SST: Dead Duck or Phoenix?

The star witness at this year’s SST hearings was one James E. McDonald. It was he who suddenly discovered last autumn that the SST was going to give practically all of us skin cancer. Professor McDonald was last in the news a couple of years ago when he named flying saucers from other worlds as the guilty parties in the New York electric power failures.

This eleventh-hour frenzy over skin cancer is typical of the tactics of the anti-SST lobby. Its campaign has been based on the appeal to fear, above all to fear of the unknown. Reading month after month about all the horrors the SST was going to bring—cancer (hair-trigger of the fear reflex), birth defects, reduction of sunlight, miscarriages in humans and animals, deafened ears, shattering of ancient monuments, ecological disaster through increased average temperature, nervous breakdown from the boom—I often thought of those gorgeous fourteenth-and fifteenth century maps through which men learned about the earth in Columbus’ day. In the distant realms of Ocean far beyond the Pillars of Hercules, you can see, foaming and surging, the gigantic serpents, dragons and other monsters who would gobble up any mariner foolhardy enough to sail west to their watery lairs.

JB

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James Burnham

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The star witness at this year’s SST hearings was one James E. McDonald. It was he who suddenly discovered last autumn that the SST was going to give practically all of us skin cancer. Professor McDonald was last in the news a couple of years ago when he named flying saucers from other worlds as the guilty parties in the New York electric power failures.

This eleventh-hour frenzy over skin cancer is typical of the tactics of the anti-SST lobby. Its campaign has been based on the appeal to fear, above all to fear of the unknown. Reading month after month about all the horrors the SST was going to bring—cancer (hair-trigger of the fear reflex), birth defects, reduction of sunlight, miscarriages in humans and animals, deafened ears, shattering of ancient monuments, ecological disaster through increased average temperature, nervous breakdown from the boom—I often thought of those gorgeous fourteenth-and fifteenth century maps through which men learned about the earth in Columbus’ day. In the distant realms of Ocean far beyond the Pillars of Hercules, you can see, foaming and surging, the gigantic serpents, dragons and other monsters who would gobble up any mariner foolhardy enough to sail west to their watery lairs.