ANTINUCLEAR 'SANCTIMONY'

Regarding the unending Takoma Park nuclear-freeze debate {Close to Home, March 29, April 5 and April 12} : circumstances recently forced my family to move out of Takoma Park, and we miss it dearly. We miss the unusually friendly atmosphere, the diverse mix of residents, the old houses, the oak trees and azaleas.

But I don't at all miss the nuclear-freeze debate. One of these days, Takoma Park will go bankrupt. It will be absorbed into Montgomery County, where its unique character will be forever lost. That's when the residents will realize that the nuclear-freeze crowd was fiddling with childish protest while real, burning local problems went untended.

May the winds of reason descend on Takoma Park. May the political leaders stop pandering to a vocal minority out of fear. May the flower children take their protest to Congress, where it belongs.

-- Christopher Madison

Oh, the sanctimony fairly drips from Jay Levy's column on the Takoma Park Nuclear Free Zone Ordinance {" 'Anti-Nuke Freaks,' You Say?" Close to Home, April 12} . The citizens of Takoma Park are too good to permit their city to deal with companies that build nuclear weapons. They are also too convinced of their own righteousness to make a rational case for their real goal -- a radical change in American defense policy.

The zealots of Takoma Park profess to hate nuclear weapons (as if the rest of us enjoy the threat of atomic destruction). But nuclear weapons don't a war make; they only sit harmlessly until a nation decides to use them on its neighbor. To imagine that atomic bombs are threatening in and of themselves is little short of animism, for it invests the physical world with benign and evil spirits.

I doubt that any Takoma Park residents are animists, however, and I suspect their true motivation is the dream of unilateral nuclear disarmament by the United States. They cannot publicly advocate this position, because in doing so they would have to explain away certain embarrassing (for them) facts about the Soviet Union's goals and conduct.

So for now a Nuclear Free Zone will have to suffice for people like Jay Levy. He and his friends can call themselves the party of peace and pay none of the political penalties a more honest stance would cost them. What fun it must be to hide in the safety of America's nuclear arsenal while mocking the rest of us who are too stupid or venal to see the true light.

Michael Warner

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.