Is Pacifism a Pipe Dream?

It's all coming back to me – mushroom clouds, fallout shelters and other relics from my duck-and-cover childhood.

The tangible fears of the Cold War were enough to turn me into a hard-core pacifist, especially when combined with books like All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque and Hiroshima by journalist John Hersey.

Nothing on earth, I thought, could be worth this kind of suffering.

But then I took a few Western Civ courses. I watched Night and Fog, the 1955 documentary about the Holocaust. There were German pacifists in Nazi Germany. Many were executed.

What about the famous pacifist Ghandi? According to author George Orwell, the British and some wealthy Indians were using Ghandi to their advantage.

The ideal of pacifism, it seems, cannot withstand real world events. And that's why a nuclear-armed North Korea today has rekindled old fears.

As a child I could never have guessed that any country would someday supplant the Soviet Union as our potential annihilator. And the 1964 film Fail-Safe, directed by Sidney Lumet, suggested that destruction of the world was inevitable.

Even the most spectacular special effects in modern cinema can't touch the quiet terror of this black-and-white film. At one point, the president instructs the U.S. ambassador to stay at his post in Moscow no matter what, followed by a shriek on the U.S. end of the line – the sound of the phone melting, we're told.

Intense efforts by both countries to stop a nuclear attack are all for nothing.

Pacifism gets a similar drubbing in the classic 1952 film High Noon, directed by Fred Zinnemann. Gary Cooper plays a marshal who must face down the pardoned killer he sent to prison. The noon train will unite the ex-con with three of his pals, and all four are set on revenge.

The few citizens who want to help are physically incapable. Some accuse the marshal of causing the problems. There was no "trouble" before the marshal came to town. A few residents hope the marshal loses the fight. For the hotel owner and barkeep, business was better before.

The one able-bodied citizen who steps up to the plate backs out when he realizes he is the lone deputy standing with the marshal.

"I couldn't get anybody," the marshal says.

"I don't believe it," the deputized citizen says. "This town ain't that low."

Oh, but it is.

Everyone, it seems, wants the marshal to leave before the noon train arrives. "This is just a dirty little village in the middle of nowhere," says the judge, who's wasting no time packing up his law books and taking down the American flag on the wall.

Again and again, the townspeople plead: Why can't you just go?

"I don't know," the marshal answers.

But we, the audience, know. So do the women who love him – businesswoman and former lover Helen Ramirez, played by Katy Jurado, and the marshal's new bride Amy, played by Grace Kelly.

"I don't understand you," Helen says to Amy. "I'd never leave him like this. I'd get a gun. I'd fight."

"Why don't you?" Amy says.

"He is not my man," says Helen with a hint of wounded pride and wistfulness. "He's yours."

But Amy's father and brother were killed by guns, and she is now a Quaker. Before the movie's conclusion, Amy must decide if loyalty to her husband trumps her commitment to non-violence.

It's not the kind of choice anyone would want to face. And in the movies, we don't have to. It's all over when the credits roll.

But that's not the world we live in.