Selling Nuclear Fear

The graying peace movement is looking for fresh blood to oppose America's latest "Star Wars" scheme. But how do you lure recruits who may have been playing with Cabbage Patch dolls and Transformer toys when the Cold War ended?

The answer for an American -- and global -- audience is being test marketed in Canada at the moment. In Vancouver and Toronto, billboards and transit ads project day-glo images of a rave-cool young people dueling with a warhead beneath the words "Don't Blow It." The ads and the Web site they promote are the direct result of a close study of how to sell nuclear fear, and activism, to 18-35-year-olds.

Irony works. Tugging at heart strings doesn't. Make plenty of neutral-toned information available to your inherently skeptical audience. And avoid even a whiff of hippy-dippy. If there's one thing youth distrust more than the military industrial complex, it's their parents' nostalgia.

These are findings of an agency hired to research and craft a just launched media campaign for the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. The aim of the campaign is to mobilize youth against support for the U.S. national defense system that sits at the top of President George Bush's agenda.

Proponents of NDM say the system will shield North America by intercepting nuclear-tipped missiles fired by "rogue" nations. Opponents claim the unproven technology is an expensive boondoggle in the making, may violate anti-ballistic missile treaties, and will trigger a new global nuclear weapons buildup.

"If the U.S. goes ahead on this, China and Russia have said they will respond by heightening the arms race," notes 24-year-old Sarah Kelly, who was one of several Bombs Away campaign spokespeople on hand at the unveiling of the Don't Blow It billboard in Vancouver. "Keep heightening the arms race," reasons the fourth year medical student at the University of British Columbia, "and eventually a nuclear weapon will be used."

Articulate, imbued with energy to not only study medicine but wrestle with geopolitics, Kelly is just what the doctor ordered for a flagging movement.

Indeed, as the Star Wars debate rekindles, peace activists in North America and Europe see a golden opportunity to replenish their membership, which plummeted as soon as the Berlin Wall came down. Fresh troops are essential, they say, to tackle their larger aim: abolishing nuclear weapons altogether.

Seizing public attention for that cause proved daunting in an era when "presidents Bush and Clinton told people that we no longer lived under the threat of nuclear war and that the world was a much safer place," says Lynn Martin, Communications Director for the U.S. branch of IPPNW.

"While it is true that the numbers of nuclear weapons decreased under these administrations," Martin says, "there are still 30,000 nuclear weapons in the world today and the nuclear war-fighting plans and strategies remain unchanged. The U.S. and Russia each have about 2,500 strategic nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert status and these are targeted at hundreds of cities. If just one modern nuclear weapon exploded over a large city -- either by accident or intent -- millions of people would die and millions more would be injured. The threat of nuclear war remains the greatest immediate public health threat in the world today."

If so, not just politicians, but popular culture fails to reflect such urgency. In 1964, Stanley Kubrick's black comedy Dr. Strangelove made a splash by ridiculing the notion that America's nuclear arsenal was failsafe. In 1983, the television movie The Day After used realism to shock viewers into imagining the consequences of nuclear war. In cineplexes now we find Thirteen Days, a retelling of the Cuban missile crisis that gets good reviews, but implies nuclear doom was confronted 40 years ago and, through cool Kennedy thinking, defused.