□ A post-victory sketch of Mikhail Gorbachev, landslide winner of the Soviet elections: “. . . a young man, and at once a progressive and a despot, as often happens with Russians” (Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev, 1862).
□ The chart in the papers said it all: In 1979, the year of Three Mile Island, there were 72 nuclear power plants operating in this country, 95 under construction, 25 on order. Ten years later, 111 are operating, but only 12 are under construction (and only four of these have firm operating dates); all of two are on order. There are no charts showing the cancer deaths caused by the coal power that took up the slack, or America’s continuing reliance on a potentially OPEC-driven oil market. No charts, most grievously, measuring the output of misleading and hysterical journalism (a-cloud moves closer), more damaging than any radiation release. New developments in fusion may make fission reactors a moot issue sooner than anyone had expected. But the economic and technological loss caused by our ten-year-panic can never be recovered, only made up at a later time.
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