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Young people are the vanguard of the peace movements: student peace movements, ecology peace movements, trade union peace movements, academic peace movements, "Scientists for Peace" and "Women for Peace." Unlike some hard-pressed crusaders in the past, the antinuclear protesters are often well financed, receiving funds not only from their adherents but in some cases from local governments. They have their own defense experts who talk knowledgeably about "throw weight" and "counterforce strategy" and, perhaps most important of all, they have a program. They know what they want and they know how to get it.
Nowhere is the diversity of the movement greater than in West Germany, where, at latest count, some 300 peace groups are active. Another 500 West German movements, ranging from Maoists and Trotskyites to groups wanting to change policy in South Africa, have taken up the peace issue as well as continuing to thump for their own causes. West German environmentalists are also finding ways to ride the missile issue. Opponents of the construction of a new runway at the Frankfurt airport that would destroy thousands of trees have gathered fresh support since pointing out, accurately, that the field is used by U.S. Air Force units assigned to NATO. 11 these West German movements began to coalesce last year when environmentalists, youth groups, the tiny Communist Party and elements of the Lutheran Church banded together in Krefeld, a city on the Rhine, to draft a basic manifesto: a document calling upon the Bonn government to withdraw its support for the 1979 decision to deploy the U.S. missiles. By March, the petition had amassed some 200,000 signatures; now the total has reached 1.5 million and is still growing.
The Krefeld Appeal, as it is known, has been followed by a proliferation of antinuclear statements, each with an emphasis to suit a different shade of political opinion.
West Germany is particularly receptive to the pacifists' arguments. A Soviet attack on Western Europe would run right through West Germany. What is more, the country, only the size of Oregon, is saturated with more nuclear arms per square mile, all U.S.-controlled, than any other nation in the world. As Schmidt pointed out to a group of visiting newspaper editors: "If the state of New York had some 6,000 nuclear weapons on its territory, then I suggest that you Americans would have a highly vocal peace movement as well."
The Germans' lingering guilt about their Nazi past has also increased the trend toward pacifism. There is a visceral fear of war and its horrors, both inflicted and experienced. Says Novelist Heinrich Boll, an ardent member of the peace movement: "Grandfathers and grandmothers who remember the devastation of conventional wars have passed their memories on to their grandchildren."
After World War II, many Germans opposed rearming. It was not until 1960 that the Social Democratic Party, after much soul searching, accepted the 1955 decision to join the NATO alliance. "There have been worse things in Germany than young people demonstrating for peace and disarmament," Willy Brandt remarked last summer. As Erich Enders, a Munich university student, told TIME Senior Correspondent William Rademaekers: "We have grown up surrounded by reminders of our terrible past, and yet now we are a