THE SIEGE AT GREENHAM COMMON

OPTIMISM ON MISSILE PACT HASN'T REACHED PROTESTERS AT BRITISH BASE

GREENHAM COMMON, ENGLAND -- GREENHAM COMMON, ENGLAND -- The successful negotiation of a U.S.-Soviet treaty eliminating mid-range nuclear weapons in Europe would mean that the 96 American cruise missiles at this military base would be packed up and taken home.

It also would mean substantial changes for the U.S. Air Force 501st Tactical Air Wing, keeper of the missiles, and the thousands of Britons who have spent a good part of lives trying to force the Americans and their weapons to leave.

Despite the official enthusiasm in Washington and Moscow for a pact, however, no one here seems optimistic that change is near. For now, life goes on as usual at Greenham Common.

To the U.S. military, that means polishing up their equipment and practicing how to use it. Once or twice each month, a convoy of missile launchers and support vehicles leaves the base and drives to the British testing range 60 miles away at Salisbury Plain. After several days of exercises, the convoy drives back.

To the protesters, it means doing everything they can to make the military's job more difficult. Women of the "Greenham peace camps" maintain a constant vigil outside the fence, waiting for convoys. As the convoys leave the gate, the women throw buckets of paint and try to climb on the vehicles.

By radio, the women spread news of the departure to members of Cruisewatch, a network of antinuclear activists, parked each night at the major intersections near the base. They check which of three standard routes the convoy will take, and pass the news along to others.

Within minutes, hundreds of protesters are lining the highway to heckle the American convoy drivers and their British police escort. Some wave placards, others lie across the road.

This has been going on without respite since the first weapons were deployed here in late 1983. For both sides, the battle seems distant from Geneva's talks on arms control.

The Geneva talks, said a U.S. military spokesman, "are a political prospect, not a military one."

Much bigger news at Greenham Common is the installation of a new "super fence," designed to stop repeated incursions by wire-cutting protesters, and the imminent deployment of another 64 cruise missiles at a second British base at Molesworth in Cambridgeshire.

The protesters seem equally immune to the optimism in Geneva. "I just can't image" the withdrawal of the missiles, said Katrina, one of the peace women. "It's just my life. I've seen generations of fence coming and going, and it's still being cut on.

"For three years, we've been holding them up. Every single convoy. It's our persistence that stops them, and we will go on and on and on."

Beth is a soft-spoken woman whose pale, youthful face and long blond hair, bangs falling over her eyes, are reminiscent of the actress Sissy Spacek in one of her more wistful roles. For "a long time" she has lived in the open on a weed-filled sliver of ground between the edge of the highway and the main gate to the base.

Although the numbers have vacillated between hundreds and dozens, and countless individuals have come and gone, Greenham women have been camped out around the base's nine-mile perimeter fence since construction of the missile silos began in 1981. Their original goal of preventing deployment failed in 1983, but the women decided to stay on as a constant protest against the presence of cruise missiles on British soil.

"These arms talks, if they are successful, if cruise leaves, it will not be just because two men have sat around a table," Beth insisted, "but because women for a long time have taken action here."

When the women started, they were hailed by antinuclear activists at home and abroad, and their effort was publicized around the world. Thousands flocked here -- 30,000 in one massive 1982 protest -- to sit with them in solidarity for a few hours or days. The feminist movement claimed them as its own, a symbol of "womanpower" and its rejection of militaristic male values.

On a recent chilly afternoon, half a dozen women sat around the wood fire at the main base entrance, one of four currently occupied camps. It was difficult to tell the ages of the permanent residents -- Beth, Katrina and Sheila, a solidly built Canadian woman who has been here for three months. All were covered in layers of sweaters and old coats, their faces smudged with soot.

Susie, a feminist activist from London, had come for the day. Isabel, from nearby Newbury, is a middle-class housewife who had brought her young daughter. She said she often visits the camp, but "it takes guts to live here. I have three children. I can't."

The fire provided the only heat and cooking facility. Two baby buggies, piled high with dishes and other kitchen paraphernalia, rested in mud. There was a large trash can, some logs to sit on and a few small tents. A large white van, donated by other peace groups, contained other supplies and the all-important citizens' band radio.

Although some people in towns around here are supportive, many of the locals actively dislike the women. In Newbury, stores carry signs saying "No Dogs or Greenham Women." "The only place we can go now is the pizza parlor," Sheila said. "Even the Laundromat has been declared off limits."

Nationwide public opinion polls consistently have shown the majority of people opposed to U.S. nuclear weapons in Britain. But many residents here like the U.S. military presence, which provides substantial income for local traders. Some of them, referred to as "vigilantes" by the women, formed a group several years ago called RAGE -- Residents Against the Greenham Encampment. "They don't like us because they think we're lesbians," said Sheila. Men are not permitted at the Greenham camps for other than short, daylight visits.

Local authorities have arrested the women by the dozens. Most who have stayed any length of time at the camps have served brief jail sentences. The authorities have tried innumerable ingenious efforts to make the women leave, once fencing off the roadside, another time covering it with large boulders. But the women stay on the basis that the land they are on is publicly owned, that the police can move rubbish and permanent structures but not them or their possessions.

An article last year in Jane's Defense Weekly accused the women of being Soviet spies, recruited here and trained in Eastern Europe, and sent back as a "secret detachment of female . . . special forces agents." Both London and Washington dismissed the charge as ridiculous.

The U.S. military appears to have adopted a policy of trying to ignore the women. At the main gate, 30 yards behind where the women squatted, uniformed guards gaze impassively past the camp. The women maintain the Americans are forbidden to engage in "eye contact," or to speak to them.

There is a sense of isolation among the Greenham women. They have little interest in talking about their lives before they came here, and tend to recount the past in terms of camp lore -- major confrontations with police and judicial authorities, or victories against forces on the other side of the fence.

Successes include the 1982 mass demonstration; the time they cut their way into the base in 1983 and danced on the silos inside; another time they sneaked in and painted a peace sign on the side of an SR71 Blackbird surveillance aircraft on display; the short-lived 1983 suit against the U.S. government for conspiring with its missiles to violate international genocide laws.

There are countless stories of cutting through the perimeter fence, which indeed looks like a patchwork of repairs in places. But there is little damage they can do to the important part of the installation. The missile silos, at a far end of the base, are surrounded with several walls of fencing, divided by concrete walkways filled with barbed wire, and watched by guards and electronic devices.

The women, and lawyers acting for them, have successfully fought government efforts to take away their voting rights and to cut off the approximately $50 most receive in weekly welfare payments. They have a legal address -- "Greenham Common Peace Camp, near Newbury" -- and pay for the public water spigot they use beside the road.

A spokesman for U.S. military forces in Britain said tours of the Greenham installation or interviews with U.S. officers are not being granted. Most information in the public domain on the base and its missiles comes from Cruisewatch.

According to that literature, and interviews with members, the usual cruise convoy begins with a phalanx of local motorcycle policemen, followed by a car carrying the convoy commander, two mobile "control centers" containing electronic equipment, four launch vehicles, each containing four cruise missile tubes, two five-ton "tactical operations centers" containing supplies, and two wreckers to tow the other vehicles off the public roads in the event of breakdown or accident.

The launchers, Cruisewatch and the military agree, do not carry real missiles on the exercises, and military spokesmen in the past have said the tubes contain sand or water, as ballast.

When the convoy arrives at Salisbury Plain, a 90,000-acre expanse of unfenced land, it drives inside the testing ground to set up an exercise. The troops fence off an area and practice communications, security and launch procedures. They do not launch anything.

Cruisewatchers harass the convoy along the rural roads, in the numerous towns and villages through which it passes and on Salisbury Plain itself. Members maintain theirs are only "nonviolent" protests and that they do not intend anyone involved to be hurt.

Although Cruisewatch is funded partly by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, members say not all of them are antinuclear; they simply do not want the missiles in Britain. A recent gathering of about a dozen Cruisewatchers at a rural home outside Newbury included a farmer, an engineer, a computer programmer, several students, an anthropologist, a retired schoolteacher and a self-described "granny and lady of leisure."

They said the group now numbers as many as 2,000 people, who participate in harassing the convoys in various ways.

"A group of us from Newbury, we always make a point of hiding from the police," said Evelyn, a brisk, well-spoken woman in whose comfortable farmhouse the gathering was held. "It seems a funny thing for middle-aged housewives to be doing, but we're trying to make a point. We jump out and yell, show our placards, and throw the occasional rotten egg."

Peg, the retired schoolteacher, said she and her husband stand by their front gate as the convoys pass, no matter what time of night. "It's different from thinking about nuclear missiles in a submarine, or out in space, or over in Europe. This goes by your house. It's very frightening, whether its just full of water or whatever. I'm older now, I've always hoped for a better life. You have to say something. It's real to us. They are out there practicing to use the things."

Cruisewatchers acknowledge they have not stopped the convoys, or sent the missiles home. What is important to them, said Bruce, a student from Southhampton on the southern coast, is that "they can't do it without us watching, witnessing."

Gerry, another student, said that most protesters probably would end their activist days if the missiles were withdrawn. "What people do after that is up to them," she said. "If the missiles go, we're not going to be up there claiming a prize. We don't care how they go . . . only that we have been part of an increasing climate that has found nuclear weapons unacceptable."

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.