now than it was for most of the
last half-century is no thanks to the anti-nuclear activists. And no thanks,
either, to the United Nations, which has declared the use of nuclear weapons
''illegal.''
Anti-nuclear activists frequently evoke the civil-rights movement and its
history of mass civil disobedience, but the difference in public response is
telling. I heard Joan Baez sing We Shall Overcome at a concert in Chicago in
the early '60s and the audience was electrified.
Music is a theme of these protests too, but it unifies only those who are
already true believers. At Sicken and Coe's trial in November, their
supporters in the courtroom burst into song. Coe was playing the flute as he
and Sicken waited at the silo to be arrested.
Satirist Tom Lehrer captured this self-absorbed naivete. ''We are the
folk-song army,'' he warbled, ''every one of us . . . cares. We all hate
poverty, war and injustice -unlike the rest of you squares.''
Though I think the protests are both futile and misguided, I accept that
the protesters act out of genuine moral concern. But that doesn't mean they
should go unpunished for their actions, as supporters of Sicken and Coe
advocated.
In the closing argument at his trial, Sicken told the jury, ''We don't look
upon this as damage. We look upon this as symbolic disarmament, something that
has to happen eventually.''
The argument trivializes his own actions. Civil disobedience, as a weapon
again injustice, derives its moral power from individuals' willingness to
accept an unjust punishment for breaking an unjust law.
The law that says you can't attack a missile silo with a sledgehammer is
not unjust, nor is it intended to prevent the expression of unpopular views.
Unlike abortion protesters, who also have genuine moral concerns and whose
constitutional rights have been abridged by laws directed at the content of
their message, anti-nuclear protesters can say anything they want anywhere
they want.
They can even sing about it.