A Movement Gathers Force

By KURT ANDERSEN

Throngs protest nuclear arms

There is something about emotionally charged political movements: until they mobilize enormous crowds of adherents in one place on one day, they do not feel quite bona fide. Last weekend in New York City, the diffuse U.S. antinuclear arms movement produced its first such mass spectacle when 150,000 protesters paraded past the nearly empty United Nations complex and then joined 350,000 more compatriots for a rally-cum-concert in Central Park. The Saturday demonstration, New York's largest ever, was well planned and peaceful, and timed to coincide with the U.N.'s five-week-long special session on disarmament, which got under way last Monday.

The demonstrators were exhorted to press for worldwide disarmament by speakers ranging from Martin Luther King Jr.'s widow Coretta to Movie Director Orson Welles. The Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr., long a prominent antiwar activist, declared the beginning of "the human century" and said, "The first order of the human century is to freeze the weapons so they won't burn the people."

Many speakers took a more pointedly political tack, deriding President Reagan and insisting that Government spending on nuclear arms be shifted to social services. Activist Randall Forsberg, referring to last week's Senate Foreign Relations Committee rejection of a freeze resolution, said, "We will remember that vote in November." Other speakers remembered August 1945: survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings spoke in Japanese, translated for the crowd, of their firsthand visions of "a living inferno."

Like them, most of the crowd seemed more purposeful than defiant. Katherine Wedel, 17, left a New York hospital in her sick-bed smock to join the rally. "To me," she said, "it's important to be here because the money spent on bombs could be spent on finding a cure for Addison's disease," for which Wedel is being treated. Some placards were flip. One beery young man carried a sign that said DON'T BOMB US, WE'RE ALREADY BOMBED and on another youth's poster was the request REAGAN-GIVE ME A CHANCE TO REACH YOUR AGE. Some would-be ralliers were absent: the U.S. Government refused to let about 300 foreigners, mostly Japanese, enter the country; Washington claimed most were members of Communist-front organizations. New York City's government, on the other hand, went out of its way to accommodate the earnest horde and expected its costs to exceed $ 1 million, including overtime pay to the 5,000 police assigned to oversee the crowds at the U.N., in the park and in more than a dozen converging "feeder marches" from all over the city. Assisting the police were the rally's 3,000 volunteer "peace keepers."

Miles of Manhattan streets were closed to traffic. On Friday night, Yankee Stadium's parking lot was requisitioned to hold the 2,000 buses that brought--and took home--demonstrators from hundreds of U.S. cities. One energetic Boston contingent, making the 208-mile pilgrimage in true youthful American fashion, arrived in a bicycle convoy. From just over the East River, a group bent on even more creative travel danced across the Brooklyn Bridge at dawn Saturday.

All afternoon, righteous speech making was interspersed with big-time pop-music making. The day's performers reflected the cultural complexion of the crowd: young and hip, like Rockers Lin da Ronstadt, Bruce Springsteen and Jackson Browne; tweedy and middleaged, like Folk Singers Peter, Paul and Mary; politically insistent, like Balladeers Joan Baez and Pete Seeger.

A small, willful faction of Saturday's crowd planned on Monday to "blockade the bombmakers," shutting down for a day the U.N. offices of major nuclear powers. More typical of the galliers Saturday were concerned mainstreamers like New York Mayor Edward Koch. Said he: "It's terrific to try to affect the conscience of the world. It's just regrettable they don't have a similar demonstration in MOSCOW." -- By Kurt Andersen. Reported -L-. White and Adam Zagorin/New York

With reporting by Jack E. White, Adam Zagorin

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