Nation Topics - | The Nation

"... Come my friends,
'tis not too late to seek
a newer world, ..."

After retiring from the Senate in 1993, Alan Cranston, who died on New Year's Eve of the new millennium in the home of his son Kim, began a new career that was as important as the one he left behind as a four-term senator from California and majority whip. He embarked on a campaign to seize the opportunity afforded by the end of the cold war to abolish nuclear weapons. His opposition to nuclear weapons was longstanding. He first adopted the cause as president of the United World Federalists in the late 1940s. As a senator, he worked to advance the control and reduction of nuclear arms. In 1984 in a brief run at the presidency, he made the issue the centerpiece of his campaign. After leaving the Senate he worked on the issue first as chairman of the Gorbachev Foundation and then as the president of the Global Security Institute, which he founded. The most important of its accomplishments was to put together, as part of a new coalition of groups called Project Abolition, the Appeal for Responsible Security, Appeal for Responsible Security, which calls for abolition and steps toward that end, and was signed, at Cranston's urging, by such notable people as Paul Nitze, Gen. Charles Horner and President Jimmy Carter. The appeal will be circulated by Project Abolition as the foundation of a wider nuclear abolition campaign in the United States in the months to come.

It was in this work to eliminate nuclear weapons that I got to know him and came to be, I believe I can say, his friend. He possessed a modesty that would have been notable in any human being but was astonishing in an elected politician. On his answering machine he was "Alan," as he was to most who knew him. The human being not only had survived the official, it had come through without any detectable distortion whatever. Self-reference--not to speak of bluster or bragging--was at the zero level, as were all other forms of showmanship. Equally, there was zero variation in his manner toward the small and the great, the scruffy and the expensively suited.

Sometimes I wondered how a four-term senator could have managed this, and in the course of many days of travel and meetings together, I believe I came to understand at least one reason. It wasn't that he underrated himself or failed to appreciate the importance of his position. He had, for instance, a nation-spanning Rolodex and entree at every level of American life, and used these to the hilt in the cause. It was that his concentration, which was intense, was entirely on the work at hand. At every single meeting I attended with him, he made something happen. He passed along news, received news, asked for a further meeting, arranged one for someone else, won support for a project or set a new project in motion--a job for someone, a research organization, an appeal, a television program, a film. He moved as swiftly as he moved quietly. The work was hard, intellectually as well as practically, and there was just no time for wasted motion, blather or nonsense. At meetings he was silent most of the time. He kept so imperturbably still--a gaunt Buddha--that sometimes I thought, "Well, a man of his eminence doesn't have to attend to every last word of every inconsequential meeting"--only to hear him speak up quietly at the end, summing up what had been said, making sense of it and offering suggestions, which usually formed the basis for what was done. Not for nothing had he seven times been elected Senate Democratic whip.

What was true of his manner was true of his mind: It was, even in his 80s, fresh, resilient, receptive, reasonable, sensible, constructive, unburdened by conventional wisdom, unencrusted by habit and crowned with what can only be called wisdom.

The work, which absorbed all his professional life, was reducing nuclear weapons until they were gone. There was never a more practical and effective man than Alan Cranston, and none with a keener or more accurate sense of what was possible in the political world and what was not, yet his opposition to nuclear weapons was above all moral. At an event launching the Appeal for Responsible Security, he said of nuclear deterrence, "This may have been necessary during the cold war; it is not necessary forever. It is not acceptable forever. I say it is unworthy of our nation, unworthy of any nation; it is unworthy of civilization." Rarely in recent American political life have common sense, effectiveness, persistence and vision been combined in one person as they were in him. Nothing can replace him as a friend. As for the work--the force of his example, if we have the strength to follow it, must make good our loss.

In May 1928 Marie Curie, the famed discoverer of radium and double Nobel laureate, received a disturbing letter from an American journalist. It told of young women at a radium watch-dial plant in Orange, New Jersey, who were dying from necrosis of the jaw, a rare degenerative disease. The women would tip radium-laden brushes in their mouths, blithely ingesting this intensely radioactive substance--at levels more than 10,000 times those allowed under today's standards. Plant managers had told them that ingesting radium would enhance their vitality.

At the time, Madame Curie herself was paying dearly for her pioneering work. Reading the letter was not easy, as she suffered from radiation-induced cataracts and from painful radiation burns on her hands. True to form, she refused to accept that her discovery had anything to do with this tragedy and advised the women to eat calf's liver. By 1934 Curie was dead from severe bone marrow damage and America was experiencing its first industrial epidemic of radiation-induced diseases.

Madame Curie's denial of radiation dangers is emblematic of the legacy we now face as America's romance with the atom draws to a close. The once dynamic and sprawling US nuclear weapons program, which underwent spectacular growth in the past fifty years, is winding down, leaving behind a tragic health legacy that, once again, is borne by working people. In the next few weeks, Congress will decide whether to enact a federal compensation program for the 600,000 people who helped make our nuclear weapons.

The current attention dates to the summer of 1999, when the Clinton Administration, spurred on by Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, proposed legislation to compensate nuclear weapons workers. In January of this year, a report prepared for President Clinton found that workers at fourteen federal nuclear facilities across the United States have higher than expected risks of dying from cancer or nonmalignant diseases following exposure to radiation and other substances. This official concession that nuclear weapons workers were harmed led to an unprecedented public outpouring in politically conservative company towns near federal nuclear sites. Workers told of being overexposed, getting sick and then having to battle against the government, which spared no expense to block claims. "The people in this area have been forced into poverty--they fall through the cracks, and they die," said Kay Sutherland, a cancer victim, at a meeting near the DOE's Hanford site in Washington.

In June an amendment to the 2001 defense authorization bill offered by Senators Fred Thompson and Jeff Bingaman was unanimously adopted by the Senate. The measure would create a federal program to provide compensation for illness, disabilities and deaths due to exposure to radiation or to beryllium or silica, two hazardous substances. The Senate provision is far from perfect, but it's a good start. However, it looked likely as we went to press that the provision was in jeopardy. Republicans in the House were at work fashioning a symbolic gesture that greatly reduces the benefits and provides no funding to compensate people.

I started working on this issue twenty-five years ago, first as an environmental activist involved in the lawsuit on behalf of the parents of Karen Silkwood, a contaminated nuclear worker in Oklahoma who was killed in November 1974 while trying to deliver safety documents to the New York Times. While it is personally gratifying to see this change take place, it still remains a tragedy for many who could have been helped as long ago as 1951, when the first official recommendations to help sick, overexposed weapons workers were secretly turned down. As we come to terms with the aftermath of the nuclear arms race, it is time for Congress to provide justice to working people who were put at risk without their knowledge and who paid with their health and lives.