Satellite Links Irvine to Global Peace Awards

It was early for a Saturday morning in Irvine--closer to 7 than 8. A few traces of frost were still on lawns and roof shingles.

Yet two attendants were already in the driveway to the Irvine Hilton hotel, directing a line of cars toward a crowded parking lot. A crowd already had formed in the lobby, waiting for show time.

There were hints inside and out that this was no ordinary telecast:

- The satellite saucer towed to the curb beside the hotel seemed much larger than the ones needed for bootleg movies.

- Hanging over the door were flags of six nations--some possibly familiar (Mexico, Sweden, Greece), some possibly not (India, Argentina, Tanzania).

- On the huge video screen in the hotel’s International Room was a notice that the “program starts at 16:30 GMT (Greenwich Mean Time).”

That translates to 8:30 a.m., Irvine Time, and by then virtually all 600 seats in the International Room were occupied. The audience had paid $8 a head ($20, if they wanted brunch afterward) to watch the show, and many had bought posters, booklets, necklaces and pins as souvenirs of the occasion.

The occasion was the third presentation of the Beyond War Award, this time to the leaders of the six nations whose flags were hanging over the door.

None of them was in Irvine; no two, in fact, were even in the same country. But through a complicated, five-continent network of satellite connections, the ceremony was carried off as if it were in the same auditorium and was beamed live to 157 sites in the United States and to audiences in other nations.

It was, its sponsors said, the most ambitious interactive TV broadcast in history.

The award, made by the 3-year-old, American-born Beyond War Foundation, honors outstanding efforts toward world peace.

In the past it has been awarded to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

This year’s award cited the six nations’ leaders for their adoption last January of the Five Continent Peace Initiative, in which they called upon the major powers to halt nuclear weapons testing and begin serious efforts toward disarmament.

The Irvine gathering, as all others that day, “is in response to a crisis that we all face,” said Paul Clark, an Irvine attorney who addressed the audience at the Irvine Hilton. “The nations of our world have accumulated sufficient numbers of nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over, and we continue to add to those arsenals every day. . . . If we continue to war, the catastrophe will be inevitable.

“Beyond War is based on these two realities: that nuclear weapons have made all war obsolete and that we are one human family,” Clark said.

At 8:30 a.m. (5:30 p.m. Stockholm time, 7:30 p.m. Athens time and 10 p.m. New Delhi time), the screen came alive. One of Beyond War’s founders, Richard Rathbun, speaking from the Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco, greeted his international audience.

He said that the complicated connections made him realize that “this is a fragile event. We’re not absolutely sure that it’s happened until it’s over. But I have heard that everybody is sending a signal, and so what we are first going to do is welcome to San Francisco each of those six nations, one by one.

“Hello, Claudio,” he said hopefully, waiting for Claudio Brook, the host in Mexico city, to come onto the screen and respond. When he did, applause was loud--in San Francisco and in Irvine.

For the rest of the show, communications were good, though fitful. The picture from Tanzania--which, according to Rathbun, was producing its first live telecast--was wavy. The sound from Argentina had an occasional echo and the sound from Sweden was cut off altogether for a while, requiring a restaging of the presentation there.

The speeches of those countries’ leaders, however, came through unhindered.

Mexican President Miguel de la Madrid, speaking in Spanish, made a point reiterated by other award recipients: “Mexico upholds its firm conviction that international peace and prosperity are indivisible and rejects doctrines that hold that peace can be maintained by a balance of terror or by nuclear deterrence.”

He stressed the wastefulness of spending money on weapons when “the greater part of humanity” is afflicted with “grave economic crisis” and shortages.

Argentine President Raul Alfonsin, also speaking in Spanish, said every person has a right to life, “yet we only have a conditional right. In a few minutes, the decision of a few men can take it away from us forever.”

Julius Nyerere, president of Tanzania when he participated in the Five Continent Peace Initiative but now out of office--emphasized during the telecast that peace cannot be separated from justice and development.

“I want to say that peace is a product of justice. You cannot work for peace in the world if you are not at the same time working for justice. My colleagues and I realize that there is no justice in the world without helping to end poverty and injustice in the Third World. And we know that development and peace are linked together,” he said.

Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou said the danger of nuclear annihilation “is neither vague nor very far away.”

“The six leaders that participated in the initiative for peace and disarmament have no illusions that they can stop by themselves this drift toward disaster. They know, however, that they will never be forgiven by their peoples if they did not try.”

He said smaller nations can take steps such as the Five Continent Peace Initiative’s call for a freeze on nuclear-weapons testing. He praised some nations’ efforts to keep nuclear weapons out of their territories.

Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi attacked the major powers’ belief in the value of nuclear weapons as a deterrence to war. “To be credible, it (deterrence) envisions, at the very least, an ultimate resort to nuclear war. It is this that breeds the irresponsible theory of limited nuclear engagements and invincible space-based systems.” He said the alternative is respect for all nations’ sovereignty and diversity. “Perhaps in the ultimate analysis, ours is a faith in the essential goodness of human nature.”

Prime Minister Olof Palme, the last of the six leaders to speak, made his case directly to the nuclear powers.

He said that in a nuclear war, “we in the non-nuclear nations, with a majority of the people of the world, will suffer as much as the citizens of the nuclear-weapons states. We therefore have the moral right to demand that the nuclear weapons never be used, that those who are responsible for them should start a process of real disarmament.

“This process must start now, so that one day we will be able to see a future beyond nuclear war. And the best start would be if they would all immediately stop all kinds of nuclear tests and would reach a comprehensive test-ban treaty.”

Palme’s statements brought the audiences at the televised sites to their feet. In San Francisco, Rathbun had the large audience hold up petitions for nuclear disarmament that, he said, contained 750,000 signatures gathered in less than two months.

They stood and applauded in Irvine, too. After the TV credits rolled and the crowd filtered out of the International Room, two of Beyond War’s advisory committee members from Orange County praised the event.

“I thought it was impressive, the number of people we had here,” said Jean Aldrich, whose husband, former UC Irvine Chancellor Daniel G. Aldrich Jr., is also a member of the committee.

She said the audience, like the Beyond War membership, “is probably what you might call the intellectuals, the educated people.”

Tom Nielsen, president of the Irvine Co. and an advisory committee member, said the telecast left a deep impression.

“You know, the kind of feeling, the sensation of that linking up, to me is just very exciting. And I must say there’s a lot of emotion in that--to being in touch with people all over the world all at one time.”