The Michigan Daily-Tuesday, June 15, 1982-Page 3
NEW YORK PROTEST LARGEST EVER IN U.S.
Huge turnout for
By ANDREW CHAPMAN
and PAMELA KRAMER
Special to the Daily
NEW YORK - A crowd of more than
half a million people gets its message
across through sheer numbers, if
nothing else. And that's exactly what
happened here Saturday, when people
from around the world descended on
midtown Manhattan and Central Park
for a peaceful protest against the
nuclear arms race.
"We have come here in numbers so
large that the message must get
through to the White House and
Capitol Hill," Coretta Scott King,
widow of Martin Luther King, Jr., told
the throng assembled for the four-mile
march from the United Nations to Cen-
tral Park.
anti-nuke rally
THE THOUSANDS waiting to take
their places in the march, cheered
deafeningly when actor Ozzie Davis
announced over the loudspeakers that
more than 400,000 people were on Fifth
Avenue "where they're shopping for
peace."
Joan Baez, Jackson Browne, Bruce
Springsteen, New York City Mayor
Edward Koch, Bella Abzug, and Linda
Ronstadt were among the other
celebrities who spoke to and enter-
tained the rally's participants in front
of the U.N. and on the 18-acre Great
Lawn of the park.
The crowd exceeded in number those
gathered for any previous demon-
stration in the United States, including
the anti-war protests held during the
1960s. The largest gathering in Central
Park before Saturday was last year,
when about 400,000 amassed to hear the
Simon and Garfunkel reunion concert.
MAC NICOLSON, a 30-year-old
Australian, observed that the anti-
Daily Photo by JACKIE BELL
PROTESTERS, ASSEMBLED on Central Park's Great Lawn, listen to speakers during Saturday's anti-nuclear
demonstration in New York City.
nuclear movement has a much broader
base of support than did the peace
movements of the 60s.
"This rally is quieter than the ones in
Europe," said Bertil Kindstromer of
Gottberg, Sweden, but he noted that
the Saturday event was far larger
than any he had previously seen. A'
veteran of the peace marches in the 60s,
he said he thinks the no-nukes crowd is
much more respectable than those of
the Vietnam era.
College students were no better
represented at the rally than were other
age groups. A diverse collection of
people with backgrounds ranging
anywhere from Roman Catholicism to
communism gathered together for one
common goal: opposition to the nuclear
arms race.
SEVERAL OF the slogans made
famous during the 64s anti-war
movement have weathered the years,
finding their way onto signs borne in the
march and hanging from windows
along the route.
Many underwent slight changes, an
indication of the wider variety of par-
ticipants in this decade's protest. Now,
world leaders are not only supposeOl to
"make love, not war," but - according
See NEW YORK, Page 5
1,600 arrested in protest
outside U.N. missions
(Continued from Page 1)-
"We've got enough arms to kill each
other. What do we need the neutron
bomb for?" said Matthew Guerin, 70, of
Long Island, outside the U.S. mission
moments before he was dragged to a
waiting stretcher and carried to a
police bus.
Police said 1,609 people were arrested
and issued summonses for disorderly'
conduct, almost 900 of them at the U.S.
Mission. The protests began at 8 a.m.
and all but the U.S. Mission protest en-
ded by mid-afternoon.
THOSE ARRESTED included
veteran anti-war activitsts D avid
Dellinger, Daniel and Phillip Berrigan,
and Elizabeth McAllister.
A block south of the U.S. Mission a
group from San Francisco calling itself
the Nuclear Freeze '80s Committee set
fire to American, Soviet, British,
Chinese, and French flags as well as the
flag of India, which has also exploded a
nuclear device. Small groups who
charged Israel and South Africa have
secretly developed nuclear weapons
later staged protests at those nations'
missions.
The sit-ins followed Saturday's
massive anti-nuclear parade and rally,
the largest in history, in which more
than 700,000 people marched through
the streets of Manhattan to Central
Park, urging world powers to lay down
their nuclear arms.
ALTHOUGH the demonstrations
were aimed at all nuclear powers, the
largest crowds and the most arrests
were at the U.S. Mission directly across
from the United Nations, where several
world leaders-including West German
Chancellor Helmut Schmidt-were
speaking at the Second Special Session
on Disarmament.
Schmidt told the U.N. General
Assembly the Soviet Union and its allies
had deployed hundreds of intermediate-
range nuclear weapons, "many of them
targeted on my country."
"The impatience of people-and not
only of younger people-is growing,"
the chancellor said, "impatience with
governments that appear to be doing no
more than talk while at the same time
they are developing, producing and in-
stalling ever more deadly weapons."
With Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei
Gromyko in the audience of the special
disarmament session, Schmidt said any
one of the missiles could destroy his
hometown of Hamburg and the two
neighboring cities.
For this reason, West Germany and
its partners were striving to negotiate
"a stable military balance between
West and East."
AP Photo
A PASSERBY ATTEMPTS to make his way through yesterday's anti-
nuclear protest in front of the Soviet mission to the United Nations. Police
arrested more than 1,600 demonstrators attempting to block the UN'.
missions of five nuclear powers.