By far the most vocal protestors at the Democrats' 1968 National Convention in Chicago, today peace activists are largely off the political radar screen. But as U.S. soldiers are dispatched to more and more hotspots in Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the defense industry spurts back to life, activists say the movement is spreading in thousands of grassroots efforts as well as at the global level. PNS contributor Mary Ellen Leary is West Coast correspondent for the Economist and a veteran reporter of the peace movement.

SAN FRANCISCO -- "MAKE LOVE NOT WAR!" "BAN THE BOMB!" "TURN SWORDS INTO PLOUGHSHARES!"

For generations, American protesters have cut their teeth on peace slogans like these, turning campus life upside down, disrupting street traffic, dominating the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. Today, as more and more American troops fan out to contain conflicts around the world and the defense industry moves from low into high gear, the peace movement in America appears to have gone into deep freeze.

But appearances can be deceiving, movement veterans say. The peace movement may have disappeared from the Democrats' radar screen as they reconvene in Chicago. But hundreds of organizations and thousands of activists are working at global and local levels to create a more peaceful world. Thanks to their efforts peace concerns are spreading and could rapidly converge into a mass movement should foreign policy issues once again take center stage.

Successes abound on the global nuclear disarmament front. In Geneva a commission has completed the draft of a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty, with only one country, India, withholding consent. Proponents hope to get full agreement and send the treaty to Congress before the end of the year.

Last month the International Court of Justice in Geneva went one step further, ruling unanimously that to use the threat of nuclear weapons is illegal under international law. The ruling concludes a 14 year old law suit brought by the UN General Assembly and backed by some 700 peace organizations, including the U.S. based Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Union of Concerned Scientists which claims 80,000 members worldwide.

On the domestic front, numerous U.S. organizations continue to push for the abolition of nuclear weapons, including the American Friends Service Committee, whose work dates back to 1917, and Peace Action, formed when Freeze Now merged with Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy in 1992.

Peace Action claims credit for persuading Bob Dole as Majority Leader to get Start II, the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, to the floor of the Senate. The Treaty, which calls on the U.S. and Russia to reduce their nuclear arsenals by over fifty percent was approved early this year.

In the early 1960s, Women Strike for Peace rallied over 100,000 women in 60 cities to agitate for a halt to atmospheric nuclear tests. Today, reenergized by the recent underground tests by France and China, the group aims at a total ban on nuclear tests.

Grassroots activities offer the best spotlight on the energies of the peace movement. In early August a San Francisco Bay Area peace group called Tri-Valley CARE (Citizens Against a Radioactive Environment) marked the 51st anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with an art display at the gates of Livermore National Laboratory. The group, which opposes further weapons development at the Laboratory, has grown from some half dozen families to 1500 families now.

Mary Anna Colwell, a professor at San Francisco State University, counted some 8000 individual groups like Tri-Valley in 1988, of which 500 had annual budgets of $30,000 or more. With the end of the Cold War and the split in the peace movement over the Gulf War, however, peace concerns waned. Now, Colwell believes, they are on the rise again.

David Leonard, Dean of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, concurs. While overall student interest in peace issues dropped off after the Vietnam War, a core group pressed on and expanded its focus to conflict resolution. Today, he says, registration in the department's classes is growing, while the study of conflict resolution has spread to grammar schools, the labor movement, U.S. corporations and scores of countries convulsed by internal wars.

In San Francisco, David Hartsough, executive director of Peaceworkers interacts with dozens of volunteer organizations promoting alternatives to guns in hotspots like Sri Lanka, Chechnya, Burundi, Haiti, and Guatemala. Hartsough believes the time is ripe for international nonviolent peacemaking teams to spread out around the world. In Upsala, Sweden, peace activists from many countries founded the Life and Peace Institute last year to research and promote the most effective techniques in non-violent conflict resolution.

"Violence and war are neither natural nor inevitable," Hartsough insists, echoing the idealism that has sustained the movement since the heydays of the 1960s. "What the world needs is to expand its understanding of peace-making."