PEACE AND CHANGE: THE WORLD OVER Edited by Charles Chatfield

The rapid development of nuclear technology is raising worldwide opposition, even as it becomes a global source of power. Questions of political, economic, military, and ecological significance a re involved. The following articles cover movements in two par ts of the world: Europe and Japan. Taken together, they illustrate the raison d’ etre for this section of the journal - the belief that movements for peace and change in a divided world need a unifying transnational base and orientation.

“The European Anti-Nuclear Movement and its Political Significance” is contributed by John Lambert, member of the “agenor” group in Brussels. This is a transnational socialist network of persons organized as an open collective to promote critical understanding in the European left. John Lambert and other editors produce the English-language periodical, agenor. Issues of the journal’ a r e topical, and four of them a r e especially relevant to th i s art icle. (See

description of agenor in th i s section for additional details.)

Barbara Reynolds, author of “Hiroshima/ Nagasaki 1977,” is director of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki Memorial Collection and Peace Resource Center, Wilmington, Ohio. This center holds a unique and comprehensive collec- tion of materials on nuclear experience and is- sues, much of it in Japanese. It has a supportive relationship with the cit ies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and is a source of understanding about Japanese efforts to develop an appreciation of re- lated nuclear issues. The Center also translates Japanese material and produces peace education resources. A list of available resources and a comprehensive, annotated bibliography of the col- lection are available. Barbara Reynolds brings to this article the experience of participation in the United Nations N.G.O. Symposium this summer and her long involvement in Japan and the Un- ited States on behalf of the hibakusha, or victims of the 1945 bombings.

THE EUROPEAN ANTI-NUCLEAR MOVEMENT AND ITS POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE

John Lambert

Fessenheim, Wyhl, Braud et St-Louis, Brokdorf, Kaiseraugst, Creys-Malville, Gorleben, Grohnde, Kalkar, le Pel ler in , Flamanville, Montalto d i Castro, Gosgen, Gravelines, Tihange - the ever-growing list of never-heard-of place names from France, Germany, ‘Switzerland, Holland - they a r e the s i tes of a campaign decisive to the fate of Europe: the struggle of ordinary citizens against the spread of nuclear power plants.

A s European governments t ry to complete their nuclear plans, the list is going to get longer. In the aftermath of the oil crisis and urged on by the nuclear lobby, these governments launched schemes that would bring 160 new sites in the nine countries of the European Common Market in the near future.

A movement of popular opposition has spread with wild-fire rapidity, however. It has grown so fast that its full political implications are only grandually being relized. Nuclear power is so central to the all-out growth philosophy and nuclear plans have so clearly been imposed by the multinational nuclear lobby that there is an implicit challenge to t h e whole pat tern of economic development and to the technocratic society. At the same time, the nuclear issue is

spli t t ing par t ies and t rade unions. I t i s illuminating the inadequacies of the political system throughout western Europe. On one side are “democratic” governments, forcing decisions which in many cases were never democratically debated and which at the local level are refused by t h e inhabi tants ; on t h e o ther a r e growing numbers of solid citizens determined to take back their right to choose what will become of them and their surroundings.

In August 1973 some two hundred fishermen took par t in a protest demonstration on the German bank of the Rhine where it forms the Franco-German frontier between Base1 and Strasbourg - significantly, in t h e hear t of a solidly conservative farming a r e a of western Europe. About that time it was announced that a site near the village of Wyhl had been chosen for a 1300 MW heavy-water reactor which had been blocked a year before a t the nearby town o f Breisach. On July 31, 1977, between 50,000 and 60,000 people from al l over France and from Austria, the German Federal Republic, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy converged on the tiny commune of Creys-Malville on t h e banks of the Rhone, equidis tant from Lyons, Grenoble, and Geneva. Their aim was to

39 Peace & Change Volume V * Number 1 * Spring 1978