Curiously enough, the first people to agree with Coles, at least in one sense, are the very psychiatrists he is seeking to discredit. Mack and Beardsice go to pains in discussing their work, to stress it inherent limitations and the potential for "researcher bias;" they point out in the Yale journal: "The questionnaire format did not allow definite answers to many of the questions to which one would want to have answers, such as the relative importance of this issue for young people in comparision with other social and technological problems, or the variation in thinking among young people from different regions of the country." In an interview, Mack repeatedly stresses the need for more research--for better surveys, for more in-depth interviewing, for studies on how families deal with the problem--and begs for caution in "claiming importance for the findings thus far." In other words, here is the acknowledgement of the need for the context of which Coles speaks.

BUT IT IS evident that something more than methodology separates Coles from those he criticizes. What is at issue is how research about children and the bomb is being used, and what conclusions are being drawn from the body of findings out there, preliminary as they may be. Coles' main point is to suggest the self-fulfilling nature of much of the work conducted thus far, and here he takes a cautious line in analyzing the motives of his colleagues. But there is no escaping the unstated implications of his research: psychiatrists have been veering dangerously close to abusing their profession by forcing their own beliefs onto what should be unbiased research.

One difficulty in taking stock of this work is the intrinsic inaccessibility of psychiatry to the layman. Who really knows what can be in the mind of a child? Our understanding of the difficulty of knowing this, knowing this in a real sense, causes us to sympathize with the efforts, however clumsy, to get closer to an understanding of the bomb's psychological impact. The danger is in generalizing from this inadequate research and using this research to further a political agenda which allows its adherents to make often-outrageous moral claims upon the citizenry.

Coles gently hints at this danger in a discussion of the phenomenon of "denial" or "psychic numbing," which appears in much of the literature on psychology and the bomb, and which is cited by leading disarmament advocates like Dr. Helen Caldicott as an explanation for why some people don't seem to be all that fazed by our nuclear arsenals. The implication of this analysis, Coles writes, is that certain people are not facing up to the reality of the nuclear arms race, and have instead "resorted to what are often called 'primitive psychological defense mechanisms,' presumably unworthy of intelligent, thoughtful individuals." You are, in more blunt words, either scared out of your wits by nuclear nightmares, or you are blocking out reality.

Such bully tactics, surprising for such an ostensibly tolerant profession, underlie other literature in the field. They represent variations on the old debating trick of attacking opposing views--Impute the worst motives to those who somehow don't see the light. But what the psychiatrists are doing is more dangerous: they want to impute psychological deficiency to those in the dark about the nuclear peril. In an article on their nuclear task force work, Mack and Beardslee in effect generalize this psychological deficiency as a cultural trait of the U.S. populace: "The fact that there is so little information available about how young people feel about nuclear issues that effect their lives so vitally suggests that we adults have entered into a kind of compact with ourselves not to know. We suspect that the implications of what we are doing to the emotional development of our young are so horrifying that we would prefer to remain ignorant, for the veil of denial is easy enough to tear away once we set out to do it."

The political appeal of the psychiatrists' form of argument is clear enough: the implication is that were we only to clear our minds of the funk brought on by the nuclear age, we could then usher in a solution to all the madness of the arms build-up. Getting the word out that children are worried about nuclear war is supposed to galvanize our consciences towards this end. This message is akin to that offered by other doctors examining the physical effect of nuclear war--all we have to do is understand the horror, and we will change their ways.

But the horror of nuclear weapons is something fully shared by most of us; this is not at question anymore, especially in the wake of massive public education about the subject in the last half-decade. Against this backdrop, and given the inadequacy experts see in current research, the continual hectoring of the population about the psychological impact of nuclear war becomes less an intellectual exercise than an exercise in pushing the freeze, a defensible but separate proposition. What was a legitimate and important research agenda becomes increasingly hostage to a political agenda, because the only thing about investigations of children and the bomb that can be defended now, Coles implies, is the politics of the matter, not the research. And psychiatrists are no better politicians than the rest of us.