'Shattered Mirrors,' by Monroe Price

This book review first appeared in The Washington Times on Monday, September 25, 1989.

Can our civil rights survive AIDS?

SHATTERED MIRRORS: OUR SEARCH FOR IDENTITY AND COMMUNITY IN THE AIDS ERA
By Monroe Price
Harvard University Press
$19.95, l60 pages
REVIEWED BY RICHARD SINCERE

In “Shattered Mirrors: Our Search for Identity and Community in the AIDS Era,” Monroe Price, dean of the law school at Yeshiva University, takes an interdisciplinary approach to explore values and behavior during the AIDS years.

Though the topic is specifically AIDS, this slim volume actually contains a wide-ranging reflection upon the sources of contemporary American culture. It also focuses on the contradictory forces that influence our society and the paradoxes that ensue.

Mr. Price argues that AIDS has had an irreversible, if sometimes unapparent, impact upon our culture. To some this might seem to be an irrefutable assertion. Indeed, since millions of people may be carrying the AIDS virus (HIV) and many thousands of those are likely to become ill and die from the disease, the reverberations from AIDS are being felt widely and deeply However, Mr. Price’s argument rests upon an assumption that AIDS, either as an illness or as a social phenomenon, has been much more pervasive than is actually the case.

Because of this faulty assumption, one of the two main themes explored in” Shattered Mirrors” — whether the First Amendment can survive the health crisis — seems misguided. The other major theme, which, appropriately for a lawyer, focuses on the Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection (primarily under the 14th Amendment), travels on much firmer ground.

Mr. Price asserts that “the AIDS crisis has jolted our confidence” in the concept of the marketplace of ideas, which ‘gives the nod to the winner in ideology in cultural styles, and in advocacy of various modes of consumption” (that is, in political speech, artistic and literary speech, and commercial speech). Insofar as this marketplace of ideas is “unfettered, it has produced cultural ideas and habits that are a risk to the public’s health.”

Because the government has seen fit to offer advice and counsel on personal behavior during the AIDS crisis, and may in the future, if it has not already done so, join forces with organized religious groups in an effort to influence cultural norms, Mr. Price believes that First Amendment freedoms of speech and of the press are threatened.

This assertion deserves much scrutiny, Certainly, we already have seen some self-censorship in the media: James Bond has fewer ladies to love, condoms are used to comic effect in movies and on television, rock musicians sing about delaying sexual gratification. There has been, fortunately, no attempt by the state to coerce such censorship. It has been a marketing decision. If Hollywood believes that sex doesn’t sell as well as it used to, let it act on that belief. Hollywood could, after all, be entirely mistaken and too cautious.

The government’s entry into the AIDS debate, and into an educational role (aimed both at children and adults), is not significantly different from the government’s role in public discussions or education on other issues.

To support his assertions that AIDS poses a threat to traditional First Amendment values and protections, Mr. Price invokes an “AIDS-as-war” simile that simply does not wash. AIDS is not comparable to the Black Death, to the influenza epidemic of 1918, or to belligerent attacks by a foreign power. The disease is quite difficult to transmit, far less contagious than influenza or the bubonic plague.

Indeed, the numbers of people affected —at least in the United States, which is the sole focus of this study — are far narrower than such comparisons suppose. There has not been, and if Michael Fumento is correct, there will not be, the long-anticipated breakout of the disease into the larger population beyond the two groups that have been primarily affected, homosexual men and intravenous drug users.

Because of this, however, Mr. Price has a much stronger argument when he says that the AIDS crisis poses a threat to the Constitution’s equal-protection guarantees. Two groups of people, long marginalized by society turn out to be those most affected by a deadly disease. There are attempts by other citizens — including national leaders — to play upon archaic prejudices in order to isolate these groups even more.

Featuring Congressional Record screeds by Rep. William Dannemeyer of California and Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, this movement takes special aim at homosexual men, mostly because — unlike intravenous drug users, who tend to come from the underclass and the politically irrelevant — the homosexual community is large, organized and affluent. To the New Right, the homosexual community and its allies pose a threat to hallowed values. Add to this the hysteria whipped up by political cult leader Lyndon LaRouche, and we have a recipe for a civil-liberties disaster.

These trends explain why, as Mr. Price argues, “one of the greatest dangers of AIDS to the national consciousness is the threat to the principle, so arduously achieved, that baseless discrimination should be officially condemned and that pnvate biases must not have public expression.”

In a passage that has relevance far beyond the realm of public-health concerns, Mr Price notes that “the constitutional notion of equal protection is complex, though the term is often invoked. We do not live in a system in which some constitutional talisman tells us the ‘right’ method of distributing wealth or health.

“Ours is, for better or for worse, s society that presumes, indeed thrives on, inequities that arise not out of the denial of opportunity itself but out of the differences in the way opportunity is seized. We know that the Constitution does not mean that every person will fare equally well, Yet, when we evaluate a course of government action — at least according to Constitutional traditions — we must ask whether a higher level of scrutiny ought to be exercised because of the very nature of the risk groups affected by the AIDS crisis.”

Citing Justice Harlan Stone, Mr. Price asserts that just as racial minorities can be identified if they are targets of discrimination. “those at risk of obtaining AIDS are subject to the kind of ‘prejudice against discrete and insular minorities’ that tends to affect the operation of political processes in a manner contrary to our basic values.” Mr. Price’s warning from all this: “We should be particularly suspicious when government approach disadvantages a group which, for longstanding reasons, those in control of the legislative process may seek to injure.”

As might be expected, Mr. Price praises the recommendation from the Watkins Commission — the President’s Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Syndrome — that Congress should forbid discrimination against those who have AIDS or who are perceived to carry the AIDS virus. President Bush has endorsed this approach. It has become clear in recent years that AIDS-phobia has been used as a thin veil to justify anti-homosexual discrimination in areas where such discrimination is patently unjustified. (Indeed, one must wonder if it ever is justified.)

While these legal and constitutional issues make up the core of Monroe Price’s book, the author has collected many readable anecdotes, microportraits of our culture on the cusp of the l990s. Although some of his arguments fall short of expectations, Mr. Price raises a number of questions that deserve further exploration. In fact, one could read this book not as a definitive description of “identity and community in the AIDS era,” but as a memorandum of suggestions for future research.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based issues analyst and writer.

'Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery'

This book review appeared in The Washington Times on Monday, November 13, 1989. Historical note: Four years after this review was published, the book’s author, Robert Fogel, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Science.


An honest examination of the slave economy 

WITHOUT CONSENT OR CONTRACT: THE RISE AND FALL OF AMERICAN SLAVERY
By Robert William Fogel
Norton. $22.50, 502 pages
REVIEWED BY RICHARD SINCERE JR.

"Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery” is a remarkable book that sheds new light on a historical topic that until now has been characterized by exaggerated mythology and moral grandstanding.

Robert William Fogel, director of the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago, does not shy away from facts that will leave people aghast. At the same time, however, in an afterword, he provides a moral critique of slavery that is fitting for the latter 20th century and, in retrospect, superior to that relied upon by the various groups and individuals who opposed slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War.

The book is the result of nearly a quarter-century’s worth of research by a team of historians, demographers and economists at the University of Chicago. It is, in fact, the third of three volumes by the same title, the first two consisting of technical papers. This primary volume condenses those findings into a readable whole.

That is not to say the book is an easy read — far from it. It would be more correct to say, however, that it is two books, one difficult and one not. The difficult part is the first half, which takes an unprecedented, in-depth look at the economics and culture of slavery in the New World. To readers who are not comfortable with numbers, this lengthy section is rough going.

The second part, which traces the rise of the anti-slavery movement in Britain and the United States, is a tour de force of historical writing. It flows smoothly, yet incorporates disparate elements of antebellum history that, on the surface, seem unrelated, and Mr. Fogel deftly draws these elements together.

Mr. Fogel will no doubt initiate controversy with his firm assertion that, far from being a primitive and decaying economy, the South was at its most prosperous on the eve of the Civil War and that slavery was in- deed an efficient and productive way to organize that economy. Moreover, he argues — and offers more than enough evidence to prove it — that slaves were better fed, clothed and housed than free laborers in the North.

This may be why opponents of slavery waited until the 1850s before they attempted to use economic arguments to bolster their case; they knew that, empirically, the slave economy was sound. Only moral arguments — whether based in religion or secular philosophy — provided the foundation for an effective case against slavery.

What makes this book most interesting is its tendency to give greater emphasis to those elements of antebellum politics that have been given short shrift by other historians, particularly those popularizing historians who write our high-school and college textbooks. For example, most political trivia buffs recognize in the Know-Nothing Party just one notable fact — that the Know-Nothings held the first political convention for purposes of nominating a presidential candidate. Other people might remember that the Know-Nothings were anti-Catholic nativists who stole the stone contributed by the pope to the building of the Washington Monument.

Mr. Fogel, however, makes it clear that the Know-Nothings were a force to be reckoned with in U.S. politics throughout the 1850s and made a major contribution to the realignment of party allegiances that made the Republican victory of 1860 possible, and thus the end of slavery.

Know-Nothings sent more than 70 representatives to Congress, for instance, and controlled the state government of Massachusetts. Their ability to organize the working classes who felt threatened by immigrant labor fertilized the soil for the anti-slavery parties seeking to seed their ideas among new constituencies. Mr. Fogel writes: “It is ironic that so ignoble a movement as anti-Catholic nativism should have played so large a role in the ultimate victory of the crusade to abolish slavery.”

The role of religion in the end of slavery also cannot be ignored. In Britain and the United States, Quakers, Methodists and evangelicals (in particular, not to exclude others) paved the intellectual highway for others to dispose of the idea — which had lasted at least 3,000 years — that slavery was acceptable and a normal part of the nature of human society.

On both sides of the Atlantic, religious thinkers became prolific pamphleteers and letter-writers, trying to change the minds of so many others for whom slavery was not yet a moral issue. At the end of the 17th century, when almost all others rejected anti-slavery sentiments, one small religious group, the Quakers, maintained that slavery was unmitigated evil. It is a true testament to the power of religious faith that by the 1880s, that position was held almost universally by believers in the Western world.

In both Britain and America, the anti-slavery campaign intersected with other important political developments. Most people would think that anti-slavery politics was set apart because of its moral importance. This was not the case. In Britain, anti-slavery issues were tied up with Catholic emancipation, the extension of suffrage to the lower classes, parliamentary reform and the fear of radicalism in the aftermath of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars.

In the United States, the antislavery movement faced great hurdles, not the least of which was that of the first nine presidents, seven were slaveholders. Moreover, the South was overrepresented in Congress because three-fifths of the slaves were counted in the census to determine representation.

Mr. Fogel writes: “Southerners also were installed as Speaker of the House in 28 of the preceding 35 years (up to 1850); they were a majority of the Supreme Court and of the Cabinet; and every Senate president pro tern since the ratification of the Constitution had been a slaveholder.” These facts were cited by anti-slavery activists as evidence of the political conspiracy of “Slave Power”: Slavery’s mere existence in the South meant the political enslavement of all Americans.

By the mid-1850s, opponents of slavery also claimed “Slave Power” was an economic conspiracy. Mr. Fogel says such arguments were wrong, in light of recent cliometric research on mid-l9th century economic conditions, but they were convincing at the time.

Though leaders of the movement such as William Lloyd Garrison opposed changing their fundamental case against slavery from moral to economic grounds, “the principal basis of the antislavery appeal did suddenly shift from ‘Christian duty’ to ‘the pocketbook.’ The shift took place between 1854 and 1856 and the political success was immediate and spectacular. The new approach transformed the antislavery movement from a minor political factor into a powerful political force that could control the national agenda.”

Mr. Fogel admits there is still much to learn about the slavery era, many more texts to examine, more artifacts to unearth. Until that time, however, his recent book likely will serve as the definitive report on slave economy and slave culture, and his interpretation of the anti-slavery movement should have few detractors.

Richard Sincere Jr. is a Washington-based issues analyst and writer.

'And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic'

This book review first appeared in The Washington Times on Wednesday, November 18, 1987.  A slightly different version was published in the New York City Tribune on Wednesday, November 25, 1987.


BOOK REVIEW / Richard Sincere
Uncertain war against a deadly virus


And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic
By Randy Shilts
St. Martin’s Press
$24.95, 630 pages

Considering the age of most victims of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, the only possible analogy is with war — a generation decimated, felled not by bullets but by an insidious virus.

AIDS was a political hot potato even before the disease had a name. In “And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic,” a gripping account of the known history of the virus, veteran journalist Randy Shilts demonstrates how political interest groups fumbled with the issue. Whether this led to the needless deaths of some 21,000 people by 1987 remains to be proven. It is clear, however, that playing politics with human lives can be devastating.

More than any number of back- alley pummelings, the AIDS epidemic has made palpable the deep-seated American animosity toward homosexuals. The evidence is in the response to the epidemic:

In the early ‘80s the National Institutes of Health spent $36,100 of research money per Toxic Shock fatality (it was no longer a mystery disease by then) and $34,841 per Legionnaire’s fatality. In contrast, it spent $3,225 per AIDS death in fiscal 1981 and $8,991 in fiscal 1982.

As a University of California dean remarked early in the epidemic, “at least with AIDS, a lot of undesirable people will be eliminated.”

This blatant bigotry was matched by more subtle remarks. When pressed about AIDS research, former Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler noted her concern that it would break out into the “general population” — as though gay men, drug addicts, and poor blacks and Hispanics were an alien population or from another planet.

By May 1987, when President Reagan made his first public speech about AIDS, 36,058 Americans had been diagnosed as having the disease, 20,849 had died and between 1 million and 2 million had been infected. The United States is today the only Western industrialized democracy without a coordinated program to combat AIDS.

It is far too easy to parcel out blame during a crisis. Only historical perspective will verify the accuracy of the charges. Few actors in the AIDS drama escape Mr. Shilts’ scrutiny. He identifies heroes, villains and victims.

The heroes include playwright Larry Kramer and political activist Bill Kraus, who early warned of the dangers of promiscuous behavior and who were ostracized b’ their colleagues for their efforts. They also include the tireless researchers at the national Centers for Disease Control, the Pasteur Institute in Paris and various hospitals around the country.

The political heroes were Democratic Rep. Phillip Burton of California, Republican Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Health Edward Brandt. As Mr. Shilts writes, these men took the commonsense approach “that attentiveness to the AIDS issue was not determined by whether one was liberal or conservative but by whether one did or didn’t care about the public health.”

Sadly, the villains outnumbered the heroes. Government officials head the list: HHS Secretary Margaret M. Heckler and her spokesmen insisted that AIDS researchers had all the money they needed, even as scientists were sending her detailed memoranda outlining the specific shortfalls in funds, equipment and personnel amounting to tens of millions of dollars; Mr. Shilts presents a convincing case that Mrs. Heckler and the administration lied to the Congress, the press and the public about AIDS research.

Likewise he documents that New York Mayor Edward Koch, his health commissioner David Sencer and Gov. Mario Cuomo refused to support AIDS research or treatment for more than five years into the epidemic, though New York City had more than half the AIDS cases. They, too, lied to the public about their concern, he writes.

The media, particularly the TV networks and the prestige press, deserve even more censure. They simply refused to cover the crisis unless it involved someone other than homosexuals. The big papers ignored shocking reports from the Centers for Disease Control, the Government Accounting Office and the Congressional Research Service. Besides the gay press, only the San Francisco Chronicle covered the epidemic in any depth.

Other villains were the bathhouse owners and paranoid gay political leaders who felt that promiscuous sex was a right to be vigorously defended. Blood banks would not acknowledge the danger AIDS posed to the blood supply. The infamous “Patient Zero,” a French-Canadian flight attendant, was linked with many early AIDS cases, yet continued to have sex with unwitting partners well after he had been diagnosed. And his irresponsible behavior was not unique.

More ambiguous is the case of Dr. Robert Gallo, credited for discovering the AIDS virus, which he dubbed HTLV-III. In this account Dr. Gallo is portrayed as childish and egotistical, refusing to cooperate with fellow scientists and setting back the search for a cure, treatment and a vaccine. The book also says there is substantial evidence that he might not have discovered the AIDS virus at all, but took his specimens from the French researchers who actually did.

The list of victims grows each day and includes Rock Hudson, Liberace, Michael Bennett, Perry Ellis, Willi Smith, Stewart McKinney, Terry Dolan, Roy Cohn and Michel Foucault. Regrettably, Bill Kraus, who fought for AIDS funding and against sexual promiscuity succumbed in early 1986.

Mr. Shilts makes no recommendations and offers no conclusions, but several can be inferred. One is that al if the AIDS crisis demonstrates anything, it is the need for a substantial public health emergency fund. AIDS caught everyone by surprise — scientists, doctors, public officials — and it can happen again. Research scientists and physicians should not have to fight tooth and nail for basic equipment in the early stages of a medical crisis. The Capitol Hill appropriations process must respond expeditiously or see thousands die.

The current government response shows no sign of improvement. The conflict between the stolid pragmatism of Surgeon General Koop and the naivete of Education Secretary William Bennett, whose solution seems to extend no further than advocating chastity, continues. And the petty squabbling within the Presidential AIDS Commission promises to destroy that body before its work begins. The band still plays on.

Richard Sincere Jr. is a Washington-based policy analyst and writer.

'With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War'

This book review appeared originally in The Washington Times on Friday, February 4, 1983.  It was also published in The News World (a New York City newspaper) on Tuesday, February 15, 1983.


RICHARD SINCERE / BOOK REVIEW
Shoveling appeasement

With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War.
By Robert Scheer, Random House, $14.95, 124 pages + 155 pages of 
notes and appendices.

Eugene Rostow’s resignation from his post as head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency underlines the pressures inherent in the arms-control process. Battered by both the right and the left, the Reagan administration has spent the past two years trying to bring order out of chaos, attempting to achieve sensible balance in the competition between the superpowers.


In “With Enough Shovels,” Los Angeles Times correspondent Robert Scheer shamelessly accuses Reagan and his advisers of wild (just stopping short of insane) views of nuclear war. Resting his accusations on unproven assumptions, Scheer pulls no punches in advancing his theory that the present administration is the puppet of a conspiracy called the Committee on the Present Danger.

Scheer is disturbed, and sometimes amused, at Reagan’s determination to stem the threat of communism. Scheer considers the Soviet threat a hallucination — or more accurately, he finds it a puzzling anachronism that lives on only in Reagan’s memories of Communist subversion of Hollywood trade unions. The few readers who could share Scheer’s conclusions are those who share his fundamental and wrongheaded assumption: The Soviet Union is a benign and defensive superpower.

Despite the many hours of extensive interviews with nuclear weapons specialists and civil defense experts, Scheer closes his eyes in this book to the possibility that there is a defense against nuclear weapons. T.K. Jones, deputy undersecretary of defense for strategic and theater nuclear forces, is portrayed as a wild- eyed maniac, a man with no human sensibilities. Scheer ignores the extensive empirical data gathered by Jones which demonstrate that, with proper preparations, the devastation from nuclear weapons can be significantly mitigated. He brushes it off with mockery rather than criticism of Jones’s case.

Clearly Scheer has fallen into the trap of believing in the apocalyptic premise preached by Jonathan Schell in “The Fate of the Earth” and by other doomsayers. Nothing will alter his assumptions. All challengers are dismissed as madmen, no matter what their qualifications.

In his criticism of the Committee on the Present Danger, Scheer carefully documents how this group of intellectuals — established in 1976 to study American defense needs and promulgate their findings that a dangerous imbalance in military preparedness exists — has moved its members into influential government off ices. Scheer calls it their “seizure of state power.” He reserves special disdain for committee members because so many of them are former (or present) Democrats from the Hubert Humphrey wing of the party. Scheer argues that they have betrayed their roots.

Yet it is no accident that people like Max Kampelman, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Michael Novak support U.S. military strength. They have observed firsthand the usurpation of political and social influence by muddle-headed utopians. They remember the lessons of Munich and are willing to take risks to prevent another global conflagration. A commitment to the liberal values of the Democratic Party — even to the values of Norman Thomas and Eugene V. Debs — requires a commitment to preserve those values against totalitarianism.

Thus the founders of the Committee on the Present Danger were willing to face public criticism when they rebutted CIA studies on Soviet military power. In asking, “Is the United States No. 2?” they answer an emphatic yes; their purpose was to influence the public debate on how to rectify that dangerous situation.

By concentrating exclusively on how members of the Committee on the Present Danger now are influencing the U.S. government, Scheer begs the question as to whether there is some sort of conspiracy at work. Since committee members helped to get Ronald Reagan elected, have advised him for many years, and since he agrees with most of their views, it is hardly surprising they are now in positions of influence. But to read that as a conspiracy is equivalent to saying that the Brookings Institution exercised conspiratorial control over the American economy during the Johnson and Carter administrations. It smacks of political naivete and fundamental distrust of American democracy.

And that is the root of Scheer’s attack on the Reagan administration’s nuclear weapons policy. A policy designed to fight and survive a nuclear war, even one designed primarily to deter war (as the Reagan policy clearly is), must — in Scheer’s view — be misguided, because there is nothing worth fighting for. American institutions are not superior to Soviet institutions. American government is as corrupt as Soviet government. Freedom is not preferable to slavery. Scheer’s repugnant view is not unique — it has been expressed in the recent appeasement demonstrations in both Europe and America.

On balance, “With Enough Shovels” presents a strikingly biased, negative view of the Reagan administration. Its only positive value is documentary: Scheer prints informative interviews with several present and former government officials. Unfortunately, Scheer is incapable of interpreting that information in a manner conducive to rational discourse. That would make a worthy addition to the literature of nuclear policy.

Richard E. Sincere Jr. is president of the Washington chapter of the American Civil Defense Association, a nationwide public education group.

'The Spaniards: A Portrait of the New Spain'

This review originally appeared in The Washington Times on Thursday, September 17, 1987.




BOOK REVIEW / Richard Sincere
Spain after Franco
The Spaniards: A Portrait of the New Spain
By John Hooper
Penguin, $6.95 paper, 287 pages


Earlier this year, sporadic demonstrations and riots by students occurred in the Spanish university towns of Salamanca, Madrid and Seville. It was unclear to observers exactly what the students wanted. They seemed to riot for riots’ sake.

Some light is shed on the situation in “The Spaniards: A Portrait of the New Spain,” journalist John Hooper’s comprehensive examination of the Spain that has emerged in the 12 years since the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

One problem Spanish students face is the inability of the country’s job market to absorb university graduates. Paradoxically, the students are demanding the removal of all barriers to university admission and more state grants to those in higher education. If the government yields to these demands, the students may soon regret it. As Mr. Hooper reports, there are some 500,000 undergraduates in the universities and another 190,000 in the junior colleges or polytechnics, “which is more, frankly, than a country of her level of economic development requires, especially in a recession. Ever since the mid-’70s graduate unemployment has been a serious problem.”

Mr. Hooper does not limit his book to contemporary policy problems such as education. Although he says in the introduction that “this is not a book about politics or economics:’ it is in fact both. “The Spaniards” successfully takes the measure of the country since Franco’s death in 1975. Its chapters on the church, the family, the sexual revolution, the welfare state, housing and the media each vividly portray not only events since 1975, but the social forces that preceded them.

There is a misconception about Spain often encountered in North America and Europe (as Mr. Hooper notes, the Spanish, like the British, often refer to Europe as though it is somewhere else). This misconception is that for the four decades of dictatorship, Spain was a boiling pot with a lid clamped down, and that Franco’s death took the lid off, precipitating near-revolutionary change. This is only half true.

The social forces shaping Spain under the constitutional monarchy of King Juan Carlos have their roots in the rapid economic development that started in 1961 and began slowing down in 1973, a period known as the anos de desarrollo. As in so many countries where political development is hampered and channels of political expression are blocked, the energies of the Spanish people were directed toward industry.

The result of the anos de desarrollo was not only a nearly unbelievable rise in the standard of living — per capita income quadrupled — but a sea-change in Spain’s demographics. Whole regions of Andalusia, Murcia and the central meseta emptied as shanty towns multiplied in suburbs around Barcelona, Madrid, Bilbao and San Sebastian. This in turn caused subtle but discernible shifts in family living and in language patterns.

In prosperous Catalonia, for instance, non-Catalan workers began speaking Catalan instead of Castilian (Spanish) in the work place. The demographic shift also put pressure on the housing market and pushed up the demand for consumer goods.

The development of Spain’s new constitutional government is also a reflection of the time that came before it. Adolfo Suarez, the first prime minister chosen by the newly installed Juan Carlos, had been a junior member of the government under the late dictatorship; the current, Socialist prime minister, Felipe Gonzales, was once a member of the Young Falangists. The decision to grant autonomy to provinces and regions came about because of nationalist sentiments (and even terrorist movements) in the Basque region, Galicia and Catalonia that had been felt for decades.

It is in his descriptions of the various regions of Spain that Mr. Hooper is at his best. He provides capsule histories rich in detail that show how disparate countries came together to form a unified Spain, how successive governments in Madrid held the Iberian Peninsula together, and how in the last years of Franco, nationalism (‘regionalism” is too weak a word) had grown so much that it became an unignorable force.

The case of Catalonia is telling. I can attest to the depth of feeling there, having visited Barcelona province several months ago.

Although the new constitution gives the Catalan language full recognition along with Castilian after years of suppression under Franco, it is not uncommon to see bilingual commercial signs with the Spanish half smeared with red paint and a Catalan nationalist slogan, such as “Visca Catala” (“Long live Catalan!”), sprayed alongside it.

There is a movement afoot to have Catalan declared one of the official languages of the European Community — perhaps a not-unreasonable request, as more people speak Catalan than Danish or Irish. As if to make their point, Catalan-language enthusiasts sponsored a consumer fair on the Ramblas, Barcelona’s main thoroughfare, in which all products were labeled solely in Catalan.

As Spain enters the mainstream of the Western political community -- it is now a member of both NATO and the EC -- it must come to grips with its new identity. The society that is emerging, Mr. Hooper says, is “distinctly idiosyncratic.”

Spain is “a federal monarchy with a tax-paying king whose father was alive when [Juan Carlos] ascended the throne; a welfare state in which three-quarters of the jobless do not qualify for unemployment pay; a former police state where the majority of detectives belong to a trade union founded by erstwhile members of the secret police; a democracy in which the circulation of a neo-fascist newspaper has risen sixfold; and a country dedicated to the cult of the Virgin Mary where there are a half a dozen whores for every nun.”

The past decade has been tumultuous, producing a Spanish state that is democratic; autonomous regions that are linguistically and culturally diverse; and multiple political parties competing for real power. Thus has Spain become a laboratory for the hypothesis that authoritarian states, which allow some freedom and competition, more easily become democracies than do totalitarian societies, which lack institutions that compete against the state.

There is still some fear that Francoist elements within the armed forces may attempt a coup. Such an attempt did take place in 1981. But younger officers are coming from more diverse sectors of society than their predecessors, and thus have more democratic views.

Those of us who spent the mid-1970s glued to the iconoclastic comedy “Saturday Night Live” saw Chevy Chase report, week after week, that “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still seriously dead.” To American high-school students in 1975 the line was morbidly funny; in 1987, Spanish high school students can freely take to the streets as one of the fruits of Franco’s demise.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based foreign policy consultant.

'Waging Nuclear Peace: The Technology and Politics of Nuclear Weapons'

This review originally appeared in the Washington Times on Thursday, May 2, 1985. This is probably the first time it has been readily available in digital form.  (Versions of this book review also appeared in the New York City Tribune on September 3, 1986, and in the spring 1985 issue of Strategic Review.)

BOOK REVIEW/Richard E. Sincere Jr.

A textbook look at our nuclear strategies

Waging Nuclear Peace: The Technology and Politics of Nuclear Weapons
By Robert Ehrlich
University of New York
$12.95 paper, 397 pages

When George Mason University physics professor Robert Ehrlich began to teach a course in arms control and nuclear weapons policy a few years ago, he could find no adequate, single-volume text that was conducive to class discussion and that provided sufficient technical and political background for his students. So, Mr. Ehrlich has produced a readable, detailed and useful primer on nuclear strategy that will also be an excellent reference book for those who are already in the field.

Page 1 introduces the purpose of the book with the question, “Are we discussing the real issue?... Nuclear war is a highly emotional issue,” Mr. Ehrlich points out. “It would be almost irrational not to become emotional when reflecting on the horror that a nuclear war could bring. However, the whole point of thinking analytically about nuclear war is to try to see facts objectively, not as we might wish them to be. It is only by clearing away these misconceptions that we can best assess the most likely course of action to avert catastrophe.”

The practical applications of this view become clear later in a discussion of the 1979 Office of Technology Assessment study, The Effects of Nuclear War, a report often cited as a primary source on the immediate and long-term effects of a nuclear attack upon the United States. Mr. Ehrlich compares the advantages and disadvantages of the United States and the U.S.S.R. that bear on their prospects for survival following a nuclear exchange. He notes that the OTA report concluded that there is no evidence “that the Soviets face a lower risk [than the United States] of finding themselves unable to rebuild an industrial society at all.”

Mr. Ehrlich argues, however, that an objective reader may come to different conclusions from those reached by the OTA report’s authors, and conclude that the Soviet Union is better prepared to survive a nuclear attack than the United States: “It is possible that the authors of this [OTA] study did not want to encourage the belief that nuclear war might be survivable -- especially the notion that it might be more survivable in the Soviet Union than in the United States.”

If Soviet military leaders do believe in the survivability — or winnability — of a nuclear war, the United States is faced with a major problem for strategic policy. And Mr. Ehrlich’s analysis of this problem deserves more prominence in, his book than he gives it.

Among many other issues that Mr. Ehrlich sheds light on, two are of particular current interest, antiballistic missile defense (ABM) and civil defense. One of his views on ballistic missile defense may surprise some pundits: “It would make little sense’ the author argues, “to build an expensive and exotic ABM system of uncertain feasibility without first investing in a much cheaper civil defense system. Such a course of action would be akin to installing an expensive photovoltaic solar-energy collection system n your roof and not bothering first to add insulation in your ceiling -- a much more cost-effective measure.”

This approach is unusually relevant, since the Reagan administration has cut the civil defense budget for fiscal 1986 from $181 million to $119.1 million. There appears to be a trend in administration thinking toward putting all of its eggs in the Strategic Defense Initiative basket -- a prospect that chills arms-control advocates as well as civil defense professionals.

While acknowledging the arguments of Physicians for Social Responsibility and other groups that there may be “insurmountable obstacles” to surviving nuclear war, including long-term climatic damage and the destruction of our national infrastructure, Mr. Ehrlich remains firm in his support for population-protection measures. At the conclusion of his discussion of the effectiveness of civil defense, he writes:

“While there are major obstacles to survival following a nuclear war, it is by no means clear that these obstacles are insurmountable. In the nuclear age the goal of preventing nuclear war must, of course, take priority over surviving one. Nevertheless, because a nuclear war could occur despite our best efforts at prevention, prudence requires that some attention be devoted to the problem of survival.”

The book is rich in its exposition of the myriad issues that students, citizens, and policymakers must face in the crowded debate over nuclear weapons policy. It is well- structured, with divisions into four topical sections: “Introduction to the issues,” “Nuclear Arms and Nuclear War,” “The Effects of Nuclear War” and “Policy Options and Objectives.”

These are further divided into chapters with headings such as “Public Opinion and the Media,” “Long-Term Worldwide Effects of a Nuclear War,” and “Arms Control and Disarmament.” Two appendixes address “The Physical Principles of Nuclear Energy and Radiation” and “Survival After Nuclear War.” Each chapter and appendix is followed by study questions to help instructors conduct class discussions or to devise midterm and final essay questions.

The fact that this book is designed for classroom use should not deter readers who are past the age of worrying about term papers, grades, and spring break in Florida. Waging Nuclear Peace is an important contribution to the catalog of nuclear-strategy books.

Richard E. Sincere Jr. is vice president of the American Civil Defense Association.