Student Group Wears Armbands As Protest Against Bomb Tests

A group of 40 students, mostly from the Divinity School, are wearing blue cloth armbands as a sign of their protest against this country's nuclear weapons tests.

"We are not necessarily passivists, we simply see no hope of ultimate reconciliation in the present arms race," Tilden H. Edwards, Jr. 1G, an instigator of the protest said last night.

Those participating in the movement have expressed the hope that other students in the University will join in their protest. Tilden and William O. Becker 1 Div. are distributing the armbands in 33 Divinity Hall and in 1 William James Hall.

"Although we realize that this can be only a beginning, we might at least show in this effort that a significant community of us has thought of the dangers of the arms race in general and that we have the courage to take a positive stand against it," Edwards stated in explaining the group's purpose.

He emphasized that students wearing armbands have wide ranges of opinion about methods of remedying present world tension. Their sole common belief is in the futility of the current nuclear race.

The group, Tilden said, wishes "to encourage our Government, as well as other nuclear powers, to abandon the confused policies which seek to found a just peace upon ever bigger and 'cleaner' weapons of war."

Edwards, Becker, and at least two other Harvard students participated during Spring vacation in the "Walk for Peace" movement. A number of other students also traveled on foot from New Haven to the United Nations Building in New York to express their opposition to bomb testing.