The "Idealists"

The point is not that Dr Spock will appeal and never serve a single second of his 60 days at hard labor, nor that the Friends' Service Committee and dozens of other foundations dripping with money will pay the puny fines for the pampered phonies who play Gandhi.

The issue is one that the Spocks and Ellsbergs, but not the prosecutors or the nuclear industry, understand: Legalistic points here or there cannot obscure the anti-nuclear stormtroopers' main purpose, which is to build their public image as selfless, idealistic defenders of public health and morality against an allegedly greedy and cynical industry.

Because the sham messiahs of Rocky Flats understood this point, they brought in discredited "scientists" who used the court for false propaganda to argue an irrelevant point. Because Rockwell Atomic (the plant' s operator) did not understand it, no attempt was made to demolish the testimony of "doctors" who had no control experiments, or of a professor of preventive medicine whose anti-nuclear obsessions help to keep the public death toll high with fatalities that nuclear power could prevent.

That is why some of the jurors, though feeling obligated to find the defendants guilty of breaking the law, expressed their respect for "these fine young people's idealism;" and that is why, once again, the stormtroopers won an easy victory by the total absence of any meaningful opposition.

It is the stormtroopers' alleged moral strength that lends them respect in the public eye; yet few things are easier to refute than the utterly absurd notion that their behavior is, by any standards, moral. Indeed, by what standard is it moral to help kill, maim and disease people? Yet that is exactly what they are doing in preventing safer power sources from replacing more dangerous ones.

They themselves, no doubt, believe that their cause is just, as did James Jones, Charles Manson and Adolf Hitler; the faces of these loafers from affluent families who have never lacked electricity, let alone food, clothing or shelter, show the expressions of early Christians about to be thrown to the lions. Money is too commonplace to buy them; they are corrupted by demented publicity and messianic delusions.

But whatever their own opinion of themselves, the cold facts of their actions testify to a depravity that is all the more despicable by being hidden in a cloak of human concern. For what these idealists are doing by their opposition to a safer form of power generation is helping to spread death, disease and environmental damage; and what they are doing by their opposition to weapon plants is ensuring that Americans will die in wars over scarce energy sources, in wars invited bv America's increasing military weakness.