SANE is Back

I was delighted in early February to see that Representative Ed Markey has introduced a new bill in Congress, the SANE (Smarter Approach to Nuclear Expenditures) Act. Markey’s bill calls for significant reductions in nuclear weapons, for a savings of about $100 billion over the next 10 years. Markey remains, as he has been for more than 30 years, the most significant leader and articulate voice in Congress for nuclear arms reduction. I’m glad to see he is still at it.

As the former executive director of SANE, I was thrilled to see renewed reference to the venerable SANE brand. When I was with SANE in the 1980s we worked closely with Markey. I continued to cooperate with him on disarmament initiatives after that—including the Urgent Call, a nuclear abolition appeal launched in 2002 with Jonathan Schell and Randy Forsberg.

When I contacted Markey’s office recently to congratulate him for introducing the SANE Act and making reference to our organization, his staff said the SANE acronym was intentional, to recall the halcyon days of the 1980s when the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign was sweeping across the country like a populist prairie fire and SANE was growing rapidly into a formidable mass membership organization.

In 1982 Markey was the original sponsor of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Resolution in Congress. Later that year he spoke before a million people in New York’s Central Park for the June 12 rally to freeze and reverse the arms race, the largest peace and disarmament rally ever held in the United States. SANE was actively involved in helping to organize that rally.

In the late 1980s SANE merged with the Freeze Campaign to form a united organization that still exists today as Peace Action. At that time some board members of SANE were reluctant to see the name go. They didn’t want to lose the legacy and history of SANE dating from the late 1950s, reflected in the involvement of such luminaries as Norman Cousins, Steve Allen, Ben Spock, and Coretta Scott King.

Many assumed over the years that SANE was an acronym but that was not the case. We were officially the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy. The name came from Cousins and other early founders and was inspired by Erich Fromm’s influential book of the time, The Sane Society. In 1980s some of us toyed with possible acronyms, like Stop All Nuclear Explosions, or Society Against Nuclear Extermination, but officially the name remained the same, SANE, a single word that powerfully conveyed the broad public outcry against the insanity of the nuclear arms race.

Now there is an official SANE acronym, thanks to Ed Markey. Let’s hope the brand and the ideas behind it gain new traction and support, and that the United States can make real progress toward reducing and eliminating nuclear weapons.