Terror and Anxiety

One of the many burdens laid on the nuclear power industry is the charge that it might become a party to the ultimate terrorism. Stolen nuclear fuels or wastes could be converted to atomic weapons by revolutionaries or criminals who would threaten the very fabric of civilization, or at least force draconic security measures which would destroy anything resembling a free society. The two books which have developed and popularized this thesis, Willrich and Taylor’s Nuclear Theft and McPhee’s The Curve of Binding Energy, are now a few years old but remain the basic texts on the risks of nuclear theft.

The first thing one notices about Nuclear Theft is its sponsorship by the Ford Foundation, which gives immediate cause for alarm. Worse, the study was a product of the FF Energy Policy Project, whose summary report, A Time to Choose (not to be confused with Nuclear Power: Issues and Choices), was widely ballyhooed; was savaged by oil companies, social democrats, and economists; was disavowed by FF executives (according to a credible account by Lewis H. Lapham of Harper’s) yet jubilated in a later FF annual report; was fed to James Earl Carter, who made it the basis of his anti-energy policy; and finally led to the director of the Energy Policy Project, S. David Freeman, becoming power commissar of the Tennessee Valley.

BB

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B. Bruce-Briggs

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One of the many burdens laid on the nuclear power industry is the charge that it might become a party to the ultimate terrorism. Stolen nuclear fuels or wastes could be converted to atomic weapons by revolutionaries or criminals who would threaten the very fabric of civilization, or at least force draconic security measures which would destroy anything resembling a free society. The two books which have developed and popularized this thesis, Willrich and Taylor’s Nuclear Theft and McPhee’s The Curve of Binding Energy, are now a few years old but remain the basic texts on the risks of nuclear theft.

The first thing one notices about Nuclear Theft is its sponsorship by the Ford Foundation, which gives immediate cause for alarm. Worse, the study was a product of the FF Energy Policy Project, whose summary report, A Time to Choose (not to be confused with Nuclear Power: Issues and Choices), was widely ballyhooed; was savaged by oil companies, social democrats, and economists; was disavowed by FF executives (according to a credible account by Lewis H. Lapham of Harper’s) yet jubilated in a later FF annual report; was fed to James Earl Carter, who made it the basis of his anti-energy policy; and finally led to the director of the Energy Policy Project, S. David Freeman, becoming power commissar of the Tennessee Valley.