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What unites Western Europe's antimissile movements is moral revulsion against "overkill," the frightening capacity of each superpower to destroy the other many times over, combined with genuine fear of a nuclear war that would leave little more than ashes and radiation where 350 million people now live. Says Mient-Jan Faber, 40, the lanky, jeans-clad leader of the Dutch Inter-Church Peace Council (I.K.V.), which serves as a model to anti-nuclear organizations elsewhere in Western Europe: "Arms control, the step-by-step approach, has not worked. Our overall goal—all nuclear weapons out of Europe—will be a long process, but it can begin here." Says Volkmar Deile, secretary of Action for Reconciliation, one of West Germany's most influential peace groups: "Talking to the superpowers about disarmament is like talking to drug dealers about stopping drug deliveries."
Europe's grim recollections of the first half of the 20th century help explain the pessimism inherent in such declarations.
"To Europeans, the increase in overkill capacity is an irrational act, an absurdity," says Fritz Stern, provost and a professor of history at Columbia University.
"They know that we have enough to kill and be killed a hundred times over again. Their historic experience in this century—unlike America's until Viet Nam—has not been the triumphant use of power but the experience of brute and futile power, blindly spent and blindly worshiped." Even in France, where pacifist sentiment is far less widespread than in other European countries, 63% of those polled consider a war in Europe "imaginable," and 30% thought it could occur in the next five years. hese fears have emerged at a particularly crucial moment. For the first time in NATO'S 32-year history, the West harbors serious doubts about its defense capabilities.
Gone is the global U.S. military superiority that could be taken for granted in the '50s and '60s. Gone is any certainty in Europe that America's "nuclear umbrella" guarantees the security of the Continent.
Simultaneously, there is a growing conviction in Europe that U.S. governments, including the Reagan Administration, cannot be trusted to handle the war-or-peace issue. Says George Ball, Under Secretary of State in the Johnson Administration and a leading expert on European affairs: "A lot of young people in Europe are disturbed by the saber rattling they have heard and continue to hear out of Washington. It scares the bejesus out of the Europeans, and they go to the streets, shouting that a bunch of lunatics is running things in Washington. What's worrisome to me is that for the people in the streets, who often aren't that numerous, there are enormous numbers at home who feel exactly the same way."
Europe's fears are so ripe for exploitation by the Soviets that the Kremlin is naturally suspected of financing some of Western Europe's peace groups. That belief seemed to be confirmed earlier this month when a minor