Books, Arts & Manners: Who Died at TMI?

The War against the Atom by Samuel McCracken Basic, 206 pp., $18.50 A word to the reader. Samuel McCracken and national review have collaborated on this topic before. Four years ago, he was asked to write the lead book review in our special issue on nuclear power. He turned in a crisp vivisection of Barry Commoner, Amory Lovins, and Ralph Nader, three of the leading critics of nuclear power. A month after we hit the stands, Three Mile Island occurred.

TMI, as it became acronamed, was, on a technological level, chiefly remarkable for what did not happen: no meltdown, no deaths (with one class of exceptions— see below). In short, no real mishap; certainly not a disaster. On the polemical level, though, the consequences were swift and awesome. America’s nuclear-power program was frozen; it runs and runs, but stays in the same place. The percentage of America’s electricity supplied by nuclear power plants is the same now as it was three years ago. In this state of things, writing a pro-nuclear book is like volunteering to help out Sisyphus.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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The War against the Atom by Samuel McCracken Basic, 206 pp., $18.50 A word to the reader. Samuel McCracken and national review have collaborated on this topic before. Four years ago, he was asked to write the lead book review in our special issue on nuclear power. He turned in a crisp vivisection of Barry Commoner, Amory Lovins, and Ralph Nader, three of the leading critics of nuclear power. A month after we hit the stands, Three Mile Island occurred.

TMI, as it became acronamed, was, on a technological level, chiefly remarkable for what did not happen: no meltdown, no deaths (with one class of exceptions— see below). In short, no real mishap; certainly not a disaster. On the polemical level, though, the consequences were swift and awesome. America’s nuclear-power program was frozen; it runs and runs, but stays in the same place. The percentage of America’s electricity supplied by nuclear power plants is the same now as it was three years ago. In this state of things, writing a pro-nuclear book is like volunteering to help out Sisyphus.