'Gradualist' Stresses Synchronized Peace

The struggle for world peace depends upon a foreign aid program which will allow whole groups of nations to achieve "take-off" at the same time, according to a prominent leader of the "gradualist" peace movement.

Amital Etzioni, assistant professor of Sociology at the Columbia University Institute of War and Peace, last night told an audience at the Leverett House Old Library that the gradualist way to peace is neither an arms race nor a surrender, but a, "synchronized treatment of cold war, the arms race, and underlying inter-bloc conflicts."

Speaking of the underveloped nations, Etzioni emphasized the need for donors of foreign aid to concentrate on only a few nations at a time, and to see that they achieve the ability to control their own economies.

Etzioni cited the futility of attempting to educate the American public in the various solutions to the problem of peace. "It's hopeless to educate the American people. We don't have the resources."

Equally hopeless, he claimed, is the attempt to influence Senators, who respond only to powerful group pressure, Rather, the people must be provided with an outlet of expression which will be heeded. "We must find an expression of peace which an average American in an average community can endorse without embarrassment." This, maintains Etzioni, can be done "by chunks of voters organized in packages" such as church groups, or unions.

For a solution to the arms race, he urges a spiral with the "conventional arms reduction as the first phase, nuclear arms as the second." If both sides should relinquish their conventional weapons, which are the instruments used in armed subversions, one of the major steps towards a war would be eliminated, he claimed.