PASADENA, Calif. -- Patti Davis, President Reagan's younger daughter, told a crowded anti-nuclear rally the global stockpile of nuclear arms has the world teetering on the brink of disaster.
'The Joint Chiefs of Staff predicted in 1975 that we had a good chance of nuclear war by 1985,' said Miss Davis, whose political opinions often conflict with her father's.
'So what are we offering a generation about to inherit the world? I want to get very old and I want everybody in this world to get very old. What we're playing around with here is mortality.'
Miss Davis was among numerous celebrity speakers and rock musicians appearing at the Peace Sunday rally, sponsored at the Rose Bowl by the Alliance for Survival and several church groups.
Estimates of the crowd ran as high as 100,000, but police said early today it numbered 68,210.
'We are trembling on the edge of catastrophe and we are getting much closer to that catastrophe,' Miss Davis said.
'I am working to turn that around. It's not going to be easy. It's not going to happen overnight. But I think we have a good chance of saving this Earth. I think it's worth saving.'
Miss Davis has called for an end to the nuclear arms race despite her father's opposition to a weapons freeze.
Miss Davis said she and her father, who has rejected a nuclear weapons freeze.but recently proposed joint U.S.-Soviet cutbacks in nuclear arms, have talked about their conflicting views on the issue.
'We have discussed it,' she said. 'We do all have the same goals. They cross political barriers. This country did not start stockpiling nuclear weapons when my father came into office. It was a problem he inherited, not one that he started.'
'Both of us are open minded. It's not on the facts that we disagree. It's the interpretation of the facts. The people of the world need to have more hope that they have some time left.
